From the Easy Chair

Memory

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 131-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CR173

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CR173, Memory, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 283, February the third, 1993.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss, first of all, the subject of memory. Last Sunday I preached on a text in Deuteronomy wherein Moses told the people that it was urgently necessary for them to remember the past. He cited their errors, their sins in the past. He incited them to obedience by remembering their mistakes with obedience leading, ultimately to blessings.

Now people’s without a memory, whether it is individual or collective amnesia, are only barely alive. They are incapable of profiting from the past. They are stymied in acting in the present because they do not know who they are, what they are or what their abilities and liabilities are.

We live in a time when we have been working to create a mass amnesia on the part of peoples. We want to destroy their memory. In Europe, as in the United States, education has turned from the teaching of history to various social studies. And with each year each new text book, the historical content gives way to teaching certain social attitudes, so that people have very little knowledge of the past.

As one observer noted recently, a large number of Americans school students today in the public schools know more about Martin Luther King than they do about George Washington. They know very little about the basic history of this country and the same is true in Britain and on the continent. And I have been told that France may be the worst in this respect.

So we have a problem today in that the assault on memory works to dehumanize people. It makes them less strong, less able to resist the totalitarian trend, because they no longer can see the past, present and future. They do not really know what they are and they have been blinded by the loss of memory that our culture has inculcated.

Well, with that general introduction, Douglas, would you like to continue?

[ Murray ] Well, I looked up the definition of memory in Webster’s second unabridged and the power or function of reproducing and identifying what has been learned or experienced, i. e., the faculty of remembering is the definition that is given there. And I think as we take a look around, as you just outlined, collectively our culture, at least, is losing its collective memory. And this seems to be an engineered phenomenon in order to institute changes to comply with the agenda of the power elite. And it is something that has to be turned around because we are nothing if we are not the sum total of our experience. People who have amnesia who get clinical amnesia go through terrible disorientatio and the ... they lose all sense of self worth, self esteem, because they have ... they have no recollection of ... of the accumulation of experience through their lifetime and it is something that each of us values and it gives us something to... to fall back on.

The memory as a human perception of time is probably unique to ... to humans. I don’t think that there is any other species that has the capability of memory, at least it has not been demonstrated scientifically anywhere that I have ever seen. So it is a unique human trait.

[ Rushdoony ] I would say memory in the sense that we have...

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] ...becuase a dog will remember who you are if you are away for a while. In that sense animals do have some kind of memory, but our memory is unique. I ... I believe that it marks us because we are able to remember not just what we have experienced, unlike all animals. We can remember because of our studies everything from the garden of Eden to the present and that makes a world of difference.

Otto, would you like to comment on these matters?

[ Scott ] Well, this is not a unique. We watched the Soviet Union deliberately erase and alter and distort the history of czarist Russia and the history of the entire West of that matter. Marx studied a certain portion of Roman history and especially the times of the troubles, greek, rather, Greek history. And the different classes in Athens, fifth century BC Athens got into a state of civil war where the prolotariat fought against the aristorcrats. The aristocrats club 30 took over. And Marx assumed from that period that this represented all history. And he transferred the class struggle of fifth century Athens to describe all of western history.

Now it is obvious that the civil war in Athens destroyed Athens. And when you have a class struggle in any country you will destroy that country because classes have to operate harmoniously otherwise a society is destroyed. So he was idiot enough to think that class struggle explained all the progress of history instead of explaining the destruction of various countries and cities. In other words, he misread history and he mistaught history.

After the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 they repeated the error of the French revolutionaries who began with the year one. And they said they were going to produce the new Soviet man. And the new Soviet man had to have his mind cleansed of all traditional information and knowledge. He had to abandon his religion. He had to abandon history as he knew it and start everything all over again. This is like saying you are going to create amnesia in a society.

Then as they progressed in the 70 years of their regime, they repeatedly began to alter the record of their own behavior. And Russian encyclopedia, for instance, in 1925 had Trotsky as an ally of Lenin. The same Russian encyclopedia in 1930 had no Trotsky at all which meant that they had to recall the 1925 encyclopedia and reprint and replace and re write.

So what we are watching here in the misrepresentation, let’s say, of the settlement of the western part of the United States and the misrepresentation of the South in the period from, let us say, 1500 to 1860, the mis... the down grading of the colonial period which lasted almost 200 years before we had this government, the omission of the ... of the problems introduced by the Articles of Confederation which gave us paper money and inflation, all kinds of various aspects and periods of American history have been either dropped or distorted. So what we are doing here or what is being done to us here is very similar to what the Bolsheviks did to the Russian people. Only difference being we don’t say that it is Communism. We don’t admit that it is Socialism—which it is—and we pretend that we are doing this for scholarly reasons.

[ Rushdoony ] Mark?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, you mentioned social studies and education. I have ... today in... in our educational system we don’t teach that there is any such thing as truth, because truth is seen as relative. So if truth is relative, truth is subject to the mind of man and truth only serves man’s purposes. Therefore truth has to change. Truth has to evolve as it meets societies needs. So in dealing with the past in history, for instance, history becomes a tool to explain a situation as you see it today. And history is not something you learn from history. History is something you... you use to explain truth as you see it today.

Therefore, one of the most honest things they did was they replaced history with social studies, because the purpose of social studies is to look at society and draw lessons for that from society and to influence a generation in how they should behave and think in this new society. So I think eliminating history from the curriculum and calling it social studies is one of the more honest things our modern educational system has done.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Otto referred to what the Soviet Union has been up to over the years. And I suspect it is still continuing because their basic philosophy has not changed, namely rewriting history. I have referred at times to the fact that they have attempted to perform a lobotomy on all the peoples within the Soviet Empire by destroying any connection with the past through language so that they have systematically worked to alter the many, many languages within the old Soviet Empire by creating new words, by dropping old words to the point that they hoped to cut people off from the various Bible version, from writers of the past like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and others. And were approaching success I this goal. In many, many instances the old purity of the language was retained only within a family context. You spoke the speech that was approved out in public. Well, the point of all of this remakig of the language was very simply to cut people off from knowledge of the past.

You and I would have trouble trying to understand anything in Anglo Saxon. It is a remote ancestor of English. But English has changed so dramatically that the two languages now are very different. And this was the goal with regard to all these subject peoples. And it was done deliberately. It was done systematically so that every periodical regularly introduced new words which were explained. And then went on to use those new words and the new words previously given to the point that peoples in the United States who subscribed to, say, a Russian, a Ukrainian, an Armenian, a Georgian or any other such periodical would have trouble reading what came from the old country.

The goal was the loss of memory.

[ Murray ] Well, technology is beginning to change people’s perception of the value of memorization, because electronically you can store huge amounts of information and also you can get rid of it very quickly. It can be dumped or erased very, very quickly. Young children now in preschool in the public school system are being introduced to computers. And it develops in them the ... the sense that this device, the computer is just an electronic file cabinet and they begi to see their own brain as just a file cabinet that you periodically clean out and throw away what you don’t need. And it is a... it is a subtle similarity, but I think it over time it changes people’s perception of the value of remembering who you are, what you are and your cultural identity.

[ Scott ] Well, these Bolsheviks were the ones who stopped the teaching of history in Russia when they took over and introduced social studies so that when we introduced social studies in the American educational establishemtn, we were taking a leaf {?} from the Marxist adventure.

[ Rushdoony ] And the Bolsheviks learned it from John Dewey so that it went there and came back.

[ Murray ] When did the social studies really start I earnest in the public school system in the United States?

[ Rushdoony ] It depended on the area. Some states adopted it very early. Others resisted it until after World War II. The more money a district had the more readily it adopted social studies.

[ Murray ] I remember that no one placed any value on the social studies texts...’

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Murray ] After... after they passed the class, they immmediatley got rid of the book.

[ Scott ] Well, there is another point here and that is that we can... we need’t blame the Marxists for everything. Science, the scientific community, the technologists were the firs to discard history. They discarded history because as soon as they found a better way to do something they threw out all the things that it improved and they threw out with this the memory of the struggle that they had to go through in order to obtain a better level of technology. So technology is taught to students today as an accomplished fact, not a historical development. It... the average engineer knows nothing about how these things were evolved and has the assumption, he is taught indirectly that the past was stupid, because it didn’t know how to do things as well as we do them today. And this attitude has flowed into commerce, because business histories, for instance, the ... an awful lot of men in senior management can’t see the point with business history. They can’t see the point at all until it is pointed out to them that at least the history of the company can prevent them from repeating some of the mistakes of their successors.

[ Rushdoony ] Predecessors.

[ Scott ] Or predecessors, yes. But the attitude of contempt towards history because the assumption is that if they are smart, why aren’t they alive. They must be dumb or they wouldn’t be dead, runs through the American nation. And to an extent, I think, we were taught that. We were taught that the world began in 1776. We were taught that the men in Philadelphia invented everything they did, that they had no background of information from their upbringing and their training in their historical knowledge, that it was a miracle that occurred in Philadelphia.

[ Murray ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And that this is a miraculous country because it has no history that connects it to any other part of the world or any other period.

[ M Rushdoony ] You... you mentioned about science. Darwin basically threw out all science before him and it is... and it is... and its basis of validity from a... a... a creationist perspective and most all of the great disciplines of science were originated by Christians. In fact, modern science didn’t even originate, as we know it, until after the Protestant Reformation when men said if God created this world, it must make sense. And there must be laws which we can understand because the.... if God created it, there must be principles which we can understand if we are in the image of God. And they created the various disicpilnes of science and the scientific knowledge ex... you know, began exploding.

When Darwin came along ... around he said, “All of that this nonsense. Everything is chance. There is no order except random mutatios and chance occurrences.”

We don't even, as my dad wrote a long time ago, they don't... he doesn’t... didn’t really believe in a universe. He believed in a polyverse, because there was no common law.

[ Rushdoony ] You mentioned Darwin. I was interested in Insight, January 18, 1993, this statemeten by Jamieson Toomey. “Of the two theories evolution seems to require more faith, because of the ubiquitous gaps in the fossil record, the complete lack of harmony of evolution with the second land of thermodynamics and the seemingly preposterous idea of an incredibly complex self replicating cell pulling itself together from primordial soup,” unquote.

[ Scott ] With shoes.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] So without an historical memory we lose the ability to think. We don't have a knowledge of the past and our knowledge is pretty largely eroded. I saw that rather dramatically when Otto Scott wrote a while back on the great flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919. That created shock in many, many quarters across country. People between the age of 20 to 55 simply had never heard of that great flu epidemic and the fact that, was it two more weeks at the same rate of increase it would have wiped out the human race, Otto?

[ Scott ] Something like that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. All right. One person told me that he went to some work to go to the library, a large library and look up influenza and find that there were two or three books on the subject, to get them out and read them with some dismay that so great an event with such far reaching implications and so tremendous a death toll was unknown, that nobody wrote about it, nobody taught it in history courses and he was confronted with it in an article by Otto with a sense of shock.

Now, the fact that the Beatles are know by many school children in Britain better than Churchill tells us something of what has happened to our historical memory. And it is a rather grim fact, a very, very dangerous one because people, well, I have forgotten who it was. It may have been Disraeli who said that those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it.

[ Scott ] Santayana.

[ Rushdoony ] Santayana, yes. Disraeli said, “Practical men are men who practice the blunders of their predecessors.”

[ Scott ] That is true. It is very interesting. The American contempt for history is what has led us to our present problem, especially in the area of currency. We have no fixed unit of currency. No even savages develop a fixed unit of currency. And here we are priding ourselves on our advanced state of knowledge and we have the record. I have a book at home 2000 Years of Price Controls.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, I have that.

[ Scott ] Do you? By {?}.

[ Rushdoony ] Excellent.

[ Scott ] It is an excellent book and in 2000 years price control efforts, every single one has been disastrous.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They are talking about them again. They are going to control health care prices. And, of course, they will run... they won’t run to a shortage of sicknesses, but it will run to a shortage of cures pretty soon.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Garamandi is going to control insurance prices.

[ Scott ] Same thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Same thing.

[ Murray ] The first question that got asked at that meeting was: How are you going to be insured when you go out of state with your car? He hadn't thought of that.

[ Scott ] Did he answer it at all?

[ Murray ] No. I didn’t hear the answer.

[ Scott ] He said, “We are studying that.”

[ Murray ] Yeah, right. We have got... we will form a commission. But your comment earlier about the contempt, I think that this contempt, particularly in the scientific circles for prior history in a particular discipline really goes to the heart of the matter because really it displays man’s arrogance in trying to make himself a god. I have run across a lot of scientists in my day who were about the most arrogant human beings I have ever run across, because nothing happened before them.

[ Scott ] Well, they are strangely uneducated. I ... on the Raytheon history I went over every scientific or... or technological detail with the chief engineer of the corporation. And at one point he protested and I said, “Well...” I have forgotten, of course, the issue, but he {?} some issue and ... and ... and we got into a side discussion on how much better it was to use mathematics than it was to use words, because, I said, “Where do you suppose zero came from?” And it was a long silence.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes. Well, I think one of our problems today is that we are ignorant of how much we have lost just since World War II. Our knowledge of the past is eroded. Therefore our ability, as you have said, to cope with price controls is gone. We don’t know that it has always been a failure.

By the way, I wish we could know whether Garamandi’s answer to driving your car out of the state is going to be you can’t do it. I wouldn’t put it past him.

[ Murray ] Yeah. Well, they haven't thought it through, I don’t think.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Murray ] That is the... that is the problem. They just want to throw it out there, grab some, some TV time.’

[ Scott ] Well, to tax energy which is the fuel by which we operate, means that it hinders all operations.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now to hinder all operations in the hope of getting enough money is to start to cannibalize yourself. It is like cutting off your arm so that you can continue to eat.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Well, I see a pattern. You know, Europe and Euroepan Common Market countries and the Japanese are paying somewhere around three or four dollars a gallon for gas. And here in the United States currently it is around a 1.15, 1.20. Now when you add that with the 35 cent a gallon tax that Clinton’s admistration wants to put on it and the insurance that they want to load on to the thing, in other words, they want to make a gasoline tax really a social ... a social program, because what they want to do is make the people who have money and can afford insurance also pay for the people who won’t buy insurance, what we now call uninsured motorists insurance which a lot of us get charged anyway. And it is very difficult to get off your insurance policy. If you insist, you can get rid of it, but the point is that they are gradually jacking up the cost per gallon for the gas closer to the other major economic...

[ Scott ] These are much smaller countries.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] In a review in Lincon Review I encountered this passage earlier today written by Angus Mac Donald. He went to Colombia after World War II to study and he says, “Living in New York was a delight as there was no crime and much to see and do. Subways cost a dime and were clean. When I visited years later and saw the graffiti on the inside and outside it was a distressing comment on what had become of the city. Stacks of newspapers used to be Grand Central Station with no attendant. Whoever was responsible for the papers would come by once in a while and pick up his money, confident that there would be no theft. I used to eat at a cafeteria in Grand Central. After you ate you went to the cashier who asked you what you ate. You told him and he told you the cost,” unquote.

Now most people today are totally unaware that this kind of thing existed in this country, that it was possible in our major metropolitan centers to have law abiding safe environments. But with the lack of historical memory, I am surprised how many people assume that the conditions we have today are normal.

[ Scott ] Well, if you have no memory there is nothing you can compare them against.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You simply don’t believe that most people are honest and most people behave in an honest manner. Although now I understand that students cheat as a matter of course.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And we know now that we have a government that tells lies as a matter of course and that breaks its promises to the people at any time without any sense of shame. And the individuals who do this are not impeached. They are not brought up on charges. And the people act as though these lies and broken promises are normal. And we are moving, therefore, into despotism because despotism is like any other kind of imprisonment. It takes two to tango. It takes one to bully and it takes one to surrender.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, loss of memory means a breakdown. I recall vividly some years ago performing the funeral of a very wonderful man whom I had known from the time I was about ... well, less than two months old. All my memories, earliest memories he is a part of. And I hadn't seen him for about a year or so and his son who was a good friend told me when I expressed very real grief that his father had died, he said—it was in an accident by the way—he said, “I am sure he was grateful, because he was losing his memory.” And he said not long before this accident he looked up across the breakfast table one morning in great distress and asked his wife if she were his wife and what her name was. Now that is very sad. But it is even more disastrous when a cultlure loses its historical memory and that is what has happening to us as a people. And it is self inflicted. Our state schools are furthering it and most people are appalling ignorant of the past of this country, of their parituclari part of the country and of the heritage that is theirs in terms of their own origin, what groups of people they represtned in the migratiosn to this country and so on.

I was startled, two or three years ago, when someone in the deep south called me and he said, “Most of our public school children here either do not know who Robert E. Lee was or have been taught that he was a soundrel.”

[ Scott ] Well, the black people are being taught by some of their leaders that all the developments of ancient Greece came from black Africa, that the human race began in Africa, that there were great African civilizations.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And that everything the white man has he stole from the black man. Of course one could say, “Why haven’t you stopped inventing? Why don’t you continue to exhibit your brilliance?” But that is beside the point. The point is that they are being taught a cartoon version of history which is going to be very damaging to racial relations I this country and in the future is already a great damage is going on now on the university level. We have black studies which are dishonest. And, of course the is a certain amount of dishonesty in all national histories and in all racial histories. Almost every group tries to brush its scandals under the rug. I mean, every once in a while I run into somebody who represents a group that has never in all its history committed a crime. And I look at them, you know, and I don’t... I don’t make an argument about it. There is no point to that. There are also, of course, efforts to solve history, to put false records into the archives or to steal genuine records from the archives and from the files. History has become a great propaganda took in this country. It is being used and misused to a very great extent and in the whole process there continues what I had mentioned before, the contempt for the value of true history, because if a nation commits a terrible crime or if it commits a very bad mistake, at least if it keeps the memory of that green, it will not do it again.

[ Murray ] You know, we are only allowed to remember certain mistakes.

[ Scott ] Very few, yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I ordered a book today by a prominent scholar, the thesis of which is that history is myth. There is no truth in history. In fact, the concept of truth for him apparently is that it, too, is a myth. And some believe that the idea of truth is a hangover from Christianity.

[ Scott ] Well, we began with the word memory. And we know that our memory tends to play false with us. I don’t have the best of memories which is the reason I take a lot of notes, but I can... many times I decide to find a book and I know it has a red cover and a white title and when I find it, it is blue and it has got a yellow title.

[ Rushdoony ] Isn't that exasperating?

[ Scott ] It is very exasperating. I... I...I could really kick myself. But I see it in my mind’s eye exactly that way and I look for it that way.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And, of course, I overlook it because it is another color. And the same is true when I interview people about their careers and what they have edone in their job and so forth and I find that their chronology gets all scrambled. And even with the best of intentions they can’t remember precisely the way the thing went and then actually some of them are very good. They wilil remember that Joe did it and then, of course, you know, you are getting somewhere because they... they didn’t take the credit and they will admit that they learned from somebody else and so forth. But history, I would say, is comparable. History is not precise. It is impossible for anybody to know exactly how things went, because we weren’t there to see the expression. It might have been…. A piece of business might have been conducted with a wink, a handshake or a nod of the head. Lots of things are not put on ... on paper or parchment. They leave no particular trace. But we do know that in the larger areas of human behavior certain things have always led to trouble and certain other things have always led to success. And if we overlook that, then we are cheating ourselves.

[ Murray ] How is the... I was going to ask the best method of learning history. I have always been suspicious of text books, particularly college or high school text books that give the history of the world from A to Z in 350 pages, because it generally winds to be... winds up to be somebody’s idea of what history ought to be rather than what it actually was. As a historian, would you suggest to people that they get their history study from as many different sources as possible?

[ Scott ] I certainly have. And also I ask myself when I read a description of some event, especially of the participants of some event if that sort of behavior squares with the way men behave that I have seen. And, for instance, the ... a good example of misuse of ... or misreading of the behavior is our Hollywood movies. You use a man coming in, insulting a woman and then seizing her and kissing her and she succumbs. Now you know that doesn’t work. It only works in the movies.

[multiple voices]

[ Scott ] I didn’t have to try it. I was never stupid enough to try it. But time and again this is how the hero meets the heroine I the movies.

[ Murray ] It is going to be an... an air born vase or some dishes or a left upper cut in there somewhere.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when I went to the University of California at Berkeley the assault on the older education was still in full swing. It had not entirely destroyed the older schooling because the rural schools still believed in drill and in memorization.

One of the things I learned from must a little bit of reading was that the experimental basis for their idea that there could be no transfer of training, that if you disciplined the mind in one sphere, that disciple would not carry over into another sphere. The research there was very shallow. They wanted to do away with the older drill and memorization methodology. So they with a very trifling experiment or two which would never hold up today, they eliminated it. Of course, within recent weeks a Reader’s Digest article without using the term speaks of how you can discipline the mind and further the memory.

Now those who were brought up under the old drill and memorization methodology had remarkable ability to give an accurate account of past events. I have mentioned more than once how my father and his classmates as small boys could remember verbatim the textbooks, the names and author and all, all through school. It amazed me how precise their memory was because of the drill method. And I recall some of the older historians who could at the drop of a hat if you brought up, say, 1436, discuss events within 10, 15 years before and after and give you a picture of history at that time in Europe. They had an incredible memory and a very accurate one for details.

I think we have suffered greatly in truthfulness I speech, because we don’t have the background of that precision that very, very meticulous emphasis on detail.

I recall a very heated argument. The heat was on my side. About 30 years ago with a professor who insisted that the new math made a correct answer unncesary. If you had the right methodology, that was the important thing. And I learned that accuracy was no longer prized. It was the ability to regurgitate something of the general framework. So I think we have destroyed the memory of each generation more and more in this century.

[ Murray ] Well, we have got lots of examples around of people who know the methodology, but don’t get the answer right. In fact, that bride that they are rebuilding over here the {?} ferry bridge is a great example of that. The guy who engineered it knew how to engineer, but he didn’t get the numbers right so they are going to have to spend 30 million dollars to beef it up so it doesn’t fall in the ... in the river.

[ Rushdoony ] And they are giving us no assurances that it won’t.

[ Murray ] No, no. You are going to have to pray every time you cross it. But that is just one of... one of many examples of people who know the method, but don't get the right answer.

[ Scott ] Well, this is a ... becoming a very serious matter. I just saw the book, the film rather, of Malcolm X and ...

[ Rushdoony ] You have a strong stomach.

[ Scott ] Well, this is for the compass.

[ Rushdoony ] I know.

[ Scott ] And I wouldn’t voluntarily go to see it, but I think it is important, because they are making an important issue of it. This is a film which Malcolm X is deliberately made to look like a hero. And I got hold of a magazine review infidelity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, excellent.

[ Scott ] A brilliant review.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Remarkable.

[ Scott ] And the reviewer had taken the time and the trouble to read Alex Haley’s false autobiography of Malcolm X and also a true biography of Malcolm X by a man named Bruce Perry. And it turns out that far from being an admirable man, well, let’s begin with the fact that he lied about his parentage. He was a high {?}. He was a mulatto with reddish hair and green eyes. He was always very embarrassed by this because he wanted to express the black part of his heritage and not the white. His grandmother had three children by his Scottish plantation owner in the island of Granada which is where the red hair came from and so on.

In the course of his career, not only did he tell lies about his mother and his father, but, of course, about himself most of all. In Harlem he operated as a male prostitute. And in the movie there is a segment which shows a homosexual being serviced by a mulatto. And Malcolm X plays the tough guy who comes in and puts this mulatto down and it is game of fake Russian roulette. But the fact of the matter according to Perry, the true biographer, is that there was no other mulatto. There was only Malcolm X and he was the one that serviced the homosexual.

He went to prison for burglary. He didn’t go to prison for being a pimp. And I said in the review that I wrote there is a diferrence. And you can never confuse the two, between a pimp and a homosexual. A pimp uses women. A homosexual competes with them.

So we have here an individual who, in a way, the biographer was sympathetic to him because he was raised essentially without a father. He was engaged in the life long search for a father. Each one he found was unworthy. And he also made a very important point and that is that he became aquianted with white people who came to Harlem for vicious reasons. And also that a great many of the families in the black ghetto had no father. They are female headed and the boys are raised without masculine example or masculine advice.

So homosexuality is rather common in that area. So what we come out with in the final analysis and he also talked about Haley and his lies about his origins and he talked about Spike Lee and his strange attitudes. And he came to a similar conclusion about all three.

Now if the movie had been truthful, it would have done a great deal to help both the black and the white communities to understand each other. But to do it falsely, to tell a total and complete lie in the... under the guise of giving a man’s history would be the same as giving a lie, in this case, is the same as lying about American history. And the damage is incalculable, because lies bring down everything.

[ M Rushdoony ] That its he biggest... the... the ... the image most people have of ... of history, whatever their view about any particular history does not go back to their high school history class. It goes to some image of that period of history that they have seen in television or the movies.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And, therefore, we have a generation that has absolutely no idea of our real history.

[ Rushdoony ] That is true.

[ Scott ] Or even of our actual relationship between the various groups that make up this polyglot country.

[ Murray ] Well, the difficulty in rectifying that is that they ... that the... the Humanist culture has destroyed the placing of any value on history. So people don’t even bother to learn it because they figure it is waste of time.

[ Scott ] Well, to not bear false witness places a very severe standard on the writer.

[ Rushdoony ] That is no longer felt as if even a remotely viable standard.

[ Scott ] Nevertheless, any Christians who is a writer...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...has to keep that in front of his head.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Well, Hollywood has been working over time at making apologies for a lot of people like Malcolm X and others, letting...

[ Scott ] Not for us.

[ Murray ] No.

[ Scott ] They are putting us into the other category. Hollywood is portraying Christians as bigots, as sadists, as abusers of women, as hypocrites.

[ Murray ] It is an interesting contrast and they are... they are not propagandizing at all, are they?

[ Scott ] No. And this is... this is really where we live. I mean this is a very important subject and the has been, I think, a sort of an error on the part of Christian groups who don’t make efforts to redress these misrepresentations. To allow insult to go unanswered is a grave mistake.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think the Christian school and home school movement is beginning to have an effect, because it is bringing up a generation with a better grasp of the past.

[ Scott ] I think that is true.

[ Rushdoony ] And it is very much needed because without it we have the idiocies of this supposedly an ultra evangelical group putting out something in their publication. President Elect Clinton’s faith shapes his social, political views. And it begins by saying, “Despite differences of opinion people may have with Bill, he is a disciple of Jesus Christ.”

[ Scott ] Who wrote that?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I don’t know the name...

[ Scott ] Did they sign their name?

[ Rushdoony ] No. It is anonymous.

[ Scott ] It should be.

[ Murray ] It was probably written by Bill Clinton.

[ Rushdoony ] No, it is in the periodical Sunday put out by the Lord’s Day Alliance which used to be ultra orthodox. The writer is himself a Southern Baptist although a moderate which means he is a modernist. But he gushes all the way through this article about the faith of this wonderful man.

[ Murray ] They must be trying to get a federal appointment to some job or something.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is very nearly over. Is there a last statement any of you would like to make?

[ Scott ] After that revelation we have gone breathless.

[ Rushdoony ] No memory there even about what happened as recently as last year.

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.