From the Easy Chair

Modern Justice, Courts & Lawyers

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 61-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BE105

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BE105, Modern Justice, Courts & Lawyers from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 215, April sixth, 1990.

This afternoon Otto and I are going to deal with the subject of justice, a very important one. And it is an issue that Otto Scott and I feel very strongly about. I think, perhaps, the bluntest way to introduce the subject is by picking up this book by Paul Hoffman entitled What the Hell Is Justice? The Life and Trials of a Criminal Lawyer. This was published in 1974 and the title comes from the remark of a prominent attorney in criminal law and it sums up the attitude of a great many legal practitioners. I asked some lawyers about the subject, some very fine Christian lawyers and their comment was that in almost all law schools today, there is no teaching on the subject of what is justice and what is law. You learn the technical skills required to practice law of a particular type, criminal law, corporate law and so on so that you are an expert in a particular field and the subject of justice, the meaning of law and similar things is of no concern.

Well, that tells us why there is a problem, because justice is essentially a religious concern. If we are not concerned with justice, then very quickly a society becomes overtaken by injustice. As Girdlestone, a scholar of the last century wrote in a book published, I believe, 1898 the word justice and the word righteousness are identical in meaning. So when you talk about justice you are talking about what is ultimately right and wrong, what is the right way to live, what is righteousness in the sphere of social order and, generally, in human behavior.

Now, remove the theological foundations of justice and you very quickly have the attitude that Pilate represented in the trial of Jesus. “What is truth?” Which was another way of saying, “What is justice?” You are raising the question of right and wrong. Of ultimate issues and these are irrelevant, Pilate was saying to a court of law. We are here only in terms of Roman law. And Roman law took precedent over all things else.

In terms of Roman legal theory, law emanates from the Roman state. The gods are subordinate to the Senate. The Senate can decree which gods deserve any place in the Roman pantheon and which do not. It can create an unmake gods. That was the thesis of Roman thinkers so that the legislative body was ultimate in determining what is justice.

Well, this attitude how prevails in our contemporary world. The Supreme Court denies that there is any law above and over the state. It denies that there are any absolutes and this denial is now about 40 years old. It is a part of the court’s operation so that the state now is the source of justice. This means that if you differ with the state, you are in the wrong. This is the attitude increasingly of the bureaucracy. This is the attitude of state and federal officials in cases involving Christian schools and home schools. The Christian school or church or the parents are automatically in the wrong because they are opposing the state. And such statements are routinely implied or made. So to deal with a subject of justice is, today, an urgently necessary thing, but also a grim necessity.

Now, Otto, would you like to make a general statement before we go on to further discussion?

[Scott] Well, it is a beautiful afternoon and a dark subject.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The ... I think the average person doesn’t see justice in abstract terms and I think that Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” wasn’t entirely cynical, because to know all the factors in any situation is almost beyond human ability. What we seem to be confronted here today, though, is that even when the facts are known, it doesn’t seem to override the rules of the court. For instance, the Supreme Court has released people whom they know have committed murders.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] No to release a man that you know to be a murderer, or a woman, is to release an enemy of the people, to turn them loose amongst the people. And when the court does that, the court has put the rules of procedural justice, the process over the result and even over the purpose. Justice becomes a process instead of a goal.

Now I had this explained to me by the general counsel of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company some years ago during the course of an interview in which he said that a great many people think of the law as a fixed highway or a roadmap with definite boundaries and definite stages and so forth. But he said that is not the law at all. The law, he said, is a continuing process. And he said the... “My duty, as the general counsel for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company is to anticipate the direction in which the court is moving and argue then not on the basis of what the law actually is at this moment, but what it is tending to become by the time the case is judged.”

And I said, “Well, in that case, we are all up for grabs.”

And he said, “Yes, we are.”

[Rushdoony] Well, the interesting things is... I mentioned earlier that I asked a number of lawyers what they are taught in law schools and apparently except for one or two still conservative Catholic schools of law, less and less is taught on the meaning of justice even in those areas where they are Christian.

Regent University where Herb Titus, one of our supporters teaches, of course, emphatically stresses justice and righteousness. And Herb Titus is very able there. But one lawyer told me that there is a great deal said about justice by public officials in appealing to the people and by lawyers in speaking to a jury, because most people still think in terms of right and wrong, guilt or innocence, justice of injustice. But behind that façade of appeal to justice, there is a strong emphasis on procedural rules, on winning rather than being concerned with justice. In fact, it is an interesting thing that only since the revolution wrought in the United States which is your present subject of study by Woodrow Wilson, that we began to see a new temper creep into the courts from coast to coast. Before that reversals did not exist unless there were evidences of injustice in the case. After that this became less and less of concern and it was procedural matters, technicalities of the law that were important.

I had a judge tell me within the past 10 years that given the court proceedings and the reporting of the proceedings by the court stenographer and so on, it was impossible for any trial to be absolutely perfect procedurally. So there is always grounds now, if an appellate court wants to do so, to reverse anything by a lower court.

[Scott] Well, yes, I have drawn up the procedural thing, because this is what is beginning to bother a great many people. Let me, if I may, read you something by a woman named Alice R. Kaminski who wrote a book called, The Victim’s Song. Her son as murdered in New York City not too long ago. And she mentions in a forward to her book that Norman Mailer received a Pulitzer Prize for writing a1050 page, quote, “true to life,” end quote, novel about a murderer, Gary Gilmore, who called it The Executioner’s Song. And he paid very little attention in that book to the victims of Gilmore’s crimes. And Mrs. Kaminski says, “I despise a world in which young innocents are murdered while the evil and the depraved rob and kill and live to be old. I cannot help but hate the conditions in New York City that made it possible for murder to thrive like garbage in a sewer.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this is a very serious condition. In Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary he lists as part of our inalienable rights the right to be physical safe. There are hundreds of murders in New York and Detroit and Washington, DC, Los Angeles and so forth. The streets at night are not safe. There is a war against women in this country of an unspeakable nature. I recall that when my daughter first left home picking up a newspaper day after day, week after week, and reading about the finding of the body of some woman, some young woman here or there wondering who it was. It is unjust for any government to allow such a situation to prevail and particularly unjust for any judicial system, any judiciary, to adopt the question of procedure over the question of guilt or innocence.

[Rushdoony] Yes. A very fine book was written on that subject by a former California judge who is retired now and perhaps dead. Macklin was his name. And he traced the history of that type of thing and its progressive corruption of the law. Another book which I could not locate written within the past decade, I believe, had a statement by a very prominent attorney to the effect that the victim being dead has no rights.

[Scott] Has no rights.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Rights, then, are a matter of chronology, a matter of whether you are still alive or not?

[Rushdoony] Yes and, therefore, in a ... in the case of the crime it is the criminal who has rights, the right, supposedly not to be executed.

[Scott] Well, this is a very strange state of affairs because at the very same time that we are talking about the rights of murders, the United States government has—and the courts have approved—the confiscation of property without due process in any instance where drugs are presumed to be involved, which, of course, is always a moot question unless it is settled by an investigation and by a trial. So here on the one hand we have a total confiscation of property which removes not only from the defendant, but from his family all their assets including enough assets to hire an attorney of his own choice.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this, of course, is an unprecedented elimination of basic rights which we have always enjoyed while at the same time a murderer has rights which nobody has ever enjoyed.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, in a case of rape not too long ago the rapist even though the evidence was clear cut of his guilt, was declared not innocent on the grounds of the women’s dress was provocative.

[Scott] Not guilty you mean.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Was not guilty, yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Yes. the dress was rather short and therefore the jury held that it was provocative and therefore she was to blame for the rape.

[Scott] On that basis everyone on a beach in the middle of summer...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...could... could be ravaged.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...at will.

[Rushdoony] Well...

[Scott] Well, of course, we have to say this. I ... I think this. I think that a nation of people, 250 odd million who never do anything against these kinds of judges have got to look in the mirror.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is a process by which a judge can be removed. He can be impeached. He can be exposed to the public. We have all these wonderful investigative reporters who hound every conservative in the country, who revel in scandals by the clergy, who sit up nights trying to hunt down somebody like Justice Bork.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But we don’t have anything about the fellow that you referred to who released a convicted rapist.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...on the basis that he was provoked beyond his self control.

[Rushdoony] I should add there that it happened in Florida and some legislators are trying to get a bill passed that would make it illegal to introduce such an argument.

[Scott] Well, this is a classic American answer to all problems. Pass another law.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We have enough laws now to take care of us for the next 2000 years. Nobody knows how many there are. They don’t even know how many there are. And that is not counting the federal laws, the state laws, the county laws, the city law, the village law. If you will forgive the digression, it reminds me of the fellow in a poker game in an old fashioned gambling house many years ago who finding out a royal flush, which, as you know, in poker beats everything, so, of course, he bet heavily and a stranger sitting across from him, or a man sitting across covered all bets and then finally they expose their hands and the fellow says, “I have a royal flush,” and he reached to get the chips and the other man said, “That is nothing. I have a {?}.” A {?} was every other card in the sequence of five cards.

Well, the man called the manager. The manager said, “That is right {?} takes everything.” So the fellow with the royal flush lost the hand. But he continued to play, being like an American voter, hard to learn. And he finally got a {?}. So, of course, he bet all the rest of his money and the same man answered and covered all the bets and then put hands down and the fellow said, I have a {?} and the other guy said, “That doesn't count. I have got a royal flush. Call the manager.”

The manager said, “That is right. Only one {?} allowed a night.”

This is our system of justice.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, even if they pass such a law, it would be reversed. Laws are routinely reversed by judges on political grounds.

[Scott] Well, the laws are not really regarded by the judges. What they are engaged in is a semantic game in which the semantic equivalent of a {?} takes everything.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You cannot legislate against a line of argument.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Even in Miami, even a Florida legislator ought to know that much.

[Rushdoony] But it sounds good in the newspapers.

[Scott] Ah, yes.

[Rushdoony] ... that you are expressing righteous indignation.

[Scott] Yes. We are going to pass a law against something like that. In the meantime, that judge sits undisturbed on the cushions of the bench.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I don’t know when it is... the only times that I know of in recent history, three times as far as I know, that a federal judge has been impeached. In each case it has been on a tax case. It has... it has not been any case on any other grounds.

[Rushdoony] In the modern world the unforgivable sin is to defraud the IRS of anything. Or to be opposed to what it is doing.

[Scott] Well I will take that back. Judge Fortas, Abe Fortas had to leave the Supreme Court of the United States because he was discovered to be taking money on the side.

[Rushdoony] I don’t think that would happen today.

[Scott] From people whose cases had come before him.

[Rushdoony] I... I wonder if it would happen today. I really do.

[Scott] I don’t know, but I...

[Rushdoony] ...or whether it would ever be exposed of a judge who had his credentials...

[Scott] Well, of course, he was a darling of the left and it was a great shock to Lyndon Johnson and the others when this occurred. Lyndon had him up for Supreme Court Justice for the chief justice.

[Rushdoony] I wonder if Lyndon Johnson was capable of being shocked. Disappointed maybe, but shocked, never.

[Scott] Oh, I will take that word back. I stand corrected and I think you are right to correct me. I don't think he was shockable.

But we are in a very strange condition as far as justice is concerned because I am not sure that the judges are unique among the American people. Let me put it this way, that the caliber of the courts reflect to a considerable extent the caliber of the people. Just as all the institutions of a society reflect that society, we cannot assume that they are separate and apart or superior.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now I remember attending a conference many years ago in New York of educators—I don’t know why I was there. I had some good reason—and they showed a little film of a child, a young boy in a classroom who broke a vase. And the pieces were all scattered on the floor and the teacher said, “Did you do this?” And he admitted that he did. So since he admitted he did, I believe he was told to pick up the pieces and no punishment, just pick up the debris.

Then the lights came back on and there was a discussion of this incident. And the majority of the teachers said he should not have been forced to pick up the pieces, because he had admitted his guilt and that was sufficient. In other words—and... and that was not even compensation. It wasn’t punishment. It wasn’t anything else. And I had to look at those teachers. I thought, what sort of values do they have?

And I think when we get into the question of the courts and the juries, for instance. Look at some of the jury verdicts we have run into. In order to protect his family from death threats, Oliver North put a security fence around his home.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And for that he was convicted of a felony, because the money came from some people with whom he was working.

[Rushdoony] Well, we do have a very, very ugly situation and I think the extent to which justice is no longer a part of the mentality of the American people came home very vividly to me yesterday. I had a long conversation by telephone with a very superior, highly intelligent woman at the other end of the country. She is a member of a church and a denomination that is ostensibly thoroughly sound biblically and so on and regarded as one of the best in the country. In the church where she is a member a teacher, a man was teaching, and I won’t go into the specifics, things that were clearly unequivocally and totally anti biblical. And nobody wanted to tackle the man. But she filed a complaint with the session and saw to it that they had to confront the issue. And she won finally and it went to a committee of the presbytery and, I believe, of the general assembly, finally and she was sustained. But she had to be punished for doing this.

So in their report they sustained her because the man in question very openly admitted it. He apparently was proud of what he was teaching. So they rebuked her for not being in subordination to her husband and the elders of the church. And she said, “Has my husband ever been able to say that I have not been in subordination to him? Ask him. He can answer you. And where was I insubordinate to the elders in calling attention to a very serious matter within the church?” She got no answer.

In other words, when you push for justice, you are the offender, finally, in the eyes of too many people in the Church and out of the Church.

[Scott] Well, yes. I would say that our bitterest enemies are based upon a resentment of our virtues.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Generally speaking if you have deficiencies people will forgive you, because it enables them to feel superior and also to feel superior for... by forgiving you. Creeps are popular in this country. All you have to do is read People magazine or, for that matter the newspapers or watch TV.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it comes back to the fact that the country as a whole has lost its sense of justice, because these fine spun sophisms which go on in school and which go on in society at large have convinced the average person.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, you are right, absolutely right, that it goes back to the average person, the people and places high and low and their abdication of moral responsibility. In fact, their unwillingness to have it. And very often the excuse is given by jurors for a bad decision is, well, it could have been my boy.

[Scott] Or the insurance company will pay it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is an old one.

[Scott] Now the idea that the... where do they suppose that the insurance company gets its money?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You would really think that insurance were some sort of cornucopias put together in heaven and that the money doesn’t come from anyone else. It comes from a disembodied treasury in the skies somewhere.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But insurance companies come ... money come from all of us.

[Rushdoony] One of the books I read recently by Sandor Kopacsi In the Name of the Working Class is about the author’s experiences as a top official in Marxist Hungary. This was in the days before the Hungarian revolution of the 50s. And in one instance where a number of very fine Marxists were wronged, there was an appeal to rehabilitate these men, to admit that the men were innocent. The party knew it. The evidence was clear cut. But Kopacsi comments, and I quote, “The party is infallible. It is the collective conscience. It never makes a mistake. And if it does have the misfortune to make a mistake, one had better keep quiet about it. Infallibility is the guiding principle of a Communist regime and to question it is considered unseemly,” unquote.

In fact, he gives evidence that to question it is to put your head on the chopping block.

[Scott] Well, then, if that is the case, it is an ideal case and it is a marvelous illustration of the state as god.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Calvin said regarding questioning God’s will, “Do not ask the question, because to ask the question presupposes the right to judge.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So this Communist is saying the same thing about the Communist party.

[Rushdoony] Yes. With the divine right of kings you have the same theory propounded with the enlightenment about monarchs and with Hegel carried to the nth degree with regard to the modern state. So we have a modern state saying, “You cannot question us. What we do is justice and, therefore, our procedures are going to govern you and you are going to submit or else.”

[Scott] Well, of course, if you ... there is a difference. One cannot really question the will of God because it is irrevocable.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We have no way of arguing with it. But we have many ways to argue with the will of the government of the United States. If it drifts too far away from what the average man sees as justice, it loses all respect, it arouses disgust and eventually means that there will be a change.

There is nothing sacred about the courts. Some fellow in England once wrote that in the entire history of England no reform ever came from the courts. Well, that is beaus the English courts always applied the law as it is given to them. But in the United States the courts have become what they consider themselves to be, reforming instruments. They are settling issues which the legislature out of cowardice has refused to address. And they have decided upon certain sociological grounds to change the pattern of the American society, to change residential patterns, to change the laws of private association so that one cannot have a private club without bringing in the entire public, which destroys, of course, the purpose of a club and so forth.

Now if the court continues in this way, I am sure somewhere down the line the judges will be confronted with a terrible dilemma, because the people will refuse to obey the orders of the court. I understand that this is already underway, that awards upon private individuals that are granted by the court in, for instance, small claims court, over 60 percent of the awards in small claims court are never paid. And we know how difficult it is to collect money from all kinds of people, whether you win the case in court or not.

[Rushdoony] The... that is a very important point, Otto. From my experience I can tell you that if you are a Christian and you go to a small claims court, you are a part of that 40 percent, a substantial part of it that pays. First, because you are more law abiding and, second, because an officer of the court knows he can lean on you, that you have a conscience. And it isn’t going to take a lot of work, a little threat. You had better come up with it and you will pay no matter how injust or unjust the decision was.

So the small claims courts have become not a refuge of the small man, but a place of injustice.

[Scott] Well, you have a whole escalating series of defiances of that sort. I discovered some years ago—and I guess we all know now—that there are all kinds of people that the police call scofflaws.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In other words, they scoff at the law. In large cities they collect hundreds of traffic tickets, hundreds of traffic tickets. They never pay any of them. They wait until they are finally arrested and then they negotiate how much of the fine they will pay because by then the fine is in the thousands of dollars and they don't have that kind of money.

[Rushdoony] A young Kennedy had that kind of situation when he was taken into the district attorney’s office recently in New York City.

[Scott] He hadn't paid his traffic bills.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Neither did his uncle Teddy Kennedy who collected a great number of traffic and accident tickets long before Chappaquiddick, driving without a license, driving while intoxicated, driving at excessive speed and so on and so on.

Well, what we are talking about here is the breakdown of law. When we talk about 20 odd thousand murders a year over 20,000 murders. That is more than there were lost in Vietnam.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is more than is lost in an ordinary small war.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Every peacetime year plus the robberies, plus the rapes, plus the burglaries which now police are so overloaded with they don't even bother to investigate.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] You have to bring in some other sort of witness to prove that you have been burglarized for insurance purposes, but as far as the police are concerned, this is not much of a crime.

We go back to the early years of the century when in 1912, the campaign of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran on the Bull Moose party and he had become very much aware of the Supreme Court, because in his trust busting activities, when he was president, the Supreme Court, if you recall, broke up Standard Oil company. Now I was later told by oil men that the Standard Oil company at that time was in the process of falling apart anyway, because the owners were all old men and rich men and they were letting things go. And it was like a dinosaur. By the time the reflex reached from the pea brain in headquarters to the end of the tail the situation had gotten much worse and so forth and so on. And small companies were taking pieces of this monster almost at will.

Well, the courts which are always 20 or 30 years behind everybody else, because the men that sit on the bench are not young men, and their ideas are formed at a previous generation generally speaking, the courts broke it up by force in the name of greater competition. Few such rulings alarmed Mr. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, because he said bigness is not a crime. After all, it brings efficiencies. It brings economies of scale and so forth.

So like breaking up AT&T, the greatest telephone system in the world...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Judge Harold Green is still going around giving speeches to the Europeans on how to break up their telephone systems. This is a great help to all of us. I mean, our bills have gone up. We get calls from Pacific Bell and 14 other people for our business and so forth.

At any rate Mr. Roosevelt said, “Whenever the court makes a constitutional ruling the issue should be put in a referendum to the people and the people should vote it up or down, because otherwise,” he said, “we are at the mercy of nine men.”

Now that particular proposition fell out of bed when Mr. Roosevelt didn’t win the election. But it is arising now because constitutional rulings are being made by federal district judges, not just by the Supreme Court. Judge Sans in New York ruled that the right to beg in the subway is part of your freedom of speech. Where are we?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, he has had a record of such rulings. Well, I don’t think the situation is going to change until theologically this country again becomes a truly Christian realm, until Christians themselves begin to concern themselves with justice or righteousness. They are concerned in too many instances with the rapture or with fire and life insurance, no thought of the fact that we have a responsibility under God here and now. So they surrender the realm to the enemy.

A book has been written by a prominent pastor named Tim Timmons in which he calls unchristian any attempt to have a Christian government.

[Scott] Unchristian?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any attempt to have some kind of justice in society...

[Scott] What sort of a minister is he?

[Rushdoony] I don’t know. He is apparently a prominent American pastor. Somehow this is all an abandonment of the faith.

[Scott] He thinks it... what does he think Christianity is, some sort of disembodied fairy tale?

[Rushdoony] Fire and life insurance.

[Scott] How... how... how...?

[Rushdoony] Now this book is being heavily promoted and advertised.

[Scott] How are you going to get into heaven when Peter says, “Well, how come you didn’t like Christianity on earth?”

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the book is directed to a degree against us and our emphasis.

[Scott] Like we are collecting some enemies that are worth having.

[Rushdoony] Yes, definitely. I just received a book today from Colonel Doner.

[Scott] So did I. Yes. There is some very strange collection of people who have been put together as the part of the menace.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And, again, all kinds of fanciful statements. I am the author of over 100 books, according to them...

[Scott] I thought... I was going to congratulate you on that.

[Rushdoony] I must have written more than half of them in my sleep.

[Scott] That is a lot of books, you know, 100.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the books I read in the past few days was Mikhail Dyomin, D Y O M I N, The Day is Born of Darkness: A Personal Account of the Soviet Criminal Underworld, a book published in 1976 so it is out of print now, but I just picked it up recently. And he quotes in her the statement that reflects a very common opinion in the Soviet Union of contempt for the old standards. This is the statement. “Goodness is like dung. They rub it in the ground for fertilizer,” unquote.

[Scott] Well, there is a sort of contempt for virtue. This is what The Victim’s Song, Alice R. Kaminski was writing about.

Normal Mailer is one of the men who is attracted to the darker side of life and to evil. He has written consistently elevating the criminal mentality or criminal activity. And all I can say about this is that it is an evidence of his naïveté. He hasn’t met really bad men, because if he had his opinion would be a lot different.

Now we are running into, I think, M. Scott Peck wrote a book about every day evil and the first half of the book was brilliant. It fell off after that, but I remember one of his early examples of somebody who was not good. And, of course, there are grades of virtue and grades of vice. And he describes some couple who came to his office for counseling and every time he asked the man a question his wife answered. And this went on and on, on and on.

Finally when... when the man did break in to answer a question his wife rebuked him. And he... Peck said... he said, “Neither of them seemed to have any idea that she was a walking nightmare.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And these every day examples could be increased as you look around. These are people who have forgotten, who feel, who believe that there is no eye in the sky, that they are absolutely invisible, that nobody sees them, nobody adds them up, nobody understands what they are doing, because it hasn’t left a visible trail. The judge on the bench, you have told me about instances where they have changed the record of the trial.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They have actually directed that certain statements made in the course of the trial not be recorded. And then you have a Congress of the United States that would not keep an accurate record of its deliberations. You have lies upon lies upon lies all over the place.

I recently remembered reproaching an editor, a newspaper editor some years ago because he left out some significant details in an event. And I said, “You didn’t tell the whole story.” He said... well, I said, “Why not?”

He said, “I didn’t want to stir up the animals.”

It was... it was an event which would have made people indignant against a group that he wanted to protect.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this is injustice. And when you take the whole question of justice out of the court into every day life, you have something else. I mean, do people have a right to speak up? Do they have a right to their own opinion? Do they have a right to be treated properly on the job or off the job or wherever? This... this is something that is being lost here.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I think the trend to injustice is going to increase all over the world. But I think because of the judgment that we are into already, the present order is going to be smashed and there is going to be a hunger and thirst after righteousness, to use biblical phrase. Or justice.

[Scott] Well, look is happening in central Europe. Now those people have been in power in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and what not since 1945 and even before 1945 the citizens were subjugated by the Nazis.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So since 19... the late 1930s until 1990 these people have been suppressed and repressed by their courts, by their police, by their government and so forth.

Now, it looked six months ago or a year ago impregnable. They are forever, a thousand year Reich or a thousand year Communist system. And, of course, when the people first came out into the streets they were shot dead in Czechoslovakia, in East Germany and in Romania and in Hungary. Every one of these dictators said, “Shoot them.” And then more people came out and the whole thing fell apart.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And for years to come those murderers are going to be put down. Now I have often wondered why it is that the Israelis have never found a war criminal behind the iron curtain. Nobody whole very massacred Jews in the Russian area and we know that hundreds of thousands if not millions were, in fact, massacred.

[Rushdoony] Yes, as a matter of fact, Rosenberg was furious when the German troops overran eastern Poland and other areas to find that Stalin had already ordered the massacre of the Jews.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] But this is a fact that is rarely mentioned. I have seen it only in... in a biography of Rosenberg.

[Scott] Well, right before our eyes the central Europeans are showing us that justice delayed is not justice denied, that the whole systems can be brought down in a matter of weeks.

Now the American people act frozen. I see in the Wall Street Journal today, this is April the sixth, an item about all the eastern European people in the Ohio district, the northern Ohio area. And, do you know, there are enclaves there of Poles and Czechs and Lithuanians and so forth and so on?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] All of them voted for Mr. Bush because he went and made good speeches about hard work and so forth and so on and freedom, how we encouraged freedom around the world. And his silence over Lithuania has created an enormous disgust.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We can’t even open our mouth while those people are being strangled with the equivalent of Soviet pillows.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, Wayne Johnson said the thing that endeared Reagan to the people behind the iron curtain was his reference to the evil empire.

[Scott] It was a beautiful reference.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And I believe it was Pat Buchanan’s phrase.

[Scott] I wouldn’t be surprised, because he has a way with words.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He really does.

[Rushdoony] So they were tremendously encouraged to resist because this was the first time an American president had condemned the Soviet Union.

[Scott] Can you imagine? In all these years...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now that is the silence of cowardice.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because we are very vocal. I remember when we bombed Libya. I remember at that time wondering if Libya was small enough for us to take action against, because we will not take action against a large power, certainly not against the Soviet. But this is... comes into the question of justice. What is justice to the government of the United States? Does it recognize its existence? Beyond campaign speeches, I fail to see it. How could the Supreme Court of the United States sit silently while the Congress of the United States exempts itself from the laws it enacts for the people of the country?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] How is the that... how is that possible? How can Congress even walk around? I don’t think these men should be received in polite society.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think one of our problems is that unbelief diminishes man.

[Scott] Very, very good... well said.

[Rushdoony] And I believe that our political figures have become progressively diminished figures as they have receded further and further from Christian faith. I quoted to you a while back, before we started this Easy Chair Truman’s statement cited by A. J. P. Taylor in Politicians, Socialism and Historians. Truman said, and I quote, “I like Stalin. Stalin is as near Tom Prendergast, the Missouri political boss...”

[Scott] I remember.

[Rushdoony] “...as any many I know. He is very fond of classical music,” unquote.

Can you imagine a more pea brained reaction than that? But that was the reaction of the president of the United States in the critical days as World War I was ending and after.

[Scott] World War II.

[Rushdoony] World War II, I mean, yes.

[Scott] Well, Pendergrass stole a lot of money and wasted a lot of money at the race track and bribed his henchmen into political position. That is as far as I know the worst crimes that Pendergrass every committed. He didn’t have anybody murdered. He certainly wasn’t comparable. But Harry Truman, you know, has received a wonderful press in recent years, everything being comparative. He looks better... he looks better than those who came later.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But the fact of the matter is that when he was in office he wasn’t much.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] He inherited Roosevelt’s position and he carried on Roosevelt’s policies. He continued to surrender. He was asked by the oil men to intervene in Persia, in Iran because the British, the Soviets had already sent troops in. So on the ... in order to get along with the petroleum industry of the day, he threatened to drop the bomb on the Russian troops unless they got out of Iran and they got out immediately. He didn’t ask them to get out of central Europe, although he still had the monopoly of the bomb at the time, because it didn’t occur to him and nobody suggested it. So therefore all those people remained under subjection.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we are ruled by a little man...

[Scott] And how.

[Rushdoony] Our time is about over. One final word by way of conclusion and then, Otto, you can add a final word, too.

I think we are going to see a dramatic change. I think the fact that Christianity is again being so much attacked indicates that we are having an impact. They are afraid of us. They hate us, because of our impact on the national scene. And that is just the beginning. So I do believe there is going to be a turnaround.

[Scott] Well, I do, too, because there is a limit to what any people will put up with. Because we are talking now... the Supreme Court is just issued a stay of execution on Mr. Harris.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now, of course, by the time the tape arrives to the listeners the case may have proceeded further. But there is no question of Mr. Harris’ is guilt.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The only question that has arisen is whether or not his suffering as a child was sufficiently considered by the court. Now what has that got to do with the guilt or innocence or a murderer?

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is such a far fetched thing and yet it is the kind of thing that is being done increasingly. Remember the Twinkie defense in San Francisco? Someone had eaten too many Twinkies...

[Scott] Too many Oreos...

[Rushdoony] Oh, was it Oreos?

[Scott] Well, it sounds like it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Too much... too much sweets.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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