While events come and go, people don’t actually change that much – even across multiple generations.
Our nature, the very thing that makes us human, determines our general characteristics, feelings and behavioural traits.
It’s immutable and helps explain why long after one event or another has been forgotten, similar circumstances arise again and man responds with the same approach, thinking it is entirely new.
That coined the phrase ‘those who forget history are doomed to repeat it’.
As our world enters a more authoritarian phase of governance, it is only prudent to recall how previous authoritarian moves have ended.
You see we’ve been here may times before. Where a political movement thinks the ends justify the means, where ruling by the elites is characterised by cancel culture, restrictions on liberty, polarisation, division, exclusion and even death
The results have been bloody and catastrophic.
More often than not, these atrocities are led by political ideology and a lust for power.
Perhaps the best known was the rise of National Socialism in Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945 where six million Jews were systematically murdered. While others – poles, gypsies, the disabled, homosexuals and freemasons were all targeted for death.
Before that, beginning in 1922, there was the communist regime of Joseph Stalin who murdered an estimated 15 million by famine, purges, labour camps and massacres.
Stalin’s atrocities have been largely forgotten as the unreconstructed communists among us seek to sanitise their ideology.
Prior to Stalin, the Young Turks Ottoman Holocaust – a collective term to describe various genocides killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenians, 300,000 Assyrians and 750,000 Greeks
One would think the world would learn something from these tragic events.
But no, the slaughter of humanity by left leaning totalitarians continued.
The rise of Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong introduced the Great Leap Forward.
That catchy three word slogan delivered slave labour, a series of purges known as the Cultural Revolution and widespread famine. Some estimate the body count from this disgraceful period in Chinese history as high as 100 million.
It’s an interesting observation that these – and other totalitarian regimes – all started with the desire to control the populace. Then, as power became more concentrated, human nature took over and the quest for total dominance became the ultimate goal.
I’d hazard a guess that few school children today know the facts surrounding the Soviet era, or Nazi Germany, the Young Turks or the rise of the Chinese communists.
Even fewer would be familiar with the Communist Khmer Rouge killing fields of Cambodia or the despotic intergenerational reign in North Korea or Tito’s communist Yugoslavia.
Instead they are fed a diet rich in self loathing where the west are the tyrants and everyone else is the victim.
That’s why we see history repeat. Ignorance and inaction in the face of similar circumstances.
Right now, the world is turning a blind eye to the despotism at work in China.
They are doing so mostly for financial reasons. It seems nothing soothes righteous anger like a bucket load of communist party money.
That’s why the Chinese Communist Party’s forced labor and human rights abuses against the Uigher people barely rate a mention in our daily news services.
Even the highly public campaign against modern-day slavery and forced labour by Billionaire Andrew Forest saw him remain silent on the issue. It is noteworthy that his philanthropic arm, the Mindaroo Foundation has recently public condemned what is going on in China.
It’s a start and a lot more than many other business leaders.
I understand the commercial rationale behind that, but when so many are happy to publicly pontificate about the Marxist and manufactured BLM they are strangely silent when it comes to suspected genocide by a world power.
But we’ve scarcely seen our political leaders speak up about this growing outrage on our doorstep.
The thinking seems to be if we ignore it, or appease it, perhaps it will all go away.
Many said the same about Stalin and Pol Pot and Hitler and Mao previously.
The thing is, tyranny doesn’t just go away. History shows that it gets worse and worse, until it is stopped.
We cannot afford to turn our back on the lessons of history, lest we be doomed to repeat it.
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
Australia is being let down by a government that doesn't know what to do or how to do it. The pressure of underperformance is starting to show and we are all paying the price.
The Prime Minister has a delicate balancing act ahead of him. He needs to muscle up to China while re-establishing important trade markets for our products.
