From the Easy Chair

Cont. Communist Strategy of Deception, Misinformation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 68-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BH112

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BH112, Cont. Communist Strategy of Deception, Misinformation from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 220, June 5, 1990.

Before we go into our subject for this particular session, I would like to give Otto an opportunity to comment a little further on Golitsyn’s New Lies for Old and the whole general subject of the Soviet power and our power.

[Scott] Yes. So thank you. Sometimes the obvious seems to come later. I believe when we discussed this before, we ended with the general agreement that the United States is in the process of surrendering and we forgot... I forgot to say that the reason for this surrender is a very valid one. We do not have the power to confront the Soviets in any serious way. People have been criticizing Maggie Thatcher’s government for not doing something to protect Hong Kong against it being turned over to the Red China in 1997 or whenever. But the fact is that England doesn’t have the military power to protect that island. If the Red Chinese were to move in tomorrow morning there is nothing that England could do about it. In fact, England has done its best to cushion the transition for the benefit of the people there. But in the final analysis it has to give way.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And we are not in a position to do anything about Lithuania or Latvia or Estonia. If the Soviets were to send tanks in tomorrow morning we couldn’t do a blessed thing about it. And we are not able in military terms to stand up and push the Soviet back anywhere in the world at this point. So therefore we have to say that our government is moving probably in a practical way... in my opinion its greatest sin is in not telling the people the truth of the situation so that we could restore our dignity, our position and we could begin to pull together in order to improve our situation.

Thank you, Rush.

[Rushdoony] Well, it is wonderful when you have a tape and you can get your after thoughts in.

[Scott] Isn’t it?

[Rushdoony] Unlike going home from some at Easter dinner and thinking of something you should have said that would have been exactly right.

[Scott] Oh, I have been so witty in retrospect.

[Rushdoony] Aren’t we all?

Well, in this session our subject is going to be new books and old and perhaps we can say also new ideas and old. I am going to start with something that is really a book, although it goes by the name of a magazine The World And I, March, 1990. The World and I is a fat magazine so-called, 10 dollars a copy with all kinds of articles in it. And the one I am going to be begin with to begin as low as possible is an article by Brad Miner, M I N E R, “Rosanne’s TV: All American... TV’s All American Mother.” Rosanne Barr.

Well, he doesn’t like her.

[Scott] I can’t understand why.

[Rushdoony] But he says, and I quote, “Victims, Joseph Epstein wrote recently in the New York Times magazine, have never been in short supply in the world. But the rush to identify one’s self as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life. Why? As Epstein goes on to explain, these days a victim gets our compassion, our indulgence and our money. They aren’t Roseanne’s words, although they could be. Rosanne’s of this world demand to be called pretty, claiming equality of appearance among all women, yet wring their hands about losing their men to prettier sisters,” end of quote.

So he says Rosanne Barr with all the millions she is making is determined that she is a victim and she is going to prove that there is an absolute equality and do it by appearing nude in a future {?}.

[Scott] What?

[Rushdoony] Yes. She was very angry and it was in the media that she was not allowed to appear nude in her first picture.

[Scott] Well, they had mercy on the audience.

[Rushdoony] Let me read what he says in part. “For Ms. Barr you have to guess financial success means what five or 10 million bucks in fiscal 89? Big money, whatever the amount. And she will probably realize her ambition. God help us to be Woody Allen. ‘I would like to make movies like he does,’ she told premier, ‘where basically you tell the same story a million different ways over and over.’ Her movies will be about a woman, a fat Jewish lady who is the victim of Christian male chauvinist power, but overcomes her enemies—and here I am guessing—in apocalyptic fashion. She will write, produce and direct as only a powerless new age millionaires can. And I warn you. She will take off her clothes because the time has come for revelation, for the woman in the stories that only the wide screen can contain. So now you know,” end of quote.

[Scott] Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some of these very successful people would say a kind word of the nation that made them so rich and famous?

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes.

[Scott] And, of course, she is... she is likely...

[Rushdoony] But that would be unthinkable. They would be too square and too old fashioned.

[Scott] She is... she does take her clothes off, the nudist movement may never recover.

Horrible thought.

[Rushdoony] There may be a movement to close all {?} the South Pacific island woman from head to foot.

[Scott] What an ambition. Gosh.

[Rushdoony] Well, I have stunned you a bit, Otto. You...

[multiple voices]

[Rushdoony] ...continuing?

[Scott] You threw me back. We have... I have here a book in my hand called Books that Changed the World and you just brought up looks that changed the world.

[Rushdoony] Now you didn’t have to regret not coming up with a good idea tonight.

[Scott] It is interesting. I remember the fellow said to me one day and I may have told is before. He said, “Who reads?”

I said, “People who give orders to people like you.”

[Rushdoony] Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, let’s see, Otto. With all the reading I do, I should be giving orders to a great many people.

[Scott] Well, I think you do in an indirect sort of way. I have this book Books that Changed the World and they really do and they really have. One of the first I see is Augustine’s Confessions. For 1500 years he was the most popular author in the West, 1500 years. Can you imagine? And he was the first man to write about his conversion. It can still move you.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But, of course, the effects have not always been good. The next one I see, or one of the next on the list is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. There she was dying of cancer. She thought the whole world was dying with her. I suppose you do feel that way if you have a lingering death. And she was such a brilliant writer. She could write about nature, I think, more brilliantly than anyone I have ever read. And in her fantasy her dying fantasy she dreamed of a world without birds and all the devastation that that would bring in its trail.

Well, of course, this is a fantasy, but it was taken up and there are people who believe it, who actually and truly think that God is so heedless that he would allow the birds to vanish.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You mentioned her dying. One of the most powerful things ever written about death, the death of an ungodly person, was by Tolstoy. I forget the name of the character, The Death of Ivan... something.

[Scott] Ivan Ilyich.

[Rushdoony] Ilyich. Ivan Ilyich, yes.

[Scott] Yes, yes.

[Rushdoony] How this man as he is dying becomes resentful for living, powerfully depicted.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And I have seen that. I have, perhaps, been by more death beds that half a dozen pastors

[Scott] Why is that?

[Rushdoony] Because I was the only pastor for 100 miles in any direction when I was on the reservation. And then I served as a pastor, subsequently, in a community of elderly people. So I would have a lot of dying people to call on. And I did see some very beautiful deaths, remarkable. And I also saw some who fought death with an intense fear.

[Scott] That is always hard to see, though a good friend of mine years ago who was a race track writer, wrote about the horses, he was an interesting man. I asked him one day about the horses. I said, “I have never really known any horses and that and so forth.”

Well, he said, “It is a small world, but it is a good on. It is a close world.” He said, “I know everybody from the stable boys to the Jock Whitney.” And he said, “There is a democracy in the race horse crowd,” he said, “which is comforting.” But he... he died hard. It wasn’t the nature... the way he went. He had throat cancer and they took out his larynx and he had to write on a slate. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that whenever he thought of his condition and inadvertently I said something and I don’t know what it was, which suddenly reminded him that I was visiting him in his hospital room. And the fear that came in his eyes was so naked that it embarrassed me. I really... I was shocked. And it was, again, a total lack of faith.

[Rushdoony] I have seen people die where you could only say that you felt very close to heaven. Their death was so magnificent and things happened that were clearly supernatural, a remarkable thing.

Well, to go on to something else, one of the very interesting books I read very recently and, in fact, finished it just about a week ago, discussed it a week ago Sunday in referring to it in a morning sermon by Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation. The subtitle: Bureaucrats, Families and Heroes in the early Industrial Revolution as foreseen in Bacon’s New Atlantic. It was published by Princeton University Press in 1982.

What he deals with is the nature of invention, the innovations that came in, the background of them. And in the course of it he is fair minded in that he deals with many, many things that he doesn’t agree with. He calls attention, for example, that the Puritan reading of the book of Daniel and the fact that Daniel foresaw a rebirth of learning and a completion of man’s dominion over nature profoundly influenced scientists. Now he doesn’t go as far with that thesis as others do, but Wallace is very fair and he records that.

He also does a great deal with ... he calls it, by the way, the Puritan technological Millenarianism, a very interesting term. He deals with fact that the corporations for generations that began technology were all family corporations, family owned and their sons in laws were taken in and made a part of the corporation. It deals with the relationship of land and family. The book from beginning to end is very interesting.

Now one of the things that I think you might find of more than a little interest, Otto, is that he has a few pages on Samuel Smiles.

[Scott] Oh, the painter. No, the writer.

[Rushdoony] Writer, yes.

[multiple voices]

[Rushdoony] He wrote Self Help, Duty...

[Scott] I have some of his books.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Very good writer.

[Rushdoony] And he was a physician, had been a railroad official and he wrote popular lives of engineers to celebrate the new kind of hero who was remaking the world. So Samuel Smiles who is very much ridiculed now did have an important part in popularizing the technology and calling attention to the men whom he felt were the true heroes of modern culture.

[Scott] But he was actually a very good writer.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Nobody that reads him would make fun of him.

[Rushdoony] Well, scholars feel almost duty bound to ridicule him, but Samuel Smiles does deserve a biography at someone’s hands, because he did shape the thinking of people. And we need to get back to his perspective, because the kind of writing you have done, industrial history, he began.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ... on a popular level and made it influential in the advancement of our culture.

[Scott] Well, of course that is one of the great blind spots of the conservative writers of today. They all want to write sermons about free enterprise, but they don’t want to write about anybody that is involved in the market.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] they don’t write about any corporations or businesses or business men or anything else. They stay as far away from them as the left does. Yet, of course, they always have their hand out.

[Rushdoony] And the publishers don't like to touch those books, because it is considered as disreputable as writing about... publishing a book about orthodox Christianity.

[Scott] Well, it is worse now. My coal book was originally supposed to be published by Athenaeum, but Pat Knopf sold out to MacMillan and when I called and said, “Well, the book is ready,” he said, “I am no longer in charge.”

I said, “Well, you can recommend it.”

He said, “Well, yes,” but he said, “They don’t necessarily listen.”

And in due course his successors told me they didn’t believe I publishing those sort of books anymore. So I called Pat back and said, “Why don’t you act as my agent? After all, you owe me a lot.”

And he said, “Well, I will be happy to. I will do my best.”

And three weeks later he called and said, “Believe it or not, I cannot find a publisher for you.” He said, “The door has been closed. No more books about business success. The door is always open for business failure or business scandal just as it is with Christianity.”

You don’t... you are not going to read about Christian success. You are going to read about Christian difficulties, Christian problems.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, let me talk about that in a minute. I did read a new book, a relatively new book called England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images, by Margaret Aston. Now Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988.

And we are, of course, almost all well aware of iconoclasts in Switzerland and on the continent and to some extent in Scotland. You know, when people heard Knox and then would rush out and destroy images and clear out churches and so forth. But England had its iconoclasts also. And Margaret Aston’s examination of the historical context of iconoclasm in the Reformation... I remember when I was young and getting a brush with education that the iconoclasts were always connected to the orthodox Christians and not to the western Christians. But Protestantism has a very strong iconoclastic element.

[Rushdoony] And so does the Spanish Catholic Church. In fact, a Harvard professor told me that one of the most explosive incidents he ever saw was when he was in France and this Catholic bookstore... and they had just received a lot of images to put for sale and they had them on this table where they were unwrapping them and placing them and this Spanish monsignor came in and the proprietor’s wife called these images to his attention and said, “Aren’t they wonderful?”

And he exploded. He took his cane and swept them all off the table and read her the riot act for having them.

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] The Spanish Church was full of that.

[Scott] We are paying a heavy price now. We are paying a heavy price for that, because imagery is being used against the Church.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, it was ironic that Calvin opposed the defacing and destruction of any images.

[Scott] So did Luther.

[Rushdoony] And so did Luther. It was a Zwingli who was the fanatic on that score who opposed even music, anything sensuous he condemned.

[Scott] Well, of course, it was a revolutionary act in the sense that the revolution really becomes real to the average person when the symbols of the tradition are destroyed. I mean, that is why the burning of the flag in the United States is a fairly revolutionary act. And the Supreme Court is proving that it is illiterate and historically unlearned by not recognizing the fact that the destruction of the symbol is an attack upon the essence, an attack upon faith.

The... to associate an ... a physical act of burning a flag with expression is to confuse words and action. It is a form of illiteracy one wouldn’t have expected from a supreme court. But to go back to the imagery business, there is still a heavy hangover of antipathy toward imagery in Protestantism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...which has created an almost an elite attitude towards popular art which over a period of time has alienated the people from Protestantism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I think Clarke in his secularization of the European mind in the 19th century talked about that where the average person began to feel or the average working person began to feel that he wasn’t good enough to go in some of those churches, because they were so better dressed and they were so severe and they were so austere. They just didn’t feel that he fit.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Was that Clarke or Chadwick?

[Scott] Chadwick.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It was Owen Chadwick.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I am sorry, yes.

[Rushdoony] Well, I would like to call attention to a book which is a very old one, reprinted in 1978 in English by Bernard of Clairvaux, The Life and Death of Saint Malachi the Irishman.

[Scott] Oh, how nice.

[Rushdoony] It is...

[Scott] Carry on.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the interesting things that the editor, professor Myers, I believe, yes, Robert T. Mayer, calls attention to is that after the fall of Rome and the barbarian triumph throughout Europe, Ireland was a Christian center and a great deal of the rechristianization of Europe took place from Ireland. Subsequently, of course, the Church in Ireland suffered heavily from the depredations of the Norsemen, plus the feuding of the various petty Irish kingdoms.

One of the interesting things to me is that Bernard of Clarivaux’s account of Saint Malachi shows that the office of bishop was commonly hereditary in Ireland in those early centuries. Also that the term that the clergy used for themselves in Ireland was the Levites of the Lord. And the bishops also were married, I should add.

The book is very, very interesting, a saint’s life, but these were written to be read out loud to groups of monks or Christians and to incite them to greater devotion. And it is a very beautiful story from beginning to end, old fashioned language and terminology...’

[Scott] When was it originally written?

[Rushdoony] At the time of Bernard of Clairvaux and his... I think he died around 1150. So ... and he presided at the funeral of Saint Malachi.

Saint Malachi was a remarkable man in the history of Ireland because he had a great deal to do with the revival of a strong Christianity in that country.

[Scott] That is interesting. I can think of the most valuable book I have seen on the initial period of the Bolshevik revolution as the time of troubles by Gotay.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I have ...

[Scott] Now that has been recently printed and it covers a diary which would... he wrote between July eight, 1917 and July 23, 1922. Gotay was descended from a French family of jewelers and he was a professor at the University of Moscow. He was a historian. And he was also one of the directors of the Moscow museum. So therefore he was in a favored position and he was allowed to keep two rooms in his apartment, his five room apartment for himself and his family. What the Bolsheviks they did, they moved the capital to the country from Saint Petersburg to Moscow and before they did they took an inventory of every room in the city. And they threw most of the aristocrats out in the street to die in the winter and in the cold and they moved the working class into the all the other places, but, of course, first the members of the party took the palaces just like Kerensky moved into the czar’s suite in Alice and so forth.

So ... and he had old, Gotay did, but in the end he had to use it to buy potatoes and to buy insulin for his wife who had diabetes. So even though gold is useful in the time of calamity, it depends on what is available. And at one point I remember he said, “How is it possible for a country as rich as this and as large as this to fall apart in a period of 18 months?” And then he said, “Well, we were at each other’s throats for the previous 75 years. So when the crisis came there was nothing to hold us together.”

And I would recommend that to anybody who wants to know what really bad times are like.

[Rushdoony] It is a grim book.

[Scott] It is a grim book, but it is ... it is an interesting book, because it was written in total honesty and he gave it to an American scholar named Frank Golden to smuggle out of the country and Frank golden never brought it or showed it to anybody. He died and it was left with all of his other papers in the archives at the Hoover Institute and only recently was it unearthed, translated and printed. And it has been badly reviewed because he had some unflattering things to say about some of the commissars.

[Rushdoony] I would like to touch briefly on a book that is nothing remarkable, a bit sad, but instructive all the same. It is RLS in the South Seas by Alana Knight. RLS, of course, Robert Louis Stevenson. And I am very fond of Stevenson’s writings and his poetry. And what this book is about is his voyage from one part of the Pacific to the other looking for a place to stay. Of course, he was to die finally of tuberculosis on a Pacific island.

[Scott] Samoa, wasn’t it?

[Rushdoony] I believe it was Samoa. Yes, you are right. I have... What it reveals, though, is something that struck me very forcibly because I knew that Stevenson had abandoned the Calvinistic faith of his mother, but I had no awareness of how a liberal he had become. A humanist and a liberal in a rather sentimental sense. But the thing that struck me forcibly was that his training, an old fashioned Scottish training was what governed his writings.

[Scott] Well, they are very moral.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He knew the difference between right and wrong.

[Rushdoony] And he also thoroughly ... well, accepted in his writings the depravity of man.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] And books have been ... or articles have been written and lectures given about the remarkable parallel to Calvinistic doctrine in so many of his writings.

[Scott] Well, Jekyll and Hyde.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Who is the same man.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So it does tell us what education does, what a person’s background does and how it lingers so that at a time when Stevenson was writing one thing, when he spoke casually to people he revealed a totally different character.

[Scott] Well, a couple of generations back even our criminals...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...were Christian.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They knew when they sinned.

[Rushdoony] That is right.

[Scott] And they had a code of honor.

[Rushdoony] Now it is hard to find it on the right side of the law sometimes.

[Scott] Well now the things that they are doing are depraved beyond belief.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Without guilt.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because they have absolutely no moorings at all. And apparently ... and I have run into recently some younger men who are quite talented and totally uncultured. They have all the culture of a horse. It is amazing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I don’t know how it is possible to grow up without any standard in literature, in music, I manners or in anything. And yet they have gone to school for long periods of time and the... they have a flare for money making. Just be careful what you want to talk about. Don’t... don’t get away from the specific. Otherwise, they will fall into the mud right before your eyes.

[Rushdoony] Well, I would like to touch on three different books now, very closely related and the first is one I haven’t read. It is newly out, but it is reviewed in the June, 1990 The World And I. And it is a book by Roger Kimble entitled Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education and published this year by Harper and Rowe.

The review is subtitled, well, the title: “Rebels Against Reason.” And the subtitle, “The Most Influential Purveyor of Conformity, Hypocrisy and Irrationality in your Community is not your Local Fundamentalist Church. It is your Local College Campus.”

And Kimble gives a great deal of evidence, according to this review, of the kind of irrational and anti Christian thinking that prevails. In fact, he raises a question. How far should we trust gurus who want to liberate us from rational thought? And, of course, he says, this is the goal of the modern university.

Now the other two books, one which I dealt with some time ago, I think, I am not sure, by Charles J. Sykes, Prof Scam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education, put out by {?} Gateway in 1988. This is a devastating analysis of what the academicians are like, their hours and their pay, what they think a university is for, how they trivialize education. One university has a course of Bridget Bardot.

[Scott] Of course. And they are 30 years too late.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We needed that a long time ago.

[Rushdoony] And for a time at Harvard you could get credit for courses in scuba diving and sport and political ideology and other such courses. It has a great deal on what Harvard has taught or teaches.

Also the fact that to prevent you and others like us from knowing what is going on, in some instances it has been made a felony to sit in a classroom without the professor’s consent.

[Scott] A felony?

[Rushdoony] A felony.

[Scott] You can go to the penitentiary?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is not worth it, is it?

[Rushdoony] Yes. This was in Wisconsin. “In Wisconsin nervous academics and friendly legislators sought to put teeth into the protections. State representative Marlin Schneider introduced a bill that would make it a felony to sit in a classroom against the wishes of the instructor.”

[Scott] That is the state that sent us Hubert Humphrey and Mondale.

[Rushdoony] Yes. “Violators would be subject to a fine of up to 10,000 dollars, a two year prison term or both for sitting in a classroom.”

[Scott] And not even laughing.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, there is a great deal more in this that is really amazing. Sykes has done a marvelous job. And, of course, he deals with tenure and not very favorably.

[Scott] Well, why should a typist in a college office have tenure? Everybody...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... in the system has tenure, the janitor, the truck driver.

[Rushdoony] From kindergarten on up through graduate school.

[Scott] Yes, has tenure. Isn’t that wonderful?

[Rushdoony] Well, the other book is by Paige Smith, an academician, Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America, published by Viking Press in 1990. And coming from a man who was a prominent historian, taught in a number of schools, was founding provost of the University of California at Santa Cruz, which tempted me to hold it against him, but at any rate, he did write a good book. He describes how because he was very much influenced before he went to graduate school by Eugen Rosenstock Huessy, a man who had quite an influence on me. He was barred for a time from the graduate division of Harvard because they resented Rosenstock Heussy who had taught at Harvard and had been not a conformist, had broken ranks with them all.

[Scott] These are the people who are always giving us little lectures on tolerance.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And they are anti bigotry.

[Rushdoony] Yes. In the course of this he has a great deal of interesting historical information. One of the things that Dabney indicated would happen in the North was that between the corporations and the unions Socialism would come in because of the triumph of the North. And Paige Smith, as an historian comments, “The most dramatic and traumatic events of the post war era, that is post Civil War era, had to do with a desperate struggle by working men and women to share in the burgeoning prosperity of the nation. By the end of the war real wages had shrunk by one third from 1860.”

[Scott] Isn’t that interesting?

[Rushdoony] Yes. He has a great deal that he throws in, by the way, to indicate that our historiography and our research today is anything but what it should be.

[Scott] Well, could I bring up a book along that line?

[Rushdoony] Yes, why don’t you just comment a little bit more. I could spend an evening on this, but I would encourage everyone to get it and read it. He speaks of the secular monks and acolytes of the newly founded religion of the university.

[Scott] You have the little collectives, collective societies.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] No strangers allowed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, I read an article in the recent issue of Encounter which is a British publication by John Grigg who was evaluating World Wars I and II. Which of these two wars, he said, was the more moral? And he talked about the fact that in World War I volunteers staffed British army for the first two years. But in World War II the leaders took no chances and the draft began at once. And he had a number of other comparisons which are equally striking, but his major point was that World War I was more moral than World War II although it is always presented as the opposite. It is always presented that in World War I men were wasted for no purpose and World War II was a good war because Hitler was defeated. But he said that is not the case. Because, he said, we engaged in terror bombing of civilians in World War II.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that is something that the men of World War I would never have dreamed of doing. And, of course, we forgave ourselves for that very easily, because nobody has ever dared to, I guess, bring the matter up on this side of the water. They are much more candid on the other side. And it brings to mind a book that was sent to me called Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II by a Canadian named James Bacque, B A C Q U E, published by Stoddard Publishing in Canada in 1989.

This is a horrifying book.

[Rushdoony] I would like to borrow that if I might.

[Scott] Yes. I will be happy to lend it to you. It is one of the worst books, I guess, I have ever read. It traces instructions from Eisenhower on the mistreatment of German prisoners in Europe. They were put in open fields. They slept in the open in holes in the ground. They were put on starvation rations. They died by the millions. More men from the German armed forces died in the West after the war than died during the war. And of course their ranks were decimated or more than decimated by disease and so forth.

The author goes on to say that the German people dared not talk about this.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because they had been covered with odium since World War II. They have been afraid to say a word although, of course, the deaths of that many millions of men affecting that many families is known from one end of Germany to the other.

[Rushdoony] The suppression of the truth about what the Allies did in World War II still continues and I think the trial of Count Tolstoy is an indication of that, because the case against him was not well made. And yet he lost.

[Scott] Yes, he did.

[Rushdoony] And it brings up what you brought up in a way before which Paige Smith has brought up. The fact that history in the hands of the academy and history in the hands of governments becomes an instrument of propaganda, it always has been so. But it is worse today, because we will no longer admit anything to the other side. We are now being given a sort of demonology where everybody is either black or white. A person who is against abortion is a fanatic and a person who is for abortion is called a person who just chooses. Murder is coming under euphemisms that Goebbels would admire. And, of course, a book like Other Losses which has never been reviewed so far as I know—this is an underground book—it... the Canadians were not involved so therefore the Canadians had no qualms about... against having it published.

I should think that a matter ... charges of this depth and seriousness would require an investigation. What is what Count Tolstoy demanded in England. And he wound up being bankrupted for his temerity.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, that makes me want to go back to Paige Smith just for a minute or two? Are you thought, by the way?

[Scott] I am through.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...because he calls attention to the moral bankruptcy and intellectual bankruptcy of academicians and the intellectuals. He says of all modern cults perhaps that of the {?} is perhaps the most stupid, the most bizarre. But he said his infatuated followers, the great majority of them were people with college degrees, many with advanced degrees. PhDs were a dime a dozen in the {?} and the largest professional group represented were psychologists.

[Scott] Well, of course, you know my opinion that that just means that they went to obedience school for a long time.

[Rushdoony] Many of the {?} had given all their worldly goods to the {?}. When the journalist Francis Fitzgerald visited the {?} he was astonished at the professional backgrounds of the {?}. The commune city planner, Swami {?} had been a professional city planner in San Mateo, California and boasted an MA from the Harvard graduate school of design. His assistant was an Australian with a PhD in linguistic philosophy. Another disciple had a degree from Harvard in visual and environmental studies. The president of the commune had been a systems analyst for IBM and Univac and studied computer sciences at the University of London. The list seemed endless. The chief publicist had a PhD from Yale.

He goes on to say their average age was slightly over 30. They came from families where the fathers were overwhelmingly professionals or businessmen and 12 percent had PhD degrees, half had protestant backgrounds, a quarter were Jewish and a quarter Roman Catholic. And here they were in the wilds in the Oregon with a silent guru who never spoke.

[Scott] It was better that way.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And he says this is not an episode limited to the Americans. The French consulate {?} told Fitzgerald that an estimated 250,000 Frenchmen were living in India in the mid 70s seeking enlightenment from a variety of gurus. At the height of the movement there ewer dozens of {?} scattered about Europe and Australia, a large number in West Germany and a substantial number in England.

[multiple voices]

[Rushdoony] Yes. Common to all was the fact that they attracted a disproportionate number of highly educated and successful me and women.

[Scott] They were looking for something in which to believe.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You have to feel sorry for them, because...

[Rushdoony] Anything but Christianity.

[Scott] Their education had left them with no belief, with no faith.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Of course they were not going to go to Christianity, because you lose your class position if you become Christian. A Christian is a second class citizen. He has no social status.

Can I try one on you? This is a...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Go ahead.

[Scott] ... a book which is of very great importance. The name is Liability by Peter Huber.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is published by Basic Books. And the subtitle is The Legal Revolution and Its Consequences .

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this is an examination of the {?} of tort actions against business. And, of course, you and I have discussed the fact that this is going to engulf churches and church groups and not profit groups as well. It hasn’t hit us yet in a large way. But it has hit business. And some of the cases are mindboggling. There was one pharmaceutical company, a chemical company that was sued by a rancher whose Mexican cow hands had given, against their printed instructions, certain chemicals to a prized bull because they couldn’t read the English instructions. Nevertheless he sued the manufacturer. The jury found for him and the company had to pay him 10 million dollars.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This sort of thing is going on and on and on and the courts are presiding over it. Now Huber doesn't go into that. He is only going into the cases in what happened. He is not mentioning the judges. We are in a very peculiar position of treating judges as though they are disembodied spirits. They are not held responsible for the damages that they are inflicting upon this society. I think that is an amazing oversight. I think ... well, of course, {?} come to mind, but I have to suppress the thought.

[Rushdoony] Well, that reminds me of something which perhaps is totally out of context, but when you talked about a man whose employee gave the wrong thing to a prize bull, it reminded me of the fact, as you know, I write a column for the California Farmer, pastor’s pulpit. The late and very fine editor of the California Farmer had a ranch. And he had a prize bull that was not performing for a while and...

[Scott] Named Ferdinand. Go ahead.

[Rushdoony] So he got some medicine that was supposed to take care of the bull. It was supposed to be a kind of tablet and they were to hold the bull’s jaws open and shoot it down with a kind of a blow gun.

[Scott] Neat trick if you can do it.

[Rushdoony] Yes, now the bull threw it. Nothing was happening. The bull was not improving. And then he found out that his cow hands were taking the tablets instead.

[Scott] And giving the bull a placebo.

[Rushdoony] Maybe an aspirin or something.

[Scott] Tell us more. You are leaving us hanging.

[Rushdoony] Well, he had to take over treating the bull himself.

[Scott] We don't know what happened to the cow hands.

[Rushdoony] He never said.

[Scott] A very funny story. Very funny. Well, the Liability book is pretty scary.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I would like to read that some time.

[Scott] Would you?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Ok.

[Rushdoony] Well, we have just a few minutes. Is there something in the way of a last little item you would like to brig up, Otto?

[Scott] Well, it is interesting to me that with all this talk about the electronic media and all the other instruments of communications, the radio, films, tapes, records and so forth that books are still what determine the thinking of the world.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Isn’t that amazing?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the future is going to be determined by Christians increasingly because the Christian schools are the only ones who are turning out literate young people and they are the readers so that they are going to be the future leaders as well as the future readers.

[Scott] Well the thing about a reader is that nobody can lock up his mind.

[Rushdoony] That is right. Well, our time is over. We 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.