Simon Weisenthal has passed away in his sleep at home in Vienna.  He was 96.  Today’s obit pages will lead with his passing.  Everybody will have something important to say about justice and guilt and those damned Nazis.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, leads the pack.  He is quoted in the Telegraph saying, “I think he’ll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust.  When the Holocaust ended in 1945 and the whole world went home to forget, he alone remained behind to remember. He did not forget. He became the permanent representative of the victims, determined to bring the perpetrators of the history’s greatest crime to justice.”

Weisenthal himself said, “When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it.

Speaking purely for myself, I want people to know that there is a certain inflation in what we “know”, hammered into public consciousness - and conscience - by the incessant repetition of statements such as Hier’s.

History’s greatest crime?  Debatable.

Malcolm Fraser is a former prime minister of Australia. He is a member of the “conservative” Liberal Party, but likes to declare himself at every turn to be a very compassionate progressive liberal.

One of his legacies is the handing over of Rhodesia to the political rule of Robert Mugabe. His biographer Philip Ayres wrote in 1987 that “The centrality of Fraser’s part in the processes leading to Zimbabwe’s independence is indisputable. All of the major African figures involved affirm it.”

Ayres also quotes Mugabe himself as saying, “I got enchanted by him (Fraser), we became friends ... he’s really motivated by a liberal philosophy.”

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An update on events from this part of the world.

First, the New Zealand election result. The best party on offer was New Zealand First, which wants dramatically reduced immigration. The party received the third highest vote and won seven seats, but its leader lost his seat. The two main parties still dominate the vote, but both rely on the support of smaller parties to form office.

Second, there’s bad news on the Drew Fraser front. Deakin University has pulled his article from its law journal because of legal advice that it would contravene anti-discrimination laws. So even an academic, peer reviewed article is not allowed to be published because of such laws. Goodbye free speech.

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Malegapuru Makgoba is the vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

He wrote a newspaper column earlier this year which strongly criticised white South African men. He accused them of being racists who could not adapt to a society “making every effort ... to transform itself into a just, equitable and non-racial society”. He wrote of them as “spoilers” who did not appreciate the new Constitution “which respects human dignity, diversity and non-sexism.”

So far the average Western leftist reading this will be cheering on Mr Makgoba. But they might like to read a little further. The kind of non-racist, diverse society Vice-Chancellor Makgoba wants white men to embrace is a purely black African one.

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“None of the candidates has yet to articulate any sense of how he would mould and lead a genuinely changed Conservative Party.  Every time the candidates attack Blair and Brown, the staple of nearly all their speeches, they confirm Labour’s dominance of the landscape, and expose their inability to do what Tony and Gordon did — take arguments about their own party back to basics and build a coherent long-term strategy to change party and country.  It sounds easy.  It wasn’t.  Not one of the Tories on offer understands the nature of what was required by Labour then, and by them now.”

Alasdair Cambell, writing in The Times about the six Tory leadership hopefuls.

Three of them - Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Dr Liam Fox and David Willetts - he writes off as plainly not leadership material.  I agree (and so, please God, will they very soon).  The remaining three - Kenneth Clarke, David Davis and David Cameron - he writes off as plainly incapable of defeating Labour at the polls.  I agree.

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The Norwegian electorate has turned its back on Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik’s Christian Democrats and their main Conservative allies, electing a Red-Green alliance to office and making the “far right” Progress Party the largest party of opposition.

If a parliament dominated by Reds and Greens and the far right sounds pretty wacky you could be right.  But in Norway, apparently, life has the odd political idiosyncrasy.  For one, they get away with some amazing election material:-

“Dangerous Africans walk the streets,” read one campaign slogan on the party’s website, while a poster showed a masked man aiming a shotgun at the reader. “This man is of foreign origin,” the caption said.

The Progress Party also has some very wacky policies for a supposed party of the right:-

... the Progress Party succeeded with a campaign that mixed blaming immigrants for rising crime with calls for tax cuts on alcohol and Mediterranean retirement homes for Norway’s elderly.

Yes, well, we would all like a small retirement apartment in St.Trop.  But there are an awful lot of North Africans mooching around southern France, you know.  Not sure where the benefit lies.

But maybe Jean-Marie could offer French voters a reciprocatory ski deal in the Frozen North, which would at least make the whole thing a cost-free exchange.  That’s “progress”, surely.  Unless French pensioners also wear masks and carry shotguns.

Thanks to Michael R for sending me this lecture (excerpt) to the Mises Institute by Ralph Raico, titled Rethinking Churchill.

Raico’s argument is that, whilst magnificent as a war-time leader, all his life Winnie was an indefatigable Welfarist/Warfarist.  Notwithstanding the inevitable anti-statist slant underlying Raico’s thinking, I think he is broadly right.  Winnie can certainly be criticised for his lack of Conservative principles (any principles at all, according to Raico).  That lack is most starkly visible in the destructive consequences of so many of his actions.

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Example 1: It is by talking to people with varying views that we find out what the range of opinions is. It doesn’t mean we agree with what they are saying.

A government spokesman defending past consultations with Mr Armad Thomson, from the Association of Muslim Lawyers, following the uncovering of his true opinions by the Telegraph.

Example 2: Britain’s political police have impounded the entire lorry load of the September issue of the party newspaper “Voice of Freedom”.

Yes, “this is it”, it is exactly what the Blair regime wants to suppress.

The news, as reported on the BNP’s website, that New Labour doesn’t want you and me to come into contact with the opinions of the patriotic right.

You can, however, “do a New Labour” and “consult” all 16 pages of the VoF on that link.