It’s time to defend our way of life
There are moments in history when a civilisation must decide whether it still believes enough in its own values to defend them.
Just when I think I have cried my last tears after 7 October, more are found.
These are not tears of passivity, idleness, or helplessness. They are tears of resolve — and of unambiguous solidarity with Jewish Australians, with Israel, and with the Australia I knew before we succumbed to an “end of history” delusion.
At least a dozen people have been murdered at Bondi Beach. People I know. Families shattered in a place that should have symbolised freedom, joy, and safety. Instead, it has become another entry in a growing ledger of Western complacency paid for in Jewish blood.
Grief is a human response. But grief that ends in paralysis is a luxury we can no longer afford.
There are moments in history when a civilisation must decide whether it still believes enough in its own values to defend them. Across the Western world — Australia included — that moment has arrived. Many remain distracted, wilfully ignorant, or convinced that this is someone else’s problem. It is not. It never was.
In 1989, political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously argued that humanity had reached “the end of history” — that liberal democracy had triumphed, that the great ideological struggles were over, and that the future would be managed, peaceful, and largely technocratic. It was an intoxicating idea. It was also catastrophically wrong.
We have been here before.
After the horrors of the First World War — the war to end all wars — the good citizens of Europe, represented by their governments, resolved to make war illegal. In 1928, the Kellogg–Briand Pact was signed by dozens of nations, solemnly renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. It was earnest. It was moral. And it was utterly disconnected from human nature.
Within a decade, Europe was in flames again.
The folly was not the desire for peace. The folly was believing that peace could be wished into existence without vigilance, strength, or moral clarity. History does not end because we are tired of it. Evil does not retire because we pass resolutions. It adapts, it waits, and it exploits the naïveté of those who mistake comfort for progress.
Today, we live with the consequences of a similar delusion.
We have hollowed out the moral and spiritual foundations that once anchored Western societies. Many now walk through life with a god-sized hole in their hearts — unmoored, searching for meaning, and vulnerable to ideologies of grievance, victimhood, and rage. Into that void has poured a toxic fusion of identity politics, historical illiteracy, and moral relativism — what some have aptly called the woke mind virus. As George Orwell warned, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” That struggle is now unavoidable.
At the centre of this civilisational stress test stands Israel — imperfect, embattled, resilient, and alive. Israel is not merely a strategic ally of the West; it is a moral lighthouse. The hatred directed at the Jewish state is not about borders or policies. It is about what Israel represents: memory, continuity, responsibility, and refusal to disappear.
It was in this context — not for personal or commercial benefit — that I wrote A Light Still Burns: Israel and the Values Worth Defending. It was written as a framing exercise: to help citizens of good will, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, understand the environment we are now living in before we are fully consumed by it. In this season of Chanukah and Christmas — festivals that each, in their own way, speak of light, endurance, and moral inheritance — it is essential reading not because it offers easy answers, but because it insists on clarity where confusion has become fashionable.
What happened at Bondi Beach did not emerge from nowhere. It is downstream of years of indulgence — indulgence of extremist rhetoric, of academic malpractice, of media gaslighting, and of community leaders unwilling to confront the worst elements in their midst. Words matter. Lies metastasise. And eventually, violence follows.
We are now confronted with a simple binary choice — in Australia, as across the West.
Either we stand up and defend our families, our values, and our way of life. Or we live with the consequences of complacency and cravenness.
I do not perceive a third option.
I choose the first.
I stand with Jewish Australians who now live with fear layered onto grief. I stand with Israel, not because it is perfect, but because it is necessary. And I stand with the Australia we knew before moral confusion became fashionable and cowardice masqueraded as compassion.
I will not be a bystander.
Grief must lead somewhere. Tears must harden into resolve. History has taught us — repeatedly — that civilisations do not fall because they are conquered. They fall because they forget what they are, what they owe their children, and what they are prepared to defend.
The light still burns. But only if enough good people decide — clearly, consciously, and courageously — to tend it.
The book is available on Amazon, Audible and Apple Books. A link is provided here.
Michael Scott CSC spent over 30 years in the Australian Army, rising to the rank of Colonel. He is the Founder of the 2023 Foundation, a charity established to combat antisemitism, and the author of A Light Still Burns: Israel and the Values Worth Defending.
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