From the Easy Chair

Important Books

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 79-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BP123

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BP123, Important Books from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 238, March the fifth, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss books, some of the reading past and present that we think you will be interested in.

The first book I would like to deal with is written by a group of people, most notably Dr. Judith A. Riceman. The title is Kinsey, Sex and Fraud and it is published by Huntington House Publications. I shared a platform some years ago with Dr. Riceman. She has spent years doing the research on the Kinsey work and on that particular team of workers on Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and a great deal of other publications. Repeatedly her files in her office have been raided at night and things confiscated so that she finally had to keep things in more than one location and in duplicate form.

[Scott] Any... anybody ever arrested?

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Or convicted of these {?}?

[Rushdoony] No one. And she has been subjected to all kinds of harassment and ugly reprisals, attempts to keep her from publishing. She has more, by the way. This is just an introduction to the subject.

[Scott] Quite a subject.

[Rushdoony] Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People.

[Scott] I see. But when you mentioned Playboy, Hustler and the rest, she is going to go on on this quest for an indoctrination.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... using different examples.

[Rushdoony] The extent to which, for example, various things like child molestation have been promoted by Kinsey and by others, subliminal influences in some of the publications, the illustrations, the cartoons. She has done a great deal of work on that.

The work of the Kinsey Foundation was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. And the goal of Kinsey was the overthrow of all morality. For him anything that occurred in nature was natural. Therefore, child molestation, homosexuality, bestiality and a great many other things were natural. The only perversions, as far as Kinsey could see, were attempts to enforce morality.

[Scott] Well, of course, the animal world is only involved in sex in terms of procreation.

[Rushdoony] True, but he regards man as a higher animal and therefore whatever man wants to do is natural. He spells this out in great detail. I wrote about this years ago myself on how in his ... one of his earliest books he said the only harm done to children by ... was not by the child molesters, but by their parents and the clergy and others who made a big deal of the whole thing.

[Scott] Does she go into him... his personal background in this effort?

[Rushdoony] She does some in this book and she will more subsequently.

[Scott] Because the point arises, how... what sort of a... what is the origin of such an individual, you know?

[Rushdoony] Yes. He was very, very careful to conceal his past and to make it look respectable as much as possible.

[Scott] Wasn’t it?

[Rushdoony] As far as anyone knows, so far it apparently was until he began his sex research.

[Scott] I see.

[Rushdoony] One of the things they did was to get small children from a few months old to two or three years for sexual experiments. They were determined to prove that sexuality was natural to children and, therefore, molestation would be all right. And Dr. Riceman says these children were literally tortured. And they were insistent that these were pleasurable experiences for the children and they were the only witnesses to what happened. But the dedication of this book is to the several hundred children who suffered inhumanely in the illegal sex experiments that constitute the basis for a significant portion of Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

[Scott] Well, then he was a criminal.

[Rushdoony] He was a criminal. For a time the FBI was considering investigating Kinsey and his sex institute. I suspect they did not because of the powerful forces working in conjunction with him.

[Scott] This is mainly academia.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The Rockefeller Foundation and academia were very, very much in favor of it. And, of course, everything was done to promote child sexuality, the molestation of children, anything natural is normal. The research was fraudulent. Prostitutes and prisoners and homosexuals figured highly. So when he gave figures on what constituted the sex life of Americans he was not dealing with normal Americans.

[Scott] I heard him speak once at Berkeley. The place was packed to the rafters. They were hanging from the rafters as a matter of fact. And his eyes looked absolutely blank. He ... he gave me the appearance of a man whose mind in the modern phrase was blown. And he spoke without notes and he spoke in a very rambling way and he also spoke about all kinds of perversities in a very forgiving way.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the grand scheme of Kinsey is—and I am quoting from the book on page 213—“Encourage gay activist movements and establish homosexuality as a normal sexual orientation. Declare pedophilia, that is, molestation of children of sex with children, a sexual orientation and add adult child sex {?}. Promote widespread promiscuity to create a sexual anarchy where so many are implicated that the distinction of pedophilia might seem insignificant.”

[Scott] He has come a long way toward succeeding.

[Rushdoony] Yes. “Promote the sexual rights of children to open the way for pedophilia, attack religion to undermine the Judeo Christian concept of sin and eliminate the distinction between right and wrong. Attack psychoanalysis to eliminate psychoanalytical concepts that associate aberrant sexual behaviors with mental illness. Dissociate sex from pathology. Lobby the judicial system to reform sex laws so that aberrant sexual behavior is not considered criminal. Legalize aberrant sex acts to eliminate punishment of sex crimes, promote hostility between the sexes. Align feminists with gay activists in a campaign against heterosexuality, per se. Exploit childhood rebellion to alienate children form parents. Separate children from the protective, traditional family structure. Redefine family to break the heterosexual model of a nuclear family with a mother and father.”

Now you and I can remember when none of these were regarded as anything but evil.

[Scott] Oh, of course.

[Rushdoony] And life was far from being criminal the way it is now. Society was orderly, law abiding, decent and courteous. Kinsey has succeeded in the indoctrination of a people. And the abuse that Dr. Riceman has been subjected to because of her research...

[Scott] By whom?

[Rushdoony] ... has been enormous.

[Scott] Does she list any of these harassers?

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes, she does and some of them have bad records one of them a criminal record with regard to sexual offenses against under age persons.

[Scott] It is astonishing.

[Rushdoony] It is...

[Scott] ... because when he came out with his book, every drum in the country rolled. I mean rave reviews.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] All the way from one end of the country to the other.

[Rushdoony] That is right.

[Scott] And he talked about male homosexuality as one out of 10 and I have, of course, in most of my activities been associated mainly with other men. I have never been active in any of the areas where there were not ... it was all dominated by men and my experience was that there weren’t that many around.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] I didn’t... I didn’t run into them. And I didn’t know any and I didn’t know anybody who know any. And I was appalled at this book because it set up a suspicion which then became very rampant within a matter of months or a year or so. The whole question of whether there was something homosexually involved in friendship, in associations, in this or that. It threw a dark shadow over every man in the country. And it was ... it... it became permanent.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, Otto...

[Scott] Yes, well...

[Rushdoony] What would you like go into now?

[Scott] Well, I was looking, in preparation for this, earlier this evening I looked at my library and I saw a book which we haven’t ever discussed before, The Brandeis Frankfurter Connection.

[Rushdoony] Oh yes.

[Scott] The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices by Bruce Alan Murphy, Oxford University Press, 1982. I read it, of course. And I was absolutely astonished. Justice Brandeis has been given the status of one of our demagogues and he had admirers for years, flattering articles for years and so forth. He had professor Frankfurter who was at the Harvard Law School on his private and personal payroll for many years and then when Frankfurter, after Brandeis died, Frankfurter was nominated and chosen for the Supreme Court, Frankfurter continued the political activities of his mentor Brandeis.

Now these two jurists, if you could call them jurists, very famous, considered shining stars of intellect and so forth violated every tenet of judicial ethics while they sat on the Supreme Court of the United States. They lobbied behind the scenes for legislation that they were interested in. They connived with various presidents. They spent money to convince other people in the media and in the professoriate and in the judiciary and in the legal circles. They were actual governors. They acted as though they had been elected to govern the United States and its people.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it is amazing. This book came out. I read various reviews of it and I sent away for it and the reviews did not reflect in a true, accurate sense, all of the material in the book. The reviews were very careful. And none of the reviewers argued with any of the details in the book, but none of the reviewers came to any of the conclusions that this sort of information provides. And the whole matter—and I think the book itself dropped from sight after its first appearance. Within a matter of a few weeks the reviews came to an end. And even when further supreme court nominees have appeared since then, I mean Justice Bork and many others have appeared and been examined by the senate, the whole question of a supreme court justice’s involvement in on going political activities has never been raised. This is like watching a bomb detonate without sound.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I would advise anyone who has any illusions about the Supreme Court of the United States to pick this book up and read it and then look at it. Look at the court, because Mr. Brandeis and Mr. Frankfurter were not operating in a vacuum. There were seven other members of the court. There were lots of other people sitting on the court with them. They had court.... they had secretaries. They had stenographers. They had observers. They had witnesses. Brandeis used to hold court of his own, a private court in his Washington home where people would come for review in front of him to seek his approval. He was a very important person. There is much more that could be said, but I would prefer that individuals would look into this for themselves, because what we are talking about, what Mr. Murphy wrote about is corruption in the real sense.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I only browsed in the book, but it was horrifying.

[Scott] Corruption involves more than money.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This was not a matter of money. This was a matter of power...

[Rushdoony] Power, yes.

[Scott] And influence, anti Democratic in the deepest possible sense.

[Rushdoony] The United States and the people were things to be manipulated for their own ends.

Well, I am going to go to an entirely different kind of book, a book I loved, because I regard the man it deals with as one of the great men of this century, Dr. K. Skilder. The book by Rudolf Van Reest, R E E S T is titled Skilder’s Struggle for the Unity of the Church.

Dr. Skilder was one of the great theologians in the Netherlands Church, a professor and a pastor, a very powerful speaker because of the content of his preaching. His three volumes on the passion of Christ, still in print in this country, are landmark works. The only thing wrong with reading them is that when you finish reading them, you know you will never read anything like them again.

Skilder saw the direction the Church was taking in the 30s. And he raised his voice against the drift, the compromise, the being diplomatic and politic and unbelieving. He was also a strong opponent of Totalitarianism, of Fascism and of Marxism. When the war broke out he was, of course, a focal point of resistance of speaking out against the Nazis who had taken over the Netherlands and he was put in prison. For in explicable reason the Germans released him, although they very quickly wanted him back. Perhaps it was some kind of error. Every bureaucracy makes mistakes. But he had gone underground promptly.

At that time the Church decided to try Dr. Skilder for...

[Scott] Try for what?

[Rushdoony] ...for being rebellious against Church discipline and for advocating various opinions, knowing that he could not appear at the synod meeting because he would immediately be arrested and probably executed. So it was a very handy way to find him guilty knowing that he could not appear in his own defense and would be ipso facto convicted.

So he was underground and a leader of the Dutch resistance. When the war was over and the sad fact is that the son of the great Abraham Kuyper, H. H. Kuyper was a leader against Skilder and was one who had switched over to being pro Nazi and then switched back when it was no longer necessary to be pro Nazi. He was rehabilitated. He was treated with dignity and honor, but not Skilder. The queen was told on her return that here was a man who should be honored by the crown, but he was not. It would be diplomatically unwise to honor so controversial a figure. And so he was not honored. But it is interesting, turning back to the book I read. ... or discussed earlier, Riceman’s with others, Eichel, Court, Murin and others, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud , tells us this that {?} a distinguished Dutch lawyer, retired member of the Dutch Parliament was arrested in 1950, tried and convicted for having sex with a 16 year old boy, spent 11 months in prison, but since has won reinstatement to the bar, reelection to the Dutch parliament and in 1975 as a reward for his services the queen made him a knight of the order of the Dutch Lion. He is, however, still a pedophile.

So that is the kind of person that is honored today. And Skilder did dishonored. When he came to the States to speak after the war only one or two Dutch churches would open their doors to him, those that had already broken with the Christian Reformed Church.

[Scott] What did they claim he had been guilty of?

[Rushdoony] Well, of disobedience to church authorities, a lot of vague charges so that it was a very specious thing.

I would like to read one thing that professor {?} wrote about and he had men like Luther, Calvin and Skilder and others in mind. And I am just reading a paragraph from this article of {?}. And it is based on Judges 6:34. So the Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon.

“If we read carelessly, we might conclude that Gideon stood up abruptly and took action, that he suddenly shook off this lethargy and defeatism, that a desire for battle welled up in him, causing him to seize his weapons. In that case, we are reading the story of the deeds of Gideon, even if it was the Spirit that first set him aflame. But when we actually read what we actually read in these beautiful words is something different. The Hebrew word we find here is the same one that is used when a man puts on his jacket.

“Now we all know that when it is time to get to work we put on our work clothes. The doctor has his white coat. The laborer has his overalls and the maid has her smock. Yet no one is so foolish as to ascribe the work he is about to do to his work clothes. The act of putting on work clothes does not signify that one’s uniform is about to get to work. Rather, it indicates the month at which the workman himself, wearing those clothes begins work. The patient does not look to a white coat to heal him, yet when he sees the doctor putting on that white coat he knows that he means to get to work. Well, what we actually read here is that the Spirit of the Lord puts Gideon on, that is to say, Gideon is to the Spirit what overalls are to the worker. Gideon is only a set of work clothes. The one doing the work is the Spirit. And so we see that it is not Gideon who springs into action, but the Spirit. The Lord arises to do battle. What we get here then is not the story of the great deeds of a certain person, but a report about the mighty deeds of the Lord,” end of quote.

Well...

[Scott] That is very interesting.

[Rushdoony] Isn't that? And...

[Scott] That is very interesting. A writer should know what he is talking about.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...because it is almost as though you are taken over by some other Spirit.

[Rushdoony] That is right. And Skilder was a man whom the Spirit put on for a time. And he... in a mighty way, a truly great man. The world did everything to dishonor him. He was regarded as unfit to listen to.

[Scott] But that is a new book.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes. But he is a great man in heaven. This book is not put out by any important press, but I am going to promote it through the report.

[Scott] Who put it out?

[Rushdoony] Inheritance Publications, {?} Alberta, Canada.

[Scott] Well, all right.

[Rushdoony] And the book was written, I believe, about 10 years ago and Theodore Platinga has translated it and translated it beautifully. When you read about it, when you read this book and all the petty politics that men indulge in to frustrate a great man...

[Scott] Well, that...

[Rushdoony] It is....

[Scott] ... the way of the world.

[Rushdoony] Yes. But it is Skilder who is going to be remembered and his work that is going to endure, not that of his enemies.

And I hope this book will have a very wide circulation in this country, because I think we need to realize that what Skilder represents is what is important for our future.

Well, we ... let me just say a brief word and then you can have time without interruption. Once in a while it is worth while to go into an old book and one such old book was Guizot, the French historian of a century or a more ago, Saint Louis and Calvin. And reading an older work like this, more than a century old, a century and a half, you see these men as another generation saw them. And it points.... it is as though you are meeting Calvin for the first time, a very judicious and remarkable man and the same is true of King Louis, one of the few, if not the only king, as far as I know, who was declared a saint.

[Scott] Which Louis was it?

[Rushdoony] Was it Louis the VII or the VI? I have forgotten. He was... his dates were the early to mid 1200s.

Well, be that as it may, it is a remarkable book.

Otto, would you like now to discuss another book?

[Scott] Yes. I seem to be on a... sort of a downward trend in this particular discussion. It was just sort of the luck of the draw. I had a book in my library called The Tyranny of Malice by Joseph H. Burke. The subtitle is Exploring the Dark Side of Character and Culture. It is published by Summit Books of New York, 1988.

Joseph H. Burke is an English psychiatrist and there are, I am sorry to say, large sections of his book where... that are absolutely nonsensical. But there are also very large sections of the book that are fascinating because he is using illustrations from life and he is naming names and using living examples. The Tyranny of Malice, we would call it envy. And he pretty well makes the case that our society today is pervaded by envy and that is one of the reasons why we are constantly being exposed to the unworthy as objects of respect. It is a way of putting it into the eye of every person of talent and character on earth. And it is especially practiced by the media. The jealousies of the journalist have never really been publicly discussed, but I am well aware of them, because I used to be in journalism.

I remember that a journalist talking about his attitude toward General Westmoreland on the Vietnam War. This particular journalist was in charge of the Washington Post bureau in Saigon. And he said at a dinner... and we were all having dinner at... as it happens the Rockford College, I believe. He said, “I am like most journalists.” He said, “I was ... I was not a jock. I was not particularly popular with the girls.” And he said glasses and in the middle of the class, to speak. And then he said there is Chesty Westmoreland who was a bit star on campus and went on to become a great general, he said, with a chest full of ribbons. He said, “When Chester Westmoreland walked down the aisle to take... get on the platform,” he said, “You can’t help but want to pull him down.”

And I said, “Do you know what you have just said about yourself?”

And he didn’t reply. They Tyranny of Malice is a book which describes the world in which we live in a way that I think would be very informative to the people who listen to these tapes, because there is a sort of an innocence in the Church, a suspension of wisdom which is not proper. One should not forget his brain because he has a face. He should use his brain to analyze and to judge he world around him and to keep abreast of its trends and to know what is happening. I believe the Bible talks about the wisdom of the serpent as well as the dove.

And this is the sort of reference book which isn’t labeled a reference book, but it is a reference book. It is a road map. It is a road map of the enemies of the faith, very well worth reading.

[Rushdoony] That brings to mind a book which I hope you will bring me tomorrow morning, The Decline of Civility.

[Scott] Yes. Yes.

[Rushdoony] It is there... they tie in together.

[Scott] Cutty. Cutty’s book. Cutty’s book.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes. I... I will bring it tomorrow.

[Rushdoony] Well, I would like to discuss now an older book Art in Crisis: The Lost Center by Hans Sedlmayr, S E D L M A Y R. And his theme is our civilization because it has abandoned God is now abandoning man, art, everything. He in the course of his study analyzes the forms art has taken over the centuries. It was very early the Church. And the Church was a place where you had architecture, painting, sculptor, music, the spoken word, the written word, everything so that the Church was a high point of art unrivaled every since. But early in the middle Ages a shift began to take place. The first shift was to the town hall. And he said that the town halls build in the 1200s on began to replace the Church as architectural gems. Now government, local government began to replace the church as the gem.

Not many of these, he says, have survived, because wars have, in particular, destroyed them. Later on, of course, it was the palace. But then in the 1700s landscape gardening and anyone who does extensive work in the history of English art finds very quickly that everything revolved around landscape gardening and the landscape gardener was the ultimate in artists.

Somewhat earlier for a time the court mask had flourished and men like Indigo Jones and Been Jonson and others were all involved in that. Then the architectural monument, buildings designed to be a monument and a work of art into which all kinds of funds were promoted, government buildings, palaces. Then it became the museum and the museum became a work of art and everything was being produced for a museum. Once it was produced for the Church. Now you were producing for a museum. And then the theater became the center and then the exhibition gallery. And then the factory. The amount of artistry that went into the design of the factory and so on.

But each of these lasts only for a short time and then they continue as relics, because the world of artificial art and artificial culture wants to cling to these forms. It has lost the Church. There is... therefore it is going to exalt all these successions of art forms as somehow essential to the civilized life.

His analysis of this and of the decline of a center in life is very telling. A weakness of the book that Dr. Sedlmayr wants to blame everything on Protestantism, although, by his own record it began well before Protestantism. In fact, one could say by 1215, the time of the Council of Constance, the Church had been put on the sidelines by the monarchs. But it is remarkable book, a brilliant study and anyone interested in art and culture will find this a gold mine of all kinds of things.

Antiquity, for example, there was a time when artificial ruins were being pre hid throughout Europe. And great sculptors and artists were roped into the work of artificial ruins. So we have had a number of different focuses whereby art and culture have ostensibly been realized in this particular thing. Some of them have been very ephemeral, have lasted only a few years. But they have been the cultural center of an increasingly humanistic world.

[Scott] Well, some day we are going to have to talk about culture.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, I would like to recommend A History of the English People by Paul Johnson, 1972, paper Harper and Row. It is obviously one of his early works, maybe his first. I don’t know. And I must say that having written on some of the same period or a few of the periods of English history that Johnson is amazing because he intuitively reaches some very discerning elements in the people that he describes in this. And, of course, his summary of some of the Cromwellian conclusions that were reached during the Civil War which was a precursor, a precursor of the American War of Independence, a precursor of the French Revolution, the soviet Revolution, all the revolutions. It is an interesting thing. And Johnson makes it very clear that the Calvinist revolution which was really what the Civil War consisted of, the Calvinist revolution was the one great event which next to Luther and Calvin did more to bring individual liberty and rights to the people than anything else. It... in a way it secularized the Reformation. It brought into the political sphere and into the social sphere the theological rights and privileges which Calvin and Luther had pioneered. And certain elements, for instance, Calvin said the Church had a right to defend its own altars.

By the time it reached the 1640s the Calvinists were arguing that the people had a right to defend themselves against the king and to limit the monarch was the real purpose here, to limit the state, to limit the government, which was a real break with the centuries.

I reached the conclusion that anyone who doesn't understand that particular period does not understand the War of Independence, does not understand the Constitution...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And does not understand the main springs of this culture.

[Rushdoony] I think you are absolutely right.

[Scott] And it is a tremendous ... because Johnson has an excellent narrative style. He has managed to do this very briskly and it came out. I looked at some of the early reviews when the book came out. It came out in Britain before Margaret Thatcher, a country that was bowed down by a sense of historic guilt for having been a colonial power that was in the throes of Socialist disarray and it restored patriotism, at least a sense of patriotism and pride to those who read it. So he was swimming against the tide and it was a time he wrote it when he was himself on the Socialist side and it is a very interesting thing to contemplate.

We do not have an American historian of a similar caliber.

[Rushdoony] Johnson has written some remarkably good books and a couple of very bad ones. One thing about him, he speaks his mind so that his books are either going to stand out or they are not. There is nothing mealy mouthed about him.

[Scott] No. Well, I think it takes a certain amount of courage to be a serious writer anyway, and certainly a lot of egotism. So this happens to be in this... one of his... this is a paper back copy

which I just happened to pick up by accident. It is not generally discussed as one of his better works, but it was an early work and it vibrates with energy and very brave statements, not all of which I agree with. I don’t expect to agree with everything any man writes. And it would be like sharing somebody else’s diet. But it ... I found a number of items in there that were fresh to me.

[Rushdoony] Well, I am just going to spend a minute or two on this book. It isn’t a great or important book, but it is interesting. And the title is Kingship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture by Gwenn Kennedy Nettle, published by the Oxford University Press in 1987.

And the interesting thing in it as against medieval pilgrimages to a shrine there are pilgrimages in this country to a family center, a family reunions.

[Scott] Oh.

[Rushdoony] It has been especially notable in the southeastern understand among those of a Scottish ancestry, but it is common across the country. Families will come together periodically for a family reunion. They will renew ties and acquaintances. They will go to the family burying ground where sometimes people from some distance are brought to be buried and to the old family church to have a service there so that as against the medieval pilgrimage the American pilgrimage is one to a family centered place. He said... she says, “I have called the gatherings kin religious gatherings.” And the gathering, in fact, form... the gatherings, in fact, form a pilgrimage system based on the reverse of the medieval and Roman Catholic pilgrimage that has been more fully described and studied. The Protestant pilgrimage system of returning home from wanderings out forms a compliment to the Roman Catholic system of traveling outward from home on a pilgrim journey in order to seek one’s spiritual fortune in the form of salvation or expiation.”

She also has a healthier view of culture. It is not quaintful ways or art, but the life of the people, religion externalized, as Henry Van Til said.

[Scott] That sounds very interesting.

I have a book that I have discussed before, I think, last year in Seattle. I am not positive just when. How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture by Howard P. Chudacoff, 1989.

I didn’t know, until I read this book, that up until about the 1850s or 60s that age was considered immaterial in the United States, that there were no birthday celebrations, that people didn’t even know what their birthday was and couldn’t have cared less. And that the ages of social gatherings included very young people as well as very old people and people in between, that it was assumed that age was just one of those things. It didn’t come into anyone’s consciousness unless, of course, you fell at old age or you were a child and you died and so forth. Age was, in other words, through the centuries, apparently, not a big issue.

It came in with mechanization. It came in with running the trains on time. The whole business of our time zones, for instance, was set by railroad men. They were the ones who divided the world into time zones and age came with the clock, with the watch, with a watch in your vest pocket an do forth and to be on time. Punctuality became a virtue in itself.

And that, of course, is relatively unimportant compared with the changes that were brought in by the educators in which this argument came along that it was normal to do things at a certain age and not normal to do them at another age. It was normal to be in such and such a grade in school at a certain age, normal to marry at a certain age, normal to do... get out of school at a certain age and so forth.

And what we created... now I skipped grades in school. I skipped whole years when I went to school. I did, because of my truancy and so forth I had to attend the seventh and eighth grade, the seventh in the morning and the eighth grade in the afternoon and I took the exam for both. It took me ... and... and that was of the last six months of the final year in elementary school And, of course, I passed. The... you could... you could... I had skipped some other grades, too, earlier. I have forgotten which ones because they... it wasn’t... whatever.

The ... now kids are not skipped. They are six year olds, they are in a certain grade. They are in 10 year old they are in a certain grade. So we have created peer groups for the kids. And each one of these peer groups becomes a sort of a society of itself.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it... it becomes alienated from its parents and from those who are younger or those who are older than itself. And we are practically in a chronological lock step that is, as you mentioned earlier, I think on a previous tape, that men are being forced to retire...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Theoretically an executive can last to 70, but I don’t know of any executive that is allowed to hang around that long. They are beginning to retire men in our corporations at 55, 55. If they can’t move in to the very top rung at 55, then out. It is called the 50 20 club. If you are 50 years old and you have 20 years experience in the company and there is no spot for you to move up, you should be retired. And if you don’t want to be retired, well, they will throw you out the window. You will lose all kinds of benefits.

We have become not only age conscious, but youth conscious. And how old are you is a question which is now propounded much more often than it should be. It is really nobody’s business how old you are. It has nothing to do with anything excepting that you know that if you tell people your age, if you are your age or my age and, of course, you are much older than I am...

Then ... then people look at it oddly. You know, they are very pleased to see that we are still wearing shoes. And it has interfered with upward mobility. It has interfered with the ability of the brilliant to go past the dull in academia. It has interfered with all sorts of things. It has become a sort of a straight jacket. There are expectations being made regarding chronological are which are absolutely bizarre. They really have nothing to do with anything, because each of us is highly individual. Some people maintain their energy incredibly long periods of time.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Others are old at 50.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So it is an interesting book. He goes into it in much better, of course, than my description. It ... one reads all kinds of ... it is almost like looking at this culture from the view of somebody who is just being told about it. It... you won... there is a shock of recognition involved, but also a wonder at how we allowed ourselves to be put into this sort of straight jacket.

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, I grew up as a part of a world where age was respected. Not only age, but scholars so that if a man was a scholar or a writer entered a room, everyone stood as a mark of respect.

[Scott] Now I would be afraid that they would be prepared to defend themselves.

[Rushdoony] Well, I am going to discus a very remarkable book, a very telling book, a very grim book. Gordon Thomas Enslaved: An Investigation into Modern Day Slavery, published in 1990 but not available in this country.

[Scott] Oh, really?

[Rushdoony] No. I called around and found that it is not available. It is not even being imported.

[Scott] Where as it published?

[Rushdoony] Published in London by Transworld Publishers, not a major house. And when you read the book you can see why, because, as it points out and states that this is a conservative estimate. There are 200 million slaves in the world today.

[Scott] He is not talking about China and the Soviet.

[Rushdoony] No. And, of course, Kuwait...

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] ... whom we have just rescued.

[Scott] Right.

[Rushdoony] And Saudi Arabia are countries where although legally for public relations purposes, slavery has been abolished, it exists and is widespread.

But the reason why I think this book is not going to get any publicity anywhere abroad or here is due to the fact that a very large number of people are sold into the slavery to be killed so that their organs can be cannibalized.

Organ transplants are a big business today. And in spite of all the propaganda, asking you to fill out a certificate so that if you have an accident you will donate an organ, not many people do. And yet there is no shortage of organs for young or for old and these come from people, slaves that have been cannibalized.

[Scott] Oh, this is {?} updated.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes. And it is on a big scale, a highly professional scale. And hospitals don’t want to know where the organs come from.’

[Scott] No, of course not.

[Rushdoony] And, of course, vast numbers of children for child prostitution, boys and girls, great many to be sold into factories in the Far East, to work endlessly until they are worn out and they are replaced.

[Scott] How did you get hold of the book?

[Rushdoony] I picked it up in a bookstore in England. And it has not been reviewed. It has not attracted attention anywhere. But highly reputable anti slavery societies that go back to the days of the black slave trade have been involved in the basic research and they have never had more trouble than now in getting the facts out, because you had an organized Christian community at one time interested in fighting slavery.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is about up. So I am going to have to end this, but this is a very important book.

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.