John Howard skewers the left

Australian head honcho John Howard has a fantastic column entitled "Australia must fight in global struggle for freedom and liberty". In the column, he takes the left to task for their idiocy. Excerpts:

WITH the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism, it became all too easy to pretend that the outcome of the Cold War was an inevitable result of large-scale, impersonal forces that ultimately left totalitarianism exhausted and democratic capitalism triumphant.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This was a struggle fought by individuals on behalf of the individual spirit.

It's worth recalling just some of the philo-communism that was once common in Australia in the 1950s and '60s:

- Manning Clark's book Meeting Soviet Man likened the ideals of Vladimir Lenin to Jesus Christ;

- John Burton, the former head of the External Affairs Department, argued Mao's China provided a model for the transformation of Australia;

- All those who did not simply oppose Australia's commitment in Vietnam but who actively supported the other side and fed the delusion that Ho Chi Minh was some sort of Jeffersonian Democrat intent on spreading liberty in Asia.

To quote George Orwell: One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

Indeed, fools abound. Fortunately, they are fewer than normal and "ordinary" people. Continuing:

In the eyes of the new left, the Cold War became a struggle defined by moral equivalence where the Soviet bloc and the American-led West were equally to blame, each possessing their own dominating ideologies.

It became the height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under communist dictatorship.

Yeah, that whole "we're just as bad as, if not worse than, the Soviets/Cubans/etc." gets old after a while, doesn't it? Sometimes you'll find dope-smoking hemp-wearing unemployable miscreants (or college professors, pardon the redundancy) spouting the same drivel.

Speaking of college professors, it looks like the phenomenon of colleges being refuges to such leftist scourges on society isn't unique to America:

Despite a more diverse and lively intellectual environment in Australia compared with past decades, we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft left still holds sway, especially in Australia's universities.

Finally, Howard shows that unlike the left, he understands the true nature of the battle and of the enemy:

Let me repeat what I have said before. This is not a struggle against Islam. It is a struggle against a perverted interpretation of Islam.

To those who want to portray the West as anti-Muslim I would say that it was not the Arab League who went to war in the 1990s on behalf of Muslim minorities in the Balkans. It was the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and their NATO allies.
...
The fact is we are part of a global campaign for the very ideals that some people wistfully dreamed were unchallengeable after the Cold War.

No less than in that long, twilight struggle, this too will be a generational struggle for ideals of democratic freedom and liberty under law.

I've always liked this guy, and now that I see that he is an ideological brother of mine, I hold him in even higher regard.