Natan Sharansky

Defending identity

"Identity without democracy can become fundamentalist and totalitarian. Democracy without identiyt can become superficial and meaningless." Spain is one of those countries that has lost both. We're practically inviting our islamist north-african neibors to come take over. A balcanized peninsula in the making.

But this essay by a former political prisoner of the Soviet gulag, and reborn Jewish Israeli is an eye opener to all the world who has not lost its senses yet, in common-sense, plain language.

A good advice on how to break the cycle of relativism and cultural decadence in the West: the fear of God. Sharansky describes this fear in a way I had never been able to describe myself, and beautifully. You don't have to be a believer to understand it at all. He explains how he became aware of this fear (which, as you should know from the bible, is the beginning of knowledge).

Countries with strong identities (supposing they are also strong democracies) are good "not because of their particular identities but because of their strrong identities, because they each had things that were more important to them than their physical existence." Just as a Christian man can find in another Christian from across the world a brother.

The author's experience in political prison camps in Russia taught him that "those with the strongest identities were the least likely to succumb to tyranny, those who retained a sense of the value of history, of tradition, of community, those who saw a purpose in life beyond life itself proved the ultimate bulwark against Soviet evil." Then comes a description of what Lenin himself called those "useful idiots" in the West, like H.G.Wells or G.B.Shaw, who played into the hands of totalitarian comunism. The story I didn't know and that really terrified me was that of American singer Paul Robeson, worth the purchase of the book alone.

Why isn't multiculturalism both ways? "Multiculturalists call on European societies to weaken their own national uniqueness ... in the name of peace, equality and justice; groups without democratic experience or traditions have flooded into Europe. And these groups do not have the slightest qualms about the supremacy of their identities."

Sharansky's book is not only a description of the decayed state of European societies, to the point of social suicide, it also brings in hope, a spirit of challenge and encouragement: we are still in time to change the tide.

"The hypocrisy of double standards of the international human rights organizations ... its refusal to distinguish democratic from nondemocratic regimes ... becomes a tool of undemocratic powers."

"In such a world the enemies of democracy have a great advantage. They are prepared to fight and die for their twisted beliefs. Identity is the only force that will give us the strength to resist and ultimately to defeat them." This book tells you basically why Israel and the USA -as long as it stands up for Israel- are to be strongly supported by freedom loving democratic countries all over the globe.