RUTHFULLY YOURS

Reprinted from Breitbart.com.

The death of Fidel Castro has driven a stake into the heart of the Left, causing progressives worldwide to weep and moan at the loss of their secular deity. While North Korea and Raúl Castro have enforced days of mandatory mourning, leftists in the free world are beating their breasts and wailing with a voluntary and committed passion.

The examples are endless: Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gushed about how he learned of Castro’s death with “deep sorrow” and went on to pay tribute to a “legendary revolutionary.” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) praised Castro and pleaded with everyone to “stop and pause and mourn.”

Other usual suspects did not disappoint. UK’s Labor opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, the U.S. Green Party’s presidential candidate Jill Stein, Rev. Jesse Jackson and former President Jimmy Carter all stepped forward, expressing their deep sadness, extolling Castro’s “heroism,” struggle for “social justice” and other expected feats of revolutionary valor. The list goes on and on.

What exactly is going on here?

To understand why leftists, especially of the Western variety, are weeping upon Castro’s death, it is first crucial to grasp the underlying foundation of the progressives’ belief system. The leftist is a believer in a political faith, a faith that envisions a classless utopia of perfect equality and “social justice.” This faith is interlinked with the leftist’s revulsion of his own democratic-capitalist host society, which he sees as oppressive and unjust – and which he seeks to destroy. And it is upon the ashes of this intended destruction that the leftist hopes to build, with his other self-appointed social redeemers, the secular socialist paradise.

From this ideological foundation grow many pathologies, including the obvious philosophy of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Indeed, by logic, anyone else who wants to destroy the leftist’s host society is seen as a helpful ally – and so it becomes completely obvious why, as David Horowitz has documented, the Left formed an Unholy Alliance with communism during the Cold War and why it continues that tradition with Islamic Supremacism in our terror war today.

Dr Brendan Nelson, a former medical practitioner and former federal politician (from 2007-8 he was leader of the Liberal Party in opposition, succeeded by Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s current prime minister) is presently director of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

At the opening of the War Memorial’s exhibition “The Holocaust: Witnesses and Survivors” on 29 November Dr Nelson delivered an interesting speech. Inter alia:

‘Six million people. Almost a quarter of the population of Australia, almost the entire population of Sydney. That is how many were exterminated in the worst genocide of the twentieth century. Jews, Roma, gypsies, the disabled and political prisoners. But almost all were Jews.

Jewish identity has been shaped by three things: Antisemitism, still a virulent and repugnant force in many parts of the world; The Holocaust or “Shoah”; The embattled nature of the state of Israel for whom existence is a daily struggle.

Adolf Hitler was able to undertake this mass extermination for two principal reasons. The first was that the majority were indifferent to the plight of the minority. The second was that in Germany – as in other parts of Europe, antisemitism was deeply rooted – religious, secular and racial.

One observation through my own life not having ever faced nor endured even a fraction of the adversities suffered by many of you here, is that almost all of life’s suffering and pain stems from people making themselves the centre of their own lives. So too, nations making their own narrow self-interest the centre of all else….

The Australian War Memorial is many things. But above all else is the repository of our nation’s soul. This place and the stories of two million men and women told here, reminds us that we are Australians and that there are in the end some truths by which we live. And they are worth fighting to defend – politically, diplomatically and at times, militarily.

Not everyone agrees with this exhibition. One regular visitor to the Memorial told me emphatically that she was opposed to this exhibition. “This has nothing to do with Australia and the Australian War Memorial”, she said. She told me that she would never walk through it. It has everything to do with us, for we are a part of humankind.

In a world grappling with the mass movement of people; the persecution of political, religious and ethnic minorities; euthanasia and a generational struggle against resurgent totalitarianism in the form of those who have hijacked the good name [sic] of Islam to build a violent political utopia, we must remind ourselves of that of which humankind is capable.

Our responsibility is to stimulate and challenge visitors, Australian and international, to see the world through the eyes of others….