Prager asks Howard: ‘Why is it that English-speaking countries tend to share values and fight evil?’

[marmar]

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/

[tanyev]

1. Why is it that English-speaking countries tend to treat anything different from them as evil?

[RC]

4. You ask a much better question.

This is what Lewis and Clark said they Did

The Meeting Ceremony

Over the course of the expedition, Lewis and Clark developed a ritual that they used when meeting a tribe for the first time. The captains would explain to the tribal leaders that the their land now belonged to the United States, and that a man far in the east – President Thomas Jefferson – was their new “great father.” They would also give the Indians a peace medal with Jefferson on one side and two hands clasping on the other, as well as some form of presents (often trade goods). Moreover, the Corps members would perform a kind of parade, marching in uniform and shooting their guns.
http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/native/index.html

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Now stop and think about this. Lewis and Clark, guided by a teenage aboriginal mother, Sacagawea, told any other people they came across that they were living on land that belonged to some white guy thousands of miles away. Never mind who was there first by 10's of thousands of years. The new white guys on the scene owned the land the old inhabitants had been living on for up to 40,000 years!
What arrogance us whites people have. The Christian God gave us that right, because the original owners were not white and were not Christians.

[dbonds]

2. Maybe because non-english speaking people call it something else.

Actually, evil is not an external thing. It is just the name we give to people when they do horrendous things to other people out of their own greedy self interest. Some people can't handle the concept that evil is a potential trait in everyone that most people choose not to act on, so they externalize it and make it into a force of its own. Maybe our language helps with the simplistic externalization, or maybe it is our culture hasn't evolved enough. Good and evil are relative terms sometimes describing the same event from different perspectives. It is not some devil influencing events and people. If there is any influence going on it is from our own reptilian brains.

[kitkat65]

3. Non-english speaking countries do fight evil.

We just can't understand what they're saying.

[RC]

5. And we are so arrogant we assume we know what is best for them.

After all, our values are obviously better than theirs because they don't worship our Christian God and most even had the audacity to be born non-white.

[kenny blankenship]

6. "Nations like Britain and America and Australia share a lot of values--"

"It's the only kind of sharing that isn't an evil against which we always band together and fight."

[Marr]

7. Inane.

Like most right-wing ideologues, Dennis Prager lives in a quaint little manichean world of black and white. No thought required.

I once heard this man argue that the Jewish people are genetically superior to other populations when it comes to intellect, because rabbis are encouraged to have children while the priests of many other cultures are not. Since he assumed the priestly orders contained society's brightest minds (a laughable assumption in it's own right), this amounted to breeding a smarter race.

What shocked me the most about this bigoted little screed was that it was a part of a rant *against* the Nazis. He was attacking their eugenics-motivated extermination camps by preaching... eugenics.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. Why is it that English-speaking countries tend to have more teenage births?

OECD countries:

#1 United States: 52.1
#2 United Kingdom: 30.8
#3 New Zealand: 29.8
#4 Slovakia: 26.9
#5 Hungary: 26.5
#6 Iceland: 24.7
#7 Portugal: 21.2
#8 Canada: 20.2
#9 Ireland: 18.7
#10 Poland: 18.7
#11 Australia: 18.4
#12 Czech Republic: 16.4
#13 Austria: 14
#14 Germany: 13.1
#15 Norway: 12.4
#16 Greece: 11.8
#17 Belgium: 9.9
#18 Luxembourg: 9.7
#19 France: 9.3
#20 Finland: 9.2
#21 Denmark: 8.1
#22 Spain: 7.9
#23 Italy: 6.6
#24 Sweden: 6.5
#25 Netherlands: 6.2
#26 Switzerland: 5.5
#27 Japan: 4.6
#28 Korea, South: 2.9

DEFINITION: The number of births to women aged below 20 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19. (1995-1998)

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_tee_bir_rat-people-teenage-birth-rate

A far better correlation with English speaking than 'evil-fighting'.

[Runcible Spoon]

9. stupid. the REAL question is why do Western countries create dichotomies like good/evil?

and stage war to reassert and garner support for those beliefs? I could go into a huge spiel, but the short answer is Christian beliefs tempered thorugh the Victorian era of science and the resulting social Darwinism. Science brought many benefits, but the way it is twisted around in the name of subjectively defined values like patriotism, nationalism, and the metanarrative of "progress" in order to match the values of its supposed opposite, religion, is fucked up. Especially when we are fighting wars and indebting the future generations to desperately perpetuate a few more decades of this lifestyle that we consider THE "way of life".