From the Easy Chair

War

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 158-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DD198

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DD198, War, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 308, February the eighth, 1994.

Mark Rushdoony, Otto Scott and Douglas Murray and I will now be discussing the subject of war.

Now war is the means nations use when diplomacy fails, which is an interesting fact, because one wonders sometimes with diplomacy as devious as it has become, why there aren’t more wars. Certainly brinkmanship is practiced far and wide the world over. We live in a time now when the threat of war is very real. We face all over the world a decline in the economies of nations. And this is an incentive for heads of state to seek an out through war, to create an external enemy that will brig people together, create an artificial stimulus to the economy and make it possible for them to duck the crisis.

Butt her is another factor, too. In modern times one of the greatest means of advancing Socialism has been warfare. During a war a vast number of regulations are imposed upon the economy and upon the people so that every segment of life is controlled. Those controls do not disappear when the war is over. Some do, but a great many remain. It is hard for people who, unlike Otto and myself, are old enough to remember the world before World War II, who much more freedom there was at that time. A war is as Lenin recognized, perhaps the most important form of revolution, because it accomplishes what it takes a revolution a long time to do. It spreads the state’s powers into every area of life and thought. And it does it from a position of cooperation on the part of all these groups, all these segments of a nations life in the name in the name of fighting the enemy.

[Scott] It is your duty to obey.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It becomes your duty to obey in your own execution as far as your freedom is concerned.

[ M Rushdoony ] And on the international scale when nations cooperate in wars that control and that influence extends beyond your own borders, beyond your own people to try to establish a world of their own making. I think that is what the whole... the new world order is all about in an attempt of nations or... it is like the old balance of power. We will cooperate with you, if you will cooperate with us. And we can control things internationally as well as within our own borders that way.

[ Scott ] Well, that is true. We keep telling people now that the United States is the only remaining super power. And we are expanding American law internationally. That is what we did when we took the dictator of Panama from his own country and flew him up here and put him on trial for violating American law outside the United States. He wasn’t a citizen of the United States. He wasn’t living in the United States. We held him guilty of violating the American law in his own country and put him in prison.

Israel began that when they brought Eichmann in and kidnapped Eichmann in Argentina and put him on trial for violating Israeli law at a time when Israel didn’t exist which is quite a feat of ... of logic. One can understand it emotionally as an act of vengeance, but we cannot understand it legally because, of course, it wasn’t legal.

Now to expand our laws beyond the limits of the United States’ sovereignty of this country, money laundering, which is not a law in Switzerland because nobody has quite defined it for me. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it means engaging in financial transactions or commercial transactions without having the government present as a third party. In effect, that is money laundering.

We are applying that now in Switzerland and so forth and I have a book I haven't yet had a chance to look at called Cops Across the Borders. I remember when I was last in Caracas—and that was a long time ago. It was in the 50s that we had more FBI men in Caracas than anyone wanted to mention and they were... they were stationed there. And of course, they are supposed to be a domestic police force, but, nevertheless, they were outside the country.

So we have what we have gone into is almost the state of barbarianism, barbarism. We have skipped past the Christian centuries when there was an effort to limit the damages of war to soldiers and to keep women and children out of the area of action and also to limit a war to an official war which was declared between countries and then a peace would be declared and then a peace treaty would be signed. Now we have wars that erupt or are launched without warning. We have peace that is not peace. We have what you might say Orwell’s perpetual war for perpetual peace, always in the name of peace. The United States always fights in the name of peace.

[ Murray ] One of the greatest problems for politicians is timing a war so that they can keep themselves in office. Mr. Roosevelt did that and {?} tried it and now Mr. Clinton is going to try it. I believe he is holding off in intervention in Yugoslavia or what used to be Yugoslavia and try to get it as close to his reelection as possible so that he can declare himself indispensible to the country.

[Scott] Well, Mr. Nixon did that. He diminished our participation in Vietnam very slowly so that it finally ended in the peace treaty just when he began to campaign for reelection. I will always think that he delayed it four years for that reason. He didn’t have the nerve to declare peace and to pull out and he didn’t have the nerve to go ahead and win. So that was the way he managed that.

But the business of not having any rules on international levels reduces us back to the pre Christian era. There is no rules now at all either of war or peace and in war all rules have been abandoned. We killed, what, 150,000 Iraqis and we still have the sanctions against them. I understand that tens of thousands of children have died there of malnutrition. We have not lifted the sanctions against Iraq yet. It was a very popular engagement, because we didn’t lose very many people. If we had lost a lot of people it would have been a very unpopular war. If Mr. Clinton gets us in war in Yugoslavia and sends American troops to Yugoslavia he will find himself in a firestorm ala anti Vietnam that he should know better than anybody else. He shouldn’t… he should arouse.

[ Rushdoony ] I mentioned Lenin’s theory that war is the best form of revolution. If we look at our own history we can see that. The United States changed greatly after 1860. For one thing the very name, the United States previously, previous to Lincoln took a plural verb, the United States are... After Lincoln it was the United States is… Because instead of being a collection of states it became a unified nation because the federal government now clearly outweighed all the states.

[ Scott ] Yes. The federal government became superior.

[ Rushdoony ] And it was a major step in the centralization of power. The next two major steps, of course, were taken by Woodrow Wilson and then by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, World Wars I and II.

Well, it is interesting that after 1860 the major problem the South had was a growing hostility to its own government. Jefferson Davis is very popular in the South now. He was not during the war. And Alexander Hamilton Stephens, a great vice president of the Confederacy was very close to treason in criticizing the tremendous drift to centralization. In fact, in his work which is, according to Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Lore and Wilson was certainly not a conservative, the greatest classic, the only true classic on Constitutionalism ever written, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, two fat volumes which are the best reading anyone can do on the Constitution.

Well, when Jefferson Davis instituted the draft as a part of the centralization because he was like the northern government thinking in terms of centralization as the best means of doing things. The southerners who up to that point had been standing in line to volunteer were heading for the hills in some instances rather than be drafted, because that was not what they were going to fight for.

In New York, of course, they had the draft riots which came close to burning down the whole city. Now Lenin knew these things. That is why he recognized that war is the best form of revolution. And we have lost our freedom with the big and little wars of this century. So we do have a very, very serious problem I that people are easily swept away by patriotism. I was amazed up here in the mountains where people are not particularly political, where state and federal governments are a long ways away from us, when the Gulf War began how many bumper stickers were visible. We support our troops and that sort of thing. We are being swept downstream by a tide of centralization and Statism which is going to take all our freedoms away if we don’t make a stand.

[ Scott ] I was attending a Philadelphia Society meeting in Baltimore when the Gulf War business began. And it put me into a regular temper. I don’t have any liking for war at all and nobody who has ever been through a war ever wants to see another. And all these conservatives around me were bubbling over with Patriotism and it became quite a bitter dispute.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In fact, some of them have not spoken to me since. And Forrest Mac Donald, historian, got up an gave a speech about the expedition to Tripoli in the early 19th century to put down the Barbary Pirates and I had to tell him that there was a lot of difference, because the Barbary Pirates were raiding American shipping and the Iraqis had not done anything to us. And I saw a considerable difference.

Now, of course, the government of the United States and the people of the United States have rescued that wonderful sultanate away from Iraq and a lot of good it has done us. We ... we... we spent an awful lot of money and effort in this. We wouldn’t be able to do it again today. But the drift that you are talking about is even worse because now we are sending our boys overseas under the UN and under foreign generals.

Now General Pershing refused to put American troops under the French. He said, “I will direct my own troops and they will not come under the allied command.” In World War II our... we finally got around that by putting Eisenhower in charge of everybody, but the United States up until today, up until... I would... I guess we could say Bush who went in with the UN and now we are going to go in under the UN. Now that is a world government.

[ Rushdoony ] I think and it may not be in our lifetime, but a true story of what is going on in old Yugoslavia by the UN forces is told. It will be a racket, a scandal that will stagger the people, because those military leaders are there without the supervision of their own countries which would be some check on what they are doing. They are there under the UN. And the UN does not feel any responsibility to the member nations. It feels it is a world power in its own right and it is beyond criticism, really. So I believe that a great deal of the armament will find its way into the international armament trade, the black market. I believe the generals will come out of it very, very rich. I believe they know that there is no check on what they do of any real sort so that they want to prolong things there as long as possible to have all kinds of materials going in which they can dispose of. There is a world wide problem there.

And I would be surprised if the same thing did not happen in Somalia and wherever we have UN troops. We have them all over the world now. American troops are on every continent and most people don’t know it.

[ Scott ] Well, what interests me about the Yugoslavian situation is that, first of all, Turkey controlled these people in the Balkans for 400 years. They were under the Muslim and they don't want to be under the Muslims again. And they don’t want the Muslims that are there to stay there. They think they should go back to Turkey, go back to the center of Mohammadism.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] The... the ... for the United States press to decide that it wants to go war in favor of the Mohammadens, the Muslims of the earth, is absolutely mind boggling. The Turks are giving the Germans all kinds of trouble. They are giving the French all kinds of trouble. They are giving NATO all kinds of trouble because they we want to be included into NATO. And yet wherever they have settle there are ancient enmities. There Serbs and the Bulgarians... the Buglars and the others, the Hungarians, the rest, want to be free of that.

[ Rushdoony ] The Bosnian and other Moslems are not Turks. They are under Turkish leadership in many instances. And Turkey is the one that is muddying the waters there, but they are native peoples who to avoid the vengeance of the Turks converted whereas all their compatriots did not. So that is a double thing. They are ...

[ Scott ] They are the ones...

[ Rushdoony ] Related.

[ Scott ] They are the ones...

[ Rushdoony ] They are the renegades.

[ Scott ] They are the ones who surrendered.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I have grave doubts about whether or not such disparate religious religions can live together in harmony. Historically they have not. Every single civilization that has attempted to put such disparate people together has failed. Now this is something that you are never taught in school. Spain... the Spaniards struggled against the Ostrogoths and they struggled against the Moors for over 500 years and they finally got rid of them. And the Roman Empire tried to put together everybody in the world and couldn’t, because everyone in the world does not fit together.

This is a very unfashionable thing to say. I mean, my wife said to me one day, “Well, if people were all going to integrate, why haven’t they done it by now? We have all been on earth all this time. How come integration hasn’t taken place on its own?”

[ Rushdoony ] It only takes place and it has historically at times where there is an economic, religious and educational parity among them.

[ Scott ] It took the Normans and the Saxons of England 500 years to integrate and they began with the same religion and the same color.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It was not easy and even in Cromwell’s day there were popular agitators who were criticizing the leaders of the country as Normans.

[ Scott ] Yes. Yes. It took hundreds of years for them to stop using French.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And among the common people there were evidences that long, long after into this century they spoke affectionately of old Noll, that is Oliver Cromwell, because he was not one of those Normans.

[ Scott ] Very old family, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. So it is hard to eliminate those things. With a common religion it is easier. Perhaps the best example of any coming together of peoples is the Catholic Church. You find among the Catholic parishes a coming together of a variety of peoples who normally would not, because they do it in terms of a very strong common faith. Now that has worked until lately.

[ Scott ] It worked in Latin America. They didn’t have to have reservations for the Indians. They married the Indians. They integrated with the Indians and they had one faith and Catholicism in terms of the Spanish version of Catholicism in Latin America has never received its true credit.

[ Rushdoony ] That is true. But in this country and the major metropolitan centers, the, say, Latins and Nordics who came together routinely married.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Simply because of their strong common Catholic faith. That is now breaking down because as the Catholic Church has gone liberal the groups are going back to their roots.

[ Scott ] Well, the Protestants of the United States integrated well.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...despite the different denominations. For what? A hundred and 20 years, let us say, up until the New Deal.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Let me...

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Murray ] Let me ask a question. Is there an alternative to war?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, diplomacy has been the alternative that fails and then war ensues. Now one of the great alternatives that the medieval church developed was the truce of God. Not much is written about it, but basically what it did was to say the church told the peoples that they were not to wage war on the sabbath and on certain given days. So they limited the times they could war. During holy week and other times, no fighting.

This mean there was a possibility, then of working to resolve the conflict. This does not mean that the lords and kings always paid attention to the truce of God. Sometimes they violated it brutally. But the point is it was there. And it did work a good deal of the time so that it was a restraint on people and when broken they knew they were violating a fundamental premise and had the wrath of the Christian community.

[ Scott ] I think there is another very big point which you brought up indirectly and that is that the wars then were fought by volunteers.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] All through Middle Ages they were volunteers who fought. They were not drafted. The draft came in with the modern era.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The draft came in with the American Civil War.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the French Revolution...

[ Scott ] With the French Revolution had draft.

[ Rushdoony ] And then we adopted the French Revolution’s idea.

[ Scott ] Yes. Then the draft is what has changed the whole nature of war.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The great crime over the United States government in Vietnam was not entering Vietnam because it entered with a good cause. The crime was drafting boys to go there and then not allowing them the military to win. And the secondary crime was in sparing all the university boys who then had the nerve to protest against the war.

[ Murray ] All the... if what we are saying is that, you know, we have got a group of tribes here on earth that can’t seem to get along. You know, if we are all created by God why can’t we live together in harmony? Are we inherently tribal?

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, the family, the clan or tribe, that is still basic in most of the world and it is a pattern that reasserts itself in time even in areas that become very cosmopolitan, because when you make life too impersonal, people rebel against that.

[ Scott ] New York was a very reasonable city when we had an Irish neighborhood, a German neighborhood, a Spanish neighborhood, et cetera. And we... well, we are ... we up to... we marry congenial people. We associate with congenial people. It isn’t actually a certain distance allows for toleration, whereas familiarity, somebody once said, is contempt. In the case of people who are very dissimilar, they have reasons for arguing become very common and numerous because their reactions are different. And very unexpected.

I remember once I had a fellow of a... of a different group, a different ancestry and everything else and so forth and I wanted to get something out of the closet and I opened the closet door and happened to be... have a number of suits. He said, “I realize you have lots of suits.”

He thought I was showing off and I was astonished. And you could ... you could repeat that sort of surprise in dealing with other cultural individuals around the clock.

[ Murray ] When we... we don't seem to progress to the point when the family of man is achievable. We only extend our family groups so far to a tribe and we can’t get beyond that...

[ M Rushdoony ] Ends up that the big guys dictating to the little guys.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] That is one of the problems in the Balkans. For 200 years they have been dominated by the ... the large empires around them, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the British wanted their railroad.

[ Rushdoony ] And the Germans.

[ M Rushdoony ] ... to go through.

[ Murray ] Maybe the...

[ M Rushdoony ] The Germans, excuse me, Berlin to what was it?

[ Rushdoony ] Baghdad.

[ Murray ] Maybe you just...

[ M Rushdoony ] The railroad...

[ Murray ] ...stumbled on... on the answer is get rid of all the politicians.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto, you wanted to say something about Tribalism.

[ Scott ] Yes. There is an effort to deny that there are tribes. There is even an effort to deny that there are nationalities or people as such, that there are... that there are Celts, that there are Saxons, Anglo Saxons that... that there are Mêlées, that there are Germans or French or Spaniards. There is an effort to say that all cultural differences are on the surface, are trivial and unimportant and that everybody basically is the same, which comes very close to arguing that everyone is an integer, like a number that you can shuffle back and forth and that we are not real personalities, we don’t represent separate cultures or individual cultures even.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think Tribalism is as natural to people as is the family. There is an instinctive drawing together with those who are close to you as against the outsider. I know that although it has been 19 years since we lived in Los Angeles, the various parts were like villages. And each had its character and you had an opinion about people who came from another area, not that it was hostile, but that you figured they were of a particular character.

There are counties in California where if you are an outsider you are a really cut out of things, because they have generations of having shared a common background. And this you can find all over the country.

[ Scott ] Of course.

[ Rushdoony ] We cannot destroy it. It is something that is basic to people. They want to feel common ties.

[ Scott ] Aren’t we all creatures of God?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And aren’t all families creatures of God? And aren’t nations creatures of God?

[ Murray ] Well, we don’t seem to be able to get past the... the ... the tribal stage. I mean we ... we accept the tribe... the tribal group as the extended family.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Murray ] When we get to the nation part, the next step, we can’t seem to...

[ Scott ] Well let’s take Great Britain which is closer to my knowledge and ... and familiarity. My people came from the British Isles and I remember the first time I went to Britain I was astonished to discover that everybody looked as though they were cousins. They looked very much alike. During the war I used to go ashore in a blue suit and a white shirt and a conservative tie. The first time I went ashore during the war and I was in a saloon bar and somebody sent me a drink. You know, so much... oh, great, you know, who... what.... why this?

And then another drink came. And it turned out that veterans were ... wounded veterans or sick veterans that were let out of the hospital in Britain during the war wore a blue suit, a white shirt and a conservative tie. And as long as I kept my mouth shut I could pass.

So I looked like everybody’s cousin, too, over there. And the same is true in Ireland and Scotland and with the English.

Well, the French have been in France forever. I mean all of them can trace their families back for hundreds of years and all of us can and ... and every country no matter where you come from, Rush’s family goes back forever and they have always been Armenians. And yet we keep listening not a group of educated sophists who keep trying to tell us that this is unimportant.

[ Murray ] Well, this, you know, this country is 200 years old yet you can drive down the street and see bumper stickers on people’s cars that say, “I am an Italian and proud of it.” Or “I am Indian and proud of it.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yeah.

[ Murray ] You know, people are still proclaiming themselves as members of groups that they no longer have any connection with.

[ Scott ] Well, this is not a very good sign when they do that.

[ Rushdoony ] Various scholars have called attention—most recently Dr. Ivan Browning—that when you have a time of international crisis you have a fragmenting of nations and people returning to their roots and there was a tremendous fragmentation after World War I. Instead of a handful of nations in Europe you had a multitude of nations. After World War II the Soviet Union seized a great many of these areas, but they have been seeing a fragmentation since then.

And as the crisis deepens, if these thinkers are right, and I believe they are, the fragmentation will continue. You have independence movements in Spain, in France, in Britain and elsewhere.

[ Scott ] The empires... what remains of the empires... we forget that Spain was an empire and we forget that France is an empire. They are now breaking up.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And you have some reputable scholars, not that I can understand why, who are ready to say before it is over the United States may fragment into several nations.

[ Murray ] Well, this is a like a perpetual tug of war. You have periods of epics in history where countries break apart into ethnic groups or along religious lines, whatever, as we are seeing in Yugoslavia and then you have other periods where a dictator will come along and for some ... for no other reason, apparently, than that he wants to have power over a larger group of people and more territory all of the sudden there is this big push to consolidate all of these fractional groups and it goes back and forth and it never ends.

[ Scott ] Well, you have centralization and decentralization in every corporation. They alternate. First they decentralize and let their branches flourish. And then they get out of control so they centralize again. And you have these clusters, ethnic clusters. You have the Scandinavians in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Germans and generally Scandinavians who settled in North Dakota and... and Minnesota and Wisconsin, Germans in Wisconsin. You have up here in Calvares County you have old Italian families who are the... the managers of this county.

[ Rushdoony ] And in the county north of us, Serbs.

[ Scott ] Serbs. North of here.

[ Rushdoony ] Overwhelmingly.

[ Scott ] Always so. And these are inescapable concatenations of people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We have now a professoriate who want to break that up. They want to import black people into Idaho because they say they don’t have enough black people. Well, what is enough? And why should they be imported?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, such thinking would say we have to have, in terms of the general population, this percentage in each state of every race of nationality which is idiocy.

[ Scott ] Well, it destroys the natural unification of the country.

[ Murray ] The community. It destroys the community.

[ Scott ] It destroys the community. It destroys cohesion. Well, under Eisenhower we began to cancel and put down our national forts which had existed in the country from the founding of the country. Some of them began as forts against the Indians and they continued. And it is now, of course, reaching a final stage. But that got started under Eisenhower, under the idea of efficiency.

And I talked to a young reporter at that time and the oversees press club who had just come back from a presidential press conference and he said he couldn’t understand the objection because it was such an obviously good thing to do. And I said, “Well, actually the people around those fortifications through the centuries, through the decades were army people, army, navy and marine people through the generations. When you break up the fortification you break up those families, the livelihood and you break up the continuity of the military which is a hell of a lot more efficient than if ... to me it is more important... it is more significant than efficiency, because it gets down to the soul of the military.”

He said, “I didn’t think of that. You are right.”

[ Murray ] You also have successive generations.

[ Scott ] That is what we mean.

[ Murray ] Oh, in the military.

[ Scott ] So when you break up communities, you break up what the sinews, the heart and soul of the country. And we are now in a position where people are almost... they no longer call themselves Americans.

[ Murray ] Do you think this is a conscious effort on the part of academia to achieve some end or do they just don’t know any better?

[ Scott ] I think they are stupid. I think the are educated beyond their common sense. And it sounds good.

[ Rushdoony ] The Enlightenment began to talk in terms of what we now call the family of man, in terms of Internationalism. Emmanuel Kant wrote on the subject. It became the ideal of the unaffiliated intellectual who regarded himself as a man of the world.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] We have that phrase now, but we have forgotten what it means. If you are a man of the world your loyalty is not to your family or nation, it is the to the world. And for a long time our politicians and our academicians have seen themselves as men of the world. So they have had a loyalty to nothing except a remote idea which becomes more and more remote with each passing year, because precisely as continents like Asia and Africa developed their independence, they are more and more hostile to the international community. You have a return to Tribalism. You have conflict between a variety of peoples in each of those continents. There is a dimension here, too, that we must deal with. When you are dealing with the subject of war, you are dealing with sin. And sin is a chronic condition of fallen man.

So that men want t heir way. They believe that wisdom was born with them and will die with them. They believe that they are in the right and everyone else is wrong.

Over the years I have seen people in the Church and out of the Church be caught in some flagrant offense, outright stealing or other sins. And yet when you talk to them, they are perfectly assured that, yes, I did that, but I am more in the right than they are. So that they can vindicate anything, anything.

Well, that is the way of the sinner. He is his own God, his own source of law.

Now you have had eras of peace in history and they have been times when there has been a strong Christian faith and an insistence on Christian premises. When that wanes you have the rise of both Internationalism and war. This has been the most internationally minded century in all of history. It is, by the count of left wing scholars themselves, the bloodiest century in all of history when a higher percentage of mankind has died as a result of war, famine, mass executions and so on so that Internationalism and terror, brutality, horrors go together. And we are living in such a time.

[ Scott ] Well, let’s go back to Doug’s comment about whether these people are intelligent or not, whether they are serious or not. The beginning of the break with the family comes when most of these fellows went to the university.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I remember reading in the 50s or... or earlier. I think the 30s, began reading in the 30s books by the second generation Americans who went to the university and who became alienated from their families by the things that they learned in college. They no longer fit when they went home with the old folks whose English was still imperfect and whose ideas the college and the university had thrown away. And this was not true across the board, but it was true in a great many of the books that appeared. And I remember reading those books with great interest. And, of course, today we have millions of such people who when they meet you don’t ask you where you came from or who your father was. They ask you where you went to school. They were born in school like Hillary Rodham Clinton. I mean all we know about there is that she went to college. And they emerge from the college with these abstractions, with these new religious political ideas. You might say that they are political religions in which everybody is the same, everybody should be the same. Everybody should be on the same level. Of course, they don’t burn their diploma because it allows them to enter a professional group. But then they become know as their profession. And there is no nationality in a profession.

I remember dealing with various corporations whose scientists, whose researchers really didn’t even know what the company did, whether it profited or lost. They were only interested in attending a convention or a group of their associate members and they would move from company to company irrespective of any loyalty or anything else, because their profession meant more than the corporation or their associates. This is what we are dealing with when we get down to it. Such alienated individuals ... individuals alienated from human values become automatons for an authoritarian government. This is where the atomic bomb came from.

[ Rushdoony ] You put your finger on the heart of the matter, Otto. I was at the University of California at Berkeley for a number of years. I enjoyed both as an undergraduate and a graduate the library. I very early through a professor who was indulgent gained stack privileges so that I could go and browse endlessly and spend half a day, day after day among those millions of books.

I loved it, but there was one aspect that horrified me and I would usually drift off or just sit quietly in the background when students, conservative or leftist, Jewish, Christian or Atheist would talk about their parents. They seemed to regard that their fathers and mothers were jokes. They picked that up almost immediately in coming to the academic community and they would vie with each other at times at stories about their parents which horrified me, coming as I did, from a very strongly familistic culture. This is why I have over the years told parents if there is a community college or junior college close by so that your student can go back and forth, send him there, because then you can still exercise a family influence over him. If he can go to the college or university that is close by, you are better off with one close by no matter how bad its reputation, because your child is still a part of the family.

[ Scott ] Day school is better.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And I feel very strongly about that, because the academic community regards the family as its enemy. It wants to depersonalize life. It wants to eliminate the family and the faith. The family and the Church are the two great enemies and this is nothing new. You can go back in literary history, for example, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the Romantic poet came out of his schooling with a radical contempt for family and church. And yet without his family he would have been nothing. He would have had no money, no means.

[ Scott ] Where do these kids get {?}

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] {?} Freud there with...

[ Scott ] Both did the same. Both did the same and both had bad relations with their fathers. And it is very interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have a major problem today because this total war that is being waged against family and church.

[ Scott ] Culture, you see, and background is all part of that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So it expands from there.

[ Rushdoony ] And too often the Church does not appreciate the significance of the family and that aggravates the problem. The home school is doing remarkable things here. I have been hearing from home schooled students who are 14, 15, 16. They write letters that college students can’t write.

[ Scott ] That doesn't surprise me in the least.

[ Murray ] Well, the social scientists are beginning to try to analyze why kids join gangs. And their answer is... is that they achieve an association in their community with the gang that they don’t have at home or anywhere else.

[ Scott ] Well, they have been segregated by age. So there is a difference now ... when I went to elementary school I skipped various years. I got through elementary school in six years, I think something like that. And that was after playing hooky for long periods.

[ Rushdoony ] Maybe they wanted to push you out.

[ Murray ] You just generated too much administrative paper work, Otto.

[ Scott ] But they don't... they don’t skip kids anymore because they feel that they belong in a certain age group.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Christian schools will.

[ Scott ] Christian schools will...

[ Rushdoony ] But not the... the… the state schools.

[ multiple voices ]

[ M Rushdoony ] {?} There is a lot of resistance among parents.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They are...

[ Scott ] Is there? They have been told that they shouldn’t be. Isn't that interesting?

[ M Rushdoony ] People are very confused. One of the problems we have in the world today is people don’t know what to believe and if they think they know what they believe they don’t know why. They come up with radically different ideas. They want academic excellence, but they don’t want the child to having homework. They want them to be able to play after school. And they have these contradictory ideas.

[ Scott ] Sort of...

[ M Rushdoony ] This is one of the greatest problems we have with parents, because they want contradictory things.

[ Scott ] They want excellence without study.

[ M Rushdoony ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, someone recently...

[ M Rushdoony ] That is what.... that is what Darlene and I were just discussing as we had a situation in school and that is what one of the parents is really asking. They want the excellence, but they don’t want the child to have to work for it.

[ Rushdoony ] The same thing has been found with regard to crime. The nation today is demanding harsher punishment, long term prison sentences, three times... three strikes and you are out. At the same time, these same people when they are on a jury are ready to believe the criminal is a victim.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And are soft hearted. And it is because there is a lack of any basic faith, a strong faith. So they are very, very wishy washy.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, nobody talks about the judges. And our judges are a standing disgrace to their profession. They are inconsistent. There is a trial going... two trials going on now in Texas. I detest Texas. There is no oxygen in the air.

[ Rushdoony ] There are more guns in Texas than anywhere else. So we need Texas.

[ Scott ] I don’t... I don’t... I don’t mind them having guns. I am all for that.

[ Murray ] Because of the methane gas. All those cows.

[ Scott ] Well said. It... but I must say. Texas has the most peculiar judicial system, I guess, in the civilized world or even the uncivilized world. You have 99 year sentences and 500 year sentences for stealing a cow and all kinds of stuff.

They have two trials going on now. They have the Waco trial and they have the trial of Mrs. Hutchinson, I think her name is, who as elected as a Senator...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And is immediately put on trial by the Democrats because they think it is a crime for a Republican to win an election. And the first... and the second... her trial should never have entered court. And the Waco thing, I understand, the jury was selected by the judge alone, not by the attorneys, the defense attorney or the prosecuting attorney. The judge selected the jurors. He questioned them in private. And I understand that most of them that he did select believe the in... private individuals should not have a gun.

[ Murray ] Well, that... that... Hoffa would... he went to prison for jury tampering and ... and John Gotti went to prison for jury tampering, but the judges and the attorneys, they seem to skate. They can... they can tamper with a jury and shape the jury’s corporate attitude towards the issue and yet they seem to get away with it.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Otto, I have got to say this. If we receive a lot of cancellations from our very wonderful friends in Texas, I am going to take it out of your paycheck.

[ Scott ] Well, there is... I have some friends in Texas, too, but I would be... I would be happy to argue the point with them. If they can do... if they defend their court system...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh.

[ Scott ] I don’t know how they are going to...

[ Rushdoony ] I... I wouldn’t defend any court system anywhere in the United States.

Well, our time is just about up. 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.