The New Left: the World's Naturalist Zoo Keepers

There was a time when the Left on occasion took the moral high-ground and spoke up on behalf of the world's poor and downtrodden. Or against the inequities of Apartheid, demanding sanctions against South Africa. But that was in another world, another era. Today - with Zimbabwe at long last on the brink of collapse - an opposition spokesman again badly beaten up when he tried to leave the country on Sunday - its people starved and made homeless by an tyrannical regime, led by an octogenarian who feeds on the grain and the blood of his people - the Left tells them that change must come from within: the Prime Directive [2] in action.

Before the irrationality of postmodernism took its toll and obliterated the dualism of good and bad, right and wrong, the Left sometimes was on the side of moral courage in support of the right thing. Now 'bringing democracy at gunpoint' only leads to disaster, we are told (and as we have seen in Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Germany) and that sanctions only cause the people more hardship, (as we have seen in South Africa).

Dutch author Leon de Winter today in Elsevier writes a polemic against a fellow writer, Geert Mak, the latter a prime specimen of today's Politically Correct and Fundamentalist Multicultural Left. Mak was invited to produce a free gift book on the occasion of the annual Book Week, a promotional effort on the part of the publishing industry.

According to de Winter, in the book Mak rants away about goings-on on an Istanbul bridge and confuses human dignity with the Turkish sense of honour that is still very dominant in modern Turkish society, as many Turkish women can attest to. According to Mak this highly developed sense of honour is a beautiful thing, a trait to cherish, an ethnic treasure, which we in the West should respect and consider in our dealings with the Turk.

Mak's attitude is one of the new Left, which takes some getting used to. It is not the posture of a Leftist idealist who is out to improve the lot of his fellow comrades, to who this variety of honour can only be an "anachronistic remnant of tribal social survival reflexes" that is keeping them from improving their economic and social situation, a shackle to the feudal, pastoral past

Instead the Fundamental Multiculturalist takes the position, already pointed out to us by Pascal Brucker in his polemic against Mak's fellow naturalists Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash: it is that of the neo-colonialist, dedicated to the preservation of the natives in their natural habitat; albeit in the present case an ultra right Islamic Nationalist one that abhorred the Danish Mohammed cartoons, but in which Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf has been the number one bestseller for weeks.

In the meantime there are a few dozen writers, critical of the Islamist government, that can only survive under police protection. In the wake of the recent assassination of Turko-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk, currently a refugee in the U.S., was driven to Ankara airport by heavy police escort. When I was in Istanbul for a brief moment fifteen years ago, the general atmosphere was one of fear - with kalashnikoved police officers at every street corner; apparently little has changed.

But the Left - presently in the process of reinventing themselves as the world's naturalist zoo keepers - have no problem with the Islamo-Nazist developments in Turkey and insist the country should be admitted to the E.U. at the earliest possible opportunity. That should be no problem, considering that we now know that:

- the E.U., as an organisation and as a bureaucracy, is modelled on the Soviet Union so as to facilitate easy convergence, and that

- it is a common mistake to think that the ultra Left and the ultra Right - the Communists and the National Socialists, the latter commonly known as the Nazis - were each other's totalitarian opposites - while on the contrary they mirror each other, and have a history of close cooperation.

STOP PRESS - Theo van Gogh Memorial inaugurated

In Amsterdam a Memorial has today been inaugurated in the memory of assassinated film director Theo van Gogh. The work was made by artist Jeroen Henneman and is called 'The Shout'. The work is a multi layered profile of van Gogh, the innermost layer mouth closed, the outer layer as he shouts out. The artist wanted to express the complexity of the freedom of speech. I think he's succeeded admirably.
And while we are on the subject of the psychological workings of the Left, I don't want to come across as petty but it is beyond me why a man Theo held in utmost contempt - Amsterdam City Mayor Job Cohen (Labour) - would want to play a prominent role in the proceedings, speech and all.

In the next post we continue with the serial "Treason".