Spectator: Douglas Murray: 'Putin, the Chinese Communist party and others have looked at the West in recent years and seen these increasingly fractious, riven and self-lacerating societies. Each has done what they can both online and off to exacerbate this tendency. They think we are awful and irredeemable, and they are delighted if large swathes of our populations and political and cultural figures agree with them. Just last week one of the CCP’s propaganda papers pumped an image around Twitter of Uncle Sam behind the Oval Office desk, surrounded by corpses. The caption accused America of racism and family separations at the border. Perhaps the people of Xinjiang province have something to say about the sincerity of that attack.
'Of course, unity is not the only thing you need in a nation, as Putin has demonstrated. But it’s not nothing either, as President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people have shown. The key question any country and any culture has to answer is whether it wants to keep going. Most of the western powers have been told in recent years that we should keep going in order to find our way to greater equity, equality, diversity and a whole pile of other meaningless guff, including ‘diversity’: an entirely anti-western concept from its foundations.
'The war in Ukraine may be just the first test of the western alliance. It is clear that in the 21st century the CCP is going to present a much more substantial challenge than Putin ever could. Will the West be willing to rise to that challenge? Only if we regain the sense that we have something worth preserving. And the knowledge we had in the Cold War that free western societies deserve to win out, not because it is in our interests to do so, but because we are better than the alternatives.
'How some people will shudder at the idea of even expressing that. But it is true. It is why the countries that most beat themselves up about their pasts are the countries that the world most wants to come to. We must be doing something right today, which means we have must have done something right in our past. The rest of the world recognises that fact by its footfall. It is time we started to recognise that truth ourselves.' [Full article]