Displaying posts categorized under

WORLD NEWS

German Election: Merkel’s Pyrrhic Victory “Ms. Merkel is in effect a lame duck.”by Soeren Kern

“Angela Merkel has ruled this country for twelve years. She has imposed a debt burden of billions on the Germans to protect the southern part of Europe from collapsing and to implement her idea of ​​a European community. She has shaken the German energy industry to save the world’s climate. And she has opened the gates of the country to hundreds of thousands of refugees because she considered it a humanitarian obligation. She also changed the traditional notion of marriage, as marriage of husband and wife, just like that….” — Tagesspiegel.

“We will reclaim our country and our people.” — Alexander Gauland, a former CDU official who is now co-chairman of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

“The reality is that as of today, September 24, Ms. Merkel is in effect a lame duck.” — Handelsblatt.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has won a fourth term in office, but the real winner of the German election on September 24 was the Alternative for Germany, an upstart party that harnessed widespread anger over Merkel’s decision to allow into the country more than a million mostly Muslim migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Preliminary election results show that Merkel’s center-right CDU/CSU alliance won around 33% of the vote, its worst electoral result in nearly 70 years. Merkel’s main challenger, Martin Schulz and his center-left SPD, won 20.5%, the party’s worst-ever showing.

The nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) won around 13% to become the country’s third-largest party, followed by the classical liberal Free Democrats (FDP) with 10.7%, the far-left Linke party with 9.2% and the environmentalist Greens with 8.9%.

“With only 33%, Merkel has not only achieved the worst result of all the campaigns she has led, but also the second-worst in the party’s history,” wrote Die Zeit.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks to the media in Berlin on September 25, the day after her CDU/CSU party alliance won first place with 32.9% of the vote — its worst electoral result in nearly 70 years. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

Merkel now has two main options for building a governing coalition: a so-called grand coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD, or a three-way coalition comprising the CDU/CSU, the FDP and the Greens. Building a stable coalition will be difficult, given that all the parties have differing ideologies, platforms and priorities.

Merkel has governed twice in a grand coalition with the SPD and once in coalition with the FDP. Schulz has insisted that the SDP will not agree to another grand coalition because it would leave the AfD as Germany’s main opposition party, which would give it special rights and privileges in parliament.

Canada Refuses Entry to Chelsea Manning for Crime That Would ‘Equate’ to ‘Treason’ By Stephen Kruiser

Chelsea Manning, a former American soldier jailed for leaking troves of classified information, said on Monday that she was banned from entering Canada due to criminal convictions in the United States.

Manning had tried to cross at the official border office at Lacolle, Quebec, on Friday. On Monday, she posted a letter from Canadian immigration officials to her Twitter account that said she was not admitted because she was convicted of offences deemed equivalent to treason in Canada.

“So, I guess Canada has permanently banned me? Denied entry b/c of convictions similar to “treason” offence,” she wrote.

The document said that Manning had committed a crime outside the country that “would equate to an indictable offence, namely treason” in Canada and which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment.

Committing a crime elsewhere that would carry a maximum sentence of at least 10 years in Canada is grounds for a person to be denied entry, the document said.

Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, declined to comment “on any specific case” at a news conference, and said he looked “forward to seeing more details about this situation.”

Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale suggested on Monday he would think hard before overruling a border officer’s decision.

“No such request has been made to me with respect to that matter,” Mr Goodale said, according to the National Post.

Profile | Chelsea Manning

“And, when a Canada Border Services officer has exercised appropriately within their jurisdiction the judgment that they are called upon to make, I don’t interfere in that process in any kind of a light or cavalier manner.”

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for leaking more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks three years earlier, when she was known as Bradley.

She served seven years, and twice tried to take her own life last year alone, before then-president Barack Obama commuted her sentence just days before he left office in January.

Manning was released from Fort Leavenworth’s all-male prison in May.

During her incarceration, Manning battled for – and won – the right to start hormone treatment. She now has cropped blonde hair and a decidedly feminine look.

Merkel’s Mutilated Victory By:Srdja Trifkovic

German general elections are usually rather boring affairs, with polite debates, disagreements over minor issues and predictable outcomes. The one last Sunday was an exception. It was interesting not because the incumbent, veteran “center-right” Chancellor Angela Merkel (a nominal Christian Democrat), and the “center-left” opposition leader Martin Schulz (a nominal Social Democrat) differ on any major issue—they don’t—but because the cosy bipartisan idyll is over. The barbarians are inside the gates. The AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) has entered the Bundestag with 12.6 percent of the vote, which will translate into over 90 deputies.

This is an immensely important development. The AfD is the first authentically opposition party to enter the diet since the Federal Republic came into being in 1949. It is the first party which represents millions of Germans who are sick and tired of not being allowed to express their views on the meaning of being German, who no longer want to be told how to think about their culture, identity, history, ancestors . . .

For over seven decades since the Untergang it has been first desirable, then necessary, and ultimately mandatory for a mainstream German to be ashamed of his past. De-nazification of the early occupation years had morphed into de-Germanization. An integral part of the final package is to subscribe to the postmodern liberal orthodoxy in all its aspects. It must include the willingness to welcome a million “migrants” in a year (with millions more to come if the Duopoly so decides – and Merkel and Schulz both agree that there must be no upper limit.) The AfD begs to differ, but when its leaders make a reality-based statement like “Islam does not belong to Germany,” or a common sense one like “We don’t need illiterate immigrants,” they are duly Hitlerized.

The result, on September 24, was a revolt of the deplorables. It did not amount to an uprising yet, but nothing will stay the same. The Social Democrats (SPD), having suffered the worst result in history with twenty percent of the vote, will go into opposition. Merkel’s CDU-CSU lost 8 percentage points to capture under one-third of all votes. She will continue to rule by forming an uneasy coalition with the Free Democrats—who are back from the cold—and the Greens (the “Jamaica coalition,” named after the parties’ colors of CDU’s black, FDP’s yellow and green), but her power and authority are fatally undermined.

The “inconvenient” Kurds By David Goldman

Except for the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan, there isn’t one state in Western Asia that is viable inside its present borders at a 20-year horizon. All the powers with interests in the region want to kick the problem down the road, and that is why the whole world (excepting Israel) wants to abort an independence referendum to be held by Iraq’s eight million Kurds on Sept. 25. If Iraq’s Kurds try to convert the autonomous zone they have ruled for a quarter of a century into a fully independent state, the Iraqi state probably will collapse, Turkey likely will invade northern Iraq and Syria, and Iran will join Turkey in military operations against Kurdish-led forces in Iraq.

There is no precedent in diplomatic history for the whole world closing ranks against the aspirations of a small people, let alone one that has governed itself admirably amidst regional chaos for the past generation. On Thursday, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to warn of “potentially destabilizing effects” of the independence vote. Turkey’s parliament Sept. 23 renewed a mandate for the Turkish army to invade Syria and Iraq, and Ankara’s defense minister warned that the vote could collapse a “structure built on sensitive and fragile balances.” The White House warned, Sept. 15 that “the referendum is distracting from efforts to defeat [the Islamic State] and stabilize the liberated areas.”

Just what is the “sensitive and fragile balance” that the Kurds might up-end by substituting the word “independent” for “autonomous” in the description of their land in Northern Iraq?

Most of Turkey’s military-age men will come from Kurdish-speaking families by 2040 or so, because Turkey’s 20 million Kurds have twice as many children as ethnic Turks. Last year I reviewed Turkey’s 2015 census data, which show the trend towards Kurdish demographic preponderance accelerating (“Turkey’s Demographic Winter and Erdogan’s Duplicity”). Concentrated in Turkey’s southeast, the Turkish Kurds dominate a part of the country contiguous to the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. After half a century of dirty war by the Turkish army against the Kurdish minority, Turkey’s Southeast might break away to join an Iraq-centered Kurdish state.

Stitched together from three Ottoman provinces by the British Colonial office, Iraq maintained a brutal sort of stability under the minority rule of Sunni Arabs who controlled the army and used it murderously against the Shi’ite Arab majority as well as the Kurdish minority. George W. Bush insisted on majority rule, namely Shi’ite domination, which pushed the Sunnis into the embrace of al-Qaeda and later ISIS, and left the Kurds to fend for themselves.

An Iraqi police man stands next to a flag of Imam Hussein in Tuz Khurmato, Iraq on Sept. 24, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Ako Rasheed

Iran faces a demographic catastrophe over the next 20 years because the present generation of Iranians were born to families of seven children, but have only one or two children. As the present generation ages, Iran’s elderly depends will comprise 30% of the total, about the same as Europe, but with about a tenth the per capita GDP. Iran will be the first country to get old before it gets rich, and its economy will implode. Like Turkey, though, Iran has huge ethnic disparities in birth rates. In Tehran province, Iranian women have less than one child apiece on average, but in the restive province of Baluchistan on the Pakistani border, women have 3.7 children.

Syria’s Sunni majority suffered long under the heel of a deviant Shi’ite (Alawite) minority, and rebelled with Obama’s encouragement in 2011. With Russian and Iranian backing, the Assad government squared off against al-Qaeda and ISIS elements, until the Kurds created a third force that could defeat ISIS on the ground while holding off Assad’s Iranian mercenaries. After the Iraq and Afghanistan wars America lacked the stomach to put boots on the ground, and the Kurds became America’s designated proxy.

The United States brawled into the region in 2003 in order to create a stable and democratic Iraq, and instead opened Pandora’s Box. That left Russia (as well as China) in a quandary: the emergence of a Sunni jihad movement claiming the legitimacy of a new caliphate threatens the security of Russia, a seventh of whose citizens are Muslims, and overwhelmingly Sunni. Suppressing the Sunni jihad was a prime objective of Russia’s intervention in Syria, and its uneasy alliance with Shi’ite Iran.

Washington is left without an appetite for a fight, and without the gumption to declare its Mesopotamian and Afghan adventures a failure. America’s military leadership of the past 20 years rose through the ranks by supporting nation-building in Iraq. Although the US military has backed and armed the Kurds, it will not support any action that undermines Iraq’s territorial integrity.

German Voters Shake Up the Elites Will Angela Merkel respond to voters’ concerns or keep ignoring them? By John Fund

German chancellor Angela Merkel has paid a steep price for her controversial 2015 decision to let in millions of people fleeing Middle Eastern and African countries.

Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, came in first in Sunday’s elections, but its 33 percent haul was its worst result since the party’s founding in 1945, at the end of WWII. (The opposition Social Democrats also turned in their worst post-war result.)

Merkel’s policies on refugees and, in particular, her poor record on assimilation of migrants led 1.1 million of her party’s 2013 voters to flee to the nationalist Alternative for Germany, which won a stunning 13 percent of the vote. Merkel’s failure to stand up for free-market policies caused an additional 1.3 million of her party’s previous voters to plump for the pro-market Free Democrats, who doubled their 2013 vote and reentered parliament.

The big news out of the election is that Merkel is now weakened and will probably have to take on the odd couple of the Free Democrats and the left-wing Greens to form a government. She has ruled out having any alliance with Alternative for Germany, which polite society in Germany brands as anti-democratic, racist, and xenophobic. Its political opponents tar it with even worse names. Katrin Göring-Eckardt and Cem Özdemir, co-leaders of the Green party, used their post-election speeches to tell supporters that there were “again Nazis in parliament.”

That sort of name-calling obscures the real reasons for the rise of the Alternative for Germany party. More than 80 percent of Germans are satisfied with their economic condition, but in the formerly Communist eastern states that reunited with Germany in 1990, life has been tough and employment prospects limited. In those areas, the Alternative party won 22 percent of the vote (it placed first with male voters at 27 percent). Similarly, many Germans believed that the “grand coalition” of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the left-wing Social Democrats had suffocated political debate in Germany, closing out real discussion over the migrant problem, crime, bailouts of countries hurt by the faltering euro, and the loss of German sovereignty.

Everyone who voted for the Alternative knew they wouldn’t enter government, but many wanted them to have a voice. Groups that have felt behind by economic and cultural change were especially attracted by its promise to upset the cozy political culture of the capital in Berlin.

Consider that the Alternative party won support across the political spectrum. While 1,070,000 voters left Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union to vote for them, almost as many voters (970,000) abandoned the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Left party (which has it roots in the old Communist regime of East Germany) to vote for a nationalist party that combines hostility to radical Islam with opposition to bigger government. After the votes were in, Left-party leader Katja Kipping mourned that “the progressive Left has fallen below 40 percent of the vote” for the first time in any modern German election.

John O’Sullivan The Left’s Most Venerable Tradition ****

The rise of Trump and the shock of Brexit have set the chattering classes to lamenting the rise of ‘populism’. What they decline to understand is that these upheavals happen when voters realise governments are not their servants but insufferable masters. Populism is what comes next.

Is there a spectre threatening Europe? That was the question put to a panel (on which I served) at Joao Espada’s twentieth annual Estoril Political Forum on the Portuguese coast in late June. The Forum is always an important event because its founder, Professor Joao Espada of the Catholic University of Portugal, takes great care to ensure that the speakers represent the full range of respectable political opinion in the Euro-Atlantic world and that an atmosphere of good-humoured tolerance suffuses the most contentious debates.

How different, how very, very different from the home life of our own dear university vice-chancellors.

As a result of Professor Espada’s stewardship, those who have attended earlier conferences—they include some of the brightest students from good universities on both sides of the Atlantic—are among the very few people not astonished by such events as the British vote for Brexit or the defeat of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in France’s election. The freer and more open the debate, the better informed both the debaters and their audience will be.

On this occasion the speakers were quick to agree that a spectre was threatening Europe, if only because there is always a spectre threatening Europe (indeed usually several). On this occasion “populism” was the spectre they had in mind. But other spectres were on hand.

When Karl Marx coined the phrase in the Communist Manifesto, the spectre he saw threatening Europe was communism itself. Two or three years ago, we might have assumed that this spectre belonged strictly to the history books. Surely 1989 and memories of the ruin that communism had inflicted on Russia and Europe—not to mention China and Asia—would guard us effectively against returning to it. But if memories are short, the memories of people born after 1989 don’t exist at all.

Accordingly, communist ideas—generally deriving from softer forms of communism such as Trotskyism rather than Leninism—have revived in Greece, in Spain, in Italy, and most recently in Britain where Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn emerged as the surprise celebrity-hero of the recent election by coming second. These new Left movements have been rendered less threatening culturally, moreover, by the success of playwrights and screenwriters such as Dario Fo, author of Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, whose fun-anarchism is the main ideological inspiration of the Five Star movement. The modern social democratic state has played its part too by accustoming people to following bureaucratic instructions to obtain free goods. To borrow what Marx said of history: communism repeats itself—the first time as genocide, the second time as therapy.

All this has meant that Corbyn is regarded by the young left-wingers who cheered him at the Glastonbury pop festival as Gandalf—a gentle white-bearded leader of humble country folk against the dark satanic mills of corporate Toryism and into a promised land. That’s to be expected at a pop festival perhaps. But his name is winning cheers and debates at the literary festivals where older, centrist and moderately Tory audiences generally fill the hall. And then most ordinary voters simply tune out Tory themes that despite his grandfatherly looks, Corbyn is a dangerous radical leftist.

Consider the positions he has taken both now and over the years. Today, he wants an end to “austerity” and greatly increased public spending at a time when Britain has very high levels of public debt. Such policies would risk the kind of stagflation that in the 1970s compelled the then-Labour government to call in the IMF for help. They would also require massive tax increases on people at all levels of income.

Second, he is soft not on communism only but on almost all the enemies of Britain and, more broadly, the West, including radical Islamists. He will almost never issue an unqualified condemnation of a terrorist atrocity, instead preferring to condemn the violence “on both sides”. On such grounds he maintained a friendly relationship with the Provisional IRA when it was bombing London and Manchester and murdering the ordinary citizens of Northern Ireland. He has since refused to retreat from that support.

Third, following the recent election and the Grenfell Tower fire, which made a febrile political atmosphere even more unstable, Corbyn talked loosely about “requisitioning” the houses of the absent rich for rehousing people made homeless by the fire. He urged people to hold protest marches against the government. He predicted that he would be in power within six months.

Given that Theresa May is unlikely to hold an election in the next six months, how is this going to be brought about? Almost certainly it’s little more than loose talk in an over-excited post-election atmosphere. But it increases the sense that Corbynite socialism is an unsettling force in an already unsettled politics.

Finally, Corbyn has followed the venerable leftist tradition of giving moral support to socialist dictatorships in the developing world, in his case Venezuela. And that may have doomed him.

Venezuela’s collapse into both extreme poverty, including shortages of basic foods and medicine, and violent mass repression has led to calls for Corbyn to disavow his backing of President Maduro. He followed his usual practice of blaming both Maduro and the opposition, both perpetrator and victim—and in addition the fall in oil prices. He is losing his halo in consequence, and will probably enter into a gradual decline as a political leader.

Muslim Insurgents Killed 28 Hindu Women and Children, Myanmar Police Say Police said two mass graves have been discovered in conflict-torn Rakhine state

YANGON, Myanmar—Myanmar police said two mass graves holding the bodies of 28 slain Hindu women and boys have been found in conflict-torn northern Rakhine state.

The government blames Muslim insurgents for the killings.

Myanmar Border Guard Police Maj. Zayar Nyein in Rakhine said Monday that the graves had been discovered Sunday and contain the bodies of 20 females and eight males. He said more bodies are believed to be buried.

The government’s Information Committee said on its Facebook page that the eight males were children, including six under 10 years old.

Police blame the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army insurgent group, known as ARSA. Security forces say the dead are among about 100 Hindus missing since the group attacked at least 30 police outposts Aug. 25.

There was no immediate way to independently verify the government’s assertions.

A government crackdown that followed the attacks has left more than 200 Rohingya Muslim villages burned and sent at least 420,000 Rohingya fleeing into Bangladesh. The government has said most of the hundreds of people killed in the crackdown were insurgents.

The 28 bodies were found in Yebawkya village of Maungdaw township, the Information Committee. It said a Hindu man who lived there and has since fled to Bangladesh told a local leader that ARSA insurgents took about 100 Hindus from the village and killed all of them except for eight women, who were forced to convert to Islam and taken to Bangladesh.

The committee said nearby residents searched and found two pits holding the bodies in the northwest part of the village.

German Results Reflect European Unease Over Identity, Economy Rise of Alternative for Germany party comes at cost to Germany’s long-established parties By Marcus Walker

BERLIN—Germany’s election result confirms the overriding trend of European politics in the past year: the crumbling of the Continent’s established parties in the face of voter anxiety over economics and identity.

Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats were projected to come in first Sunday with around 33% of the vote, their lowest share of the post-World War II era. The center-left Social Democrats were projected to win just under 21%, their worst result since the prewar era. Germany’s two long-dominant parties, which have governed together in a “grand coalition” since 2013, lost support to an array of opposition groups including the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany.

The fragmented vote mirrors this year’s elections in other Continental European countries including France and the Netherlands. Established parties have suffered steep losses, especially on the center left, and voters have turned to upstarts on the nationalist right, the anticapitalist left or the liberal center.

The upheavals partly reflect the fallout of a decade marked by economic, security and immigration crises that have tested the cohesion of the European Union. The future direction of the EU and its major nations is now up for grabs in a fluid contest between internationalists and nationalists, incumbents and insurgents.

The outcome makes it likely that Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, will become more difficult to govern. Long and difficult negotiations are now expected between Ms. Merkel, the left-leaning Greens, and the pro-business Free Democrats. An unwieldy coalition may struggle to agree on the major challenges facing the European Union’s most populous nation, from immigration to its scandal-hit auto industry to how to stabilize the euro currency zone.Ms. Merkel has governed for 12 years as a pragmatic centrist. She is likely to come under pressure from many in her conservative party to shift to the right, to address concerns about immigration and security that helped drive support for the Alternative for Germany, known by its German initials AfD. CONTINUE AT SITE

Islamists Responsible for Rohingya Refugee Crisis by Mohshin Habib

Mohshin Habib, a Bangladeshi author, columnist and journalist, is Executive Editor of The Daily Asian Age.

The current crisis is being depicted — wrongly — as the “ethnic cleansing” of an innocent Muslim minority by Burma’s security forces, and the “apathy” to the plight of the Rohingyas by Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s foreign minister and its de facto head of state.

“Their [the Rohingyas’] tactics are terrorism. There’s no question about it. [Kyi is] not calling the entire Rohingya population terrorists, she is referring to a group of people who are going around with guns, machetes, and IEDs and killing their own people in addition to Buddhists, Hindus, and others that get in their way. They have killed a lot of security forces, and they are wreaking havoc in the region. The people who are running and fleeing out to Bangladesh… are fleeing their own radical groups…. [T]he international community has to sort out the facts before making accusations.” — Patricia Clapp, Chief of the U.S. Mission to Myanmar from 1999 to 2002.

The origins of the Bengali Muslim jihad in Western Myanmar in the late 19th century through the World War II era, illustrates that it is “rooted in Islam’s same timeless institution of expansionist jihad which eliminated Buddhist civilization in northern India.” — Dr. Andrew Bostom, author and scholar of Islam.

A surge in clashes between Islamist terrorists and the government of Burma (Myanmar) is at the root of a refugee crisis in Southeast Asia that has caused the United Nations and international media to focus attention on the Rohingyas in the northern Rakhine, an isolated province in the west of the Buddhist-majority country.

In late August 2017, a terrorist group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) launched a series of coordinated attacks on Burmese security forces in northern Rakhine. When the Burmese Army announced that it had responded by killing 370 assailants, Rohingya activists claimed that many of the dead were innocent people who had not been involved in the attacks. They also accused the authorities of demolishing Rohingya villages — devastation that was shown in satellite images released by Human Rights Watch — but the Burmese government said that it was carried out by ARSA, which had committed similar attacks on Burmese police in October 2016.

Since those events, hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas — Muslims who settled in Burma prior to its independence in 1948 — have been fleeing for the last two years, primarily to neighboring India and Bangladesh, in an attempt to escape violence and poverty. Fearing for its national security, on the grounds that among the refugees are ARSA terrorists and sympathizers with ties to ISIS and other Islamist organizations, India issued a deportation order for the Rohingyas who had crossed the border illegally. This move, however, was met with resistance by the Indian Supreme Court. Bangladesh has addressed the problem by severely restricting the movement of the Rohingya refugees.

The outcry on behalf of the innocent men, women and children who are caught in the crossfire of the radicals — who claim to represent their interests — is completely justified. No humanitarian solution to their plight can be found or implemented, nevertheless, without understanding the conflict — and the true culprits behind it.

The current crisis is being depicted — wrongly — as the “ethnic cleansing” of an innocent Muslim minority by Burma’s security forces, and the “apathy” to the plight of the Rohingyas by Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s foreign minister and its de facto head of state. As PJ Media reported, many critics in the media and among human rights groups are calling for Kyi to be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in 1991 for her campaign on behalf of democratization and against the country’s military junta rulers.

John Rigo Jackboots in Rainbow Hues

I fled communist tyranny to breathe and speak freely, to live without the fear and obligatory debasement of paying lip service to evil. Don’t think me dramatic when I say the the Left in general and same-sex marriage bullies in particular have inspired a deeply unsettling sense of deja vu.

There are times in life when at last you can fully recognise a deadly, half-hidden danger. Reading an intensely perceptive analysis helps, and there is a relatively recent one by the Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko, published in English as The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (brief excerpts featured in Quadrant‘s April 2015 edition). Professor Legutko and I grew up in the same epoch and political environment in the communist tyrannies of Eastern Europe. I escaped and came to Australia as a refugee in 1981, while he became involved with Solidarity in Poland. Now he is a leading member of the European Parliament.

My point of view differs in part from his in that I have more sympathy for today’s voters, who must swim and struggle in the filthy oceans of propaganda the Left elite churns out. But I find his main thesis strikingly true:

“There are increasingly ominous parallels between the communist tyranny we have known and currently developing versions of ‘liberal democracy’ ”.

Totalitarian tendencies in those who increasingly dominate public life in the West – let’s call them the progressive elitists; Legutko hyphenates them, somewhat ambiguously, as “liberal-democrats” – have been pointed out before. It is the way these forces have behaved in Australia during the same-sex marriage and Safe Schools debates that awakened me so sharply. Don’t think me overly dramatic when I say you can smell the totalitarian threat in the air. Yes, right here in Australia.

Decisively, it is the progressive elitists – on the Left and elsewhere – who control the marriage-fakery and gender-confusion pushes, and who, in effect, are exploiting same-sex attracted people for their own purposes. Powerful enablers do far more harm than noisy activists. Of course, not all advocates of false marriage belong to this camp. Some are honestly misguided. There are puppets and there are puppet masters.

Marriage fakery and gender confusion should be seen as parts of the elitist push. There are other parts, too, in other fields. Going by recent experience, we can expect new forms of inhumanity threatening us year by year, with the aim of destroying traditional foundations and herding us towards the prison camp of progressivist utopia. And we are not talking about “fringe elements”, not at all. The tell-tale is their deviousness as they deny obvious interconnections, all the while crying “Red herring!” and “scare campaign!” even as the consequences of legislating for gay marriage are manifest in other countries. Take the Ontario experience, for example, where grade-one children are taught there are six “genders”, as even the program’s defenders concede.

Let me illustrate a couple of the parallels between the elitist social engineers and the commissars of the country and system I thought I had left behind.

The word forgers

Confusing, distorting, reversing and destroying the meanings of words was a major characteristic of communism, as much as the constant threat of state terror. The elitists in Australia also depend on word forgeries. “Homophobe” has become a term for the hysterical condemnation of ordinary people, and it is as manipulative as any communist cant. You may be democratically tolerant and compassionate; as a Christian, for instance, you will try to love all people “as yourself” and accept that all share in the highest possible inherent dignity as children of God. Nothing can more dramatically demonstrate the polar opposite of hating people than the Sermon on the Mount, but today stating as much is of no use. If you still dare to recognize the natural complementarity of man and woman as a fact and a norm, then you are a homophobe and, of course, “a hater“. This from the the very same people who so loudly and often say they wish only to promote “respect”!

That abuse might well have ben directed at people like my mother, who survived the Nazis and the Communists with her kindness and humanity tested but intact. Her generosity, open mind, unselfishness and self-sacrifice, her deep concern for the true needs of children, would count for nothing. Had she dared to disagree, she would have condemned herself to being vilified with the homophobe label. There are others of similar perspective who come readily to mind: a staunch old friend, an Anzac hero, wonderfully welcoming; Chinese migrant friends with traditions deep and fresh; a generous colleague, living in a joyful African Christian family culture. These are good people with valid objections and reservations about same-sex marriage and Safe Schools-style indoctrination, but they are automatically cast as “enemies” for all their goodness and the charity of their characters. They disagree and that is enough to be declared pariahs by those with the loudest megaphones.