Why The West Must Not Apologize For Its Success

There is a philosophy that has now become dominant on the Left and even parts of the center. It’s throughout the West.

The deeper roots of this philosophy bear a deadly fruit.

Let’s begin with a bizarre and hilarious spectacle. Great Britain’s King Charles III was visiting the Canadian Parliament and decided that it would be worthwhile to offer a land acknowledgment.

This is hilarious because King Charles is the King of Great Britain. The only reason the Canadian Parliament exists is because of the settlement of Canada by British citizens. That’s why he is there in the first place.

Charles doing a land acknowledgment and taking that seriously would amount to essentially disestablishing Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa and a bunch of other countries, because all of those countries were originally created as functioning polities by the British Empire.

This bizarre idea that Charles can arrive on Canadian territory and start apologizing to the indigenous people for the presence of white people in this particular area is absurd, especially coming from King Charles, who is the greatest beneficiary on planet Earth of the imperialism of the British Empire.

There are human universals, such as migration, settlement, annexation, and conflict, and they are not unique to white people, Westerners, or Europeans; it’s just that white people, Westerners and Europeans, have been much better at it than other parts of the population on planet Earth. They’re more successful, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, but that does not mean that there is some unique sin that attends to whiteness, being Western, or being European.

Charles said, “I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. This land acknowledgement is a recognition of shared history as a nation. While continuing to deepen my own understanding, it is my great hope that in each of your communities, and collectively as a country, a path is found toward truth and reconciliation, in both word and deed.”

Of course the land is unceded, because the nature of human conflict is that when people migrate from one part of the Earth to another part of the Earth, conflict tends to arise, and then someone wins and someone loses. And it is a very good thing that the British Empire won in Canada.

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Here’s the basic idea: The world is better off because of the British Empire. The world is better off because of American power and the spread of European ideals. That is obviously true. The spread of things like property rights, due process of law, capitalism, freedom of religion, all of which are not human universals — those are the legacy of the West.

There’s always an attempt to take human universals and then project them as West-specific problems. That is not true.

The problems of murder and raping and looting and slavery are human universals.

What is unique about the West is all the other stuff. Reversing that polarity and suggesting that the West is somehow uniquely sinful because it was better at war than others, or because Westerners were better at settlement than the Algonquin who lived on the land where Canada’s parliament now sits, and that is a human tragedy, is not, in fact, a human tragedy.

Bad things happen throughout human history. The bad things are tragedies. But overall, in the broad scope of history, it is an absolutely wonderful thing that Europeans ended up on the North American continent.

Anyone who doesn’t believe so should probably leave. If you don’t believe that, you probably should go back to your dingy apartment and cede it back to the natives from whom your ancestors took it.

All of this ties into a deeper and more deadly philosophy.

The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, visited the White House and was asked about the “Kill the Boer” chant, which has become common at some rallies, targeting the Afrikaner farmers who originally settled in the area of South Africa as early as the 17th century, fought for hundreds of years, and were responsible at one point for tremendous racism against black people.

But the solution to that is not genocidal chants. Yet there’s an idea that as long as the people who are shouting the genocidal chants are not white, European and Western, it suddenly becomes okay.

Why? Because the rules don’t equally apply in this left-wing philosophy, where the sins of the West are unique and the West is unique in its evil.

What that means is that the West has to be destroyed. This has deadly consequences. And it doesn’t matter whether you call this stuff anti-white or anti-Semitic or anti-whatever. The problem with this generalized philosophy is that it is simply evil.

When you separate the world into victims and victimizers and you suggest that anyone who’s been uniquely successful is the victimizer and anyone who is not is a victim, what you get is victimizers with the moral impetus and the moral weight to kill people.

What you end up with is actual terrorism, actual violence, actual overthrow of the institutions that made the West great in the first place.