From the Easy Chair

Crime

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 31-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AQ77

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AQ77, Crime from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 183, December 14, 1988.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss crime.

Now one of the first things we have to say about crime is that we have a problem today because the definition of crime has been radically altered. At one time crime was the commission of some act which was a violation of God’s law. It was sin. It broke with fundamental order. Now crime is a violation of the state’s law or of a law passed or a regulation by some department of state so that bureaucrats are the main law makers of our time.

As a result we have a major problem in our society in that whereas at one time it could be said that ignorance of the law is no excuse, that can no longer be said. When that proverb was coined it had reference to the Bible. Everybody knew what God’s law was. After all, there are only 600 some laws in the whole of God’s law. And those laws have a place in human nature. Their character is written in our hearts. God having made us has inscribed his law in our hearts so that we know that certain things are right and wrong even though we hold down and suppress that truth in unrighteousness, in injustice.

Now how can you know what the law is? Every day a library of laws is being created. Today I had a notice which told me that if I did not post this in our Chalcedon office I would be guilty of violating a federal law. It was a poster which had a great deal on both sides, so what side are you going to post? But the gist of it was that I had to make public to anyone working for Chalcedon that they could not be subjected to a lie detector test.

Now where is the morality in that law? I am letting you know, Otto, that I cannot subject you to a lie detector test. So you have got a hold on me now. If you don’t see that poster, you can report me.

[Scott] I will.

[Rushdoony] Well, be sure to go down into the office and look on the back of the closet door. I think that is where I shall put it.

But you see the point. We have a vast realm of regulations that are now called laws that are often meaningless. No person can know all these laws that are passed. And as someone told me a few years ago, it is possible to send anyone in the United States to prison on the violation of some regulation of which he has never heard a word.

Well, Otto, would you like to make a general statement by way of beginning?

[Scott] Well, this is very interesting. The ... the sign that you referred to reminds me of the sign I saw in the restroom of a restaurant in New York years ago in which it said to have the sign over the wash basin. It said, “Employees must wash hands.” And somebody had written underneath it. “Thanks, but I will wash my own.”

And this sort of thing is, as you say, it is an epidemic, regulations that have the force of law are law by any definition in common English excepting technically speaking they are regulations. And only a lawyer can see a difference between a regulation and a law as it is applied today. But if we are going to talk about crime, we have got a vast and dark subject ahead of us, because I can recall in the 1964 election campaign that one of the platform positions that Senator Goldwater took at that time was the elimination of crime in the streets. And there was an immediate outcry saying that that was a code for racism, that it was aimed against black people.

Now even today it shocked me that such an interpretation was not itself immediately labeled as racist, but in any event it put a crimp into the discussion of crime which has existed to this day. It inhibited a straight forward examination of the crime situation. Who commits crime? What crimes do they commit? How many crimes are committed? Against whom are these crimes committed? These are elemental, elementary questions which the statistics do not answer.

We do not keep crime statistics in terms of the population. So therefore we are not able to assess who commits most of the crimes. There have been efforts to interpret the statistics, but we are at the mercy, then, of the interpreters. But let’s say that overall what is the crime situation? Overall the crime is that in almost every city of any size in the United States women are afraid to go out at night and many of the men.

[Rushdoony] Well, you know, Otto, speaking of statistics. I have often wondered why men don't start protesting against the sexism of the statistics, because we are told that the police are being sexist, racist because more blacks are arrested in some areas for crime than whites and numerically they are not in the same number. Well, quite a few times more males are arrested than females. Now that is sexism. We should have equality in the arrests of male and female persons.

[Scott] Well, also, of course, then in the sentences that are handed down, because very often, you know, women get much lighter sentences than men do, even for the same crimes. Although they are beginning to engage now, women are beginning to engage in violent crime more often than they used to.

The statistic I read very recently so it is still fresh in my mind is on the prison population. We have something over 600,000 persons in prison in the United States which is a very large number. It doesn't compare with the number of prisoners in the Soviet Union. That figure has been estimated at 10 million. But, of course, part of the prisoners there are used for slave labor.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So part of it is forced labor camps and forced labor projects and so forth. So we don’t know whether that actually reflects the amount of crime or not. We do know from television that we see the leaders of the Soviet Union walking out in the middle of a crowd. They are not afraid of the crows. And we know that our leaders cannot do that, which would give us some index on the situation here.

You recall that when Lyndon Johnson was in the presidency that when the campaign escalated against our involvement in Vietnam that he was reduced to speaking at army bases. He couldn’t speak in a public auditorium when he was president.

[Rushdoony] I am inclined to be suspicious of those pictures of Soviet leaders walking out into crowds. I wonder if those aren’t carefully chosen bureaucrats.

[Scott] Could be.

[Rushdoony] Because we also read from the accounts of refugees that they travel to and from work in armored cars and the streets are cleared when they are going to go.

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] That doesn’t indicate any trust of the people.

[Scott] Well, you may have a point.

Let’s go on here. The types of crimes... when I was reporting on crime, Sadism was the big thing to look out for. The crimes of property didn’t generally involve assaults against people. There was a threat in the case of armed robbery, but not so often was it defied. But murder and Sadism are, of course, linked together and they were crimes so horrendous that I won’t bother to try to describe them, which, as a matter of fact, well, not even printed on the premise that they would provoke imitators. It was a series of such crimes, although I wasn’t covering it anymore, in San Francisco years ago when I lived there in the late 40s, early 50s. Some individual was killing derelicts and he was very ... whoever it was he was very astute, because they always found somebody who had no friends and whose murder would not be noticed for a while. They were accompanied by tortures.

And the police spent untold hours trying to track that monster down and to my knowledge never succeeded. That has never appeared in the press. Now, however, the press seizes upon these things and features them, puts them on film. And in almost every way encourages Sadism. At the same time that we have stopped the famous third degree in the United States. The police don’t beat the prisoners up anymore. And yet the prisoners confess as readily as before because it seems to be a part of human nature that the criminal wants to confess. He wants to tell somebody what he did. And that seems to be in your heart.

Very few men can keep anything secret, especially their sins.

[Rushdoony] Well, some years ago in the 50s Robert Linton... Lindner wrote a interesting book Rebels Without a Cause.

[Scott] I remember it.

[Rushdoony] And to put it in terms of our context in this discussion, what he was calling attention to was that a very sizable percentage of lawless behavior previously had been purposive, to get even with somebody, to get some money, to get a hold of something, take a car and so on. But now there was this sheer maliciousness and destructiveness. Crime was becoming meaningless. It was crime for the sake of crime.

And that indicates that what has happened in the world of art and in other spheres as well is happening also in the world of crime, the triumph of meaninglessness. And that in itself has elements of sadistic overtones.

[Scott] Well and then you are really talking about sin.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And legally sin is not recognized in the United States today. There is no statute against envy. There is no statute against pride. There is no statute against gluttony, avarice or any of the seven deadly sins.

[Rushdoony] And there never has been.

[Scott] There never has been. The Church, I think, used to come at it indirectly, though, in the way you treated other people and in the way you conducted your life as an individual.

[Rushdoony] You had to confess those sins.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] But you were not penalized in your day by day life for those things.

[Scott] Ok. The ... but this is one of the deficiencies of the law. Of course, we are talking about sins which are... cannot be photographed. They are not... they can’t be measured in a wave. There is... the logical posit of this would say they don’t exist. But they do.

Then you have the statutory crimes against theft and murder and so forth. You also have a whole area of mistreatment of humans by others under the heading of the search, experimentation, social science and so forth which in my opinion I wrote about this some time back for the Chalcedon Report constitute new crimes. I think the drugging of school children on the basis that they are hyper active, for instance, falls into the criminal category. Active children are always active. They should be active. And if you can’t discipline them, there are ways, of course, of arranging that. But to drug them is something else.

To tell lies to people under the guise of professional research is another crime. I remember—and you do, too—a very famous experiment where a professor of psychology in I think Harvard put a battery of electrodes and what not and buttons in front of one student and then behind a glass panel they had another student in a chair who was asked questions over a loud speaker. If he gave the wrong answer the student at the panel would press a pain button to give him an electric shock. And the shock would increase in intensity. And the student in the chair would writhe in pain.

Well, most of the students placed at the... at the board, so to speak, were willing to push the pain button. And the professor said this proved the tendency of the obedient type citizen to join in something as evil, let us say, as Nazism, because he would inflict pain, although it is not a good thing to do, on another student when he was told to do so. And I lost a job on that experiment, because I was asked what I thought about it. And by some people who obviously thought it was a very good one. And I said, “Well, the professor was an authority figure. The student was only a student. He never thought...” Incidentally, the whole thing was right, because there was no actual electricity involved. The student in the chair was acting and the student in the chair was acting and the student pressing the button didn’t know that he wasn’t actually causing any pain.

And I said, “Well, here the student was obeying the instructions of an authority figure, a full professor. And who cares what that liar thought about that student?”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

You referred earlier to the seven deadly sins and envy in particular. Now as we pointed out then, those crimes have never been punishable, but they have been at the heart of religious instruction in the Christian heritage. Well, that is a very important point, because at one time churches, Protestant and Catholic, preached on these sins so that you would have sermons...

[Scott] You... you knew they were sins.

[Rushdoony] You knew they were sins. You knew that envy was something you should be ashamed of, that you should seek to weed out of your nature.

Now when you no longer have any teaching on these sins...

[Scott] You don’t know what they are. You don’t know that they are sins.

[Rushdoony] That is right. And envy now has been institutionalized politically into a virtue.

[Scott] Envy is encouraged. You are expected to be envious of those who have more than you have an everyone... well, I wouldn’t say everyone, but heads nod sympathetically when you express that envy.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And say, “Yes, of course.”

[Rushdoony] Well, consider the consequences of that. As I pointed out more than once, there are 600 some laws in the Bible. A very considerable percentage of those are punishable only by God, not by man. Man is not allowed to get into that sphere and punish what only God can punish, such as envy. But when the Church fails to teach and when parents fail to teach that these things are sins, what you do is to erode the spiritual order so that then crime flourishes in the civil and physical order of life such as theft, envy, theft.

[Scott] Well, you know, of course...

[Rushdoony] Envy, murder.

[Scott] Envy doesn’t even want what the other fellow has. Envy wants to destroy the other man for having it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And his possessions with him.

[Rushdoony] Right, to destroy the things he has. And that is one of the horrifying things very often about certain hoodlums who break in.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] They damage more than they take away.

[Scott] Well, burglars are notorious for defecating before the leave the burglarized premises. They do that customarily. And the better the rug the more certain they will do that. And other desecrations...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Likewise. That seems to go with the character of the burglar. A murderer will torture very often. The Mafia murders, for instance, are almost always marked by torture. The murder... mafia murder without torture is, in their eyes, a favor, because they haven't tortured. There are other characteristics of other types of criminals or other types of crime. But her we have a society which has been assured by psychiatry that there are no sins.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] By medicine that there are no sins, because now the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have both accepted various perversions as aspects of normality. So, in effect, there is no sin there.

Now what is the essence, then, of criminality? In my opinion, a criminal is a person who has no respect for the rights of others, who feels that he is entitled by his desire to override the rights of all others up to and including taking their life, taking their property, humiliating them physically, pushing them to one side, destroying their possessions. You can go down the list and telling lies to them, because we are entitled to the truth from each other.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, in the development of our modern, 20th century scene and the high crime rate, I think there are two steps taken in the academic and intellectual sphere that have contributed tremendously to this development. The first in Freud. When a mother wrote to him asking if he could cure her homosexual son he wrote her a sharp letter of rebuke. And he said that the purpose of psychotherapy was not to cure a person such as her son of their condition, but to enable them to live with their condition and to understand it and not to be tormented by it. In other words, to continue being a homosexual and enjoying it without guilt.

[Scott] Well, we go back to the Jeffrey Saint John’s definition which I always liked that homosexually is biologically insane. And I think that is true. But it is interesting that you bring up Freud and, of course, the father of psychoanalysis who was never himself psychoanalyzed is the fitting man to begin the discussion with in this area.

What he did was to transfer guilt, as I understand it, from the individual to his parents.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And from a religious problem to a scientific problem, because he said we can eliminate religion if we eliminate guilt as a religious problem.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And he said we must take it away from the clergy and give it to scientific practitioners.

[Scott] Well, in that case we should really blame Hitler’s parents.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because of traumatic experiences in his childhood.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And he is not guilty of any crime, particularly, because he simply had a sickness.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the second great step—Freud’s was the first—was Durkheim in his Rules of Sociological Method, which is still used and is a part of the training of students in universities. And he has a chapter there on the criminal and his thesis is that the criminal is an evolutionary pioneer. There are ideas of good and evil, right and wrong are a product not of science, but of religion, of myth, of superstition. And the criminal is a free spirit who keeps testing the practices of our forefathers to see what new directions mankind can take. And, therefore, while very often he is a social deviate, nonetheless, he is a deviate who is probing the future of human conduct and, therefore, is an evolutionary pioneer.

[Scott] Well, Durkheim also remarked, I think, in passing that there was no such thing as a society without a religion. None could be discovered.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, that was an historical observation.

[Scott] That’s right. And I could add to that, that no society has ever survived the loss of its religion.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that is equally historically valid.

Well, the whole business going back to that definition of criminality that I tried out, if we are talking as the criminal personality the individual who doesn’t believe in the inherent rights of others, we will have to then include people like the social scientist who use experiments on human beings because no human being as the right to be the subject of an experiment.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We have these remarkable exhibition here of the medical profession which will not accept a drug until it has a clinical experiment in which half the patients are given the placebo and half the patients are given the new drug. Even though the drug may have been tried out in France or in England or in some other highly civilized country and proven to be effective, they will condemn half the test group to no treatment at all in order to re-verify something that has already been proven.

[Rushdoony] Possibly proven. Let me qualify that. Very often it may be valid, but these various bureaucracies know themselves fairly well and they, therefore, distrust other bureaucracies.

[Scott] Well, they why should we distrust ours? Why should we trust ours?

[Rushdoony] Good question. Good question.

[Scott] I mean if there is no trust in the world, what are we talking about?

[Rushdoony] There isn’t. Increasingly there isn’t. They don’t trust one another. They don’t trust the results of anybody else. They don't trust any results except their own.

[Scott] Well, what can be said about such a profession?

[Rushdoony] Well, it tells us what is happening in our society. Consider all the scientific experiments that are proven to be fraudulent regularly.

[Scott] Is that a crime? Wouldn’t you say that would be a crime?

[Rushdoony] Yes, but ...

[Scott] Wouldn’t you...

[Rushdoony] ... the state does not so {?}.

[Scott] Wouldn’t you say that a fraud which misleads society is as serious a crime...

[Rushdoony] Of course.

[Scott] ... as a fraud which merely takes a few dollars from somebody?

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is a form of theft.

[Scott] It is destructive of the social order.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Very destructive. And we are reaching the point where increasingly it is impossible to feel anything but distrustful of one agency after another.

[Scott] That is a terrible commentary.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because that means that what you are saying now is that taking crime as the epiphany of corruption, individual corruption to violate the law. We are not talking, of course, about these regulations that you mentioned, which cover us like cobweb strands all the time. But basic fundamental laws, theft, fraud, murder, et cetera, that the corruption also has extended into the private sector to the point where integrity and ethics have dwindled to a point where a professional group does not trust another professional group or a scientist cannot trust any other scientist.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, this is what is happening. I had someone a few years back in Washington tell me and it was quite a startling statement. And he said I probably think less of the internal revenue service than you do, but I want to tell you it is probably the most efficient and most trustworthy operation conducted by the federal government and that is not saying it is honest all the way through.

[Scott] Well, you can’t call them up and get a straight answer.

[Rushdoony] Well, who gives a straight answer this... in this day and age?

Otto, I would like to call attention to something that I mentioned before on other occasions, the perspective of Khadafy, an Arab leader. I have a soft spot in my heart for him.

[Scott] You are unique.

[Rushdoony] Yes, probably. But I think Khadafy, for all his very serious faults and sins, is far ahead of a great many other world leaders. His green book while amateurish in much of its writing is still a very remarkable work. But he says something in that green book and has said it on a number of occasions, restated it in a new year’s message to the various countries and rulers including Reagan. And it was this. He said that the western world was destroying the whole globe. Because the Christian nations who were the leaders of civilization had departed from their faith and had secularized law and had taken away the real moral sanctions behind human behavior, the fact that God says thou shalt not. Men now had no moral absolutes. All they had was a constantly changing word of the state. And the word of the state has no moral authority in the life of man.

And he said as a result the western world has unleashed a tide of lawlessness on the world which is without precedent in all of history and it is going to destroy the whole of humanity. So in his messages for some years he was appealing to the heads of state in the western world and saying, “Go back to your Jesus.”

[Scott] Well, the Soviet Union cut loose in modern times completely. And the Soviet Union has unleashed a regular satanic wave of murder, torture, subversion and so forth around the world. So I think Khadafy could have selected a better target than the West.

[Rushdoony] He... he included...

[Scott] He includes the Soviet Union?

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Scott] ... in the West?

[Rushdoony] Emphatically. He... he mentioned them definitely.

[Scott] Ok. Well, all right. Then the ... there... the apostasy of the West, if you want to use that word, isn't really so old. The French Revolution will be 200 years old next year which is just on the horizon. And that was the second time that a government had arisen which was disrespectful of God. We were the first. We put up a government which gave no recognition to a higher power than itself. And I maintain that that was a central failure of our constitution. The French Revolutionaries went the next step and declared war against God and set up a state in which religion was to play no part whatever.

When Robespierre, bad as he was, began to realize that this was an impossible imposition and he tried to set up what he called, I believe, the supreme being or something of that sort and he had a festival for it and what not, he... he drew back from the brink. And then, of course, later on Napoleon tried to put the {?} back into the eggs, which is very difficult to do. And France has never recovered in any event.

I noticed with interest in England that new laws, the new educational reform includes the fact that there must be more Christian instruction in the schools and it must be Christian. Now that is because they have an official church and they therefore have the official position already established in law to put religion into the schools.

[Rushdoony] And if they put it into the schools as the Thatcher regime would like to see it, there will be more religion in the schools than in the churches of England, which are in a sorry state.

[Scott] That is true. But at any rate it...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is an effort in the right direction. Now our... we are going in the opposite direction.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And we are proving the truth, I think of what Khadafy said. On the other hand you have the growth of the Christian school movement. You have the home school movement. You have the very fact that the word Christian which 20 years ago no one used. Everything was denominational identification. The word Christian is now a valid word and that means the Christian community is coming back. The... that means that the whole idea of sin is coming back.

[Rushdoony] You referred to the fact that our de Christianization of the western world is not too old, goes back only to the French Revolution. And one could say that in the United States it goes back according to Nesbitt to World War I.

However, we have to say this, Otto. A fish can live a long time in water and that water it starts stinking quickly. And we can have 70, 80, 90 years of good life, but in a couple of days dead we stink. And the same is true of societies. As long as they are alive with a Christian faith, they have a vitality and a freedom and a health. Once they abandon it they are dead and they start stinking. They have crime. They have all kinds of evil. And the law abiding population can often be on thin ice whereas the lawless will be anti law. They will be outlaws.

Consider the kind of thing that prevails in Congress today. They can commit offenses that send members of the administration to prison, as you have often pointed out, but they themselves are immune and they can censoriously condemn the non congressional members for what they routinely do.

[Scott] Well, of course, the very fact that the country has sat down and allowed Congress to exempt its members from obeying the laws that it enacts for the rest of the people, shows you how much the intellectual and spiritual and moral decline has been underway, because formerly the people would have risen up. The courts would have been forced to confront that and the people themselves would have voted out of office an entire Congress that exempted itself from the law, because it is obvious that this is against the spirit of the Constitution. The idea that in this republic any group of men do not have to obey a federal law is inherently ridiculous and unjust. But so far as I know there has never been a finger lifted to do anything about it.

[Rushdoony] Well, what has happened is that because we have left, we have abandoned God’s law, we are creating laws which are crazy and which are supposedly going to save society.

[Scott] All right.

[Rushdoony] Before I came here tonight I was reading a copy of an animal liberation magazine and their drive is going to be to pass laws requiring the neutering of all domestic animals. And they include cats and dogs, cows, everything, every kind of domestic animal.

[Scott] Well, then how will the animals reproduce?

[Rushdoony] That is their goal. They are going to liberate them by ending all reproduction and they will be freed from bondage to men.

[Scott] I don’t see how that follows. It makes no sense. Of course, you and I just came back from Baltimore...

[Rushdoony] Of course.

[Scott] ... remember? And I read in the paper before we left in the Baltimore Sun that some animal rights people had liberated some lobsters in a local restaurant.

[Rushdoony] Yes, Dorothy saw that on television. Yes. Well, you are asking the insane to make sense, Otto. And perhaps I was reading between the lines, but I have turned to another article. It was dealing with human over population. And I would gather that the next step will be the neutering of all people.

[Scott] Well, the population control is going and destroying the young.

[Rushdoony] Well, they feel that we are unnatural. We have followed unnatural ways and, therefore, we are destroying the environment and apparently we should be eliminated.

[Scott] Well, apparently so. The ... the ruling legalizing abortion was interesting. It was ... it was based on perjured testimony. It overthrew two... it over threw, what was it? Twenty centuries of Christianity.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Twenty centuries. All the sudden what had been illegal and immoral was legal and moral. Now I understand the ... the amount of abortions have reached something like 24 million. If those 24 million had lived to be between the ages of 20 and 30, we would assume that they would have produced 40 million children. And that 40 million in another 30 or 40 years would have produced another 80 million. So in the year 2050 we would have had 120 million more people in this country and worries about the solvency of the social security system would have been ridiculous because there would be plenty of young people to take care of the old. Instead, they have set an imbalance in the population that the proportion of the elderly is rising not because there are more of them, but because the young are being murdered.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And it has been estimated that at the present rate of population decline all countries in the western world will see a dramatic drop by 2010 to 2015, not too many years away. Germany will have half the people it does today.

[Scott] It will be like France.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the United States will have a significant decline in population.

[Scott] Well, we can bring in people of the .... in their prime years from other races and other lands and other climes.

[Rushdoony] Except those nations are now instituting mandatory neutering or sterilization in many cases, as in India, as in China where the girl babies are being killed because there is only one baby per family allowed. It is race suicide.

[Scott] Yes, race suicide, of course. And I suppose if we want to go back to the sin and the crime. Crime and sin are interconnected because a lot of the crime we are told today is for the drugs. Now the whole drug thing is... is greatly under estimated in terms of crime, because I can recall prohibition and so can you when the gang wars of Chicago and New York and so forth and Detroit were headlined, but the gang wars were the least of the evil effects of that situation. It was the corruption of the police, the corruption of the courts, the corruption of the elected officials, the corruption of the bureaucracy while an entire liquor industry operated. The ... the great, wonderful, multi millionaires of Canada got their money from feeding drugs... feeding booze into the United States during prohibition. And I am often amused when I read their indignant and highly moral statements about various situations today when I reflect upon the source of their wealth and their character. But at any rate it was the corruption that prohibition caused that was worse than the crime. It is the corruption that the drug industry has brought in its train. And, of course, each one of these poor people that are addicted are in the grip of a sin they... what do you call it, gluttony? Gluttony. It is the sin of gluttony.

[Rushdoony] I heard someone remark not too long ago who knew Chicago well, if compared to what Chicago is today, the days of Al Capone were days of law and order.

[Scott] Innocence.

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is so bad now.

[Scott] And the sons of money. I wonder where the IRS is with all its efficiency when you hear of the sums of money that are involved.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And you know that the bank transactions are a matter now of record. How can this kind of money move around without the authorities knowing about it and keeping track of it?

[Rushdoony] Very good question. I don’t know the answer.

[Scott] Well, let’s take another question on the question of high crimes and misdemeanors as they say in the law books. Hamilton Fish is going to be 100 years old pretty soon. When I interviewed him he was in his 90s and a fantastic man, fabulous. Said, “Isn’t it strange that all these billions of dollars have flowed out of the United States and there has never been a hearing to see whether or not the banker’s nephew had anything to do with it?”

There has never even been a congressional hearing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] On who handled these vast sums of money which have flowed all over the world.

[Rushdoony] Hamilton Fish’s grandfather, wasn’t it, who was associated with George Washington?

[Scott] Oh, yes. All the way back.

[Rushdoony] And...

[Scott] His... I think...

[Rushdoony] Three generations have met...

[Scott] Yes...

[Rushdoony] ... of very, very great and marvelous service to the United States and they have dropped out of sight because Roosevelt found Hamilton Fish to be a road block. And since then the fish family has been non persons.

[Scott] Well, Hamilton Fish had a... was officered a negro regiment.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A black regiment in World War I and was one of the heroes of the black community.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Until the Roosevelt... until he broke with Franklin Roosevelt. And the minute he broke with Franklin Roosevelt he was labeled a racist.

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is sad that his grandson now is a liberal.

[Scott] Well, he is apparently a radical.

[Rushdoony] Oh.

[Scott] Apparently... I think Hamilton Fish could live with a liberal. He wouldn’t agree with him, but he could live with him, but a radical all the way over. His... his son is a liberal. His grandson is a radical.

[Rushdoony] And he has disowned him, hasn’t he?

[Scott] I think he has.

[Rushdoony] The old man.

[Scott] Yes. But it is a very good question, because the enormity of the sums involved mean that if some individual had taken a tenth of one percent it would still be a very large sum of money. Fiscal responsibility, well, we... we get in to the ... what do you suppose the United States will do about the fact that it has lost its constitutional right to be physically safe as a citizen of the country?

[Rushdoony] {?}

[Scott] I mean Mr. Bush campaigned against crime and against drugs. And Dukakis insisted that he was no friend of the drug business.

[Rushdoony] Ronald Reagan campaigned against crime and drugs and so did Jimmy Carter. At election time everybody is anti crime.

[Scott] Yes. They are also law and order when they are running for office.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But I wonder if there is any real effort in mind. I can recall to instances, one from my own time and one from Napoleon. Disorder racked Venezuela. They had an elected ... they elected a novelist president and it was a free election, I believe. And the Axion Democratica, Democratic Action Party and there was all kinds of disorder broke out. There were lootings of better homes. My step mother said she saw a fellow going down the street wearing the hat of the general and carrying some articles in his hand. And it was ... the city of Caracas was unsafe at night and partly unsafe in the daytime and so forth.

And then there was no overthrow of the government by the military which, of course, is always regarded here as a terrible calamity. And Perez Jimenez became dictator. And Perez Jimenez stationed a soldier at every intersection of the city armed with bullets with orders to shoot to kill if any ... any disorder whatever and to leave the body in the street of 12 hours as an example. And within 48 hours the city was like a garden. I don’t think there were more than seven or eight shot, a few who went out to see. And from then on there was no disorder.

The other example is from Napoleon. Disorders continued in France throughout France by those who had taken advantage of the liberation to lead a disorderly life and to have... assume authority and so forth. Finally Napoleon told the army, told his advisors that he was going to stop it. And he would have the army suppress it and they said, “What the ... the Jacobins?”

And he said, “Who are they?” Which, of course, was a joke, because they... he was one of their protégés and they had put him in power. And he is... they said so. They said, “Well, the party that put you where you are.”

Well, he said, “That is not true.” He said, “The truth of the matter is that France had no government. France was being ruled by women. Now France has a government again and the French will obey.” And the army was sent to every area and asked the citizens to report the trouble makers. The citizens pointed out the trouble makers and there was a drum head trial and those found guilty were shot at once. Something like three or 400 were shot throughout the whole country of France and that ended all internal disorder for a full generation.

Now what sort of government do we have which had to be... which had the nerve to do anything about the horrible slums, about the fact that New Yorkers cannot go to Harlem and be physically safe?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And other cities have similar areas which the police know, which the government knows about and which nothing is done about it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the wages of sin are always death, according to Scripture, death for men and death for societies. And the only alternative is a return to Christ, a return to Christian faith. And I don't see any change possible for this country without that. I do believe that change is underway, but we have a growing criminal class that is being coddled. It is not being dealt with as it should be. One of the things that a police official told me years ago was that when the criminal population of a community or a society reaches two percent, the situation is out of hand. You don’t have enough police to cope with it. And it has reached that.

Now one reason for that is that so m any criminals who before World War II were executed, are now out in seven years, murderers for example. And we are giving a license to kill. That was an issue in the recent presidential campaign. The Willie Horton case.

[Scott] The... the furloughs. Yes.

[Rushdoony] Yes, the furloughs. And that hasn’t stop the furloughs. They are continuing and I doubt we will hear anything more about it. I will be very surprised if we do. But with the furlough program you have hardened criminals who know that executions are rare and therefore they feel free to commit crimes because they are going to be on the streets before too long.

[Scott] Well, as you know, I have talked about this recently. And I have thought about it also. And I... we have here the very strange paradox where the courts have enlarged their authority to interfere with the private lives of all the citizens of the country, where we live, who we live among, what we think and so forth, far beyond any constitutional restrictions.

At the same time, the famed courts have presided over an escalation of crime which has now burst the limits of control as you say. So on the one hand the judges are exercising unprecedented authority and on the other hand they are not exercising their traditional duty. Now what is the answer? And my answer at this point was that when the President of the United States’ term is limited to eight years it seems to me ridiculous and archaic that the judges on the federal bench should be appointed for life.

[Rushdoony] I agree.

[Scott] I think they should be limited to, say, 12 years. And those who have already served 12 years should be retired with healthy pensions, because this is a rich country and we can afford to pay them off. We would lose some good ones, but it would be well worth losing the rest. And we should appoint new judges. One term, 12 years, period. Let’s do something. Let’s change the people who are failing in their obligation to the nation. Let’s get rid of these parasites, these liberal judges who feel that for... for instance that judge in... who ruled in White Plains. The county... the town of White Plains accepted the idea of a housing project. They had no objections whatever. But he wanted to put it in the middle of their best residential section. Now a man like that does not deserve authority over citizens of this country.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Not in his neighborhood, however.

[Scott] Oh, of course not in his neighborhood.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So I think we should change the judges.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Just as we should change Congress on the same terms.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I referred earlier to the poster I received today.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] About ...

[Scott] I was greatly relieved to hear that I don’t have to pass a...

[Rushdoony] It had never occurred to me. Now the idea has been planted in my head.

[Scott] All right. What can I take? Extra pens?

[Rushdoony] Now, I am sure that if anybody violates that federal directive, any employer anywhere from coast to coast, even if it is a one or two employee establishment they will be punished by the federal government far more readily than murderers and bank robbers are punished.

[Scott] Well, apparently so. The middle class is severely treated. The middle class citizen is very severely treated. There is no excuse.

[Rushdoony] No. Well, our time is running out, Otto. Do you want to take about a minute to conclude with a summary statement?

[Scott] Well, I think despite the horrendous nature of the situation, is conversation is on a more realistic level today than it would have been 20 years ago. I think that drastic situations have a tendency to provoke drastic remedies. I don’t think the American people are any different from any other population. I think that there is a limit to their tolerance. This is a great, decent and toleration population but there are limits to what it will put up with.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And when this country swings, it swings far and fast.

Now we either... either our government will pull its socks up and begin to handle some of these problems which it is supposed to handle or there will be basic changes in the people in our government. I am sure of it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, let me add that in Institutes of Biblical Law, volume I, some years ago I wrote against lie detector tests and pointed out why they were morally unsound. So we have no lie detector tests in Chalcedon’s future.

Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you all.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.