Rare Leadership
In the May 13 Spectator, the feisty Melanie Phillips asked, “Just what was that ghostly and unfamiliar noise we heard over the weekend?” She answered her own question, “[I]t was the sound of a country’s political leader actually exercising leadership.”
The subject was Australian Prime Minister John Howard. The occasion was his declaring a daring, politically incorrect stance against one of this world’s most rapacious dictators. The field of interest was one of Australia’s most beloved and entrenched institutions: the hallowed sport of cricket.
“The Australian prime minister, John Howard, ordered his nation’s cricket team to pull out of a scheduled tour of Zimbabwe in September, and even threatened to suspend the players’ passports if the sport’s governing body did not abide by his decision,” Phillips explained. “His reason was that the proposed tour would be an ‘enormous propaganda boost’ to Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, a ‘grubby dictator’ who was behaving ‘like the Gestapo towards its political opponents.’”
Writing during a visit to Australia for an earlier edition of the Spectator, Phillips declared, “Coming from Britain to Canberra to interview members of the Australian government is like leaving a fetid malarial swamp to be douched with fresh cold water from a mountain spring.” She praised these politicians for simply being “on-side in the great fight for civilization against barbarism” (March 15).
True to form, Melanie Phillips places her finger right on the button when it comes to the real cause of today’s weak, ineffectual political leadership in the West. “Throughout the West, … [t]he political class is incapable of disinterested statesmanship because it is no longer sure in what—if anything—it still believes” (op. cit.).
Phillips noted, “Mr. Howard, in sharp contrast [to today’s British leaders], is entirely free of such absurd and crippling cultural cringe. He believes in Australia and its Western values. He thinks these values are superior to any alternatives. And it is this total absence of equivocation in upholding the national interest which explains his robust defense of both Australian identity and Western civilization against attack” (ibid.).
Some consider Australians a hard-bitten bunch. But there’s no doubt that, despite liberal socialist opposition within the country, such strength of leadership as that demonstrated by John Howard does give a country real backbone.
Take the case of the Australian troops, caught in a situation similar to the one in which 15 British marines simply gave in to Iranian militia earlier this year. Not for the Aussies the white flag of surrender! When Iranians tried to intercept them, the Australians simply pointed their weapons at their would-be attackers and told them in no uncertain terms to get packing! They knew their prime minister was the type of man who, when confronted with the news that certain nations had pulled out of the alliance against terror, simply announced immediately that he would commit more Australian troops to the war.
Is John Howard literally the last of the true statesmen among the English-speaking peoples? It appears so.
While the British are busy apologizing for their great colonial past; while so much of the rest of the Western world is busy apologizing for the richness of its Judeo-Christian heritage and how this has contributed to possessing every blessing under the sun compared to all other cultures; while the Anglo-Americans are busy appeasing a “peaceful” Islamic religion under whose banner innocent men, women and children are blown to bits daily, the world’s largest island and smallest continent, Australia, thumbs its nose at bleeding-heart, politically correct liberalism and stakes a claim for the fundamental biblical values on which the nation was founded! Beauty bottler, mate!
Oh, that Britain and America would only look south for some refreshing inspiration to motivate their political leaders to break the hold of their continuing, demoralizing surrender to the destructive voice of foreign peoples intent on stealing their nations’ wealth and destroying their traditional values!
But they won’t.
And the odds are stacked even against Australia continuing on its current courageous course once John Howard leaves the scene. For the prophecies declare this present era of global disorder as the God-ordained “time of the Gentiles.” These prophecies in your Bible speak of a time when the great blessings of the English-speaking peoples will be overtaken and plundered by a foreign people, people of a strange tongue: non-English-speaking people. People unfamiliar with the great biblically based values upon which the English-speaking peoples built an empire that was literally gifted to them by the Creator Himself.
You need to know this reality!
What’s more, you need to know the outcome of this present crisis of the English-speaking peoples. Request your own copy of our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy, and we will send it to you for free. Not only will you find it enlightening, but it will arm you with knowledge guaranteed to give you real, genuine hope in the tumultuous months and years ahead.