from ThinkProgress:
Prager asks Howard: ‘Why is it that English-speaking countries tend to share values and fight evil?’»On his radio show yesterday, right winger Dennis Prager asked former Australian prime minister John Howard, “Why is it that English-speaking countries tend to share values and fight evil…more readily than it seems other countries?” Howard said that it is because “nations like Briatain and America and Australia share a lot of values.” He then claimed that “many of those values are instinctive.” Listen here:
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/27/prager-howard-english/Transcript:
PRAGER: Let me ask you, have you reflected on, well, I’m sure you have. Why is it that English speaking countries tend to share values and fight evil, if I may and I know with you I can use that term, more readily than it seems other countries?
HOWARD: Well, I certainly think we should use that term because that’s what’s involved. I think, and you know in saying this there are many non-English speaking countries that have fought evil. If you look at World War II in that period, I don’t suppose any country suffered more from Nazism and savage imperialism than Poland, which was a terribly put about country. But I think nations like Britain and America and Australia share a lot of values. We have a common belief in the individual, we have a common belief in democracy. We share because of our common language, we share a philosophy that identifies us with freedom and many of those values are instinctive. And it is the case in Australia that we do identify with nations such as Britain and America more directly and immediately than we do with other countries, not that we don’t regard other countries as important.
In our economic structure in Australia, nations such as Japan and China are enormously important. And of course our nearest neighbor, Indonesia, is the largest Islamic country in the world. And it’s very important what’s happening in Indonesia, the democracy that’s taking root there, but the commonality of the committment of those English speaking countries and the fact that they fought together over the years to defend freedom, it does spring from common values because values are the things that unite people more than anything else. You may not trade with a country very much, but if you share that country’s values or if you share common values with that country then it binds you together far more effectively than anything else.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/27/prager-howard-english/