One Jerusalem held a valuable bloggers conference call with John O’Sullivan about his new book on Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, which is subtitled “Three Who Changed the World.” One Jerusalem, Gateway Pundit, The Hedgehog Blog and Tel-Chai Nation all participated in the call and have valuable summaries.
I was interested in what advice O’Sullivan would give, based on his historical study, to the current analog to the threesome in his book: Bush, Blair and Benedict. He responded in part as follows:
We can’t have the situation we now have, in which fundamentally political leaders turn a blind eye to the unreasonableness of Moslems in public debate and just repeat, mantra-like, “Islam is a religion of peace.” There has to be a willingness to lay down certain clear rules.
Now this is where I would bring in my three heroes. The thing about them is, almost the most important thing about Reagan, Thatcher and the Pope is that they spoke the truth clearly and it was a truth which they forced their enemies to accept. When Reagan called Communism an “evil empire,” this had a huge impact on both the slaves and the masters in the Eastern bloc.
And that’s a very important point here. You can’t expect the Moslem world, any more than you could expect the Communist world, to moderate its positions, to come to some form of compromise, to be willing to meet us halfway, if we tell them from the start that we’re not at all sure that we’ve got any rights in these questions, that they may be even more right than we are. We stopped doing that toward Communism in the 80s. We’re still doing it with Islam today.
John O’Sullivan knows something about laying down clear rules and speaking the truth clearly. As the Editor of the National Review, he devoted virtually the entire December 31, 1991 issue to William F. Buckley’s seminal essay on anti-Semitism — ten times as long as the average cover story — and he added an Introduction of his own that made some important points about anti-Semitism on the right and left. It was an important moment in the history of American conservatism.
His new book “The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the world” has received some glowing reviews. You can get a free chapter here and buy the book here.