From the Easy Chair

World Union or Secession

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 107-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CD149

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CD149, World Union or Secession, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 259, February the fifth, 1992.

This evening Otto Scott, Douglas Murray and myself are going to discuss a subject which briefly stated is world union or secession, question mark. One of our Chalcedon trustees, Wayne Johnson, was at a conference recently where virtually everyone present was from the left and it was basically a conference very much in line with Bush and Gorbachev’s call for a new world order. Remember Gorbachev, of course, but he and Bush and many others have dreams of a one world order.

Wayne Johnson when the agenda was being voted on said, “Why not include the subject of secession?” They all looked at him blankly. Was this Virginian talking about a revival of the Confederacy? And he explained. He said, “You are talking about world union, but what you are seeing, instead, is secession.”

Look at the situation in Yugoslavia. Look at what has happened throughout central Europe and in the Soviet Union. Now having a different name, but having trouble hanging together.

So he said, “Perhaps the great reality of our time is secession.”

Well, I believe Wayne was right. The matter was put on the agenda but was not given any serious consideration, because they had their own influential agenda and that agenda, Hegelian to the core, the rational is the real, saw as the only reality of the future a one world order.

But the fact is we do not have to go to central Europe or the Soviet block to find secession taking place. The Basques for years have been fighting for it and indulging in violence seeking it. In Italy there are very, very really claims of various groups that secession from Italy is the only reality for their area. And the Italians, of course, regard themselves, first, as Neapolitans or Florentines or Calabrians or whatever the area is.

When I was in Britain last November the Welsh decided in some of their school districts in one area to drop English in favor of Welsh and to teach in Welsh and to teach Welsh which would, of course, have meant that in time as they became more and more Welsh speaking any non Welshman would find no place in Welsh life. It would exclude foreigners.

The number of people in Scotland who talk about secession is increasing. In France you have the same thing as, for example, the Bretons who are of Gaelic people, not French. Or in Germany which was made up of some 60 odd states. The Bavarians, for example, would prefer to be Bavarians and independent. And the same is true of others. India was made up of 600 plus principalities and the British bought them together and they are showing signs now of falling apart.

So the question of world union or secession is a very, very important consideration.

Otto, would you like to comment on this?

[ Scott ] Well, of course, one world is the oldest dream of mankind. James I thought that he and the pope ought to sit down and straighten out the world. He proposed a summit of that sort and the pope didn’t deign to answer. There was a one world of a sort when Christianity reigned over all Europe. And there were no countries as such. And one world, of course, in China as far as the Chinese were concerned. They called themselves the center of the world.

The ... on the world stage it seems to me to be almost a sort of large illustration of what happens in a corporation. Corporations always are in a process of either centralizing or decentralizing. First they centralize. And they go along for a while and that begins to get static. There is no new ideas allowed from the top. So they decentralize and they... immediately profits go up and everybody says, “Well, this is the way to go.” But after a while the decentralization goes beyond limits so then, of course, everybody is called back to centralize again. And what we are seeing here in he case of the Europe... European socialist in Brussels, for instance, was an effort to centralize Europe which began about 40 years ago and has been slowly sitting there in Brussels putting itself together on paper, putting Europe together on paper.

In the meantime Russia has decentralized. The Soviet Union has decentralized. The people in Brussels haven't caught up with that reality yet. There is something like Gorbachev a year ago or, for that matter, the American liberals a year ago who thought that Gorbachev was the man to put their money on.

So what we are seeing is the collapse of one world order but the people who are promoting it have not yet admitted it. They will have to, I guess, be confronted with the fact that there will be a rebellion. And the rules that they are putting down on paper will simply not be followed. And that will go on for quite a while until new centralizers appear.

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas?

[ Murray ] The latest flap, just as an aside, but it kind of goes in this direction between the Japanese and the United States, the Japanese criticize our business because they are vertically integrated and chain of command coming from the top and they have sought to decentralize and to have group participation in decision making and so forth. And they claim that that is more efficient. It kind of gives you the picture of a room full of balloons. Some are going up and some are coming down in any given time. And the one worlders are trying to get all the balloons in the air at the same time.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have had dreams of a one world order since the tower of Babel. That was he first great dream. And God pronounced judgment on it as he will on every tower of Babel, because it attempts to build on something other than truth and God’s righteousness or justice. I think it is very, very significant that the European community is governed by non elected rulers so that the various countries, whether Britain, France, Germany or Spain, Italy, any of the others, are surrendering their ability to rule themselves to a group of unelected rulers. And these unelected rulers are also given the power through the court created in the court of Europe to overrule the decisions of any court in any member country.

This extends to everything. So it means that whether it is a matter of economics and the business community or the Church or any matter hat is racial, the court of Europe now can overrule the will of any country.

Of course this dream goes back and this is an area of your expertise, Otto, to Woodrow Wilson who believed that the people were too stupid to rule themselves and that things should be turned over to non elected rulers, to bureaucrats. And we have today a number of people—I believe Walter Cronkite is one of them—calling for an end to primaries for presidential elections, that the parties should name, without any primary votes, candidates and then let the people vote on what they have decided.

So that there is a great deal of hostility to the common man in the name of the common man in our contemporary world and a great deal of unreality. These people are drawing further and further away from the real world.

[ Scott ] Well, it is a sort of a new form of empire building. All the empires had the idea that they would become universal rulers. The English probably came the closest. They ruled over one third of the earth and all its people for a brief period. The Austria Hungarian Empire reached the point where its elements were too dissimilar to maintain under a position of crisis. The Turks ruled over an awful lot of people to for 500 years, the Spaniards, for almost the same length of time. World empires, super powers. What has happened to us now, of course, is that we have gone bankrupt as a result of the cold war and the Soviet Union went bankrupt because of its over expansion in terms of military expenditures. So there is no super power left. But while the super powers were still in existence, which is only a few years ago, the Socialists really saw an international Socialist network as the great empire of all time connected by modern communications and governed by computers and telephones and financial transactions and all the rest. This is just a more sophisticated brand of empire building.

But we are up against—and you brought up the question, Rush, of Yugoslavia—we are up against the fact that the human race never forgets an injury. Individuals never forget an insult. They never forget a put down, which is what a lot of sarcastic individuals overlook. Racial groups never forget harms that have been committed against them. And as soon as the barriers are lifted they will undertake to get their revenge. Like the Serbians who suffered under the Croatians are now getting even with the Croatians. And everybody, practically speaking, has inherited these blood feuds, the Irish against the English, the Welsh against the English, the Basque against the Spaniard. Spain, after all, was an empire at home as well as abroad and this is true of France which has the Bretons. It is true of every country and every empire.

So we have reality coming back in a new form. History, which the Americans believe is unimportant, never dies, never dies. And there is no way that any group of Socialists or environmentalists or any one else is going to press all societies into a single mold. All these different races and people have been on earth for an incredible length of time and they never melded before and they are not going to meld now. They will not meld in the future. And I am afraid that of all the empires involved, the American empire is in for the rudest of awakenings, because we are no longer able to govern beyond our shores to any great extent at all.

The last great convulsive effort was in the gulf which the English would have called an action and not a war. And we had to borrow money to do it. Now that was very similar to England in Suez. It is the equip... it is our 1956. It is the last roar of the American lion.

And I think we have a lot of hangover. We have a big hangover due because all this dream about great super powers and telling other people how to do it, telling the South Africans how to deal with the blacks and so forth is going to come crashing to earth. And I, for one, will be very glad to see an end of it.

[ Murray ] Well, you take a look at Russia. There is probably no more a disparate empire in history. They have something like over 100 different separate and distinct cultures. They can’t... you go from one end of Russia to the other and they can’t understand each other. Cultures are totally different. Their social order is totally different. We are actually a little better off because we have had pretty much common language, but now multiculturalism is trying to break that apart.

[ Scott ] Well, our own school teachers insist that we should have multiple languages.

[ Murray ] Well, it is... it is the beginning of the end of any kind of cohesiveness. Without a common language you can’t have a country.

[ Scott ] We have ballots in San Francisco in Chinese. We have Chinese... Japanese signs in the airport in New York together with English.

[ Murray ] The instruction books in consumer appliances nowadays are printed in six languages.

[ Scott ] Six. Look at Quebec. It doesn’t want to allow English to be spoken in the name, of course, of human rights.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I was doing a lot of thinking today because of a book that just arrived and sickened me. I don’t know whether you recall from the Queen Anne era in England the Sir Roger D. Coverly papers.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, here was the country squire, a fictional character, but drawn from life, very much a character, very much aware of his prestige and position. And yet able to talk with a most common man freely and readily because there was a common culture. They shared a common faith so that Sir Roger D. Coverly was closer to the most lowly and humblest man in his area than people are in any average community today.

Well, then I got this book today which reminded me of the Coverly papers, something I had not though of for maybe 20, 30 years. By an English woman, a professor now in the States who deliberately came here who broke her ties with England out of total disgust and dismay. And the reason she did was Margaret Thatcher.

She felt that Mag... Margaret Thatcher—and she spoke contemptuously of the fact that the common people spoke of her as Maggie—was the epitome of all the middle class virtues and horrors.

[ Scott ] Well, what is more middle class than being a professor?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, she cited with contempt the fact that under Margaret Thatcher more middle class and even upper lower class people acquired home ownership than ever before. And to her that was disgusting. For a country...

[ Scott ] It was good for them.

[ Rushdoony ] ... too good for them, of course. So she is now in New York City.’

[ Scott ] Great.

[ Rushdoony ] ...where she can look down on... at most of the people and move in rarified circles and occasionally fly back to Britain to feel sorry for those of her relatives who are still stranded there.

[ Scott ] It is pretty hard to find rarified circles in New York any day now, because they hide.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, apparently she feels that she belongs to one. But with that type of mentality our intellectuals are doing more to destroy any kind of unity or union in the world than one can begin to fathom.

[ Scott ] That is a very good point. You read that book, I suppose, Political Pilgrims by Paul Hollander.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...which I think he began around 1925 or so and carried it up to 1960 or somewhere around there about all the intellectuals that were wined and dined and toured around the Soviet and similar totalitarian countries and who found so much to admire there. And he pointed doubt that these were not people who had suffered in their own country, but hey were alienated by their own cultures, English and American, because they felt, apparently, that they had not been sufficiently honored and they were given the really high class treatment. They met the heads of state in the Soviet and in the Soviet satellite countries. Whereas here they would never really get the same sort of reception in the White House.

And he was very puzzled. He never was able to explain these individuals and I noticed with very great interest that after the fall of the Soviet Union, after the fall of Gorbachev and what not, they are still alienated. They have not changed their positions in any way. And this is, I suppose, something new that the intellectuals of the modern world are against the modern world.

I can’t think of any parallel in history.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I have never before been confronted with the idea of traitors against a culture. I could understand if you read him, Benedict Arnold who felt mistreated. And I could understand others who turn against their country. But not to stay in a culture and denigrate it at the same time. And I have the feeling that this one world business or one Europe business that rose up in Brussels is staffed by this sort of person.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That is a very good point. It would be interesting if someone were to study...

[ Scott ] If we knew who they were.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You notice that we have never seen any profiles of these individuals. They are never written up.

[ Rushdoony ] No. They are anonymous. And bureaucrats, I was told by a bureaucrat, someone in the IRS, love anonymity because then they can exercise more power without responsibility.

[ Scott ] Well, power without retaliation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] They can invoke more fear that way.

[ Scott ] Wouldn’t you like to... to know who they are to publish it?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And you wonder at these so-called investigative journalists who never seem to go into these particular topics.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] They talk about a highly placed individual or a spokesman.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, if you say the right thing for them, you are a highly placed person.

[ Scott ] Well, you mean, if you give them a story. You tell them what to say.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which is really what it boils down to. Well, what do you think will happen?

[ Rushdoony ] I think secession is the name of the game. I think we are going to see the world fall apart in the days ahead.

[ Scott ] Well, it will become a regional world.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is the end of the super powers.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So that the next step when the super powers vanish is little England, little America, little France, et cetera. And maybe even smaller groups than national groups. Italy is not really a country, as you pointed out. Nobody ever calls himself an Italian who comes from Italy. He says he is a ... he comes from Roma, Genova, whatever, Milan. But would that apply also here? Would the... would the states fall apart?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, there are some who feel that it can happen here and that we might divide into nine regional areas. Certainly China could fall apart very easily. Various portions of China have no love for each other. I know during the 30s I was working as missionary in San Francisco’s Chinatown and I was a student and I was also tutoring a north Chinese girl and we wet to a concert or two together and I was quickly told by the Cantonese who knew me that I was making a very bad mistake because they had no love, the northern Chinese. And, in fact, they did not speak the same language. The north Chinese spoke Mandarin and the south Chinese or the Kim, those people in San Francisco almost all were Cantonese. But the are other areas besides those two and some of them are Islamic. Some are Turkic. So China is a conglomeration of peoples....

[ Scott ] It is an empire.

[ Rushdoony ] It is an empire and it will collapse one of these days. It was quite divided under the old war lords who was only nominally China. Each area had its own warlord who recognized now over lordship.

[ Scott ] We may see that in the... in the former Soviet.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Did I ever tell you that I was at a banquet in Sweden and Anne was with me and we were at separate tables, which is the custom. And they had wonderful ice carvings on the head of the... it was a ship building company and I was up there with {?} one of the christen a ship. We can say that without blasphemy. Name a ship. And I was next... I was at the end of my table and there was a very tall, broad shouldered Swede beside me who wanted to know why I was listed on the list of guests as from the West coast. And I said, “Well, they had to say something.”

And he said, “Well, when you go from the West coast to other parts of the United States do you feel strange?”

I said, “No, I feel at home anywhere in my country.”

But he said, “It is such a big country. Don’t you think it would be better if it was broken up into three or four smaller countries?”

And at that point I looked at his eyes for the first time and I could see that they were hostile. And I said, “Did you ever say that to a Russian?” And he turned his back. He turned his shoulder to me and I saw his shoulder for the rest of the meal. He never spoke to me again.

But the thought has arisen before regarding the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You know, maybe we should take a look at the definition of what is meant by a world union. Did they mean a world union in terms of geographical area? We should question our assumptions of what we think is meant by world union or new world order. Perhaps they are talking about controlling the world’s population as one political entity. Are they talking about a one world in an economic sense, controlling the worlds markets through trade, such as perhaps moving the London gold exchange to Brussels and putting out the daily precious metals prices from Brussels instead of from London? Controlling the money of the world or having a single currency? What really are they talking about? It is obvious from history that it is trying to manage the world’s population as an unmanageable proposition. It can’t be done because the diverse cultures and diverse languages.

[ Scott ] Well, you are hit on something very important and that is the financial international structure. There is a financial international structure in the process far along, I might add, of making a central bank for all Europe. We already have a central bank for the United States and we have the international monetary fund and we have various and other institutions which in effect control financial movements everywhere. This was one of the things that defeated the Arabs after their embargo and after their quadruple oil price when they really for a while had enough money to buy every corporation in the United States. They weren’t smart enough to do it. And most of the money was immediately used by the bankers for other purposes.

That sort of a structure is based, however, on the idea that paper can control the movement of goods. This can only be done if there is an iron discipline and if the amount of currency disseminated is proportional to the goods involved.

I know there is no government, no form of government which has ever been able to control itself to that extent. They do not accept discipline. Discipline at the top is never followed. So it is a... it is a modern version of an old dream.

[ Rushdoony ] Right now the dream is moving forward despite all contrary signals. The European community is working to take over more and more power from the national states. The United States and Canada have entered into a kind of economic union. Mexico is now being included. Bush’s next step is to include New Zealand and Australia and expand from there. And these regional unions are going to unite into a one world order. However, the thing that comes through to me very, very strongly is that these people have a total contempt of the common man and of all people who disagree with them.

One of the things that I did constantly when I was a boy, I read the books by men like Walter Durante and Maurice Hindus on the Soviet Union. On the one hand we were getting accounts of mass murders, mass tortures. On the other, these men were presenting a rosy picture and it was obvious that, especially in Walter Durante, people didn’t count. He had nothing but contempt for what happened to ordinary people. He was a man as callous and as dishonest as they come.

[ Scott ] We know that now. But at that time Durante and Maurice Hindus and the others just were giving us the rosy side.

[ Rushdoony ] Except that there were those, for example, who did write as eye witnesses about the death of six to 13 million people whom Stalin starved to death. There were people escaping. There were Russians defecting. And yet Walter Durante treated it as a non story and so did others. So it was obvious there was something wrong and then, of course, Eugene Lyons came out with his book Assignment in Utopia.

[ Scott ] That was in the 30s.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And that was after the ... there was an initial wave of refugee stories and massacres and what not by the religious.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which was generally denigrated.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And... and treated as though it was all right. It didn’t matter. Then there was a long period in which nothing came out of any real consequence. Most of the refugees couldn’t get their stories printed and {?} and a few others...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... began to appear, but that was much later.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Much later. We were told I the depths of the Depression and I remember it very distinctly that there was no unemployment in the Soviet, that everyone had a low rent. Everyone had free medical care. Everyone had free education. And we used to wonder.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, of course, I knew the stories of relatives who came out of Russia.

[ Scott ] Well, then you have a familial knowledge which was..

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...which was not widespread.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And what was loud and clear to me was that here were intellectuals, people who were there on the scene denying the reality and here was the reality, which meant that they had a contempt for the common man.

[ Scott ] Well, that has always been true on the top. And it ... it is especially true today. And what is even worse is that that contempt has spread from the top to the middle. So we have people who feel that because they went to school that they are better than others.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] They are taught...

[ Rushdoony ] Don’t believe that ever in the days of monarchs, lords, the was a.... a contempt for the common man equal to that which exists in high places now. For example, Henry II hardly the image of a generous and kindly king of England, but when he raised taxes, because his programs required it, his wars required it, he had nightmares about what the ordinary peasants of England were suffering...

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] Actually nightmares.

[ Murray ] We should be so lucky that our politicians would get a dose of the same thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They... at least generate a second who committed offenses, let us say, that a George Bush or a Mr. Majors would never commit. Nonetheless had a Christian conscience.

[ Scott ] Well, there was Christianity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they knew when they were doing wrong.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the whole question of Russia, of course, was to eliminate Christianity. That is why it was so widely praised by so many people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The anti Christians gloated over what happened in Russia for decades, for decades and are now afraid that the Christians may rise up to do something to their murderers and their torturers.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They are very much afraid of that. We are never going to hear about anybody being hounded down and the president put on trial for atrocities in Russia against Christians.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Unless there is a great change in the wind.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, since they are busy building new slave labor camps, you know who is still in charge whatever the name of those who ... Soviet republics now may be.

[ Scott ] All right. So we go back to the question of what kind of a world order does... these people think they are going to create. The Muslims are uniting in a much more serious way. There is no Christianity uniting. What is happening here is a unity of bureaucrats. Bureaucrats uniting, bureaucrats in Brussels, bureaucrats in England and so forth. They don’t care... perhaps they think they can dispose of the electorate all together and the elected officials all together in terms of authority and power. But what we are really looking at is the collapse of an international civilization.

We have here the phenomenon of there is no money anywhere. There is ... there is only paper. Stocks, bonds, debentures and paper. And no currency is any better, really, than any other because none of it is real. And the... we have... the world has never seen a phenomenon as wide spread as this. If there is a collapse of... a currency collapse, let us say, then it will affect everybody.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] No country will be exempt. And then what?

[ Rushdoony ] It will be the end of all their dreams.

[ Murray ] I... I have a feeling that these people behind the new world order effort feel that if they can control the world’s economies that the weapon of choice, as we have seen recently, is now the economic embargo. There is one in place against Cuba.

[ Scott ] There is one against Iraq.

[ Murray ] There is one against Iraq. And apparently they feel that they can starve people into submission.

[ Rushdoony ] You mentioned the anti Christianity. We are seeing it right here in this country in that the chaplain in Congress who is supposed to be an evangelical, Halverson, had a Moslems open the House of Representatives session a few weeks or months back with prayer and tomorrow morning, February the sixth, a Moslem will open the session of Senate.

Now a woman called me before I came tonight to say that she had talked to Halverson and made clear to him that what he was doing was wrong and ungodly, unchristian. And he would be judged for it. And she laughed. He laughed, she said. He laughed. He thought it was a joke.

[ Scott ] Well, we live in a polytheistic society, a government that acknowledges all gods and reverences none, which was the Roman system.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the Romans found that I the end the formula that led to their success was the formula that led to their defeat. We are running into the same phenomenon. We ... our financial controls have gotten out of hand. The international financial markets can no longer be controlled by individual governments.

Now Brussels may think it can do it, but I don’t know how it is going to do it. They think they are going not put out a gold {?}, right? A European currency unit, an {?}, a gold coin. And yet we are being told every day by the Wall Street Journal and by our government and our bankers that gold is an obsolete...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...and impossible metal that has no currency value whatever.

[ Rushdoony ] The gold {?} is a propaganda bit to bring in the recalcitrant elements in Europe. It is a promise that there will be a return to something stable.

[ Scott ] There is more gold buried in France than there is in circulation anywhere. They have been very near gold forever in that country. And Italy also. Italy has 24 carat gold pieces and gold jewelry and has been supplying the Muslim world with gold for a long time. We are in a peculiar position where the upper class is absolutely folding in the... in the ether.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is I the clouds. The ordinary people know better. They... if they don’t know better mentally, they know better psychologically.

[ Murray ] Right now they are in the ozone layer.

[ Scott ] Yes. Well, that is nonsense, of course. I mean the sky is cracking is what the peasants say in Venezuela when it rains too long. And... and the idea of the ozone cracking has gone on the same level.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You couldn’t get rid of it if you wanted to.

[ Rushdoony ] The hole in the ozone layer South Pole is a phenomenon which occurs when you have earthquakes and it apparently vents some of the gasses or whatever, but it is a temporary thing. It has been known for generations and it comes and goes.

[ Murray ] Chlorine gas.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] In volcanic eruptions is what thins the layer of the ozone. It is the action of the sun that creates ozone and oxygen in the atmosphere.

[ Scott ] Well, it is very interesting because we are reaching closer to the year 2000. The year 1000 was accompanied by all sorts of unworldly predictions, the apocalypse and so forth and the... we are not too far removed from that in the year 2000 coming up with strange phenomena and all sorts of governmental shifts and changes and so forth.

But as far as the average person is concerned, I would say that their... their psychological state today is very similar to the psychological state of people at close to the year 1000.

[ Rushdoony ] That is an interesting fact. When I first studied history we were told that there was {?} expectation of the end of the world at the year 1000. Later on we were told that was a myth. The most recent study I read of the subject said that there were a number of people who did hold that belief but when the year 1000 came and went it exploded that type of thinking so that there was a burst of creative activity. So the year 1000 and the false expectation led to a great deal of innovation and a surge forward.

[ Scott ] Well, the same thing may be true here. they thought then, I believe, that it was possibly the end of the world.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But that is not the expectation this time. What is the expectation this time is that the past is going to be darker than the future is going to be darker than the past, that all sorts of strange things are likely to happen. And I think in that case that is fairly realistic.

[ Rushdoony ] But at the same time you have these one world dreamers who believe they are going to realize their utopian dreams.

[ Scott ] Well, I... it is very hard. When you see an enormous empire like the Soviet collapse before your eyes, to think that an even larger empire is going to be built by a bunch of bureaucrats in the middle of Europe.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And right now what we are faced with as Douglas has shown us by sharing with us his Larry Burkett tape and book, the federal government now has to put out 40 percent of all its income to service the debt, to pay the interest on it. And by the end of the 90s, if not by 96—and Howard Philips feels by 96—it could be 100 percent.

Now the various states have been looking to Washington for more and more and have been surrendering their independence. But I think that is going to end. We already have one state, Wyoming, which has refused to go along with the one man one vote idea, which has ticked off both the United States and Mexico, California and Arizona and it has damned up the Green River water and says, “We need it more than you do. It is our water.”

I think this will increase. Now the basic governmental unit in the United States legally is the county. Your law enforcement is county. Your courts are county units. The federal government has been pushing counties around and controlling them by all kinds of funding. A few counties in California have tried to declare independence of the federal government and its subsidies. Before very long all of them will have to declare their independence, because there will be nothing forthcoming. And I think that in itself is going to lead to massive decentralization here in the United States. And the same thing will happen in France and elsewhere.

[ Murray ] I think you are right, because in the last 50 years the federal government... Congress has passed all of these laws mandating various social programs. And then when the federal government got to the point where they couldn’t pay for them all, then they laid it off on the states and put the states in charge of welfare, et cetera. The states would have these governor’s conferences like the one we just witnessed where there was some rebellion going on there. The states never questioned about how they are going to pay for it. They just assume they would start a personal income tax like we have seen in recent years here in California and I am sure other states are starting to... to think about it.

And then the states would then impose mandated programs on the counties. Our supervisors here in this county are in a straight jacket. They are in an economic straight jacket. There is only so much they can do with the tax base that they have got in order to meet these state mandated programs. And it is from then on it is shut down local libraries, shut down local services. And I think you are going to... it... the secession that you are talking about is going to come in the form of bankruptcies.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...by counties and by states. And they will finally say to the federal government, “We can’t follow your programs anymore, because we can’t pay for the programs that you have mandated on us.” And that will be the end of the game.

[ Rushdoony ] And the cities and counties of Texas only a few cents out of every tax dollar can be used at the discretion of the city fathers or the county fathers because of these state and federal mandated programs. And those are going to disappear. And then we will see a return to freedom.

[ Scott ] Well, I am not so sure. Sorry. But I can’t chime in with this, because to a great extent I consider this particular period the equivalent of the Weimar period in Germany. The... Germany operated under emergency decrees under Weimar, expanded social programs, exacerbated racial and ethnic arguments and finally encountered a tremendous economic crisis in the Depression, much worse than we ever had and worse than anything Americans ever dreamed of. And then they got the man on horseback. And in my view the conditions here are adding up to autocracy. They are not adding up to freedom.

If we get the wrong fellow in the White House who wants to apply these regulations and who has certainly the legal background to do it, you know, in the form of regulations, programs and so forth, he can solve unemployment by the Roosevelt method of putting people to work building bridges and roads and so forth all of which, of course, need to be done, because we have allowed all these things to fall apart, the piers and the harbors and so forth are in great decay. There is already talk about having them work of their welfare. And I think that we stand ... there is a very strong sense of danger, political danger in the air, because we are seeing political correctness being applied by the press and the universities and by the bureaucracy and by the agencies from one end of this country to the other. People cannot say what they think. They have lost the most elementary freedoms. The EPA out governs everything that moves from insects to elephants. And, therefore, I think that it would take a convulsion to restore liberty in this country and the signs really are in the other direction.

[ Murray ] Do... do you think...

[ Scott ] I...

[ Murray ] Let me ask one question. Do you think it is fair to extrapolate from a historical precedent like Germany’s situation when they are a very different people than we are here in the United States? Now Germany had some diversity among their population, but basically the Germanic people tend to have more of a herd instinct than our polyglot society here.

[ Scott ] No. I don’t think so. The German Empire was very new. It was formed in 1871 by Bismarck. Before that they were separate states and principalities. They were very diverse. And they were European. And Europeans are, by definition, mixers.

What I am saying is that the historical formula has always been democracy to autocracy irrespective of the people. It was true in Greece. It has been true everywhere else. Democracy is over the long haul is unworkable. A republic, yes. A democracy, no.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Otto, I am ready to agree that there is a very real possibility that you are right. In fact, I will say there is a high degree of possibility. On the other hand...

[ Scott ] We hope not.

[ Rushdoony ] I hope not and I will tell you one reason why I think not. I think there are too many Otto Scotts in this country and Doug Murrays and R. J. Rushdoonys who are of an independent mind and will not go along with this.

[ Scott ] Well, obviously that is true.

[ Rushdoony ] And in all these church and state struggles, I have seen the stubbornness that is a part of the American character and these people will not submit.

[ Scott ] Well, they will have to start standing up.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I agree.

[ Scott ] The first step in standing up is to say what you think.

[ Rushdoony ] Exactly.

[ Scott ] And if they don't do that, there is no possibility of any resistance.

[ Rushdoony ] I agree. Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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