From the Easy Chair

Peace; Christian vs Humanism (Middle East)

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 77-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BN121

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BN121, Peace; Christian vs Humanism (Middle East) from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 241, April 17, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott have with us one of our Chalcedon staff members, John Lofton. And our subject is peace, Christian versus humanistic.

Now I believe this is a very important subject and I think one of the great evils in all discussions of peace by Christians is that they discuss things in abstraction from the Bible and the Bible in abstraction from life. They forget that all of the Bible was written in the context of very grim world affairs. And, in fact, in the day of our Lord one of the most obvious facts to both Romans and Jews was the fact that war was coming, war between Judea and Rome. There were too many people zealous, of course, were the major party for war, who were determined at all costs to overthrow the Roman rule. They believed that because they were the covenant people and they were, therefore, the people of God on their side, that God would miraculously deliver them no matter how insane their rebellion might appear humanistically. This was a very considerable course. At the same time the Romans recognized the strategic importance of Judea. It was on the highways of commerce between the East and the West, North Africa and the Middle East. And they went over board in doing everything to please Judeans. As a matter of fact, they turned it into a show city, full of marvel buildings, magnificent gymnasiums, palatial public places. It was a city of remarkable beauty, of remarkable costliness.

And the Romans had the belief that so many people in Washington do now with regard to Moscow. If you pour enough money into the Soviet Union they are bound to love us and bound to turn into a peace loving people. And that as the thesis of Rome with regard to Judea. And this is why they were so vengeful when finally war broke out. At that time all the areas, the mountains the hills around Jerusalem were heavily wooded. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD every last tree was cut down in order to be used as a cross. They crucified them by the thousands of upon thousands, sold others into slavery and others simply butchered because they felt all their earnest peace efforts had come to nothing.

Now that was the humanistic view of peace which the Romans had and the Judeans with their belief that because they were the chosen people God was going to deliver them miraculously no matter what they did, no matter how outrageous and stupid they were.

As against this there was one who spoke out and the attitude of the public officials was that if we allow this man to come, the Romans will take our city away. They will prevail totally and it is better for this one man to die than for the nation to perish. That was the conclusion of the leaders of Judea. And in the night before his ... well, the night of his arrest, our Lord spoke about peace to his disciples. And I think his words we need to remember, beautiful words, but they were to abstract words. They were words set in the context of this coming conflict which he predicted the day before. You can read about it in Matthew 24. But this is what he said. “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” So he was saying there is the possibility of peace. But it is not the peace that Rome nor the peace of the Judeans. It is the peace of God and the earth can only know peace through that.

Well, with that general introduction, Otto, would you like to make a general introduction before we turn to John for his comments?

[Scott] Well, we are talking now about peace in the specific. We are talking about peace I the gulf. Is that right? Peace in the Middle East.

[Rushdoony] There and elsewhere.

[Scott] And elsewhere.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, not too long ago, in fact, the early part of March there was a convocation in the Vatican between the Vatican and the bishops and the patriarchs in the Middle East on the discussion of what next, what after this. The patriarchs, the Chaldeans and the patriarchs and the bishops of the other, the {?} Christians and various and sundry other Christian groups in the Middle East in Syria, in Jerusalem, in Iraq and all the other countries. There is about 15 million Christians in that area. They include Palestinians. A considerable percentage of the Palestinians are Christians. And ...’

[Rushdoony] Iraqis, too.

[Scott] Yes. And Iraq. Well, Iraq, interesting about Iraq, Iraq is the only Arab country in the Middle East where Christians and Jews were not discriminated against under Saddam Hussein. And our press which has been over there somehow did not... didn’t manage to stumble over that fact.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is interesting. And it is also interesting that this convocation of the Christian leaders, Christian spiritual leaders of that community denounced the war. They were against the war and they were against the results of the war. The Chaldean patriarch estimated the Iraqi dead at 500,000 and he compared that, he said, is Kuwait worth 500,000 lives, 250,000 Kuwaitis worth that much? They didn’t talk about the destruction of property or he didn’t excepting in the terms of the monasteries, convents, the, churches that were bombed, the archaeological places, Babylon, Ur, Nineveh, the oldest places in Mesopotamian civilization, which are still be excavated. They were all bombed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They are all bombed by our air force and the argument, of course, is that they might have held ammunition or something of that sort. Yesterday I read the English Spectator and it... the individual said that the drove along the road leading from Kuwait toward Baghdad which is littered with automobiles and trucks and tanks and bodies. And we not only bombed them, but we napalmed them. We burned them alive. Nobody knows how many thousands. They were in retreat when we did this. We burned them as they retreated. And some of the soldiers disobeyed the orders of their officers, some of our soldiers and refused to fire on them. And the same thing was true of the British troops. It was the air force that went all out.

And none of this convocation and none of these statements from this great religious convocation, as far as I know, was printed or reported anywhere in the United States. But if you stop to think about it, it is a very significant event.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The Catholic Church in the United States, of course, repeated what the Vatican had concluded and told all its parishioners in the armed forces and out that they were engaging in the war against their church. And they said it is a matter of your conscience as to whether you obey the church or the state in this issue. And, of course, as we know, they all obeyed, almost all obeyed the state.

But we have here the issue of Jerusalem. We have here the issue of all these different groups and faiths. We have detonated a bomb which is a fire which is not going to go out in our time.

[Rushdoony] I agree. John?

[Lofton] Yeah, I think it is... I think you are right, Otto. I think it is a fire that is going to spread.

[Rushdoony] And burn us.

[Lofton] I think so. What got me to thinking about the question of biblical Christian idea of peace versus the secular idea of peace which is also the idea of peace of many conservatives was when during the war against Iraq I saw secretary of state Baker somewhere in the Middle East on yet one more peace mission, quote, unquote, actually saying at a podium somewhere that quoting the psalmist, he said. We must listen to the psalmist who said, “Seek ye peace and pursue it.” He said, “It is time that all of us took the palmist... the psalmist, Freudian slip there, the palm... the psalmist said...advice.

Except, of course, the kind of peace Baker was pursuing really had nothing to do with the kind of peace spoken of in the psalm. In fact, in the very next scene on the nightly news after showing Baker saying that he was shown smiling and shaking hands with President Assad of Syria who doesn't strike me as a man who is heavily into reading or obeying the Psalms.

The biblical idea of peace which this statement by Baker caused me to do a little research on is... tells us that peace is the achievement of God, not man. It is inescapably wrapped up in the idea of righteousness and holiness and God’s justice and God’s law. But the... the modern idea of peace with which, again, I ... and, you know, it saddens me to say it is the idea of most conservatives, even conservatives who call themselves Christians is the idea of peace through strength, peace through war. I have here in front of me a quote of Billy Graham who prayed at the White House with George Bush before and during this war and he equates peace with war. In fact, a quote here it is out of US News and World Report is, “We must fight for peace.”

[Scott] Peace through strength was a Nazi slogan.

[Lofton] Is that right?

[Scott] Yes.

[Lofton] Well, of course, they were pagans, too, weren’t they, a type of pagan.

[Rushdoony] {?} Pardon me.

[Lofton] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Wasn’t Gorbachev and Bush’s term the new world order Hitler’s term originally?

[Scott] That was his... Hitler’s term for the ... the new Reich, the new world order.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So we are on the same path.

[Scott] Very... very similar.

[Lofton] Well, I thought of Bush and his ... President Bush and his new world order when I... when I read how Jeremiah and Ezekiel were concerned about the false prophets who were always going around mouthing off about what? About peace, when, of course, is... proclaiming peace when, of course, there was no peace, because men were not right with God.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] And...

[Scott] May I interrupt?

[Lofton] Sure.

[Scott] The evangelical leaders, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham and the others were in favor of this action. It was the established churches that were not. Most of the main line churches in the Protestant denominations were opposed to his action. They were opposed to ... to bombing and the rest of it. They all were in favor of negotiations. And here we run into the peculiarity that Saddam Hussein called for a negotiation and was told that there wouldn’t be any, that his goal was to surrender and retreat.

[Lofton] Well, I would say that the idea of peace through negotiations which is peace through talk is ... is... is a... another kind of false religion, certainly when compared to the biblical idea of peace, the idea that we... if we just sit down with an enemy and talk, you know, talk long enough that somehow peace will occur because our differences are some kind of failed communication. I mean, I... we hear this all the time whether it is a domestic or an international problem. Well, you have got to talk about it. You have got to talk it out. It is just as if all disagreements are somehow can be solved by ... by talking.

[Scott] Well, in this case it didn't seem to me that negotiations were unthinkable.

[Lofton] Well, no, but I mean, to negotiate what? That is what I usually think of when someone...

[Scott] Well, the idea was to negotiate an end to the sanctions and a negotiated retreat from Kuwait on the...

[Lofton] Sure.

[Scott] ...on the side of Iraq. And also to negotiate the dispute that Iraq and Kuwait had over the question of who was getting whose oil on the border.

[Rushdoony] And I would say even to raise the question of negotiations was inappropriate because we weren’t ready to negotiate with Moscow on Lithuania or Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, the Ukraine or Armenia all wanting freedom and all being persecuted and all being treated worse than Saddam Hussein treated anyone.

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] ...making no excuses for Saddam Hussein.

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] So we were not going into any negotiations or into a war with clean hands. We were guilty both ways.

[Scott] No that is another question. I mean, our hands haven’t been clean at any time as far as I know. But this was a full fledged all out attack on a scale which the world has never seen.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We dropped more bombs on Iraq than we did on ... that was dropped on Germany in all of World War II. And negotiations to avoid a catastrophe of that proportion seems to be would have been a better course of events.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] But let me say one other thing on the negotiations thing. Because of the way... from George Bush is a... he is a moralist and he personalizes immediately these kind of conflicts and when you spit in someone’s face for six months straight from the opening bell, even if you then at some point wanted to negotiate, how could... how... how could a person negotiate with you. When that ... when that man, that ... their foreign ministry, Mr. Tariq Aziz refused to accept a letter that Baker gave him and a ... a lot of people acted as if they were shocked and I thought, well, what do you expect? I mean, after you insult and call the guy Hitler and threaten war crimes trial and then you expect him to take your letter?

[Scott] Well, there is no question but Mr. Bush maneuvered from the beginning for this particular war.

[Lofton] Exactly. He wanted a war.

[Scott] But I don’t think that he quite realized what it would accomplish. Right now we have ... he as effectively destroyed not only Iraq, but Jordan and Kuwait. Now Lebanon was already destroyed because the Syrians and the Israelis. So you have got dogs, wild dogs running through the streets of Lebanon, of every major city now. The people are afraid of them, because that is... that is the kind of devastation that was wrought. It took... When Eisenhower sent the marines over in 1952 or three—I have forgotten exactly when—all the disorder there stopped. That was the extent... we had such great prestige. When Reagan sent them over they were... they were destroyed. That was the difference in our prestige in that area of the world. But the destruction of Lebanon is a crime which has never been brought to the attention of the average person.

[Rushdoony] That is right.

[Scott] It is a fantastic destruction. It was destruction of the only country in the Middle East where you had Arabs, Christians, Muslims and so forth all living in harmony. It was the largest banking center in the Middle East. It was the only international culture in the ... in the Middle East in a real sense. And it was destroyed and now we have three other countries destroyed. We have Jordan is destroyed, effectively. Kuwait is on fire. And Iraq is destroyed. They have starvation in Iraq now. They have planes in Iraq now. And we are maintaining the sanctions and the blockade against it.

[Rushdoony] And today’s paper says that we are feeding the {?} the most savage people in the Middle East and not feeding the Christian Assyrian refugees.

[Scott] We are doing this because this is a continuation of the policy of destabilizing and destroying the Arabs in the Middle East. We... this is now four countries that have been destroyed: Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan.

[Rushdoony] We are old enough to remember when Lebanon was called the Switzerland of the Middle East.

[Scott] Yes, it was. Yes, it was. You used to have pictures, vacation...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The beach.

[Rushdoony] It was a popular European... resort area.

[Scott] Yes. And remember this... the capital of Lebanon was bombed. That was very quickly forgotten, wasn’t it?

[Lofton] I tell you. One of the things that shocked me about this war against Iraq was not just that the most prominent Christians in this country made no effort to in any way biblically justify the war, they didn’t even twist Scripture to try to justify the war. They didn’t cite it at all, but in addition to that some of them had such a blood lust for the war, particularly Pat Robertson who I watched every day on the 700 Club for ... for two months straight. I meticulously recorded is program. I wrote down his quotes and this was a man that was laughing. I mean, he could not wait to get into this are. Cal Thomas, the columnist called for the use of nuclear weapons in this war. This was an amazing spectacle to shed blood.

[Rushdoony] {?} Yes. Why these men and Billy Graham and the Dallas seminary faculty were so war like and three books were published within a matter of weeks by some of these men, Pat Robertson one of them which sold in excess of a million copies in a matter of a couple of weeks, because they were all predicting that this was the beginning of Armageddon and the rapture.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And you have so m any people out there who are believers in this nonsense and they were welcoming the war and the butchery that followed because it was going to lead to the rapture.

[Scott] You know, when you stop to think of it, the whole idea of the rapture is not very flattering. What do they want to do? Leave us all to our troubles while they go to paradise?

[Rushdoony] Well, it is supposed to be all the Christians are going and if we don’t, we are not Christians.

[Scott] Oh, I think heaven will surprise all of us by its population.

[Rushdoony] I think some of these people are going to be raptured to hell, because of their blood thirsty, ungodly ways. The rapture is more important to them than Jesus Christ according to some I talk to. That is the test of the faith for them.

[multiple voices]

[Rushdoony] Now there are some godly...

[Lofton] I never really thought of the faith as an escape, did you?

[Rushdoony] No. I know some godly Premillennialists, men I respect, although I don't agree with them. But I have encountered too many who if you don’t believe in the rapture and if you didn’t believe that Armageddon was right there, you were of Satan.

[Scott] Well, it may not ... you know Armageddon is a very big word. But we seem to be traveling on the brink of a civilizational collapse.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The... you brought up Armenia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Latvia, et cetera. There ...Africa, you know, is a basket case.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And those countries are collapsing. Those economies are collapsing. The {?} is in new convulsions since Thatcher left. The whole British commonwealth idea is, of course, now that it is nonsensical which we are looking next door to Canada where Quebec is on the verge of departure and there is new secessionist movement on the west coast.

The central American countries are in a bad state. South American countries are in a terrible state. We have got Argentina and we have got Brazil. We have got Chile. We have got Peru.

[Rushdoony] With cholera spreading in Latin America.

[Scott] Plagues. And so forth. The plagues that are going to arrive in Iraq are going to spread all through the Middle East. Where instead of a new world order we are looking at a new world disorder.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And a very widespread one, too.

[Rushdoony] And Europe is being flooded because of a variety of liberal ideas by aliens who are anti Christian to the core, {?}.

[Scott] Well, they are... the geographical home of Christianity is being demolished by immigration. Christendom is not going to be easily defended while it doesn’t have a geographical base. And Europe can {?} pardon me with the same problem.

[Rushdoony] And thousands of Christians are slaughtered daily, somewhere in the globe and nothing is written about it.

[Scott] Well, we are living behind an iron curtain.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] {?} you could call it a pressed curtain.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We are in the condition, you know, somebody wrote a book called They Thought They were Free. And it was about Nazi Germany. They had lots of newspapers. They had lots of magazines. They had radio. And they really thought they were kept informed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So do we. But look at this convocation that I mentioned in the beginning. The pope, bishops, patriarchs representing all kinds of people. That is the first I have heard of it.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think it is significant that so many of the stories spread about the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime and Kuwait are now turning out to be lies, that even the oil spill was to anything they did, but it was an ... well,

[Scott] You mean the cormorant, that old photograph that they dug up of the oil slick the cormorant?

[Rushdoony] Well, supposedly they had created an oil spill to destroy the desalinization plant. It was an oil tanker that had a problem and spilled a lot of oil.

[Lofton] Well, it is a good rule of thumb regarding this recently concluded ... I almost don’t want to call it a war. I call it a war because it wasn’t much of a fight. You have to have a new name. But almost everything we were told as a rationale for the war has now in very short order been proven to be false or ... or seriously exaggerated.

[Scott] No one has asked the president what we won.

[Lofton] Good question. Maybe I will show up at the next White House press conference. That is an excellent question.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] What did we win and when do we get it?

[Rushdoony] Yes. And I think we disgraced ourselves in the eyes of the world with the sheer viciousness of our murderous bombing and our killing of fleeing soldiers when the war was really over.

[Scott] That... we took that from the Nazis. What they did to Poland.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I remember the shock created by the stupid dive bombers of Germany against the relatively defenseless people of Poland. And John Grigg later on, many years later, compared the men of World War I with the men of World War II said, “World War I wasn’t considered a holy war. It was just a war between great powers. But in World War I it was agreed to leave civilians alone. In World War II both sides attacked civilians and we attacked civilians more fervently and for longer and did greater damage and did the Germans.”

[Rushdoony] And Churchill started it.

[Scott] Yes. And Griggs said if... and World War II was supposed to be a crusade, a holy war, a war against the devil. But, he said, “The men of World War II, the generation of World War II was not as moral as the generation of World War I.”

Now obviously we have gone a step deeper down, because of what we did in Iraq. We now stand exposed as a nation that will hold no barriers.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Once we draw the sword it is going to be like the ancient Mongols.

[Lofton] Yes.

[Scott] And don’t forget. We are the people who did drop not only one bomb, but two.

[Rushdoony] On the Christians...’

[Scott] On the Christians of Jap Japan.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The Christian center.

[Lofton] Yes, it... it as often said as one of the rationales for going to war against Iraq that you had to do this because Saddam Hussein never had a weapon that he didn't use. But, of course, he did. Well, as it turned out, A) that was a lie because he apparently did have weapons he didn’t use. Or we may find out that he never had those horrible weapons in the first place. I am talking here about chemical and biological weapons and possibly nuclear weapons. They have found... there was a story in the paper today that they can’t find the nuclear material that he was supposedly building these bombs with. But you can bet they are looking for it like crazy.

If it is not there, I am sure they will plant some.

[Scott] The Soviet Union used poison gas in the Ukraine under Gorbachev. It has used poison gas in Cambodia. And the Egyptians used poison gas in the Sudan in 1956.

[Lofton] But I was going to ...

[Rushdoony] Selective indignation.

[Scott] Yes.

[Lofton] Oh, yes. The end of what I was going to say was that our president, as it turns out, is the one who had the worst weapon in the history of the world and his name was Harry Truman and he was a Baptist and he not only used the weapon once, he used it ... he used it twice.

[Scott] Yes. I never understood the second time. I never understood the first time. I didn’t know why it wasn’t demonstration off shore.

[Lofton] I recently read a book about the allied bombing campaign in World War II. It is called Wings of Judgment. It is written by a professor Ronald Schaeffer, I believe, of the University of California, one of their campuses. And it is published by Oxford University Press. And all of us here have a ... have knowledge of that bombing campaign. But until I read this book which took you inside private meetings and into memos and strategy documents and you really read what people like Curtis Lamay and Hap Arnold and other people... people that I am sure called themselves Christians and went to a church back in their town, that these men actually used the words. The word terror was not a bad word like it is now because we have terrorists and that is an ugly word, but back then they said, “We must terror bomb the population of these countries so that the population will force their government to stop the war.” Even though every survey showed that this massive indiscriminant slaughter of civilians stiffened the will of those people and it prolonged the war.

[Scott] Well, what would you say when somebody is out to kill your family that you want to negotiate? I mean it is one thing to be up against another army. I was in the Pacific when the bomb was dropped. And I remember how stunned we were. And I was pleased at the time. I was relieved because I later on went into a harbor there. It was like going into the neck of a bottle. We would have lost an immense number of men, I am sure.

But on second thought—and we all have second thoughts—and certainly men in high places are supposed to think two or three times. I couldn’t understand why this devastating weapon couldn’t have been demonstrated, why it had to be dropped on two of the only Christian centers in the country. And we never found out who pinpointed those targets.

[Lofton] No. That is not in the... that... who pinpointed those targets was not in the book I read.

[Scott] Yes.

[Lofton] But there was one interesting fact that this professor reported and that was that Kyoto Japan had been scheduled for one of the drops, I forget which of the bomb cities it was replacing, but that Edward {?} said absolutely not, because he had been to Kyoto and he found it to be a very beautiful city which had a lot of religious shrines in it, which, of course, were...

[Scott] Another religion.

[Lofton] Another religion. So he ... he single handedly vetoed. He evidently had great clout and he said, no, that it was off the list. So...

[Scott] Well, it is like any other committee. Committees operate on the basis of if there is any objection you change it.

[Rushdoony] Well, we have very curious situation with regard to war and peace. A retired general whom all three of us know told me some years ago of a visit with high... highly placed men in the state department arguing against détente and against the whole of the attempt to bribe the Soviet Union, massive grants, massive loans, everything. And he said these people are evil. And you have to deal with the fact that when you bribe an evil man you only increase his capacity to evil. And their reaction was one of contempt. That they called, the term they used was the devil theory of politics, an ultimate good, an ultimate evil and a kind of a religious war between the two, between good and evil. And their thesis was that all people are basically good and if you win them over by bribing them, in effect, you will achieve world peace. And this is why we are in the problem we constantly are. We bribe every country in the world with foreign aid unless, of course, there is some kind of anger because Saddam Hussein was against the use of American banks and was for the oil countries investing in central Europe.

[Scott] Well, of course, who was it? Marx. Marx thought that everybody was after money. That was a projection. He thought money was what moves the world. Imperial Spain spent almost all the treasure it received from the Americas on attempts to drive other countries and it was a disaster. And the religious element which we persistently overlook in the Middle East, we don’t call the problems that Israel has with the Muslims a religious conflict. We keep talking about it as though it is a geo physical economic and political conflict. The American government has a blind spot against our religion. It is an anti... it is not just a neutral government. It is an openly anti Christian government that we have. And it also believes that there is no such thing as Islam. There is no such thing as any religion anywhere and even Khomeini didn’t shake that conviction.

[Lofton] I want to comment on that. Your... your remark about Marx reminds me of Eugen Rosenstock Huessey’s quote that Marxism was an attempt to found a church on bread alone. But what... but what keeps coming.... the question that keeps coming to my mind over and over regarding a number of issues... I mean we are currently discussing the war with Iraq or whatever that was, police action. It wasn’t even really a police action, something less than a police action is where are the Christians in this country?

Four out of five adults in this country are supposed to be Christians. In June of 1990 74 percent of the American people said not that they just believed in God or some cosmic energy force, but that they had a personal commitment to Christ. Yet we have a war where we go to save countries. We rent our armed forces. We rent our sons and daughters to go fight in defense of countries where Christianity is illegal, where it is against the law to be Christians.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] And then in the countries where there are Christians like the Balkan nations, we not only don't send, you know, our armed forces there, which I am not necessarily for. They are more than... you know, more than one way to help those people. We do nothing of the Christians countries, but fight for the ones where our faith is outlawed. It is madness.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think, as Otto observed earlier, our media has closed the minds of Americans to the truth about many things and especially to the fact that a Christian witness in this country.

Now with the kind of reports being made that nine out of 10 Americans were for bush and for the war, when I wrote, as I had, somewhat earlier and it was published, I think in the March number of the report, Chalcedon Report on biblical military laws, I expected a flood of protest. And the result was quite the contrary. In fact, one newspaper in Virginia asked permission to reprint it immediately. A radio station in Chicago wanted to interview me, but I was tied up and I couldn’t do it. And I know of only one person who disagreed, as you know, very bitterly and violently. But apart from that I was amazed at the fact that there wasn’t that enormous pro war sentiment out there that was being paraded everywhere in the public media.

[Scott] Well, the poles are a great illusion. There was no great war spirit in this country. There never is. This is not a war like country and I think that the female professor I heard—I wish I could remember her name—she said before it started. She said the argument that we would not put our fighting men at risk, but we would hit the enemy’s women and children is basically an immoral argument.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now the... there is great relief because we lost less than 100 men and most of those were lost in accidents in the desert. I mean they ran into each other in their jeeps out in that desert or they fell out of ... fell in front of a tank or something. There was hardly... there was no engagements at all here, hardly any shots fired back. So there was great rejoicing. And now I understand there is going to be great parades in New York.

[Rushdoony] Oh.

[Scott] ...if they can rustle up the money to put one on. We went in there with a credit card which we ... which we asked the bank of Tokyo and the bank of Berlin and others to.... to honor for us.

[Rushdoony] Well, if I were a soldier in that war, I would want no part of a parade put on by a city where the mayor on a Saint Patrick’s Day parade marched with the homosexuals who crashed the parade.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And where they trashed the Catholic Church, Saint Patrick’s cathedral. That was shameful. And any city that does that, nothing they do for you is anything but a dishonor.

[Lofton] That is true. Yeah and then... and then Archbishop O’Conner finally had a meeting with Mayor Dinkins where they came out smiley faced and posed for a picture so the archbishop, while he may have several months ago started off on a very hard line biblical position, evidently appears to have knuckled under to the mayor and become friends with him.

[Scott] Well, I talked to a man. I think I mentioned it to you, Rush, from Canada the other day who grew up in Buenos Aires and an English family. And he said there are 500,000 English families down there at that point. You know, it is a very Europeanized country. Under Peron when things really got bad, his parents took him out and he said it was against the law at that time to leave the country. Now he is living in Canada. He said both the Canadians and the Americans are totally unaware of the fact that they are living in a tyranny. He said we have less rights in these countries than we had under Peron in Argentina. And you know that is true if you try to exercise your constitutional right of free speech.

[Lofton] Amen.

[Scott] Well, people are being punished for their position on the war.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Editors have been fired. They have lost their jobs and there is a sort of a purge going on.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...with those who spoke against the war before it started are going to be retroactively punished.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] I hope you are right.

[Rushdoony] We have ... have information from people have been involved in that kind of retribution or whose friends have been.

[Lofton] Well, I think the worst thing that could have ever happened to this country was to appear to get some sort of quick fix short victory in a war like this. I think it is going to have terrible repercussions. I don’t think the people that are coming home that are going to march in that big fourth of July parade, I don’t think in their hearts they think they are heroes at all. They... they know who they...

[Scott] They know better.

[Lofton] ...killed. They know who they incinerated. They... they saw the ages of those ... a lot of those kids they pulled out of those holes in the desert, kids that were forced into uniform by Hussein because they were told that their families would get no food or water if they didn’t get on the bus and go to the front. It was an atrocity.

[Scott] Well, there was another atrocity going on because right now the infrastructure of Iraq has been destroyed. It is a city ... it is a country of 18 million people about the population of California and they have no water. They have not a single working toilet in Baghdad.

Now just for reasons of health alone we should go in there. Something should be done. But I heard the president say recently that he didn’t feel that any... any goods should be sent in. He doesn’t think the Iraqis should sell any of their oil on the world market until Saddam Hussein leaves office.

Now this is a peculiar thing. Why do the Americans feel that if somebody loses a war with them, that they have to change their government? We did that in World War I and it didn’t help the Germans. They got Hitler.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] Well, look... I mean...

[Rushdoony] And with this war crimes business what is going to happen when we lose a war?

[Scott] We are going to go on trial.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is what is going to happen.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Because we have established the precedent... the precedent that if you are a loser, you are going to be a criminal.

[Lofton] Well, I think that what is wrong, certainly from a Christian biblical perspective about this whole balance of power idea is that it is man attempting to play God. God raises up nations and rulers and throws them down. And every time men have tried to do it just in my lifetime. Get rid of Battista. Who did you get? You got Castro.

[Scott] You got Castro after Battista.

[Lofton] You can roam the list. You get rid of Somoza. Who did we get? We got the Sandinistas.

[Scott] One of these prelates that attended this meeting came over here, by the way and he said he watched on television a program where men were kissing each other. It was apparently one of these pro gay, to use the term...

[Lofton] Yes.

[Scott] ...demonstrations. And he thought of Sodom and Gomorrah and he said, “How long is this country going to endure?”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] You know, well, I... if... maybe Bush can send 500,000 troops to wherever that demonstration occurred in our own country and try to secure our country.

[Scott] Well, that is like Ross Perot said before the thing started. He said we are all against abuse of individuals, murder, tyranny and so forth. But he said when is he going to send the army into Detroit, into Los Angeles...

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[Lofton] Or how about two blocks from the White House?

[Scott] Or what if...

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[Lofton] For openers, yeah.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] You know, of course, the problem...

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[Lofton] You know, I thought of a quote while you were speaking. One of the rationales put forth by Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press spokesman was that we had to intervene in this Kuwait thing because America has this unique... a unique respect for human life that was right when the war began. And I think there was a time in our history when that probably should have been said. But then you look at what... I mean our... you look at what was done in Iraq. And that convoy, the pictures of that convoy won’t leave my mid. Are... are Iraq... are the people of Iraq not humans?

[Scott] Or we have over 20,000 murders a year...

[Lofton] That is, you know, here.

[Scott] Here.

[Lofton] ...in America.

[Scott] And many more than that maimed.

[Rushdoony] We have reared up a generation which shows so much violence and murder on TV that the average child by the time he finishes school has seen thousands upon thousands of murders and other instances of violence. So that sort of thing has lost its meaning to them.

[Scott] It has lost its meaning to the government, too.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It has lost its meaning to our military. And this means that we are ripe for Despotism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] But, you know, I think there is some method in President Bush’s madness. I ... I think he does have a feel for the American people in this sense that you... you notice over and over in assessing this war how often it has been dealt with, the so-called victory in psychological terms, like we had this problem with our psyche. We really didn’t esteem ourselves enough and now that we have gone and bombed and killed, who knows, 100, 500,000 people, we are supposed to feel better about ourselves now that Bush knows that being against evil at a distance around the globe people of a different color there is no coast there. But if he sent that 500,000 troops to the District of Columbia and went after those people, I don’t think he would have 91 percent support. That would be a real act of courage.

[Scott] Well, I don't think he has 91 percent support.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I also think this is very interesting that when he campaigned for office, you know, he went to a flag factory and he was held... it was considered a contemptible thing to do. This action we have at this point, we were given official permission to be patriotic. To be patriotic was considered despicable just a year ago. But this was an official... it is almost like a Soviet spontaneous demonstration. You will appear in the square tomorrow at eight o'clock, you know, and carry a flag. Now all of the sudden the flag is fine. They burned the flag. The Supreme Court said you could do other things to the flag if you wanted. But certainly to burn it was an expression of free speech. And now suddenly...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Suddenly it is ok to be patriotic. It is not chauvinistic.

[Rushdoony] That reminds me. It is, in a sense, unrelated, but very much related. Dr. K. Skilder, a great Dutch theologian who was under such attack by the church and during the war, you remember, the church synod met and condemned him when he could not appear because he was a leader of the underground to defend himself. The thing about Skilder was before the war, knowing all that he did about the nation, he never displayed the flag of had one. But once the war broke out when everybody was praising Hitler and thanking him for taking over the country, Skilder used the flag on every possible occasion when it meant something.

And that is the difference between what we are seeing today. It means nothing now to show a flag.

[Lofton] Well, I... I was just going to say. I think that just as we have seen in the theological realm the cheapening of a number of doctrines where we have cheap, easy grace, we have cheap easy forgiveness, we now see the civil religion equivalent of those theological doctrines where patriotism now means tying a yellow ribbon around something or putting a flag out in front of your house or on your aerial.

During this war I made up a special bumper sticker that I put on my van and it has a little flag on it and it said, “I, too, support our troops, but not this stupid war.” And not was underlined. And I had about a half a dozen people want to know where they could get one of those.

Thank goodness, because some of them were quite large and burly men who came up to the van and said, “I as your bumper sticker.” And though, uh, oh, I am going to get a knuckle sandwich. But they... I told them it was homemade and...

[Scott] That brings up the mystery, because I didn’t run across anybody in favor of the are except Forrest McDonald, the historian who gave a little talk about how brave we were against the Tripoli pilots, but, of course, Forrest lives in the 18th century. To him, modern times begins with 1811. So I didn’t pay too much attention to that.

[Rushdoony] He is a good man and I am sorry to hear that...

[Scott] He is a good historian.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lofton] Well, I will tell you. With the exception of Howard Philips and Pat Buchanan initially, although Pat basically supported the war after it began, virtually all the conservatives in Washington were very enthusiastically for this ... this war.

[Scott] For the war.

[Lofton] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is really up. To end on a hopeful note, God is on the throne and he is going to judge...

[Lofton] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ... these people. And his judgments are true and righteous all together. So justice will be done by God even when man will have no part of it. And it is God who alone will prevail.

Well, 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.