Douglas Murray is arguably one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary world. He’s a worthy successor to the late Christopher Hitchens (whom he knew very well.)
Every piece that flows out of his pen is brilliant. He is a prolific writer and commentator. He wrote his first book at the tender age of 18; his recent books are “The Madness of Crowds,” “The Strange Death of Europe,” and “The War on the West.” He writes for the NY Post, the Spectator, and The Telegraph.
His April 7th piece for The Telegraph is particularly worth noting. Here’s a slice:
The United States has been single-mindedly focused on one story: the arraignment of a former president on charges cooked up by an ambitious Left-wing district attorney who wants to make his name by getting Donald Trump to jail. In Manhattan and Palm Beach, the media has paid for helicopters to fly overhead and capture every move of the former president. The streets have been packed with press photographers taking photos of other press photographers, all waiting for something to happen.
All the time, America’s cities – from New York to San Francisco – are rotting from the centre out, with Leftist DAs allowing theft and even violent crime on a scale that has not existed in living memory. This is presided over by a president who everybody can see is half asleep on the job and a vice-president who is not as up to speed as all that.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has its own designs. In recent weeks, Chairman Xi popped up in the Middle East to broker a deal between the Saudis and the Iranians. The great divide in the Middle East between the Sunni bloc, dominated by Saudi Arabia, and the Shia bloc, led by Iran, suddenly appeared to reach a rapprochement.
And another:
This is just to focus on the international diplomacy side of things. But the same applies in area after area. While we in Britain argue about things like whether or not a woman can have a penis or how “racist” we are this week, China’s top politicians and envoys are busily travelling the world making trade deals. Ever since Beijing was allowed into the World Trade Organisation in 2001 – a decision which already looks both world-historic and unwise – it has used its financial clout to simultaneously exploit the rules and break them.
Today, they are not even hiding their desire to ensure Chinese economic dominance in the 21st century. Nor are they any longer hiding their desire to leave the US dollar-dominated financial system behind them.
The US is messing up big time. The downward spiral began with Obama and has accelerated under Biden. Electing them was criminally irresponsible. Now it’s payback time.
It’s all karma, neh!
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 
In Chapter 1 of his book 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙖𝙧 𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙒𝙚𝙨𝙩, Douglas Murray says that “The only thing modern Western populations are more ignorant about than their own history is the history of other peoples outside the West.”
3 pages later, in Chapter 2, he says “They [critics of West] believe that people in the West are uniquely ignorant of their own history and uniquely ignorant of other peoples’ too. . .Yet nothing could be further from the truth.”
Clearly, the man is brilliant and a sharp observer.
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Unfortunately I have not read the book so I can not comment.
Western societies have invested a lot of time and money and often through private charity to understand their own culture as well as others. Nearly everywhere in west there history is well preserved and taken care of, sometimes even minor battlefields and buildings are well conserved. Much better than anywhere else.
But history does not just mean buildings and dates and battles. It is also knowledge of past, what went wrong and what could have been better. West is unmatched again in this sort of study. West is the only society where someone like Stephen Kotkin say I will devote my life to write autobiography of Stalin and society takes care of his financial welfare. He then produces volumes that become the best source there is to understand Stalin.
There is no need for average burger flipper to understand history or know history as long as people who need to know it are well aware. An average Indian is probably like a laborer working on a construction site, I bet his understanding of history is even poorer than an American teenager.
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