Sands of Dune collects four unrelated novellas by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson from the Dune Universe. One offers the backstory of Fremen Shadout Mapes, who had a brief role when the Atriedes first came to Arrakis. One offers a backstory of one of the Sardauker who disguised as a Harkonnen when the Atriedes were betrayed. One offers a story of Gurney Halleck working with the smugglers after the Atriedes were defeated. The final novella gives a sense of the Atriedes-Harkonnen feud going back thousands of years. This publication is designed more for those familiar with the Dune universe.
In The War on the West (published April 26, 2022), Murray, a British conservative commentator, illustrates how Western Civilization has been under assault for the past two decades from the ivory towers of academia and how that assault on Western values (Judeo-Christian values) is being used by foreign actors such as China and Radical Islam to the disadvantage of those values we have grown up in. “The War on the West,” he explains, “is a book about what happens when one side in a cold war – the side of democracy, reason, rights, and universal principles – prematurely surrenders. Two key ideas are explored. First, the celebration of non-Western cultures allows such cultures to get away with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that has happened in the Western past. Second, it leads to a form of parochial internationalism where Westerners mistakenly assume that aspects of Western values are common aspirations across the rest of the globe and the truth is that such values are not.
All aspects of Western civilization, Murray explains, are under attack and the Judeo-Christian tradition that is the cornerstone of Western tradition is under particular assault and so is the Enlightenment. Thus, the newest generation “does not appear,” he says, “to understand even the most basic principles of free thought and free expression.” And, the result is that we are in the process of killing the goose that laid some very golden eggs.
Primary among such assaults on Western tradition, he explains, is racial consciousness and the failure to take people into account as individuals leads to the horrors of the mid-Twentieth Century. The message of Dr. King to treat people as individuals and reject those who would reduce them to merely group membership by accident of birth is getting lost, particularly with the prevalence of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which questions the foundations of liberal order, including equality and legal reasoning. CRT, Murray explains, has an absolute obsession with race as the primary means to understand the world and injustice and argues that racism is so deeply interwoven into White-majority society that no proof of racism is needed. These academics are consumed and obsessed with power in the theory of Michel Foucalt and attributes power on the basis of skin color. In effect, as Sowell observed, racism is now being kept alive by politicians and other race hustlers.
Murray’s book then goes on to take on Kendi’s circular theories of racism and anti-racism which seems ultimately to boil down things Kendi likes and things he doesn’t like. “Rather than taking face out of a discussion (the very concept of which Kendi also describes as racist), this worldview goes out of its way to impose race into every discussion.” Thus, Murray explains, at the exact time that racism has never been more discredited, it is portrayed as being omnipresent. The practical consequences, though, of projecting racism everywhere has permeated education and corporations.
In comparison, China, the major challenger to Western civilization, has without much protest from the masses in the West, put over a million Uighurs in concentration camps and regularly imposes on all Chinese subjects forced abortions at nine months when a woman dares to have a second child. The result is now a culture where people do not respect human life anymore. But rather than focus on its own problems, the CCP weaponizes Westerm weaknesses such as the discussion on racism.
After discussing modern CRT, Murray turns to the new attempts to rewrite history such as the 1619 project, which is being used to smear American history and capitalism. Slavery, he points out, was ended in a Civil War in the United States and by the British Empire. But it is not a unique sin to America as the numbers of African slaves put into the Arab slave trade was far larger than the other direction across the Atlantic. Also, the Barbary pirates and the Ottomans sold millions of Europeans into slavery for centuries. “If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move past it.” And, the discussion of privilege, he argues, ignores that most white Europeans were not living in any type of priveleged paradise. As to reparations, the book argues that it comes down to “people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who look like the people who may have done the wrong.”
The next topic of the book is the attacks on historical figures, taking footnotes out of their history, and ignoring their accomplishments in order to refashion history such as the attacks on Churchill. And not only are historical figures under attack, but the very philosophical and religious pillars of western civilization. These attacks are done, Murray explains, by using omissions and double standards.
At its ultimate, the attacks include an attack on mathematics and truth and the idea that 2 plus 2 equals 4.
We have a few options, Murray explains, the first being to fight and defend our own history.
This is a fascinating book, both for the examples it cites, but also for setting out in logical formation how ridiculous some of the arguments and attacks on Western civilization truly are.
Those Crazy Books 