From the Easy Chair

Terrorism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 133-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161CS175

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161CS175, Terrorism, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 285, March the third, 1993.

This evening Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss terrorism. Terrorism is a very, very important subject because from time to time in history it has been a major tool used by some group or, very often, by some civil government, in order to destroy the will of the people or to destroy a state or to destroy a particular movement.

The Roman Empire, for example, used terror against the Christians. Joseph Stalin at one point had his men go out and seize people for slave labor camps in terms of a quota without any relationship to any real or imagined offense. The result was to create total fear by means of his instrument of total terror.

As I indicated, terror can be exercised by the state. The state can, for trivial offenses, move heavy forces against an individual or against a movement. We have seen at time for supposed crimes that are not very serious or sometimes are, but a disproportionate amount of force is used. We have seen, for example, two occasions of late where federal authorities have moved against someone or a group for violations of the weapons ownership act. Now I believe in living by the law insofar as such things are concerned. But on the other hand, why go after people who have never committed a crime whether they are likeable or not makes no difference when we have a situation where criminals have illegal weapons all the time.

Do we round up criminals simply to put them away for illegal weapons? Of lately it has been shown that prisoners in New York, where there is a strong licensing act and gun control have shot one another in the prison with guns. Why is nothing done to go after criminals?

You see, this is the use of terror. To use it against people in order to create an atmosphere of fear.

Then you have various groups, terroristic groups of which we have many in the world today and we have had many in history. These groups try to disrupt everything in society in order to call attention to a cause they feel is important. I am not going not say more there, because I would like Otto Scott to deal with the abolitionists and their campaign of terrorism and their agent John Brown of Harper’s Ferry.

On the other hand, to go back again to states, states can use terror in a fearful way to deal with legitimate grievances. For example, one of the things we are told in history books is that Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes because he wanted religious unity in the state. He wanted the state to be totally Catholic. And the Huguenots, of course, were Calvinists.

Now no doubt there is an element of truth there, but it is basically a lie. The Huguenots got into trouble. They had the Edict of Nantes revoked. They had troops quartered on them, lawless men who were given carte blanche to rape their wives and daughters, not primarily because of their faith, but because they were the ones who called attention in France to two things: one, Louis XIV’s heavy burden of taxation and, second, his foreign policy which was killing off a generation of youth.

They expressed what all Frenchmen felt, that none others dared to talk about. And so they had a campaign of total terror launched against they by law.

So states can use legalized terror against people. This goes back to the Roman Empire when in the latter years of the empire progressively taxation was extorted from people through total terror. When you were called in for a tax examination you were brought in by the troops. You were then tortured and sometimes killed, because they felt that you had to go to the extreme to get a man to admit where he had hidden his wealth, untaxed wealth.

So terror has been of two kinds in history, by the state and by radical revolutionary groups within the state.

Douglas, would you like to continue now?

[ Murray ] Well, I was thinking on the way over here that Otto made a statement some time back that men who resort to profanity are men that have run out of ideas and I tend to think that some of the people that are championing movements such as in the Middle East are... have run out of ideas, too. They are no longer willing to wait for... to... to coalesce their movement into a state. We have the same sort of thing in various movements of so called minorities here in the United States where it is ... they want everything now, like in the Feminist movement. Everything has to be done now. That was the statement that was made during the 60s and the 70s by students in the universities. They wanted freedom for this now, freedom for that now. Everything had to be done now and if it wasn’t done now, then terrorist methods of one kind or another would be employed. And we saw terrorism here in the United States indiscriminately used with terrorist bombings by the minute men and various other organizations, the Simbian Liberation Army and acts of terrorism against innocent individuals was employed.

And it seems to me that there is a parallel there, perhaps broadly drawn, but it is people who have run out of ideas. They... they become impatient. They are like children trying to achieve some end through terrorist means.

What do you think, Otto?

[ Scott ] Well, terror by the state is the oldest form of terror. That is traditional terror. And terror by, you might say armies against the state, armed force without regard to law on the basis of terror.

John Brown was an original, partly by accident, I think, and partly because he wasn’t entirely rational. But he committed terror against innocent, unarmed people in the name of a noble cause. Now ordinarily he would have been arrested and hanged and his pretensions to furthering a noble cause would have been dismissed, but by an accident of the ... of the times he and he put... he announced his defense at a time when the penny press had just come on, come on stream and the telegraph had just come on stream. And the press in Kansas territory at that time accepted his explanations as valid, that he killed people in order to advance the cause of anti slavery even though there were no slaves in the Kansas territory at all and, therefore, no slave owners.

At any rate, they white washed the use of murder in a political cause against unarmed civilians. Now that is the formula for modern terror today.

John Brown was picked up by the northern press first and then by the northern abolitionist movement and then finally by the whole north. And his explanation was accepted as a valid reason for committing a murder against somebody who hadn't done anything wrong. And the nihilists and the anarchists and the rebels of Europe picked it up, because the avant... the United States at that time was an avante garde country. Everyone watched us to see how we were going to solve a social problem and, in particular, the problem of slavery.

The Czar of all the Russias solved the problem of slavery by emancipating the slaves, very simply. The English paid the slave owner for the slave and had the slave owner emancipated. So up until John Brown slaves were emancipated by a political act. Well, he chose terror. And his example... the example of the United States which used violence after the terror in the form of the war between the states our solution to a social problem, in other words, in the 19th century was violence. We unleashed modern terror upon the world, because we gave the rationale for modern terror that terror before had been religious rationales or political rationale and so forth. I this case it was a racial rationale. So we introduced racism and terror together. And the essence of modern terror is that innocent people are murdered as objects in an ideological conflict.

Now this is about as base as you can get.

I had a friend a seaman friend of mine who was in Vietnam, South Vietnam during the troubles there who was in a restaurant into which somebody on a bicycle going by had thrown a bomb and he was slightly injured, but not much, but there were children in there. There were women in there. There were unarmed men in there. And this was hailed by our press as freedom fighters, as heroes. And, of course, we see the bottom of the gutter in North Ireland, the bombing of Waterloo station, the attempt to kill the leaders of Britain and so forth and so on, horrible things being done, men shot dead in front of their children, all in the name of a noble cause.

So I have reached the state, both by research and experience where I do not want to hear about noble causes and violence in the same breath from any group, from any group. To go into the street is no way to win an argument.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and even demonstrators for various causes who take to the streets and are lawless, basically, even though they don't kill anyone, are still terrorists.

[ Scott ] Well, they are beginning at the end. What do you do for an encore?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] If you had a noble cause you can win victory for a noble cause. If you have got the high ground why leave it? You can win through persuasion. You can win through argument. You can talk down people who are against a noble cause. I mean the demographics of our society, for instance, that made abortion look... we now abort one third of all the children conceived in the country and this is the reason the social security system is losing its base. It is losing its young and it cannot pay for the old and it is very simple. And recently I saw Harold O. J. Brown wrote a very interesting illustration. He said, “A pyramid used to describe the human population with the elderly, you know, at the small end of the pyramid and the great mass of the... of the young at the bottom. Now,” he says, “it is more like a palm tree with the elderly shedding off the top and nothing at the base.”

[ Murray ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] Mark?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, when you... regarding terrorism, it makes me think of what Paul said. I believe it was in 1 Corinthians he said not to keep company with extortioners. Terrorism is a form of extortion, to do what we say or here is the penalty. And you don’t to suffer the penalty. So it is ... it is a criminal act, in effect and by its... its... the threat of criminal of I will harm you if you don’t do things my way.

[ Rushdoony ] A good illustration of that—interesting that you should bring that up—from World magazine February 20, 1993. I would like to read this.

“A homosexual group is picketing about 100 restaurants in New York because those restaurants serve Celestial Seasoning teas. The group, New York Boycott Colorado, is targeting the tea company because its president refused to give homosexuals 100,000 for the campaign against Colorado’s amendment two, a measure passed in November denying special rights to homosexuals. New York Boycott Colorado spokesman Chet Why explained the flap over tea saying that by not becoming part of the solution, Celestial Seasonings remains part of the problem.

“The New York Group is planning a tea party to throw Celestial Seasonings into the New York Harbor. The environmental group Greenpeace might need to be on hand to crash the party. Tea acid might damage the pH of the harbor.”

Now there is a great deal of that kid of terrorism and blackmail going on, because black mail is a way of terrorizing people. We hear about this because Celestial Seasonings refused to go along with it. There are reports that the funding for many a homosexual group comes from various organizations and firms who have given in to this terroristic threat.

I for one am going to insist that Dorothy buy Celestial Seasoning teas for me.

[ Scott ] Their sales have gone up like a rocket.

[ M Rushdoony ] Yes. I think this has backfired on them.

[multiple voices]

[ Rushdoony ] That is good.

[ Murray ] I am just wondering. Did they... did they demand that Celestial Seasons ... Seasons tea donate the tea that they are going not use to make the protest with?

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Murray ] They remind me of petulant children, you know? It is just... it is... it is the kind of thing, the kind of act that you would expect from, you know, the first or second grade on a playground and... in any school in the country. It is really a...

[ Rushdoony ] Petulant children with bombs and AIDS.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] Well, it is getting rather serious because the ... there is a palpable threat hanging over ... hanging over Los Angeles. If the police officers that are now being treated to double jeopardy are not found guilty there is an ... a threat being fairly openly repeated in the press that there will be another L A riot. And there have been a number of these kind of threats from the black community regarding various trials over various criminals and I don’t know when white America is going to admit that this is a form of terrorism, but the point appears to me to be inescapable.

[ Murray ] Well, it is, you know, you have got the media yelling fire in a crowded theater. You know, because they are putting Maxine Waters o in prime time telling them that it is ok to do this and making excuses fro them. You have got the mayor of Los Angeles, all of these major figures in black politics, black politicians telling them that it is all right.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Murray ] ...absolving them of any guilt.

[ Scott ] Well, it has been working for them.

[ Murray ] Sure.

[ M Rushdoony ] If there is a second riot it is going to bring a whole new chapter to the cities in this country, because they are predicting this one. It is not going to be spontaneous.

[ Rushdoony ] They...

[ M Rushdoony ] And if they do it again and if it is not put down with a show of force immediately they are going to get the idea now that we can threaten to riot. That is a whole new chapter in city politics.

[ Rushdoony ] If all they... they have already threatened that they will.

[ Scott ] Well, they have been doing this. It is just that this is a little more open. I mean we have... I say we. Most of the people that I know have been acting like sleep walkers. We have been living under the threat of physical violence I this country for a number of years in every city. And pretending that it is not true, that these are isolated, unrelated incidents. And when we hear racism in glaring tones and when we look at the crime statistics, how could we deny the fact that there is an undeclared war underway? We are so afraid to even mention it. That is terror.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, terrorism is not new. It has a long history. And one aspect of terrorism or rather its history which is very important is the Renaissance.

[ Scott ] Very much so.

[ Rushdoony ] Terroristic tactics were used everywhere.

[ Scott ] Absolutely had pitched battles in the piazzas, in the squares. And blood and death and murder by poison, by every means conceivable was common place. Women put out contracts on their husbands and vice versa. Things are interesting. I have forgotten the name of one of the great artists of the Renaissance who was a witness to a number of these bloody riots. Everything went. Every sense of honor except vengeance {?}.

[ Rushdoony ] The Renaissance really vindicated every kind of evil and every kind of terroristic activity. One of the problems of the Renaissance era was that in some spheres such as the Church, law had become so intricate and hide bound that it made it difficult for justice to function. Shortly before the time of Alexander the Borgia pope when he was a young man in the Vatican he found that a high prelate was taking some of the things that the pope was routinely signing, altering them and then forging others to justify all kinds of acts as valid.

For example, one nobleman gained permission to sleep with his sister from a forged papal bull. And it was difficult to move against the prelate. So they simply voided things and transferred him. They couldn’t deal with him, because it was too difficult. And Alexander Borgia learned from that. And that is how the most fearful of ht Borgias operated when he became pope. He realized that law can strangle itself with too many regulations.

[ Scott ] Well, people forget that the Church is an institution of society. The Church is not something that is sitting up there in the middle of the air. The Borgia popes and the Renaissance popes were a reflection of their society. Just as the Church in our time today is a reflection of our society. All these nerds are reflections of what is going on around us. These are the ones who do not see the terror that stalks women in the streets, who don’t see the corruption that runs through our government like a plumbing system. How long has it been since any of the main line churches have ever risen up and took Cardinal Conner in New York several weeks to pull himself together enough to protest against the faggots who went in and tore the communion posts out from the altar.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It was several weeks before he even made a peep.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the Church is supposed to be more than a human institution. When it is faithful to God it represents the power of God in history. But it too often is unfaithful. And this is our problem. We need now is perhaps as rarely ever before in history a faithful church. And yet it has become appallingly silent or wimpish.

[ Scott ] Absolutely. I mean, if the Church cannot stand up against sin right in front of it, what do we have? We have a false church.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We have a fake church.

[ Rushdoony ] Well you know the well repeated story about Coolidge who went to church one day when Mrs. Coolidge was not too well and when she... when he returned to the White House she asked what the sermon was about and he said, “Sin.” And she said, “Well, what did the preacher say about it?” “He was against it.”

Now it would be hard to find preachers who are against it as vocally as they once were.

[ Scott ] They don’t use the word.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] The word has gone out of the language.

[ Rushdoony ] Together with the word hell.

[ Scott ] And the word honor.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. So we have a problem today because the Church is silent. And not until the Church starts speaking and starts, of course, rebuking its own members can it begin rebuking the world at large and it needs to do both.

Well, the silent role of the Church in a time when terror is increasingly in the air the world over is a sorry aspect of our time.

An example of terrorism against the Church exists in San Francisco. Chuck and Donna Mc Ilhenny, pastor and wife, are at the San Francisco Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Some years ago he advertised for an organist. One came who professed to believe the ... in the... in Christianity, professed to be a Calvinist, a devout Christian and so on. And within a matter of two or three weeks Chuck found the man was a homosexual. He had been set up.

Well, when he fired the man and the ... he went and explained the matter very graciously, told him what the problem was and why as a church they could not have him, the man listened courteously and graciously, but it was, perhaps, a set up, because he went immediately to an attorney and Chuck landed in the courts. Since then he has been subjected to terroristic activities.

It came close on one occasion to killing him and his wife.

[ Scott ] I saw. How did they do that?

[ Rushdoony ] A firebomb, a Molotov cocktail thrown through their window into the bedroom. And the church and the house have been vandalized repeatedly. The police have done nothing. The mayor’s office has promised to help and has done nothing. A lot of pastors and churches have backed off and refused to get involved because they are afraid and the whole situation is a very, very ugly one and it has taken courage for people to stay faithful to the church.

Now this is not a unique situation. It is, perhaps, more extreme than most, but it is an ugly situation.

[ Murray ] Well, the... another area where you see terrorism employed is in the environmental movement. You know, driving spikes in trees...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ... so that people will become injured when they cut the lumber is... is a pure terrorism because you never know when you are going to come upon one. And these saws shatter very ... they are rotating at tremendous speeds and they have tremendous mass and if they fly apart, the shrapnel can kill a lot of people. So, you know, the press has played that down. And but it is a very serious matter.

[ Scott ] Well the press hasn’t been fire bombed yet.

[ Murray ] No.

[ Scott ] But it will happen.

[ Murray ] If they turn against the environmental movement or against the homosexuals.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... we have so many now it is pretty difficult to say which group, but we have a number of group who have been encouraged by the press and by the government and by our wonderful social scientists to believe that they have a right to injure in the name of their cause and to injure institutions like churches, to injure schools.

Do you recall during the 60s where a bomb was set off in a university which killed a scientist there and so forth and if I remember correctly very little effort was made to track down the perpetuators of that crime, because these are politically correct criminals.

[ Murray ] I remember during the 50s when I was going to... came back out of the military and went back to college I remember professors lamenting the fact that students at that time seemed to be very phlegmatic. They didn’t have any fire...

[ Scott ] Well, not...

[ Murray ] They were not champing against. They were law abiding. They weren’t championing any causes. And they were floating various buzz words, code words, really, to take action. And, you see, in all of these various groups, the environmental movement, all these various movements, they have code words for taking action.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... most of this action I the name of the cause is not accepted as uncriminal.

[ Rushdoony ] One type of terrorism that has become very, very commonplace is to refuse to allow a person their due freedom of speech.

[ Scott ] Oh, that is a very big point.

[ Rushdoony ] To interrupt lectures. This has happened to both of us, Otto.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And to interrupt even sermons on some occasion in church services as at Saint Patrick’s.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] Because the belief that you are in the right somehow gives the terrorist the freedom to violate everyone else’s rights.

[ Scott ] Well, and the University of Wisconsin under {?} she issued a code of forbidden words and forbidden expressions and they took her to court and the court said, of course, the First Amendment doesn’t allow that. On the other hand the courts have not protected the First Amendment rights of religion in this country and especially of Christianity. Christians are now being told that they have no right to express their Christian viewpoint, because that is construed as pushing it down somebody’s throat or forcing their beliefs upon somebody else. The very expression of their beliefs is, in effect...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...being outlawed. And, of course, if we haven’t speech, we haven’t anything. We have no freedom whatever if we can’t say what we think.

On the other hand, on... and I have to say this that to allow somebody to muzzle you is to share in your own slavery. The Christians have only themselves to blame for the fact that people have dared to insult Christianity so freely, so often and on every level. They wouldn’t do it to another group.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, terrorism by the state, I think, is growing rapidly. In this country definitely and all over the world. And terrorism by the state is an effective means of destroying any dissent and any hope of remedying ills.

I mentioned earlier Louis XIV and the Huguenots. Now there are scholars who have said—there aw some who poo, poo it, of course—that France lost a great deal of its industrial ability when it lost the Huguenots, because many of them migrated, although it was illegal. And those that remained, much of what they had was with one means or another destroyed. So France paid a price. But the terrorism against dissent, was exercised in a number of ways.

Know we have the taxing power of the state, their ability to audit you, to tell you that you owe them money or to walk in under EPA and to do so without a warrant, to tell you that you are fined so much. And most small firms can’t afford to fight such cases. That is terrorism and they know it.

[ Murray ] Due process has slowly been eroded.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Eliminated in some cases. You are denied due process by the regulators.

[ Scott ] Well this... this is true. And, of course, you began, I think, Rush, with talking about these armed onslaughts by the state against individuals.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The incident down in Waco, Texas now and the Weaver family in Idaho.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Of course, the... the Waco, Texas thing is not yet over as we are discussing it tonight. Ordinarily if you know that somebody has violated a... a fire arms act, you could serve them with a warrant without going to the extent of 60 men in armor and heavy guns themselves mounting an assault against the residents. You would think that is a very strange way to serve a legal paper.

I am very uneasy about both of these incidents, not only because of the violence used by the authorities and the deaths that have ensued from both instances and the fact that in one instance the warrant was being served for a misdemeanor. I don’t know what the category of the second in the Waco thing is concerned. But it has given rise to a big blast against people owning guns at all. And also there is a sort of a ... a fall out against Christianity. They are talking about cults. They don’t define a cult. And they obviously this fellow is not a rationale man, but they are not saying that he is irrational. What they are saying is that he is a fundamentalist out of control.

Now the word fundamentalist has become a pejorative. What does it mean? It means an orthodox Christian, really.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the word cult, of course, today is enough to damn any group. However the word cult basically means worship. You can speak of the cult of the sacred heart of Jesus, the cult of the virgin Mary. And in both protestant and Catholic dictionaries the word means worship. But today it is given an ugly meaning. And we are told that we today are enlightened and prior to our time intolerant Christianity prevailed. And yet in the last century when the Church was the dominant cultural force you had groups that were Atheistic and Communistic, the various colonies that Robert Owen and various of the Transcendentalists were a part of. You had the Oneida colony of Noyes. Sexual freedom was what they were proclaiming. You had a host of such groups all over the country. You had in what is now Sequoia National Park in the last century a group that was at least socialistic if not communistic. And it was one of a number of groups from coast to coast...

[ Scott ] Yeah, well, we used to have a lot of eccentrics. Eccentrics were almost as numerous her as they are in Britain.

[ Rushdoony ] Do you remember the house of David movement?

[ Scott ] Oh, indeed. Those baseball players with the long muffs and...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Of course.

[ Rushdoony ] There were several groups that were found to be indulging in very off beat activities.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] And yet the authorities lean over backwards until there was something thoroughly criminal. The tolerance was amazing.

[ Scott ] Well, it is hard to say whether they went after that group in Waco, Texas, because they were off beat Christians or whether they had guns or what. But in any event the way that they went at it has been a nightmare.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] People have been killed. And, of course, the attackers have been killed and they have suddenly developed a great deal of patience.

[ Rushdoony ] You remember back in the 20s there was this city created by—I have forgotten his name—one man and it was called Zion.

[ Scott ] Rutherford, wasn’t he?

[ Rushdoony ] No, no. Rutherford was Jehovah’s Witnesses.

[ Scott ] That was Jehovah’s Witnesses, yes. He used to put up a box in front of the cathedral and start talking about the horror of Rome.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But this group in Zion was really far out. And nobody bothered them. They allowed them to create their village which became a city and to continue their activities. And now we have taken them to the court because the city seal has something about God in it. And the Supreme Court has ruled against them. So our supposedly tolerant era is the most intolerant in American history.

[ Scott ] Well, we are... we are being pressed into a corner and it is interesting to watch. Some groups are not. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech if you want to call it that, is certainly enjoyed by the black community.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is the white Christian community that does not enjoy freedom of speech.

[ Rushdoony ] It is the lawless black community.

[ Scott ] The lawless black. Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The Christian black community...

[ Scott ] ... is silent.

[ Rushdoony ] It is under fire from the lawless black community.

[ Scott ] Well, the Christian black community is like the white black ... the white Christian community. It is mainly not heard.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But so we have intolerance in areas, certain areas. We have ... it is almost Orwellian.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Pigs are pigs, but some pigs are better than others.

[ Murray ] Well, the press doesn’t seek out responsible spokesmen from the responsible black community or the responsible white community. They only go for the... the... you know, the Maxine Waters and the Jesse Jacksons and ... and ... and throw the spotlight on, you know, some screw ball like the guy down in Texas. I mean that is ... that is all that the press puts out. So the general population thinks that is all there is.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, you know that it is contagious. You know that violence evokes violence, that eventually Germany and Austria both had armies in the street, private armies. They had the Communist army. They had the Nazi army. In ... in Vienna and in Austria they had similar armies. People begin to band together and the ... the history of democracies has been of increasing crimes against property and increasing disorder and increasing rise of demagogues. They... so far we are going down the classic path.

[ Rushdoony ] During the Renaissance, not only the noblemen, but well to do businessmen had private armies.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] They did not dare venture into the street without 20 or 40 men depending on the place.

[ Scott ] Well, the... it goes all the way back to Babylon when the rich had hired beaters who used to beat the crowd away when they walked down the street. We didn’t have police in ... until Britain had set up regular police under Sir Robert Peale. Until then wealthy people had body guards and if you didn’t have a body guard you had a nice long knife of your own and you had clubs. The poor men carried a club. All the other men carried a cane or a sword cane. So you defended yourself.

But we have here the weary business of escalating violence in the streets while the government wants to disarm the citizenry.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it has no love for the citizenry and it wants them helpless, apparently, because nothing else makes sense.

Well, we will continue to be helpless until me come back to biblical law and to a strong Christian faith.

The state is powerful today because Christians are weak and terrorists command countries today because there are not enough godly men ready to act and to take over the government by means of self government and applying God’s law in their spheres.

I believe we are not going to come out of this crisis by anything the state does, because the state is a part of the problem, nor any legislation, nor any increase of the policing power however much it may in some areas be needed and in others definitely not.

We are only going to come out of it by a return to a biblical faith, a return to the lordship of Christ, a return to a recognition that God’s law alone provides justice.

I believe anything short of that is going to leave us in more trouble than we already have.

Well, since our time is nearing an end, why don’t we go around and each one say something by way of conclusion. Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, one of the common denominators that I see in all of the social groups in the United States since they employ a particular set of techniques is that they all seem to be Marxist driven, whether it is the environmental movement or any of these other movements that seek so called social justice when, in effect, they want more than equal treatment. And, you know, people need to take a look at that and evaluate that for what it is on its face. But you are right. There is no other viable option and people have got to stop looking to government to solve their problems. That is how we have gotten ourselves in this tremendous debt that we are in and it is a debt that apparently there is no ... there is no end to it. It is spiraling out of control with no end I sight. And it is going not destroy this country.

[ Scott ] Well, the thing that killed Rome in the end was that it lost control of its economics. It lost control of its national ethos. And it lost control of its purpose. Now we appear to be heading rather well toward an economic crisis. An economic crisis, by the way, was what brought on the French Revolution. The government had collapsed. The people were still rich. The upper bourgeoisie and the aristocracy became, you might say, Socialist. And Socialists are... Socialism must be operated under compulsion, because it goes against human nature and it goes against the people.

In the end they wound up with Napoleon. In the end the Romans ended up with a series of Napoleons. So far that has been the classic history of the end of democracy because no matter how you slice it, the mob cannot run a country.

[ Rushdoony ] Rome also lost control of the army.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Because the army made more and more demands so that there were so many rules and regulations that it was not an army that could function anywhere at any time.

[ Scott ] Well it lost coherence.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And this, in the end, is what happens. It becomes... you have an incoherent society.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And one of our first tasks, I guess, and we do it to an extent in the Easy Chairs and in our writings. We try to bring coherence back to the situation.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, I would only say that in many ways we have already yielded to terrorism out of necessity. There are places we don't go, parts of town we... we don’t go into. We lock our cars. We lock our doors at night. We changed our behavior as a society. There are situations where we don’t go into a store if the wrong type of people happen to be about. So our whole society has, in effect, yielded to the ... the threat of terror or the threat of violence.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and it is interesting that many teachers and students in the state schools admit that they are afraid when they go to school and that it would be stupid if they were not. That is one of the effects of creating terror.

[ Scott ] Yes. Making people afraid.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, we live in difficult times, but men have lived in more difficult times more than once. The problem is there is never any progress when people sit back and wait for someone to do something about it. Progress and a solution only comes when men under God take steps to alter the nature of men and society. This is a slow way and that is why terrorists are so dangerous. They want a quick solution to everything. They are going to demonstrate. They are going to kill. And Utopia is supposed to come in, but it doesn’t.

There is no solution apart from that which is in our hands as Christians.

Well, thank you all for listening. God bless you and guide you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.