Education expert Dr. Kevin Donnelly AM is both someone at the tip of the spear and someone who understands why the spear is necessary.

His recent book, Defend the West: The Culture of Freedom, is a sharp-witted anthology of essays piercing light into the heart of the pending dystopian dark age.

Ten essays are the crux of Donnelly’s 125-page guest-filled treatise.

Subjects range from Australian culture, Christianity, life, liberty, the Indigenous community, and individual responsibility.

Contributors are not social media influencers, or fringe podcasters feigning high esteem.

Each contribution comes from respected thinkers whose platforms are as serious as the arguments they make.

Writing the introduction, Donnelly asserts that Australian students have to first have a firm grasp on their own culture, before “having any chance of understanding a foreign one.”

Worship underpins how people groups live and interact.

It’s in this light that we can assert that the foundation for Western culture is Christ-centred Christianity.

Decorating this cornerstone is the Greco-Roman marital union uniting democracy, philosophy, and technological ingenuity.

“For all its faults and sins,” Donnelly writes, Western culture is unique.

Inherent to this culture are freedom and responsibility; and thanks to Christianity the inherent ability “to recognise and remediate injustice, and wrongs inflicted on others.”

Only Western Culture “could produce the King James Bible, the Magna Carta,” human rights, a fair-go for women, and the American Declaration of Independence.

Unfortunately, adds Colin Black, “muscular Christianity” alongside a robust grasp of classical liberal education has been replaced by an anaemic and sickly oikophobia.

The learned and those doing the learning are placeless.

We are no longer taught to be “proud guardians of the culture we inherited. Such as Christian convictions, Western literature, music, art architecture, political and legal institutions.”

Teachers went from being educators to activist programmers, “no longer the sage on the stage, now just a guide by the side.”

Classical Marxism morphed into Cultural Marxism and replaced classical liberalism.

However, there is hope, and it’s found in the Edmund Burke-inspired “little fires sparked by the lively defiance of the faithful who still rest in unvisited tombs.”

These are, Augusto Zimmerman, asserted, “societies who know they are indebted to Western culture for a rule of law guaranteeing freedom, justice, and liberty.”

From the separation of powers to limited government, impartiality, and branches of government, the rule of law exists as a bulwark against being ruled by the whim, or will, of kings, or centralized bureaucracies. 

This is why Western nations who erode the importance of faith, “make themselves vulnerable to the power of the state.”

“Unrestrained power is always inimical to freedom.”

Adding his own thoughts, Donnelly warns that “freedom and liberty can no longer be assumed sacrosanct.”

Defending the West is necessary because it’s under attack.

The war is truth vs. falsehood.

“Neo-Marxism,” he writes, “has since World War 2 inspired activists to overthrow” Western societies.

A key weapon in this insurrection is post-colonial theory, which hammers out a one-sided view of colonialism, under the false belief that “all cultures are equal.”

This “black-armband view” of Western institutions often ignores “African chieftains terrorizing and enslaving nearby tribes; the Islamic slave trade, conquest, and slaughter of innocents.

While bad things happened as the result of European exploration and settlement, we shouldn’t forget that British common law and its Christ-centred Christian faith “exerted positive influences and societal change.”

For Donnelly, worse than post-colonial critical fiction is the “emergence of cultural relativism, and multiculturalism.”

New arrivals into the West are not adopting the country that has graciously adopted them.

Under diversity, equity, and inclusion, immigrants are now told that “instead of assimilating” they can bring their culture, hold on to their baggage, and not learn the host country’s language.

“Such is the Woke infection,” Donnelly writes, many Australians have no idea who they are, what they should defend, and how “our political, legal, and way of life” works.

Prolific and on-point is a great descriptor for Donnelly, who is easily Australia’s preeminent voice on West-oration.

While there is hope, as the five remaining essays assert, the Woke war on the West is far from done.

Defending the West’s connectivity shows the real genius of Donnelly’s reach to fortify essential freedoms like free speech.

The structure is carefully put together, creating a chronology that forms easily into a cohesive conversation.

This is a laid-back read; a bedside nightcap, or an afternoon pick-me-up after a depressing scroll through your newsfeed.

Albeit deep, and necessarily so, every contribution launches a valiant critique that doesn’t have to be read in one go.

If these essays are not the canary in the coal mine, they at least point us to those who are.

Such as Solzhenitsyn, Roger Scruton, even Douglas Murray, and Tertullian.

As Anna Krohn states, “The most insistent “canaries” are those who have walked by God’s grace through the abyss of evil.”

Notably, this isn’t Donnelly’s first dance in the defence of the West.

Defend the West’s roots go back, at least as far as 2016, when the repeat Daily Telegraph columnist, wrote a monograph of the same title for the Institute of Public Affairs.

These books are available on Amazon.