Contemporary intellectual culture is rife with moral criticisms of Western civilization and white people. These accusations stem from a constellation of beliefs, among them that Western civilization is exploitative and that white people are inveterately racist. Proponents of these beliefs teach history with an emphasis on Western imperialism, claim that the United States was founded to perpetuate race-based slavery, demand reparations for a brutal system terminated 159 years ago, seek to “cancel” the achievements of towering heroes, assert a theory of “white privilege” and “systemic racism” designed to keep nonwhites at a lower social level, and so on.
Are the criticisms accurate and just? Are they partly true but partly false? Are they entirely false? What about non-Westerners: have they perpetrated crimes as bad or worse than those attributed to Westerners? If so, why do so many contemporary intellectuals single out white Westerners for the bulk of their criticisms? Are they employing a double standard? And what can the answers to these questions teach us about their motives?
Accusations of Western Imperialism and White Racism
In 1967, the American writer Susan Sontag summarized a critique that was just beginning to gain intellectual traction in her day:
If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. . . . The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, Baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads.1
Around that time, the Martinique-born psychiatrist and Marxist writer Frantz Fanon expressed similar ideas:
[T]he wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth. . . . Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. . . . [The] capitalist powers . . . must pay. . . . Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster.2
Douglas Murray summarizes Fanon’s views: “the West is especially rapacious” and, in this, “it is wholly unlike all other cultures. . . . [T]he West is wholly without virtue. . . . [R]evenge is called for. . . . [T]he West needs to pay for what it has done.”3
Fanon influenced Edward Said, literature professor and author of the famous book Orientalism, which argued that Western civilization is universally racist in its portrayal of the Orient (Middle Eastern culture). Said wrote, “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”4 Nor did Said limit his claims of European racism and imperialism to the past; he included all present Westerners as well. As Douglas Murray noted, Said “also helped to create an interpretation of the world in which the non-Western peoples were people to whom things were done, while the Western people were people who did things. And terrible things at that. . . . [Said] added to the feeling that the West itself was overdue for some justice or, rather, revenge.”5
Such attacks on the West are increasingly prevalent, both in terms of broad assertions and narrower claims. Here are two more specifically focused on Western settling of the New World and on the fate of the American Indians. The first is from historian David Stannard’s book American Holocaust: “[W]hat happened on Hispaniola,” the island on which Columbus first landed and that in the present day is composed of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, “was the equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas. . . . Within no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere’s native peoples had been exterminated.”6
Here’s another regarding the indigenous peoples of the New World, this one from Ward Churchill (notice that in the following passage, he conflates the United States as a country with the entire Western Hemisphere):
During the four centuries spanning the time between 1492 . . . and 1892, when the Census Bureau concluded that there were fewer than a quarter million indigenous people [American Indians] surviving within the country’s claimed boundaries . . . a hemispheric population estimated to have been as great as 125 million was reduced by . . . over 90 percent. The people had died . . . of being hacked apart . . .[,] worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved . . . and . . . deliberately infected with epidemic diseases.7
Dr. Jason Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul University, relates an encounter with a class of bright college students, some of whom repeated similar ideas. A student expressed the following viewpoint: “America was and continues to be located on stolen lands. This land was forged in genocidal conditions to eliminate Native Americans from the continent. . . . [W]e have yet to admit that genocidal policies neutralized any possibility for an ethical space [in America].” The other students agreed with this assessment. When Professor Hill challenged these claims, the students “responded by stating that their version of events was an incontrovertible historical fact.”8 This belief regarding the genocide of American Indians is not merely the view of these specific students; it is widely taught in American schools and colleges.
The Marxist historian Howard Zinn espoused similar views, writing that “there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.”9 Fred Siegel, associate professor of history at Cooper Union, wrote that, according to such critics, “American history became a tragedy in three acts: what we did to the Indians, what we did to the African-Americans, and what we did to everyone else.”10
Anthropologist David Graeber claimed that any account praising the accomplishments of the West is merely “a retroactive apology for genocide, [given] the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations—visited upon the rest of the world by European powers.”11 In his view, these are the defining characteristics of Western civilization, superseding all others. . . .
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Endnotes
1. Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America (A Symposium),” Partisan Review 34, no. 1, 1967: 57–58. Quoted in Wikipedia, “Susan Sontag,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag, emphasis added (accessed April 6, 2024).
2. Quoted in Douglas Murray, The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason (New York: HarperCollins, 2022), 98–99.
3. Murray, War on the West, 99.
4. Quoted in Murray, War on the West, 101.
5. Murray, War on the West, 102–3.
6. David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992). Quoted in Jeff Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen: The Truth about European Colonialism in the New World (New York: Bombardier Books, 2023), 24–25.
7. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997). Quoted in Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen, 25.
8. Jason Hill, “Genocide, Stolen Land, and Other Lies about America,” December 3, 2021, Frontpagemag.com, https://www.frontpagemag.com/genocide-stolen-land-and-other-lies-about-america-jason-d-hill/ (accessed April 8, 2024).
9. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 23. Quoted in Mary Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2019), 90.
10. Fred Siegel, “History and Politics: A Common Fate,” Academic Questions (December 1991), 32–36. Quoted in Grabar, Debunking Howard Zinn, 89.
11. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London: Penguin UK, 2021). Quoted in Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen, 29–30.
12. Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston: Beacon, 2018), 149–150.
13. Barbara Applebaum, Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010), 179.
14. “Abolish the White Race,” Harvard Magazine, September–October 2002, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/abolish-the-white-race-html (accessed July 20, 2024).
15. “Abolish the White Race,” Harvard Magazine.
16. James Lindsay, Race Marxism (Orlando, FL: New Discourses, 2022), 34.
17. Zach Goldberg and Eric Kaufmann, “Yes, Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught in Schools,” October 20, 2022, https://www.city-journal.org/article/yes-critical-race-theory-is-being-taught-in-schools (accessed May 15, 2024).
18. Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 188.
19. Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 154.
20. Murray, War on the West, 111.
21. Matthew White, Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History (New York: Norton, 2012), 282.
22. White, Atrocities, 282–84.
23. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: MacMillan, 1998), 34–46, 167–77.
24. White, Atrocities, 325–33, quote on 332. See also Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York: Avon, 1991), 11–23, 239–55, 434–51, 585–601, 656–68.
25. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 662–63.
26. “£100 in 1908 Is Worth £15,075.92 Today,” https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1908 (accessed August 9, 2024).
27. White, Atrocities, 325, 597–98.
28. Wissler, Indians of the United States, 106.
29. Wissler, Indians of The United States, 106 (emphasis added).
30. Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen, 44.
31. Tom Bowden, The Enemies of Christopher Columbus (Cresskill, NJ: Paper Tiger, 1992), 40.
32. Hill, “Genocide, Stolen Land, and Other Lies about America.”
33. Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen, 260–61.
34. Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen, 263–64.
35. Quoted in Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen, 266.
36. Quoted in Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen, 268–69.
37. Fynn-Paul, Not Stolen, 272–73.
38. Mary Stockwell, “Ulysses Grant’s Failed Attempt to Grant Native Americans Citizenship,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 9, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ulysses-grants-failed-attempt-to-grant-native-americans-citizenship-180971198/ (accessed July 21, 2024).
39. “Granting Citizenship to American Indians,” VisitTheCapitol.Gov, https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/artifact/act-authorize-secretary-interior-issue-certificates-citizenship-indians-june-2-1924 (accessed on July 21, 2024).
40. Wissler, Indians of the United States, 311.
41. “Granting Citizenship to American Indians.”
42. White, Atrocities, 118.
43. White, Atrocities, 120.
44. White, Atrocities, 121.
45. White, Atrocities, 115–25.
46. White, Atrocities, 148.
47. White, Atrocities, 149.
48. White, Atrocities, 146–53.
49. White, Atrocities, 115–16.
50. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–18.
51. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol. 1, “Our Oriental Heritage” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954), 459.
52. Francois Gautier, Rewriting Indian History (New Delhi: Indian Research Press, 2003), 38.
53. Sowell, Race and Culture, 150, 188, 210–12; White, Atrocities, 80–87. The exact numbers of Africans enslaved is in dispute, but general agreement is that the Islamic slave traders enslaved more than did the Europeans.
54. Murray, War on the West, 116.
55. White, Atrocities, 87. On widespread white slavery in North Africa, see Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellew and Islam’s One Million White Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006). See also Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
56. Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 219–20.
57. “Genocide in Darfur,” https://hmh.org/library/research/genocide-in-darfur-guide/ (accessed April 11, 2024).
58. Paul Fregosi, Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998), 343–48.
59. Christopher Hitchens, “Why the Suicide Killers Chose September 11,” The Guardian, October 3, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/03/september11.usa2.
60. Vahakn Dadrian’s The History of the Armenian Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 1995) is the definitive examination of this atrocity. See also Andrew Bernstein, “Lessons of the Armenian Genocide,” The Objective Standard 10, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 48–57, https://theobjectivestandard.com/2015/05/lessons-of-the-armenian-genocide/.
61. “Jihad Report,” TheReligionOfPeace.com, https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/ (accessed April 11, 2024).
62. White, Atrocities, 429.
63. Jean-Louis Margolin, “China: A Long March into Night,” in Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 463, 464.
64. White, Atrocities, 436.
65. Jean-Louis Margolin, “Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes,” in The Black Book of Communism, 583–98.
66. White, Atrocities, 493.
67. Margolin, “Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes,” 589.
68. White, Atrocities, 447.
69. White, Atrocities, 447.
70. Pierre Rigoulot, “Crimes, Terror, and Secrecy in North Korea,” in The Black Book of Communism, 553.
71. “Modern Slavery in North Korea: Global Slavery Index 2023 Country Snapshot,” WalkFree.org, https://cdn.walkfree.org/content/uploads/2023/09/27164815/GSI-Snapshot-North-Korea.pdf (accessed April 12, 2024).
72. White, Atrocities, 446.
73. Sowell, Race and Culture, 186.
74. Sowell, Race and Culture, 186–96.
75. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 406–7.
76. Sowell, Race and Culture, 149–50.
77. Justin Cremer, “Norman Borlaug Saved Millions of Lives, Would His Critics Prefer He Hadn’t?” April 24, 2020, https://allianceforscience.org/blog/2020/04/norman-borlaug-legacy-documentary/ (emphasis added).
78. Theodore Tulchinsky, “Maurice Hilleman: “Creator of Vaccines That Changed the World,” March 30, 2018. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7150172/ (emphasis added).
79. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 15, 18.
80. Barbara Applebaum, Being White, Being Good, 9.
81. James Lindsay, Race Marxism (Orlando, FL: New Discourses, 2022), 43.
82. Lindsay, Race Marxism, 43.
83. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 129.
84. Charlie Spierig, “What We Know about Amy Coney Barrett’s Family and Adopted Children from Haiti,” September 26, 2020, Breitbart,
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/26/what-we-know-about-amy-coney-barretts-family-and-adopted-children-from-haiti/ (accessed April 15, 2024).
85. Debyemm, “The Truth about Louis Armstrong’s Adoption Story,” MissingMom.com, https://missingmom.home.blog/2021/06/15/the-truth-about-louis-armstrongs-adoption-story/ (accessed April 15, 2024).
86. “Richard Loving,” Biography.com, February 27, 2022, https://www.biography.com/legal-figures/richard-loving (accessed April 15, 2024).
87. Ben Carson, Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992).
88. Joshua Rothman, “When Bigotry Paraded through the Streets,” The Atlantic, December 4, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/second-klan/509468/.
89. “Tattered Robes: The State of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States,” Anti-Defamation League, May 11, 2016, https://www.adl.org/resources/report/tattered-robes-state-ku-klux-klan-united-state.s.
90. Jesse McKinley, “Jeff Hall, a Neo-Nazi, Is Killed, and His Young Son Is Charged,” New York Times, May 10, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/11nazi.html.
91. “Aryan Brotherhood,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/aryan-brotherhood (accessed July 24, 2024).
92. Kyle Jaeger, “Here’s How Big the KKK Really Is Today,” February 29, 2016, https://archive.attn.com/stories/6255/how-big-kkk-is-2016.
93. Ralph Ellis, “The KKK Rally in Charlottesville Was Outnumbered by Counterprotestors,” CNN, July 10, 2017, https://archive.attn.com/stories/6255/how-big-kkk-is-2016.
94. Nick Penzenstadler, “Why Is Charlottesville Ground Zero for White Supremacists?,” August 12, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/08/12/why-charlottesville-ground-zero-white-supremacists/562088001/.
95. Joe Heim et al., “White Supremacist Rally Near White House Dwarfed by Thousands of Anti-Hate Protestors,” Washington Post, August 12, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/washington-readies-for-todays-planned-white-supremacist-rally-near-white-house/2018/08/12/551720c4-9c28-11e8-8d5e-c6c594024954_story.html.
96. “Richard Bertrand Spencer,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-bertrand-spencer (accessed July 27, 2024); “Jared Taylor,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/jared-taylor (accessed July 27, 2024).
97. Quoted in Murray, War on the West, 21.
98. Applebaum, Being White, Being Good, 16.
99. Applebaum, Being White, Being Good, 15.
100. “Working Immigrants,” WorkingImmigrants.com, https://www.workingimmigrants.com/2021/04/the-amazing-educational-success-of-nigerian-americans/ (accessed April 15, 2024). This claim is disputed. But by any standard, Nigerians are at or near the acme of American educational achievements.
101. Aryan Prakash, “Why Indians Are the Highest Earning Ethnic Group in the US,” Hindustan Times, January 15, 2023, https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/why-indians-are-the-highest-earning-community-in-us-harsh-goenka-explains-101673757990980.html.
102. Stefan and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 18, 183.
103. Gretchen Livingston and Anna Brown, “Public Views on Inter-Marriage,” Pew Research Center, May 18, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/2-public-views-on-intermarriage/.
104. Lindsay, Race Marxism, 82.
105. Ibram X. Kendi, “Pass an Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment,” Politico, https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/ (accessed July 25, 2024).
106. William Shakespeare, King Lear, act 4, scene 2, line 35 (Spark: No Fear Shakespeare, 2003), 210.
107. Ayn Rand, “The Age of Envy,” in Return of the Primitive (New York: Penguin, 1999), 130.
108. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 221.
