Anti-Western sentiment

Not to be confused with Anti-Americanism, Anti-Western (genre), or Anti-White racism.

Chinese pamphlet issued during the Boxer Rebellion depicting the Europeans (represented as having goat heads) being slaughtered and Manchu officials shooting at a crucified pig (meant to represent the Corpus Christi [which is Latin for "the body of Christ"] here)

Anti-Western sentiment, also known as anti-Atlanticism or Westernophobia, refers to the irrational fear, broad opposition, bias, or hostility towards the people, culture, or policies of the Western world.

This sentiment is found worldwide. It often stems from anti-imperialism and criticism of past colonial actions by Western powers. For example, in Africa, figures like Patrice Lumumba and Mobutu Sese Seko blamed the West for imperialism in the Congo region. In Ethiopia, resentment over internal politics and conflict resolution during the Tigray war led to anti-Western sentiment. In the Middle East, Pan-Arabism and Islamism contribute to anti-Western attitudes. Jihadist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS view Western countries as targets for terrorism due to perceived insults against Islam and military interventions in Muslim countries. Many Latin American countries harbor criticism due to historical American and European interventions. In Russia, anti-Western sentiment has been endorsed by many. Russian leaders have traditionally rejected Western liberalism which they see as a threat to Russian hegemony in the region.

The phenomenon is often exacerbated by contemporary events. In recent decades, anti-Western feelings have been fueled by factors such as the Iraq War, support for Israel, and sanctions against countries like Iran.

Definition and usage

In many modern cases, anti-Western sentiment is fueled by anti-imperialism, particularly against countries that are "deemed guilty for colonial crimes of the past and present," such as Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands and Belgium. Anti-Western sentiment occurs in many countries, including the West – especially European countries. Broad anti-Western sentiment also exists in the Muslim world against Europeans and Americans. Anti-American sentiment stems from US support for Israel, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and numerous sanctions against Iran.

Samuel P. Huntington argues that after the Cold War, international conflict over economic ideology would be replaced with conflict over cultural differences. His "Clash of Civilizations" argues that economic and political regionalism will increasingly shift non-Western countries towards geopolitical engagement with countries that share their values. He argues that Muslim population growth simultaneous to a growth in Islamic fanaticism is leading to a rejection of Westernization.

Africa

Main articles: Pan-Africanism, Decolonisation of Africa, and Neo-colonialism

Anti-American graffiti at Mogadishu referring to the Bloody Monday raid.

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba blamed the Western world for imperialism. On 1 August 1960, he "gave a speech that indicated in no ambiguous terms that the United Nations, its Secretary-General, the United States, and the Western powers were all corrupt entities." During the Congo Crisis, Lumumba received support from the Soviet Union, which contributed to his overthrow and execution by the Western-backed Mobutu Sese Seko.

When Mobutu became leader of the Congo, he renamed the country Zaire and created the national policy of Authenticité or Zaireanization, which aimed to remove all Western cultural influence from the country.

In 2001, anti-Western sentiment skyrocketed in the Congo following the assassination of the Congolese president Laurent Kabila, with many Congolese citizens blaming the Western world for his death.

Ethiopia

Anti-Western sentiment was broadly expressed in Ethiopia during the Tigray War as a result of resentment over pressure in internal politics and request over resolution of the conflict. On 30 May 2021, a pro-government rally took place in Addis Ababa to protest an international pressure denouncing "Western intervention" and US economic and security assistance sanctions. Protestors also waved banners supporting the controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project. On 22 October 2022, tens of thousands protestors took a demonstration in Addis Ababa's Meskel Square, whereas the other cities in Ethiopia, including Bahir Dar, Gondar, Adama, Dire Dawa and Hawassa also hosted a similar demonstration to denounce the intervention.

Ghana

Kwame Nkrumah with Ernesto "Che" Guevara, January 1965

Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, had a staunch anti-Western stance and blamed the United States for many of Africa's difficulties.

Nigeria

Located in northeastern Nigeria, the name of the extremist Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram translates to "Western education is forbidden" or "Western civilization is forbidden."

Zimbabwe

Former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe used anti-Western rhetoric in his speeches.

Asia

Main article: Pan-Asianism

China

Main articles: Anti-Western sentiment in China and Sinocentrism

See also: Boxer Rebellion and Wolf warrior diplomacy

Anti-Western pamphlet issued during the Boxer Rebellion showing lynching of Christian missionaries (derogatorily referred to as 'ghosts' here) by the Chinese natives and burning of their books.

Anti-Western sentiment in China has been increasing since the early 1990s, particularly among Chinese young adults. Notable incidents which have resulted in a significant anti-Western backlash have included the 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the 2008 demonstrations during the Olympic torch relay, and alleged Western media bias, especially in relation to the 2008 Tibetan unrest. While available public opinion polls show that the Chinese people view the United States in a positive light, there remains suspicion over the West's motives toward China stemming largely from historical experiences, specifically the "century of humiliation."

These suspicions have been increased by the Chinese Communist Party's "Patriotic Education Campaign". Although Chinese millennials are largely apathetic to politics, China's Gen Z now has an unprecedentedly low opinion of the West and "Western values" since the reform and opening up of the 1970s. Young Chinese have grievances such as the Western alienation of Chinese tech companies, anti-East Asian racism, anti-Chinese propaganda, and pressure on China's internal affairs, among other issues. In a study conducted by Toronto University in April 2020, 4 out of every 5 Chinese people under 30-years-old said they do not trust Americans.

India

See also: Hindu nationalism and Hindutva

Although opinion polls suggest positive views towards Western countries today, anti-Western sentiments were common during the British Raj due to the Indian independence movement.

Anti-Western sentiment is widespread within the Hindu nationalist circles due to various factors like Occidentalist caricatures and resentment against the anti-Hindu-pro-Muslim attitude of the Western world (which it sees to be dominated by wokes and Islamoleftists) in the context of conflict between Hindus and Muslims. Contempt for Western values like secularism and liberalism is encouraged by the Hindu nationalists as decolonialism.

Japan

Further information: Sakoku, Japanese militarism, Japanese New Left, Foreign relations of Japan § Europe, and Japan–United States relations

The Greater East Asia Conference in November 1943, participants left to right: Ba Maw, Zhang Jinghui, Wang Jingwei, Hideki Tojo, Wan Waithayakon, José P. Laurel, Subhas Chandra Bose.

There is a history of criticism of the west within the intellectual history of Japan.

Korea

Historically, anti-Western sentiment in Korea has been linked to the opposition to the Christian missionary activities in the region, most notably by the Donghak Movement. More recently, it has been related to the occasional difficulties in the American-Korean relationship in South Korea and, to a vastly more pronounced extent, North Korea.

Anti-western sentiments was just that extreme in the early phases of the Republic of Korea. It was confined to a very small number of people who faced arrest and jail under the National Security Law (1948). The Rhee administration largely exploited the National Security Act to garner support for his extreme right-wing power base. Its use also ensured that anti-Americanism remained the preserve of extremists ready to risk arrest. In practice, this meant that anti-Americanism remained intimately intertwined. It was associated with Marxism-Leninism until the onset of the democratisation movement.

Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, argued that East Asian or Confucian countries such as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam should develop based on "Asian values" or what is generally referred to as "Confucian" or "Sinitic" values. In other words, countries such as the Four Asian Tigers should aspire to have Western-style standards of living without accepting liberal democratic social institutions and principles. The Asian values are primarily influenced by the ideals of Confucianism, notably filial piety, and social cohesion. The concept of Asian values is widely criticized as a means for instituting authoritarianism, notably by Amartya Sen.

Middle East

Main article: Pan-Arabism

Islamism

Main articles: Islamism and Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Anti-American protests in Iran

Together with political Salafis, jihadists (also called Salafist jihadists) view Christian Europe as a land inhabited by infidels (Dar al-Kufr). For jihadists, this makes Christian Europe a just target for armed jihad, e.g., acts of war or terrorist attacks. Jihadists refer to such lands as Dar al-Harb (lands of war). Jihadists themselves motivate their attacks in two prominent ways: to resist Western/Christian military intervention in Muslim countries, especially those committed in favour of Israel and to discourage perceived insults against Islam such as the Muhammad Cartoons.

John Calvert writes that in their critique of the West, Islamists quote Western thinkers like Alexis Carrel, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Arthur Koestler.

Extremists terrorist groups al-Qaeda and ISIL/ISIS are said to be both anti-Western. They have been known to promote terrorism in Western countries, and anti-Western countries, most notably Russia.

East Europe

Russia

Further information: Eurasianism, Russian world, Russian neo-imperialism, and Golden billion

Russian President Vladimir Putin with religious leaders of Russia, 2015. Putin has promoted religious traditionalism and the rejection of some Western liberal principles, like toleration of homosexuality.

Samuel P. Huntington in Clash of Civilizations classifies Russia and the rest of Orthodox Europe as a different civilization from Western civilization.

Anti-Western sentiment in Russia dates back to the 19th-century intellectual debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles. While the former deemed Russia to be a lagging Western country, the latter rejected these claims outright and considered Western Europe to be 'rotten' (whence the Russian-language cliche phrase 'rotten West'). An important anti-Western figure during the reign of Alexander III of Russia was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a former liberal who eventually renounced and thoroughly criticized his former views.

Under the Soviet Union, 'the West' eventually became synonymous with 'the capitalist world', resulting in the appearance of the famous propagandist cliché 'corrupting influence of the West'.

After the Cold War, a number of politicians in the Russian Federation have supported an explicit promotion of Russian Orthodox traditionalism and a rejection of Western liberalism. Some ultra-nationalist politicians, such as the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky, express the most anti-Western sentiment.

Vladimir Putin has promoted explicitly conservative policies in social, cultural and political matters, both at home and abroad. Putin has attacked globalism and neoliberalism and promoted new think tanks that stress Russian nationalism, the restoration of Russia's historical greatness, and systematic opposition to liberal ideas and policies. Putin has collaborated closely with the Russian Orthodox Church in this cultural campaign. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Church, endorsed his election in 2012, stating Putin's terms were like "a miracle of God." The Russian Orthodox Church is known to host groups that promote nationalist and anti-Western tendencies.

The Russian government has restricted foreign funding of some liberal NGOs. Pro-Russian activists in the former Soviet Union frequently equate the West with homosexuality and the gay agenda. The 2013 Russian gay propaganda law was welcomed by nationalist and religious political figures in Russia as a bulwark against Western influence.

Putin with heads of delegations at the 16th BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia in October 2024

The Yarovaya Law prohibits evangelism by religious minorities. It was used to ban the United States-based Jehovah's Witnesses.

In 2023, Russia adopted a Eurasianist, anti-Western foreign policy strategy in a document titled "The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation" approved by Vladimir Putin. The document defined Russia as a "unique country-civilization and a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power" that seeks to create a "Greater Eurasian Partnership" by pursuing close relations with China, India, countries of the Islamic World and rest of the Global South (Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa). The policy identifies United States and other Anglosphere as "the main inspirer, organizer and executor of the aggressive anti-Russian policy of the collective West" and seeks the end of geopolitical American dominance in the international scene.

In his speech in November 2023, Putin claimed that the Mongol-Tatar yoke resulting from the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' was better for the Russian people than Western domination, saying: "Alexander Nevsky received a jarlyk [permission] from the khans of the Golden Horde to rule as a prince, primarily so that he could effectively resist the invasion of the West." According to Putin, the decision to submit to the Tatar khans preserved "the Russian people – and later all the peoples living on the territory of our country."

Turkey

Main article: Pan-Turkism

Further information: European Union–Turkey relations and Turkey § Foreign relations

During the Ottoman period of Turkish history, a tradition of anti-Westernism developed.

West

Further information: Islamo-leftism, Euroscepticism, Red Army Faction, List of anti-NATO parties and organizations, and Gaza war protests

Protest in Slovenia against the alleged complicity of Friedrich Merz, Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas in the Gaza genocide, 1 September 2025

In the view of the Western conservative minority, the anti-Western sentiment is prevalent in the West, forming an overwhelming paradigm in political, intellectual, and educational circles. Conservative writers describe and criticize numerous concepts they deem to be anti-Western. These elements include the responsibility of the West for the poverty of the Global South today and in the past numerous deadly and destructive wars and other man-made disasters either intentionally made by the West or indirectly caused by the West.

Among prominent books of this school are Pascal Buckner's The Tears of the White Man and The Tyranny of Guilt, Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West, Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West and Douglas Murray's War on the West.

Overview

In one of the earliest overviews (1983) of the anti-Western sentiment in the West, French novelist and essayist Pascal Bruckner described:

From existentialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter's hypocrisy, violence and abomination... In almost identical language, the callow Third World is described as having been robbed of its natural goodness by a diabolical and corrupting West.

The West was found guilty in most crimes in history including most deadly and destructive ones. Arguably, the West was able to produce computers only because somewhere people were dying of hunger. The sentiment of Western guilt, according to the conservative school, is related to two other sentiments - self hatred on the one hand and on the other exaggerated compassion or empathy to others. In the conservative eschatology, the anti-Western sentiment inflates the Western sense of guilt, contributes to anti-white discrimination and liberal immigration policies, and these in turn lead to "civilizational suicide."

Some of the books on these subjects were bestsellers and their several concepts are popular and were echoed in the second Trump administration. Its one agenda was to combat the anti-Western sentiment. The 2025 National Security Strategy states that Europe faces "civilizational erasure" mostly due to the large number of immigrants. Vice President of the time, J. D. Vance, warned Europe of "civilization suicide" for the same reason and proclaimed that under this administration there is no longer need to "apologize for being white." Donald Trump promotes "color-blind, merit-based" policy implying his belief in the existence of anti-Western reverse racism.

The concept of Western civilizational suicide is traced to James Burnham's Suicide of the West (1964). Burnham regarded the phenomenon as inseparable from certain aspects of liberalism which, as he put it, is "the ideology pf Western suicide." Burnham claimed a potential of liberalism to "justify" decline. Liberalism "permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution" by diminishing its achievements. Writing in 1964, Burnham had not expected that the trend he detected would go as far as the American progressive anti-Western sentiment in the 2020s. He only warned of deriding the sentiment of nationalism and promoting a transnational universalism - milestones the West passed in the late 20th century. Later, the subject was developed by Jonah Goldberg in his book, also titled Suicide of the West.

In the 2020s, civilizational suicide was linked to collective suicidal empathy elaborated by evolutionary psychology Gad Saad. He warned of "the descent to madness" if "our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets." In 2025, Cathy Young suggested that suicidal empathy as becoming a "right-wing buzzword." Earlier, Buckner developed a similar concept using "compassion" instead of "empathy."

20th century

Pascal Bruckner and Douglas Murray date the beginning of the anti-Western sentiment in the West to the beginning of the postcolonial period. As "the West retreated, anti-Westernism advanced" and in the West as much as elsewhere. Borrowing much from Third-Worldism, Western left-wing intellectuals and journalists shifted from the Third-World originally neutral position regarding the two superpowers of the time to a strong anti-Western school blaming the West for all collective failures of the Global South. From the civilizing mission the  intellectual pendulum swung to the consensus that the West had never done anything right.

Among the pioneers of Western anti-Westernism, Bruckner and Murray name Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. As the European powers lost colonies and the United States rose to superpower, the anti-Western sentiment in the West focused on the United States (and its "pariah" Israel). Sartre warned in 1953: "Beware! America is a mad dog." A decade later, Fanon added:

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the USA became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to a alling dimensions.

In Buckner's satirical comment, the West found in America "its own disgraceful quintessence." Four centuries of Western crimes "achieved their supreme expression and converged under the roof of the White House." The US evolved into "the ideal guilty party." No West European could forgive the US for defeating the Axis. One equivalent of this logic would be giving Hitler Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.

One of leading American Third-Worldists, Noam Chomsky, focused the anti-Western challenge on the US, blaming his country for numerous "bloodbaths' since 1945. Most progressive European minds blamed America and Israel for all monstrosities that happened in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Performing what critics called "intellectual acrobatics," the left wing accused the US in such disasters as the genocide of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. America was labeled "Bloodbath Archipelago" paraphrasing Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. The American way of life was redefined as the American way of death.

The anti-Western line of Sartre and Fanon was continued by Edward Said. Published in 1978, his seminal Orientalism exerted a greater impact on the way people in the West thought about themselves. Said was inspired by the infamous phrase "exterminate all the brutes" from the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness and devoted a book to the author.

Another inspired by the same phrase notable author was Sven Lindqvist who titled his 1992 book Exterminate All the Brutes. The ideas of extermination are a common European heritage "soaked" in the conviction that imperialism is a "biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races." Originally published in Swedish, the book was translated into 14 languages. Eponymous with the book, television series "Exterminate All the Brutes" with Lindqvist in the cast won award.

By the 1980s, according to Bruckner, the anti-Western sentiment became the "common denominator of the leftist intelligentsia." Convinced that this denominator is pathological, William R. Beer ended his "Introduction" to Bruckner's Tears of the White Man (1986) hoping "that publication of this book will be part of the healing process." According to Bruckner, the opposite happened. In 2010, he stated: "A movement I described in 1983 is now spreading and growing deeper."

Meanwhile, Western activists and protests grew more explicitly anti-Western. In 1987, Jesse Jackson led a crowd of protestors at Stanford University with the chant "Hey hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go." Back then, Jackson and his followers were protesting against Stanford University's introductory program "Western culture." They proposed that there was something wrong with teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition. The university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of "Western culture" with the study of many cultures. What happened at Stanford in 1987, according to Douglas Murray, was a sign of everything to come... In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford's lead." The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture was redefined as the "product of a bunch of dead white males." Murray argued that Western tradition is shameful in the racist view of modern anti-racist gurus.

Anti-white statements

In 2004, the onion-documentary maker Michael Moore published a number-one best-selling book, titled Stupid White Men, with a chapter, titled "Kill Whitey." White people, according to the book, bear exclusive responsibility for slavery and are guilty of most crimes in history including the black plague and the internal combustion engine. As Moore concluded, "You name the problem, the disease, the human suffering, or the abject misery visited upon millions, and I'll bet you ten bucks I can put a white face on it."

According to Robin DiAngelo, "a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy." Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge, Priyamvada Gopal, called to "abolish whiteness," said that "white lives don't matter," and she personally has to "resist urges to kneecap white men every day."

On his Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon mentioned this in his lead monologue. "The results of the 2020 census just came out," he told his studio audience and viewers at home. "And for the first time in American history, the number of white people went down." In response to this, the studio audience whooped and cheered uproariously.

Protests and revisions

In 2019, the 1619 Project revisioned the American Revolution as a pro-slavery cause and linked Microsoft Excel to plantation accounting books. The Project was praised by Kamala Harris and Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her flagship essay in the collection. Along the 1619 Project, other issues became subjects of the American history wars. These issues were criticized by some as promoting political narrative disregarding egregious errors of historical fact and teaching the Americans to hate America.

Shortly after the 1619 Project was published, the George Floyd protests toppled or vandalized several national monuments and memorials including the statue of George Washington. Anti-Columbus sentiment surged across the country, with statues of Columbus either torn down by crowds or preemptively removed by the authorities. Statues of confederates who were in favor of slavery were coming down, but so were those of Union leaders who opposed slavery and the statue of George Washington who freed his slaves. The riots spread to Britain where the statue of Churchill was assaulted. In Canada, the statues of John Macdonald, James Cook and Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II were removed. One observer described these demolitions as the "great iconoclastic rage," and another observer " damnatio memoriae."

The New York Post called them and accompanying acts of burning and looting the "1619 riots." Hannah-Jones commented that calling these acts the 1619 riots "would be an honor" for her and thanked the New York Post. Western main news channels were said to distort their reports on the anti-Western actions during the George Floyd protests. BBC ran the headline "27 Police Officers Injured during Largely Peaceful Anti-racism Protests." CNN showed a reporter standing in front of a burning city with the tagline "Fiery, but Mostly Peaceful Protests."

The same year, CNN published an opinion by Professor of History at the University of Exeter, Richard Toye, who justified the defacement of Churchill. Sharing the fate of Columbus and American founding fathers, Churchill was described as a racist and white supremacist, and it was time to break free of his "great white men's view of history."

Postcolonial perspective revisioned historical significance of the outcome in World War II. Professor of black studies in Cambridge, Kehinde Andrews, found that the better side in the War lost because the British Empire was "far worse than the Nazis." Considering British imperial history, the Holocaust was not unusual in recent history. The victory of the Allies over Nazism just moved the world "from an old version of white supremacy to a new version of white supremacy."

Attitude to radical Islam

In his 1983 book, Pascal Bruckner noted that "the remorseless and self-righteous critic who endlessly denounces the deceptions of parliamentary democracy is suddenly rapt with admiration before the atrocities committed in the name of the Koran..." In the early 21st century, he observed an "astonishing," in his view, phenomenon which he described as the fusion between the atheist far left and radical Islam. Around the same time, David Horowitz recorded a call to global jihad heard in the Western academia.

The September 11 attacks were justified in Western intellectual circles and widely in academia. Noam Chomsky was one of prominent academics who argued that on September 11 the US got what it deserved, while the most vivid reaction seems to belong to Ward Churchill, expressed in his book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.

Similarly to Ward Churchill, Spaniards in the 2004 islamist bombings regarded their killed compatriots as the guilty party and the next day about one million protested by blaming the atrocity on their own prime minister, José María Aznar.

The new peak of the Western positive attitude to terrorist acts occurred after the October 7 attacks, accompanied by celebrations in campuses across North America. Pascal Bruckner described this celebration as the largest judeophobic coming-out since 1945. This time, united in joy were the Western radical Left, radical Islam, and traditional antisemites. Russell J. Rickford of Cornell University described his feeling as "exhilarating," "energizing" and "thrilling," and if someone feels differently he is not human. For the first time since 1945, mass liquidation of Jews was done. "That day, the licence to murder was given..." All the atrocites closed to public due to their extreme inhumanity from the start were justified, welcome and celebrated. They were part of the noble resistance to colonialism and Israel, in popular view, is just that - pure European colonialism with no relation whatsoever to Biblical history.

Psychological criticism

The best Western minds, criticized Pascal Bruckner, applaud radical revolutions, go into ecstasies over the beauty of terrorist acts, or support guerillas because it challenges our imperialism. Foreign dictatorships are favored over our democracies. Critical thought turns against itself. Clerks emerged to maintain our whole intellectual intercourse and issue permits to think and speak. At the slightest deviation, they enforce proper order in language. "In the great factory of the mind, it is they who open doors for you or slum them into your face." The past crimes, too heavy to bear, make the West eternally guilty and thus forbidding them to combat or even argue against anything non-Western. "Our only right is to remain silent." In this anti-Western sentiment, "every Westerner is presumed guilty until proven innocent."

The sense of the Western guilt leads to self hatred and in the process hate obtains legitimacy and high moral purpose. As of 2026, the phenomenon of collective self-hatred remained unique to the West. "Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West." This sentiment ends with the conviction that the West deserves revenge. This revenge is indeed implied in much of anti-Western rhetoric. Anti-Western hate speeches and dehumanization of white people are common and tolerated or even encouraged. Speakers are elevated to folk heroes for targeting Western most significant persons, institutions, values, and events.

The whole world, according to the broad Western consensus, hates the Euro-American and he deserves it. Since 1945, the West has been progressively obsessed, in the words of Bruckner, by "torments of repentance." He characterized the Euro-American: "Thanks to him, everything becomes clear, evil acquires a face, the dirty rat is universally designated."

Douglas Murray characterizes the West as the first society in human history who, when they are hit, know that they deserve it and only ask why they deserve it. European masochists are welcome in the world of sadists. The European liberals and the anti-Western world find common language as easy as a masochist and sadist do."Only modern Europeans are happy to be self-loathing in an international marketplace of sadists." Bruckner has diagnosed it as a Western moral intoxicant.

Bruckner stressed a paradoxical phenomenon to which he devoted his book: "All the Third World wants to gain a foothold in Europe at the time when Europe is wallowing in shame and self-loathing." Douglas Murray suggested that the job of ending the Western self-hatred should be best performed by a pathologist. According to The New Criterion, one measure to estimate the severity of a civilization's addiction to pathological sentiments is the extent to which the civilization attacks, repudiates, or otherwise undermines its key cultural achievements.

Criticism of anachronism and double standards

Beginning with Aristotle, almost all pillars of the Western philosophy were blacklisted for their failure to stand to the anti-racist standards of a progressive Western university in the 2020s. Nor Shakespeare was spared "decolonization." The pendulum of racial issues in the West has swung "past the point of correction and into overcorrection." The West has been pushed into "racial ultra-awareness" to the point where none of Western history and culture is safe from the charge of racism.

Nabila Ramdani redefined Enlightenment as Darkness due to racist remarks of Voltaire and his contemporary colleagues. A statue of Voltaire in front of the Académie Française in Paris was removed. In the 2000s, Voltaire's play Mahomet, a ferocious attack on hypocrisy and fanaticism written in 1741, could not be staged in France except under police protection. In 1983, Pascal Bruckner suggested: "With suicidal madness," Europe "kneels down before Allah's madmen."

The only exception among the negative features of the West is Marxism widely regarded as positive among both non-Western peoples and the postcolonialist thinkers in the West. Ironically, according to Douglas Murray, Marx, "a Western thinker, with next to no knowledge—let alone experience—of non-Western cultures or societies... Intent in shrugging off the legacy of Western colonialism, they find an answer for every non-Western society in Western Marxism." Murray claimed a "double standard" in treating Marx and Western thinkers who were lambasted:

Marx's anti-Semitism is more nopious than Immanuel Kant's. His career-long record of racism makes a single footnote in the work of David Hume look very slight. His language of superior and inferior races was of a kind that progressive thinkers such as John Stuart Mill already abhorred and worse than anything Thomas Jefferson engaged in.

Murray explains the double standard by anti-Western sentiment:

Marx is protected because his writings and reputation are useful for anyone wishing to pull down the West. Everybody else is subjected to the process of destruction because their reputations are useful for holding up the West.

Murray claims that a diversity as practised reflects another double standard. While all cultures are equal, Western cultures are less equal than others. A "person who favoured the culture of Germany over that of Eritrea had, in the most gracious interpretation, an out-of-date or ill-informed opinion, and in the more common view was simply an out-and-out racist."

Historical criticism

The correction of Eurocentrism, in the conservative view, exceeded due proportions and took an anti-Western bias. The 1990s American textbooks omitted Wright brothers and the 1969 moon landing. Instead, they introduced readers to the wealth of the Mali Empire and its achievements and grandeur during the reign of Mansa Musa.

Jack Weatherford proclaimed that Columbus was no more the discoverer of America than Pocahontas was the discoverer of Great Britain and any perception of difference in world historical significance between the two is a case of Eurocentrism. With all his achievements cancelled, Columbus was convicted in genocide, colonization, slavery, and atrocities. By 2000, "diabolized" as an irredeemable racist murderer, Columbus made "Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent." His statues have been the target of assaults since the 1990s, including his Obelisk torn down in 2017, and the Columbus Day in many states and districts changed to the Indigenous Peoples' Day. The revisionist literature on Columbus is vast but does not present statistical data demonstrating that conquerors and governors in other civilizations on average killed or enslaved less people.

Nor does the revisionist literature present evidence whatsoever to back its wholesale attack on Western history. According to its counterfactual implication, had any other group of people got first to discoveries made by the West, of new lands or of the atom bomb, the results would have been more peaceful and socially more equal and just. Douglas Murray finds more credible the opposite counterfactual, that things would have gone far more deadly and destructive had the West not been first in a whole range of discoveries.

In research, the Arab slave trade is completely overshadowed by the transatlantic one despite their comparable scales. There is no movement of reparations for the descendants of Arab, Ottoman, or Berber slavery, and no European or African has seriously suggested trying to find out where any bill for compensation should be sent. The nuance that the West is the first civilization to outlaw slavery and conquest is hardly mentioned in mainstream literature on these subjects. There is no doubt that Europe has given birth to monsters, according to Bruckner, but at the same time it has given birth to theories that make it possible to understand and destroy these monsters.

Western governments are said to internalize criticisms leveled against them by both hostile powers and anti-Western activists significantly more than other civilizations. For comparison, Asoka in India, Muhammad in the Arab world, or Genghis Khan in Mongolia are not widely convicted in genocide. The statue of Genghis Khan stands unperturbed as the world's tallest equestrian statue. Bruckner stressed the double standard with which the Western history is treated: "Ruminating on its past abominations — wars, religious persecutions, slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism— it views its history as nothing more than a long series of massacres and sackings that led to two world wars..." In the vast world beyond Europe, however, few nations lack history full of corpses, guard towers, tortures and exactions. Crimes which constituted the perennial dynamic of history, in the European context were elevated to a new order of evil.

Similarly, Douglas Murray claims that many countries are more abusive and discriminative than the West but nobody speaks of them with an "iota of the rage and disgust poured out daily against the West from inside the West." And if other countries do have any such vices, it must be because the West exported them to the non-Western world of Edenic innocents. World history has become the history of Western crimes and non-Western innocence.

Apologizing for national historical crimes is the tradition of Western governments. By contrast, Russian, Turkish or Mongolian governments have never offered such an apology for their empires. In the chapter, titled "Tyranny of Guilt" (the same as Bruckner's earlier title), Douglas Murray asks if Europe does not find itself in the strange situation of feeling unusually guilty. Empires existed worldwide but the concept of immigration as "empire strikes back" is peculiar to Western Europe. Since all civilizations have committed comparable crimes in their time and only one of them is punished in this way, one should see a specific anti-Western and in particular an anti-European sentiment.

According to Pat Buchanan, the demonization of the West proceeds along with the whitewashing of the rest. The 1990s American textbooks described the achievements of the Aztecs in great detail but omitted any information about their conquests and their sacrifices of captives to Huitzilopotchli. Instead, the new textbooks portrayed Cortes's conquest of the Aztecs as a genocide which was committed against a peace-loving people.

Latin America

Main article: Panhispanism

See also: Pink tide, Cuban Revolution, Nicaraguan Revolution, and Chavismo

Anti-Western sentiment exists in Latin America, especially in countries where the population consists mostly of Native Americans, such as Bolivia, Guatemala, or Peru. On the other hand, in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, Europeans are more represented in the population. Consequently, there are many Latin Americans who identify as Westerners, so the anti-Western discourse is therefore not as prominent as in other regions. That is not to say, however, that there is no anti-Western discourse. Indeed, it can be found in countries with nationalist and populist leaders or movements, including left-wing political parties in Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, or Venezuela. In recent years, Latin American nations have increasingly turned away from the United States.

Fidel Castro (right) meeting with Brazilian president Lula da Silva, a significant "Pink Tide" leader

Anti-Western sentiments are related to the history of American and European political interventions in Latin America. Many people in the region lay sharp criticism on the United States for supporting Cold War era coups and CIA-backed military dictatorships. Most Latin American countries tend to be more regional, focusing on internal cooperation. Accompanying this is a notable distrust of globalization. Latin American organizations like Mercosur, Prosur and Unasur are strong groups that represent this aspect of Latin American foreign policy.

Samuel P. Huntington in Clash of Civilizations controversially classifies Latin America as a different civilization from Western civilization.

See also

• Anti-Americanism
• Anti-Australian sentiment
• Anti-Canadian sentiment
• Anti-Europeanism
  • Anti-Armenian sentiment
  • Anti-Austrian sentiment
  • Anti-British sentiment
  • Anti-Croatian sentiment
  • Anti-Dutch sentiment
  • Anti-Estonian sentiment
  • Anti-French sentiment
  • Anti-Georgian sentiment
  • Anti-German sentiment
  • Anti-Greek sentiment
  • Anti-Hungarian sentiment
  • Anti-Irish sentiment
  • Anti-Italian sentiment
  • Anti-Polish sentiment
  • Anti-Portuguese sentiment
  • Anti-Romanian sentiment
  • Anti-Russian sentiment
  • Anti-Serbian sentiment
  • Anti-Slavic sentiment
  • Anti-Spanish sentiment
  • Anti-Ukrainian sentiment
• Anti-Israeli sentiment
• Anti-Japanese sentiment
• Anti-Palestine sentiment
• Anti-South Korean sentiment
• Anti-Turkish sentiment
• Anti-imperialism
• Anti-Christian sentiment
• Clash of Civilizations
• Occidentalism
• Criticism of globalization
• Gharbzadegi
• Neocolonialism
• Pan-nationalism
• Left-wing populism
• Post-Western era
• Racism
• Reverse racism
• Right-wing populism
• Active measures
• Anti-White racism