Margaret Thatcher & Ronald Reagan: A Very Special Relationship Ep.2

A Union of the English-Speaking Peoples

"As we stand on the threshold of a new century - indeed, of a new millennium - it behooves us to remember what led to the creation of the English-Speaking Union in the first place.

Evelyn Wrench’s idea to form a society for the co-operation of the English-speaking peoples came amidst the carnage and chaos of the First World War. He was prescient. He believed then - and history has borne him out - that the security of the world would largely depend on the close co-operation of the English speaking peoples. Europe’s first great war had made that much clear; its second, only a little more than two decades later, would confirm it.

It was in the 1930s that Winston Churchill set out to write A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Having served as chairman of the English-Speaking Union from 1921-1926, he knew well the importance of drawing together those who had stood their ground against Germany during the Great War. When he was finally able to return to his task in the 1950s, after the defeat of Hitler’s tyranny, he was more convinced than ever of what he called the English-speaking peoples’ “common duty to the human race.” In his commitment to the English-speaking peoples, as in so much else, Churchill displayed what President Ronald Reagan would later describe as “that special attribute of great statesmen - the gift of vision, the willingness to see the future based on the experience of the past.”

From its official launch on the Fourth of July, 1918, the ESU has prospered and grown into the international organisation we know today, bringing together in common cause over one billion speakers of the English language. Through your programmes and publications, your scholarships and exchanges, the ESU does so much to insure that we will remain united and continue to promote the fundamental principles inherent in our English-speaking cultures. For English is not only the language of politics, diplomacy, and finance, of international business and travel; it is also - and most important of all - the language of values.

The values of the English-speaking peoples which we celebrate are of ancient origin. In the preface to his History, Churchill pointed out that “by the time Christopher Columbus set sail for the American continent” Britain had already come to be characterised by a body of legal principles and institutions including “parliament, trial by jury, local government by local citizens, and even the beginnings of a free press.” These values which we share as English speaking peoples have come together in what we call the rule of law."

_____

1999 Dec 7 Tu, Margaret Thatcher.
Speech to the English-Speaking Union in New York ("The Language of Liberty").

Margaret Thatcher on the Anglo-American Relationship

The Anglo-American relationship is not some out-dated romantic notion, it reflects shared history, language, values, and ideals–the very things which generate that willingness for sacrifice on which the outcome of every military venture ultimately depends.

Western cooperation will also be easier if we re-assert, as I have been suggesting, the moral and cultural foundations of our Western world. In the Cold War years, we were able to persuade our populations that our values were worth fighting for. By re-iterating those values, we conservatives offer the best prospect of security, stability and peace.

The whole of this programme, like any political programme in the real world, has to adapt to circumstances. But what gives it such relevance and weight today is that it is the only one which recognises the over-riding importance of keeping the West strong and united.

Western civilization would not be the first to re-shape others in its own image, only to discover that it had lost the identity, confidence and will to survive: on this matter the historians of the Classical World could provide some useful lessons to today's Western liberal politicians.

The decline of the West has been predicted before, and it has not occurred. It need not occur. And it will not occur–if we conservatives keep faith in everything we have achieved and the bedrock principles which inspired us to prevail.

_____

1997 Sep 28 Su, Margaret Thatcher.
Speech to the First International Conservative Congress.

John Paul II and the Cold War’s Decisive Moment

From The Catholic Herald

By Father Raymond de Souza

Forty years ago the communists got what they wanted, and lived to rue the day.

When Archbishop Karol Wojtyła of Kraków was elected Pope John Paul II in October 1978, the question arose of how Moscow and Warsaw would deal with a potential papal visit to his homeland. The communists wanted no part of a pope behind the Iron Curtain. St Paul VI had accepted the invitation of the Polish bishops to visit for the millennium of Poland’s baptism in 1966, but the Polish regime and its Soviet overlord refused to permit the Holy Father to come.

The wily “Primate of the Millennium”, the now Venerable Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński went ahead with the Mass marking the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in Poland at the shrine of the Black Madonna at Częstochowa, concelebrated by Archbishop Wojtyła and the entire Polish episocopate. At the centre of the celebration was an enormous vacant chair, upon which the cardinal placed a portrait of St Paul VI. Everyone got the message.

In 1979, the aging tyrants in Moscow advised their Polish subordinates to close the border to John Paul, as they had to Paul VI. Warsaw knew better; it was simply impossible to refuse the Polish pope entry to Poland, perhaps the world’s most devout Catholic country. So they tried to do the best they could. St John Paul II asked to visit “my beloved Kraków … where every stone and brick is dear to me” for two days in May 1979. He would come for the 700th anniversary of the martyrdom of
St Stanisław, the 11th-century bishop of Kraków, murdered by King Bolesław the Bold himself during Holy Mass. The Polish communist party was aghast; the Polish pope returning to commemorate the anniversary of the state killing his predecessor was simply impossible.

So they refused the proposal for two Stanisław-focused days in May, and offered instead nine days in June. John Paul accepted the “compromise” and announced the nine-day pilgrimage for June. The Polish bishops then decided to transfer the celebration of St Stanisław’s feast to June.

Thus outmaneuvered before the apostolic visit even began, the Polish regime, at best, could only attempt to limit the damage. They clumsily directed Polish state television, for example, not to show any scenes of the massive crowds. Yet they did not manage to get through the first day before suffering a lethal blow.

Landing in Warsaw on June 2, 1979, John Paul made a triumphal entry to the capital city, entering Victory Square, with its tomb of the unknown soldier, for the Mass for the vigil of Pentecost. With a million people packed into Warsaw’s rebuilt Old City, he preached the most important sermon in the thousand-year history of Poland. He began by pointedly recalling that God had seen to it that a pope would visit Poland, even after the refusal of 1966. The words were diplomatic and pious, but there was no subtlety in the message: God had won, the Church had won, the Polish people had won.

“Together with you I wish to sing a hymn of praise to Divine Providence, which enables me to be here as a pilgrim,” he began. “We know that the recently deceased Paul VI, the first pilgrim pope after so many centuries, ardently desired to set foot on the soil of Poland… To the end of his life he kept this desire in his heart, and with it he went to the grave. And we feel that this desire – a desire so potent and so deeply rooted that it goes beyond the span of a pontificate – is being realised today in a way that it would have been difficult to foresee.”

“Difficult to foresee” – perhaps the greatest understatement in the history of papal rhetoric. But John Paul clearly saw what was at stake. It was the same question that led to the martyrdom of Stanisław: would Poland remain free, or would the Polish state claim the things of God?

He continued: “My pilgrimage to my motherland in the year in which the Church in Poland is celebrating the ninth centenary of the death of St Stanisław is surely a special sign of the pilgrimage that we Poles are making down through the history of the Church.”

The witness of Poland, “from Stanisław to Maximilian Kolbe”, could not be understood without reference to Christ and the nation’s Christian faith, John Paul insisted. There could be no justice in Europe without a free Poland on the map, and there could be no just accounting of Poland’s identity and mission without including its faith in God.

As the homily went on, John Paul was repeatedly interrupted, sometimes for minutes on end, by a rhythmic chant of the vast congregation: “We want God! We want God!”

By the end of the homily, only hours after his arrival, the historical moment was already clear. The contest was over between a free Catholic Poland and the communist tyranny that had been imposed upon it from Moscow in 1945. It would take another 10 years to work out the details, but it was not in doubt who would win, and why.

The end of the Cold War cannot be understood apart from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev and the geopolitics of the 1980s. But the decisive moment was on June 2, 1979 in Warsaw, not on a battlefield or in a chancellery negotiation, but at the Mass for Pentecost.

Fr Raymond J de Souza is a priest of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario, and editor-in-chief of convivium.ca

"Pope" Francis Assisted the Argentine Military Junta

On this day in 1983, thanks to Margaret Thatcher and British armed forces, Argentina's murderous military junta fell.  A key supporter of that criminal regime was none other than Jorge Mario Bergoglio.   "Pope" Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio), according to Steve Pieczenik (MD, PhD, former United States Department of State official, psychiatrist) assisted the Argentine Military Junta between 1976-1977 in its crackdown of priests and nuns who tried to counter that regime.  Fancy that – the current Pope – assisted in the arrest, torture and subsequent murder of fellow Catholic priests and nuns.

 

Sir Roger Scruton: How to Be a Conservative

In the latest episode from Uncommon Knowledge, Sir Roger Scruton, a formally trained political philosopher, talks about his life and the events he’s witnessed that led him to conservatism. He first embraced conservatism after witnessing the leftist student protests in France in May 1968. During the ensuing riots in Paris, more than three hundred people were injured. Scruton walked away from this event with a change in worldview and a strong leaning toward conservatism. Visits to communist- controlled Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1979 cemented his preference for conservatism and his distaste for the fraud of communism and socialism, initiating a desire to do something about it. From thereon he dedicated himself to helping organize underground seminars for the young people oppressed behind the iron curtain. 

 

Sir Roger examines a brief history of conservatism in the twentieth century of England in regard to Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. Although he appreciates what Margaret Thatcher stood for, he argues that she had many conservative ideals but never used the conservative framework to organize her overall political strategy. Instead she organized around market economics, which was not always effective in the social, cultural, and legal areas. Peter Robinson argues that Winston Churchill did a much better job of organizing around conservative ideals but eventually lost an election because he didn’t have the vocabulary or the focus on free markets. They discuss the tenuous relationship between free markets and conservative ideals that have not mixed well together in British politics. 

 

Robinson and Sir Roger discuss the 2016 political upset of Brexit in the United Kingdom and how the political analysts failed to predict the vote outcome, much like what happened in November 2016 in the United States. They deliberate how the issues around immigration from Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom contributed to Brexit, in addition to general dissatisfaction with the European Union. Thus, in the cases of both the United Kingdom and the United States, the media and intellectuals ignored the will of the “indigenous working classes” who made their voices known through their votes. 

 

About the Guest:

 

Sir Roger Scruton Sir Roger Scruton is an English writer and philosopher who has published more than fifty books in philosophy, aesthetics, and politics. His book discussed in this episode was How to Be a Conservative; it was published in 2014. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches in both England and America and is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington. DC. He is currently teaching an MA in philosophy course for the University of Buckingham. Sir Scruton was knighted in 2016 by Queen Elizabeth II for his “services to philosophy, teaching and public education.”

 

 

Daniel Hannan: Why Americans Should Back Brexit

The campaign is in full swing. On June 23, Britain will decide by referendum whether to leave the European Union (EU). Most of the political establishment, including the leaders of all the main parliamentary parties, are arguing for a “remain” vote. But the country is unimpressed, and opinion polls remain evenly balanced.

Margaret Thatcher Named MOST Influential Woman of Last 200 Years

IRON Lady Margaret Thatcher is the most influential woman of the past 200 years, a poll has found.

Most think the formidable Conservative Prime Minister, who died in 2013 aged 87, the person who paved the way for others to smash the glass ceiling.

Her influence is such that 25 years after she stepped down she heads a glittering list including Nobel Prize winning scientist Marie Curie and suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.

Mrs Thatcher, who occupied Number 10 between 1979 and 1990, used her handbag as an icon of her rule once telling an interviewer: "Of course, I am obstinate in defending our liberties and our law. That is why I carry a big handbag." She also said: "If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman."

Read more >> 

 

Daniel Hannan: The Free World Has Lost Its Leader

The free world has lost its leader. In the absence of a vigorous American foreign policy, Canada's Stephen Harper supplied his own. For the better part of a decade, he energetically championed Western interests. He was serious about fighting terrorism, keen on free trade and prepared to deploy proportionate force in defense of freedom.

His defeat in last week's Canadian general election will be felt far beyond that sparse, chilly country. When other Western leaders fretted about Israel's 2006 Lebanon war, he gave his full backing to the Jewish state. When others dithered over Putin's invasion of Ukraine, he led international condemnation. Obliged to meet Vladimir Putin at a summit meeting, he was admirably curt: "I guess I'll shake your hand, but I have only one thing to say to you: Get out of Ukraine."

Daniel Hannan: How Big Should the State Be?

When the times require another Margaret Thatcher, Daniel Hannan will be that leader.  In this BBC discussion, he addresses the appropriate size and scope of government.

Thatcher Aide: America Would Be Better Off If Britain Left EU

 

The Heritage Foundation's Nile Gardiner speaks at David Campbell Bannerman's alternatives to EU conference on February 18th 2015.

From Breitbart

By Andre Walker

The Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator, Nile Gardiner has called for the British public to ignore both Downing Street and the White House by backing the UKs departure from the EU.

 

The former aide to Margaret Thatcher made the call in a video to be shown at today’s conference on Brexit held in London. Gardiner explains the need to unite the English speaking world, and for America to “stand with the British people”.

Today’s conference is being hosted by David Campbell-Bannerman MEP and includes speakers from a range of political parties.

Mark Levin's Hope-Filled Remembrance of Margaret Thatcher on Her Birthday

Dr. Paul Kengor: Shirley Temple's America

I learned only yesterday that Shirley Temple, the iconic child actress, died earlier this week at age 85. Reports on her death were easy to miss. I went through my usual scan of various websites and saw nothing. I fortunately caught a buried “Shirley Temple, R.I.P.” by a writer at a political website.

I was dismayed by the sparse reaction to the loss of this woman who lived a great American life. Had Shirley Temple died 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago, the country would have stopped. People everywhere would have paused to give Temple her due. It would have been the lead in every newspaper.

Happy Birthday, President Reagan

It has been said that when it is dark enough, one can see stars.  In these dark days for our nation, President Reagan's greatness, optimism, joy and vision shine more brightly than ever.  Perhaps seeing in President Reagan, unconsciously, an image of herself, no one has paid more eloquent tribute to the late President than did Margaret Thatcher on his 83rd birthday (see below).  On this, the 103rd anniversary of President Reagan's birth, let us recall when these two great leaders reversed the decline of their nations, freed half a continent and inspired freedom loving people throughout the world.

The words of Longfellow eloquently describe the legacies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and their great partnership for good:

"So when a great man dies,
  For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
  Upon the paths of men."  

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace.  Amen. 

Flashback Friday: Margaret Thatcher Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991

Mandela, Churchill and the War for the Future

By Patrick J. Buchanan

By their heroes shall you know them.

In his eulogy, President Obama put Nelson Mandela in the company of three other heroes: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Lincoln.

What did these men have in common? Three were assassinated, and all four are icons of resistance to white rule over peoples of color.

Lincoln waged the bloodiest war in American history that ended slavery. Gandhi advanced the end of British rule in India. King led the civil rights struggle that buried Jim Crow. Mandela was the leader of the revolution that overthrew apartheid.

Obama's heroes testify to his belief that the great moral struggle of the age is the struggle for racial equality.

For the neocons, the greatest man was Winston Churchill, because he stood up, almost alone, to the great evil of the age -- Nazism.

Thus, to neocons, Munich was the great betrayal because it was there that Neville Chamberlain, rather than defy Hitler, agreed to the return of the Sudeten Germans to German rule. [To the Old Right, Yalta, where Churchill and FDR ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin, a monster as evil and more menacing than Hitler, was the greatest betrayal.]

But what did Churchill think of Obama's hero Gandhi?

"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace ... to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King."

What did Churchill think of ending Western white rule of peoples of color? Here he is in 1937:

"I do not admit ... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia ... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race ... has come in and taken its place."

Here is Churchill during World War II:

"I have not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."

In short, Dunkirk defiance aside, Churchill's convictions about the superiority of some races and civilizations, and their inherent right to rule what Kipling called "the lesser breeds without the law," was and is the antithesis of what Obama believes.

Any wonder Obama shipped that bust of Churchill that "W" kept in the Oval Office back to the British embassy. Any surprise Obama failed to show up at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, a Churchillian who sent the fleet to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina.

The point: Obama's vision of an ideal world and Churchill's are irreconcilable.
Second, not only is Churchill dead, his empire is dead, his world is dead, and his ideas on superior races and civilizations would be censured and censored if spoken in any international forum.

We are in Obama's world now. It is a world where not only are all races, religions and civilizations equal, but within nations the greater the diversity of races, religions, cultures and ethnic groups the better.

And not only should all have equal rights, but more equal rewards.

Inequality equals injustice. Income inequality is the new enemy.

But though Obama's world is today, it is looking less like tomorrow.

Across the Middle East and Africa, Islamists are murdering and persecuting Christians as they do not regard Christianity as equal.

Ethnonationalism unites Chinese against Tibetans and Uighurs and propels a confrontation with the Japanese who have never been forgiven for the Rape of Nanking.

Vladimir Putin is in the crosshairs of Western secularists for seeking to revive and restore Orthodox Christianity and its moral precepts to primacy in Russian law, which likely means no Gay Pride parades in Red Square any time soon.

In a Christmas card to this writer, the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson brings up my late father's support of Spain's Gen. Francisco Franco -- to reveal the son's suspect motives.

In a civil war from 1936-1939, Franco ran off a Christophobic regime of Socialists, Stalinists and Trotskyists as their comrades of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion got waxed at Jarama River and ended up on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations.

Sorry about that, Harold.

Across Europe, globalism and transnationalism, as represented by the eurozone and EU, seem in retreat, as nationalism is resurgent. Now it is the UKIP, a new British independence party, which seeks to secede from the EU that is surging -- at the expense of the Tories.

Let France be France! Let Britain be Britain! Let Scotland be Scotland! These are the cries coming from the hearts of Europeans rejecting mass immigration and the cacophonous madness of multiculturalism.

All men may be equal in rights. But most prefer their own faith, country, culture, civilization, and kind. They cherish and wish to maintain their own unique and separate identities. They do not want to disappear into some great amalgam of the New World Order.

Whether globalism or nationalism prevails, the big battle is coming.

Margaret Thatcher: A Rare and Highly Personal Interview in 1985

In a time when America's national leadership doesn't dare admit to its true agenda or call its ruinous Marxist philosophy by its proper name, this insightful and highly personal interview with Margaret Thatcher in 1985 is a reminder of what noble, highly principled leadership looks like.  

Emerson wrote that “When it is dark enough, men see the stars;” so it seems to be in discerning great leaders.  We can take hope in the knowledge that statesmen of Margaret Thatcher's caliber, and that of Ronald Reagan, come along when times are dark and they are most needed.  With the ruin of our nation at the hands of a man who daily violates his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," surely great hearts and minds are being summoned, as was Thatcher, to put matters right.

Margaret Thatcher on Leadership: Lessons for American Conservatives Today

Roger Kimball: The Anglosphere and the Future of Liberty

A few days ago, The New Criterion and London’s Social Affairs Unit hosted a one-day conference about the future of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, with special reference to the contributions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in maintaining that filiation. It was a jolly and informative convocation. Among the participants were John O’Sullivan, a close advisor to Margaret Thatcher, and Peter Robinson who drafted Reagan’s famous “Mr. Gorbachev-Tear-Down-This-Wall” speech. Other paper-givers included Daniel Hannan, a conservative, euro-sceptic member of the European Parliament for southern England, Douglas Carswell, a eurosceptic MP for Claxton, and Keith Windschuttle, the historian editor of Australia’s best cultural magazine, Quadrant. If I am counting correctly, this was the twelfth such collaboration between these two organizations. Our stated purposed is to enhance and strengthen the transatlantic conversation on such subjects as limited government, individual liberty, and the the constellation of values adumbrated by the word “Anglosphere.”

What is the Anglosphere? I’m not sure who coined the term, but it was James Bennett, another participant, whose book The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century that gave the word currency. As the title suggests, it is an optimistic, or at least an upbeat book. (Dr. Pangloss was an optimist, but somehow was always a source of gloom.) If the 19^th century was preeminently the British century in world affairs (and it was), the 20^th century belonged to the United States. And going forward? “If the English-speaking nations grasp the opportunity,” Bennett wrote at the end of his book, “the twenty-first century will be the Anglosphere century.”

Read more at PJ Media >>

David Cameron's Address to the Conservative Party Conference 2013

This week in Manchester we’ve shown this Party is on the side of hardworking people.

Helping young people buy their own home. 

Getting the long-term unemployed back to work. 
 

Freezing fuel duty.
 
Backing marriage. 

Cutting the deficit.

Creating jobs.

Creating wealth.

Make no mistake: it is this Party with the verve, energy and ideas to take our country forward…