In God We Trust

10 March 2008

Holding on to our Culture

Posted by Joy Bischoff under: Judaeo-Christian Values Under Attack .

I appreciate any prominent figure who has the courage not to be ashamed of the western culture. I had professors who told us that every culture was of equal value. The cultures of the head-hunter tribes held the same intrinsic value as any other on earth. In almost the same breath they would deride everything American and show shame at being called an American. I doubt the Lord felt that the culture at the time of Noah had equal value to one at a more moral time. This does not mean the people have less value, but a free society based upon timeless God-given principles is better than its opposite.

Here is a selection from comments by John Howard, former prime minister of Australia. Thanks to Thomas E. Sawyer for sharing this:

Tonight I wish to touch on some of the values and responses which, in the world we now inhabit are important for today’s conservatives. Whilst the intrinsic worth of values never changes, their relative importance and the tenacity with which they are applied by societies will always be determined by contemporary threats and challenges.

Today’s world remains confronted by the ongoing threat of Islamic fascism, a new and quite unfamiliar assault on our values and way of life. It relies on indiscriminate terror without regard to the identity or faith of its victims. It also calculates that it is the nature of western societies to grow weary of long struggles and protracted debates. They produce, over time, a growing pressure for resolution or accommodation. The particular challenge posed by extremist Islam means therefore that more than ever before continued cultural self-belief is critical to national strength.

Ronald Reagan and that other great warrior in our cause, Margaret Thatcher, taught us many things. One of them was to remain culturally assertive, to understand always the importance of self belief in the psyche of a nation; to be willing to stand against the fashion of the time. In his book “The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister” John O’Sullivan wrote of Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher “all three were handicapped by being too sharp, clear and definite in an age of increasingly fluid identities and sophisticated doubts. Put simply that Wojtyla was too Catholic, Thatcher too conservative and Reagan too American”.

O’Sullivan was speaking of a time when the views of all three were still largely unheeded. Instead of bending they remained resolute and, as we gratefully know, their subsequent leadership permanently changed the world for the better.
When Ronald Reagan said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” the left-liberals shuffled their feet, but as we know he meant it. His historic achievement, through a massive build up in United States’ military strength (especially his persistent promotion of the Strategic Defense Initiative), in forcing the Soviets to confront their own internal weakness thus leading to the implosion of their empire — delivered the most profound political development in my lifetime.

It was his unapologetic American character that really won me. In my years in politics I have seen or heard a no more evocative political slogan than that of “Morning in America” in 1984. In a brilliant phrase it encapsulated simple patriotism, a confident but not arrogant assertion of the great values of American life and importantly told the American people that their country had emerged from the long post-Vietnam self flagellation.

When Ronald Reagan died Colin Powell reminded us that in the early 1980s military personnel often went to work in civilian clothes, such was the mindset of the time. That was just one element of the cultural trepidation that President Reagan confronted and overcame.

In the protracted struggle against Islamic extremism there will be no stronger weapon than the maintenance by western liberal democracies of a steadfast belief in the continuing worth of our own national value systems. And where necessary a soaring optimism about the future of freedom and democracy. We should not think that by trading away some of the values which have made us who we are will buy us either immunity from terrorists or respect from noisy minorities. If the butter of common national values is spread too thinly it will disappear altogether.

We should not forget that it is the values of our societies that terrorists despise most. That is why we should never compromise on them. It is not only their intrinsic worth that should be staunchly defended. It is also because radical Islam senses — correctly — that there is a soft underbelly of cultural self-doubt in certain Western societies. There are too many in our midst who think, deep down, that it is really “our fault” and if only we entered into some kind of federal cultural compact, with our critics, the challenges would disappear.

Perhaps it was this sentiment which led the Archbishop of Canterbury to make the extraordinary comment several weeks ago, that in Britain some accommodation with aspects of Shariah law was inevitable. It is fundamental to the continued unity and purpose of a democratic nation state that there not only be respect for the rule of law but the state have but one body of law, to which all are accountable, and from which all are entitled to an equal dispensation of justice.”

Read it all at www.IBDEditorials.com

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