From the Easy Chair

Crime

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 170-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DL210

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DL210, Crime, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 322, September 9, 1994.

In this hour Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss the subject of crime.

One of the important aspects of the subject is that we understand what crime is. In every society that has ever existed, of which we have any knowledge, crime has been defined at the beginning of its history religiously. For us the biblical faith, biblical law defines crime. Crime is some kind of sin. This is what defines it. It is morally wrong in terms of the basic premises of God’s universe.

Well, as time passes in societies, the faith that undergirds its doctrine of crime wanes. Then crime becomes what the state says it is. When that happens then law breaks down. Crime increases and you have a civilization on the verge of a collapse because it has no longer any valid ground of defining criminality.

Well, of course, we are in such a phase. The Christian foundation of our culture has disintegrated. Now we have no real ground for calling anything crime except that a federal or state legislature has called something criminal. When you reach that stage, lawlessness proliferates and the culture is on the brink of a breakdown, a collapse.

Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, something just occurred to me. It was just about a generation ago, around 1960 that we still had part time legislature here in California and, I think, in most other states. And since then they have become full time professional politicians and full time professional legislators and California currently passes over 3000 laws every year every legislative session, most of which the legislators don’t even know what is in them. They do this late night, last night of the legislative session passing of laws that none of them have ever read. And they have codified all human activity.

If you were to sit down with a copy of Dearing’s copy of the penal code, you would be amazed at the ... how finely they have ground into dust every possible human activity and nuance thereof and passed laws governing all of those actions. There is virtually nothing that you can do... there is no human activity in any sphere that isn’t covered by a law that is on the books here in California.

[ Scott ] Well, you are talking about what is... what is called statutory law. They pass a statute governing certain activity. And if you don’t operate within the parameters of that activity then you are, technically speaking, committing a crime. That is only the beginning of our problem. Our problem is not simply the regulations or the statutes that we are governed by, but the collapse of the judicial system. What is going on in the courts is unbelievable. We have... we have trials that are... literally last for years... years. When English courts were admired, up until 1930 or so, a murder trial would last two days. If the judge... if an attorney repeated a question the judge would rebuke him, because he would say, “That has been answered. Don’t do that again.” And swift justice, although it may sound cruel, but swift justice is necessary. There is nothing just about convicting a man of multiple murders and bedding and feeding him and taking care of him for 12 years in the penitentiary before execution. That is the sort of thing we have.

We have, in effect, a mountain of law and inability to adjudicate it. We have the police placed in no higher status as witnesses than the accused. And we have also we have moved into a different area all together, something new in the West for many centuries, confiscation of property without trial, without conviction, without charge and also total confiscation of property after conviction. Now up until recently every offense had a definite penalty, so many years or so many months or so many weeks or days in jail, so much in fines. Now we are running into unlimited punishments in which entire families are wiped out. Over three million have gone through this process to date.

Now these are three million families. That is more than three million people. And even out of 250 million people this is an awful lot of people to be reduced to paupers because one of the members of the family, the father, let us say, is convicted of a crime or becomes the target of an accusation which is deemed sufficient to strip him of all his possessions. At the same time we have the FBI setting up a branch office in Moscow in order to work with the Russian police and we have other branches of our government making concordats or treaties. Under pressure our government is leaning on other governments to eliminate limits on extradition for people evading taxes and all sorts of other offenses committed in the United States or elsewhere. In other words, the American legal authorities now want to operate anywhere in the world, much as Israel considers itself free to operate anywhere in the world where they feel that the rights of an Israeli or a Jew, who is not even an Israeli, is involved. So we have moved into an era where the whole concept of law and sovereignty and individual rights is being transformed. It is almost evaporating before our eyes into dust.

[ Murray ] Well, Noriega was a case in point.

[ Scott ] Yes, indeed, he was.

[ Murray ] The leaders in Haiti are about to be.

[ Scott ] Well, Noriega was the head of a foreign state who was convicted of violating American law in another country.

[ M Rushdoony ] Ferdinand Marcos was the president of another country who was kidnapped by American forces.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ M Rushdoony ] And removed from the country.

[ Rushdoony ] And conditions are no better in the Philippines now than they were under Marcos.

[ Scott ] Oh, no. No. If anything worse.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They have a Mohamedan assault on Christians in the Philippines that is not being reported.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The greatest assault on Christians in the country is in the Sudan where over a million have been murdered.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Not a word by the same people who bleed for the Serbs, for... for the Bosnians.

[ Rushdoony ] Not the Serbs, the Bosnian Moslems.

[ Scott ] For the Bosnian... Bosnian... Bosnian Moslems.

[ Murray ] It is also happening, although it is not getting much press in western Australia.

[ Rushdoony ] The...

[ Scott ] The other major cities in Australia.

[ Rushdoony ] The Bosnian Serb patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church has said, quoting Dostoevsky, “Europe is always ready to bleed for the Turks rather than the Christians.”

[ Scott ] There is one other element which is not mentioned very often, but which I think is very important and that is the revival of torture by governments in this century. There are over 60 countries which now regularly practice torture. And in addition to that, there are many, many countries, and even more, who will incarcerate people without a charge and hold them indefinitely including England, including the United Kingdom, because Ulster, after all, is technically speaking a part of England. And the rule of law, therefore, has become something else. Here in the United States we have prosecutors who threaten individuals who are accused with first confiscation of all their property unless they join the police forces as informers in which case they are forgiven and turned loose. Now this is inherently a violation of ethics, both sides.

So when we talk about crime, we are living in a terrifying century. It is not just street crime. It is governmental crime...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... and street crime.

[ M Rushdoony ] And we are being increasingly defined as criminals by—you mentioned—statutory law. The regulatory law that you can’t escape, because it becomes so all encompassing. It comes to the full activities like farmers, ranchers, loggers. It starts to incorporate environmental law and it starts incorporating whole spheres of activity. So we are all under these regulations that define us if we do any activity, virtually as criminals.

[ Murray ] You can’t...

[ M Rushdoony ] There are...

[ Murray ] You can’t put a society under that kind of pressure for very long. It is a pressure cooker that is building up and you see people that are falling off the tailgate now who... who can’t take it and come unglued and it is... it is simply not a matter of if, it is a matter of when there is going not be a reaction to it.

[ M Rushdoony ] But... but the longer you wait to react, the deeper we are in a... in a pit and the longer it is going to take us to get back to real freedom and revive our culture.

[ Murray ] Well, the nature of the reaction is not going to be pretty. It is not going to be done at the ballot box.

[ Scott ] There are two issues of the Wall Street Journal recently, these last few days. One is an editorial regarding the situation in the Los Angeles area where the EPA regulations are ready to drop and to be applied. They estimate that it will disemploy anywhere from 500,000 to a million people in which airplanes going into LA are supposed to be limited and automobile usage is supposed to be limited and a variety of other strict environmental regulations are supposed to be applied.

Now that is the area upon which the whole economy of the state of California hinges and it is also the... a... a snake pit of ethnic difficulty.

[ Rushdoony ] I believe that the air quality in Los Angeles is no worse and often better than in Washington, DC and in New York City. I have flown enough to recognize that while there is a great deal of screaming about Los Angeles, it can be much worse in some areas of the east. I have never, never seen air quality as bad as in Washington, DC. You can smell the bad air. It is overwhelming.

Now the hostility to Los Angeles is because it became the center of the American economy rather than New York City in the northeast. So these laws that the EPA is pushing on southern California are ways of destroying the economy there. The economic basis of the world or center of the world is now the Pacific basin and Los Angeles has been very important to the whole of the Pacific basin. We are destroying it and we are destroying it for one reason. It has not right to out compete New York City and the northeast of the United States.

[ Murray ] Well, they have always been jealous of California. California is the sixth largest economy in the world and the eastern part of the United States has always hated California.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] And you feel that immediately when you go to the east coast.

[ M Rushdoony ] It was... as ... as large cities go for a long time it was one of the more affluent and more suburban oriented. And...

[ Scott ] It was a great suburb...

[ M Rushdoony ] It was easy to make Los Angeles feel guilty about something as nebulous as... as air quality. I don’t think if they had taken the same pressure and put it on New York, the people of New York would have felt embarrassed about their air quality or Detroit or Chicago.

[ Scott ] Well, New York stinks, literally.

[ Murray ] Well...

[ Scott ] The air smells.

[ Murray ] I have come to the conclusion that all of these things are Trojan horses. The... the spotted owl is a Trojan horse. The air pollution thing is a Trojan horse. The global warming is now become a joke. It is an obvious Trojan horse. The game here is to get control over every sphere of human activity and all of these rouses that they come up with to gain public sympathy such as for the owl, nobody wants to go out and kill owls. Nobody is against owls. In order to get a constituency that will go along with these rules, they have to find some object. It could be a teddy bear. It could be a koala bear. It could be anything. And it is... this is strictly a Trojan horse tactic strategy that is being followed.

[ Scott ] Well, these are all the EPA laws come under the category of... violating them comes under the category of crime.

[ M Rushdoony ] Oh, if... if... if you modify your carburetor you are a criminal.

[ Scott ] Well, if you sell a car to me without having a smog inspection and a brake and tire and carburetor and everything else inspected and approved today, you have committed a crime and so have I in buying the car from you in the state of California. It has to be done over. It has to be inspected as carefully as selling a house.

[ Murray ] Well, transferring a... a gun...

[ M Rushdoony ] And meanwhile while they are defining us increasingly as criminals in a more and more activity as ... a criminals, the Bill of Rights is constantly eroded. There is not one of the Bill of Rights that is still completely intact.

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] Except part of the first where it relates to the press.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Scott ] Well, for the time being.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the behavior of the press indicates that the press is afraid of the government also...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... because Mr. Clinton is not like Mr. Reagan and not like Mr. Nixon. Mr. Nixon knew he had enemies in the press, but the Kennedy brothers were going to move against their enemies in the press.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He was assassinated before he could complete his plan. But this administration has behind it a very dark past in Arkansas and the press has two things. First, they would love to get a job in the government and, second, they are afraid of the government. So the two ... the two feelings or positions prevent them from writing about Clinton candidly the way the British press is delightfully writing about him. They are getting even with us for all our dumping on their royal family by dumping on our royal family.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, hardly a royal family.

[ Scott ] Well, the equivalent. It is an electoral royalty somebody said years ago.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] It has some of that aspects.

[ Rushdoony ] There are {?}.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think the whole issue is a very, very broad one. Crime is now no longer something that is defined in terms of the 10 Commandments and very easily understandable. It is as broad as the earth. Anything the state by law or by regulation chooses to call a crime becomes a crime so that we have lost all sense of reality. It produces a fearfulness in a great many people. Businessmen know they can be and often are arbitrarily put out of business or fined for some ostensible violation which is not a real thing, but it is a shake down.

[ Murray ] Well, what... how do, you know, people ... I guess are so confused now about that law. You have got a situation where it is... it is own possible, legal for a woman to ride the subway in New York topless and yet they have outlawed topless bathing on a beach in California.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, they can only arrest them in the subways if someone complains.

[ Scott ] Oh? What... on what grounds would they complain? Ugliness?

[ multiple voices ]

[ M Rushdoony ] {?} a disturbance.

[ Scott ] That would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

[ Murray ] You know, the... the... what is a crime?

[ Scott ] A crime is what they say is a crime.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That is a key issue. Throughout Christian history men have known what good and evil are, what crime is in terms of the Bible. Medieval man, Reformation man knew this. In this country we knew it until Ralph Waldo Emerson came along and began to redefine all things. And his disciple, Friedrich Nietzsche denied the validity of good and evil.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] He said we must live beyond good and evil.

[ Scott ] The superior person is beyond good and evil. And we are now witnessing the lifestyles of superior people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Who are not being held accountable as the rest of us are.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] They don’t quite...

[ Rushdoony ] What...

[ Murray ] ...measure up as gods.

[ Rushdoony ] ...we have created is a generation that does not know what good and evil are.

[ Scott ] They don’t know, for instance, that you cannot cheat on an examination or lie in order to hold a job or lie in court. I understand now that perjury is habitual on the witness stand and that neither the courts nor the judge nor the prosecutor is surprised or does anything about it.

[ Murray ] They cheat in law schools.

[ Scott ] Yes. Yes. Dewey tells me—and he is a lawyer and a good one—that he will not accept the word of another lawyer. He wants it in writing.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ M Rushdoony ] Then the lawyer should become judged. But the crime is not defined by the statutes. It is defined by the judge. And that is why the... like a judge who decided, you know, when, you know, being topless on the subway was ... was... it could be considered a crime and when it couldn’t. It was one judge’s opinion.

[ Murray ] I suspect that he rides the subway to work.

[ Scott ] What happens when they go out of the subway?

[ Murray ] I don’t know.

[ Scott ] They put on a sweater.

[ Murray ] It is amusing, though, you know, the topless thing at the bathing at the beach they decided to defer enforcement until October, well, by that time it is ...

[ M Rushdoony ] I was browsing in a used book store at a book which... it was a little more than I wanted to spend for it. It was about odd laws. And the ... the memorable one I remember just from browsing at it, it was a state in the northern... one of the northern plains states. It was a law still on the books that it was against the law to dance the hoochie coochie with a circus worker.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I picked up yesterday and am reading a book about one of the celebrities in the world of the beautiful people in New York, a person who... a woman who grew up in affluence, in a mansion. But the fact that it was in a very choice area did not mean there was any absence of crime because there was an absence of morality. And she was raped at the age of six by a neighborhood boy.

Now the interesting thing to me was that there appears to be no indication whatsoever that at any point this very attractive young woman ever got any morality. And the result is he whole life, a brief one because she died of AIDS, was ever given to anything but trifles and to complaining about trifles and evil for her was things that at best we could call annoyances.

Now I find that to be a kind of parable of our time. It is as though for a sizable segment of our population somebody has just taken morality out of the picture, because neither in their homes nor their schools, nor their general associations is there any hint of morality.

[ Scott ] Or of its value.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And instead, their whole life focuses on trivia and the momental issues in their life are trivia. You look at such a person and realize she was more prominent than hundreds of thousands like her and you realize why we are in trouble as a country, why the world is drifting into a suicidal status.

[ Murray ] Well, Christianity is a direct threat to the power of the government to say what the law is. It is against the law to post the 10 Commandments in a school room...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ... so that children at least get some basic rules to live by. That constitutes just the existence of those 10 Commandments is a threat to the power of the state.

[ Rushdoony ] I was at a couple of trials in the 70s. I think... yes, mid or late 70s, early 80s involving the posting of the 10 Commandments. And it was interesting the state attorney who was defending the 10 Commandments had earlier been the state attorney trying to shut down the Christian schools of that particular state. Now I was very interested in that here was a man whose background was Humanism, who was so intense about persecuting—which it was—the Christian schools was fighting so intensely and doing so much research on the defense of the 10 Commandments. And I said, “Why is it,” when we were having lunch together, “that you are so intensely involved in the defense of the 10 Commandments?”

And he looked at me in surprise. He said, “Why, I hate to lose.”

[ Scott ] It is just that simple.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] It is a game.

[ Scott ] It is a game.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] With no other purpose or point.

[ Rushdoony ] No other purpose or point.

[ Scott ] Now the...

[ Rushdoony ] This was in the Bible belt, by the way.

[ Scott ] Yeah, ex.... ex Bible belt.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] One of the things that we lack and we used to have in the theater and in literature on crime was the misery involved in committing crimes, the misery of the life of a criminal. And it is now presented as something else.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Very good point.

The 1930s saw the glorification of gangsters, Otto, so that there is abundant verification for the point you made. James Cagney became famous for it. I recall in one film set in New York, what was it, 37th Street or 47th Street, something like that was the name of the film.

[ Scott ] Forty second, perhaps.

[ Rushdoony ] At any rate, there was this one theme song speaking of the women of easy virtue and the gangsters there side by side, there glorified, 42nd Street.

[ Scott ] Yes, 42nd Street.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That was the song.

[ Scott ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] They were glorified in the film.

[ Scott ] Yes, they were. And they were heroes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, now the thing has gone sideways into something else. The films have gone into Sadism.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I can’t stand it when I turn on TV to see another film of a man brutalizing a woman. And it happens time and time and time again they show this. Now what is not mentioned is that there is a war against women in reality.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...which this feeds.

[ Rushdoony ] That... that is a very important point. What the writers, Feminists, male and female are telling us is that until recently in Christian America, women were brutalized. They have actually claimed that—and it is fictitious—that a woman could be beaten with a stick of such a width.

[ Scott ] Nonsense.

[ Rushdoony ] It is a myth. Women were not beaten. It was against the law and it was against custom, customary law. If a man were known as a wife beater, other men in the community ... community took him out quietly, gave him a talking to and a beating in some form or another. But now there is a great deal of violence. Not only so we are told that violence against women is a masculine fact.

Well, a study not too long ago, which has not been publicized indicated that in lesbian relationships the dominant lesbian is very, very prone to beating up on the other woman.

[ Scott ] Many of the battered women’s shelters can tell you that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. But we are not told that in the literature of our time.

[ Scott ] Well, it is...

[ Rushdoony ] It is anti male.

[ Scott ] It is interesting that with all the psychiatrists and psychologists that we have, that the producers of these sadistic spectacles are never analyzed, are never held up for examination. In this latest natural born killers catastrophe that Oliver Stone has put out, it is described as a satire and previously the phrase used to be black humor to forgive what is revolting, open Sadism and hatred of people. And this is very interesting, because the film industry of Germany specialized in Sadism.

[ Rushdoony ] Rome did, too.

[ Scott ] And accustomed... accustomed the Germans to the idea that torture and violence is an ordinary part of life.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. We are given accounts of the middle ages as a time of torture when torture had been abolished because of Christian standards only to revive with the Renaissance.

[ Scott ] That is right. It was the professors who brought back Roman law.

[ Rushdoony ] It... yes.

[ Scott ] ...which... in which torture was customary in the latter centuries of the empire. Now up until then, you know, a Roman citizen was safe from torture so they tortured slaves and they tortured foreigners. But in the end they tortured everybody. And these movies and these arguments that men are naturally this way and so forth is a prelude to the use of torture in the United States by the legal authorities.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Just as the Israeli authorities use torture over the Palestinians and other countries do the same.

[ Rushdoony ] We are seeing the revival of torture the world over.

[ Scott ] Well, it is true.

[ Rushdoony ] As Christianity recedes in one country after another, the protection once given to the law abiding citizen is gone.

[ Scott ] The law really is applied against the law abiding.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I think the criminal in court has more rights...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes...

[ Scott ] ... than the individual who is accused by a jealous neighbor of having marijuana in his home. And look at what this opens up. What is to stop the police from dropping a marijuana cigarette inside your house?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In former years we would be horrified at the very thought that the police could play such a role, but not today.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the situation is not going to alter until we get back a relevant Christian faith so that once again people know what good and evil are. Until then, the state will define it. You either have God defining good and evil or you have the state doing it. There is no other alternative.

[ Scott ] Well, the Christians are going to have to do something else. They are going to have to start telling the truth about circumstances and situations and what they see and what they know, because if a whole country joins in the lie of covering up for what is going on, then there is no way that it is ever going to be repaired and it is a crime for a Christian not to be honest.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And I believe it is a sin for churches to invite politicians to address them when they know these are not believers and they are immoral men.

[ Scott ] Well, what can you say about a Christian who gets up and speaks to a church, a Christian church and then puts on a mezuzah or whatever they call it and speaks then to a rabbinical group? What? What is this?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. We are seeing a contempt shown...

[ Scott ] For both.

[ Rushdoony ] For both, yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] A lot of Christians can tell because they don’t know ... a lot of church men don’t know because they don’t know what Christianity even teaches. They don’t know the Bible. They have gotten much from the pulpits so long. Clinton recently appeared in a church group. I forget what he was promoting, but a man afterwards said, “I didn’t realize he was a man of God.”

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I recall when Eisenhower was informed that he had been nominated for the presidency by the Republican convention, he was playing golf at the time and he swore and he said he would now have to start going to church.

[ Scott ] Did he really?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, you know, going back to the business of appearing before different groups, the orthodox rabbinical groups insist that the politician who comes and speaks to them shows them the respect of putting on the skull cap. They consider that if he comes in any other way they don’t want to hear him, but the Christians don’t draw any line and have forgotten that they have the right to have their standards respected by others equally. It is a very important point.

So when we talk about restoring the faith we have to restore, I would say, pride in the faith...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the pride of the faith.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Murray ] It is interesting...

[ Rushdoony ] We...

[ Murray ] It is an interesting contrast that the military turned their back on Clinton at some of the military functions, but church groups that ask Mr. Clinton speak don't turn their back on him.

[ Scott ] Well, I sometimes think that the worst thing that ever happened to the clergy in the United States was the tax exemption, because they are afraid of it. They are afraid of the government.

[ Rushdoony ] No. Tax exemption is totally biblical and it was the first battle between Rome and the Church.

[ Scott ] But it shouldn’t be used as an instrument to gag the clergy.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it hasn’t been so used yet. It is cowards who have been afraid to speak and have used that as an excuse.

[ Scott ] Well, that is an interesting distinction.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, a major church recently rejected an appeal by some of the clergy that they speak out against the homosexual approval of the... by Clinton, the approval of homosexuals. And there were those who said no, they might remove our tax exemption.

Now that was new. Heretofore no church has ever hesitated to be open in its condemnation. But first you have the acceptance of it by many of the churches and then the cowardice of the others.

[ Scott ] And then the excuse that their tax exemption is being threatened.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It is basically an excuse. They don’t want to be relevant.

[ Murray ] Every time anybody speaks out, though, the press is just like a pack of dogs. They are on it immediately. And you almost think that they have been sent there by somebody in the government.

[ Scott ] Well, dogs don’t have to be sent. They run by instinct. And they are dogs. Everyone else has been pushed out of the business. A real reporter couldn’t survive. And we look at the way Buchanan was abused and is abused. What has he ever said that is offensive? He spoke of a cultural war and any one who doesn’t know that there is a cultural war in this country must be blind and deaf and dumb. There is a multi cultural war. It isn’t just one side and two sides. It is a whole bunch of sides. And I am reminded of the collapse of the Russian government according to that diary kept by Goethe. He said, “How could a country so large and so rich collapse so quickly?” And then he said, “Well, on the other hand, we have been at war with each other for the last 75 years so I guess the collapse was reasonable.

[ Rushdoony ] Before the collapse, you had a series or things. First you had the students who in the second half of the 1800s were like our hippies. In fact, their method of dress, their method of ...

[ Scott ] The same.

[ Rushdoony ] ...demonstrating as the same. Then you had the novelists who questioned every kind of moral restriction. They ridiculed anyone who drew the line on certain types of sexual activity. Prior to World War I these writers dominated the culture.

[ Scott ] There was one other matter and that was the rise of crime.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Prior to World War I they had street gangs which committed their depredations in broad daylight. There were assassinations, wide spread assassinations of the bureaucracy. Crime was rampant. There were more murders proportionately that we have now and we have 23,000 a year. So every one of these symptoms of decay in Russia exist among us.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I think... I think the widespread crime is very sinister.

[ M Rushdoony ] I... I read in ... I believe it was Insight magazine that had an article on the state’s... emerging state’s rights. They talked about the inevitability of the spontaneous collapse of central power and they compared it to what happened in the Soviet Union. You are talking about from a crime and a social perspective, they said sooner and later people are going to get fed up with the federal government.

[ Scott ] Was that in Harper’s?

[ M Rushdoony ] I believe it was in Insight.

[ Scott ] Oh, Insight. Well, it was similar... there was a similar article a few months ago in Harper’s if you remember, very frightening, about really the growth of anarchy. Now the inner... the gangs of the inner city it is interesting. Everyone knows they live on crime. They live on drugs. And they commit murders and so forth. They are not highlighting the murders in California, in LA right now among the... the black and the... and the Hispanic crime. They are gangsters, gangs. But I often wondered since why the B A T F didn’t go after the unregistered weapons of the gangs in the inner cities and just went after a Christian group sitting out in the middle of the desert of Texas. And they went tanks and guns. So you know they weren’t just simply sending a message.

[ Murray ] You can get hurt in the inner city.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Those people don't fool around.

[ Scott ] Well, then you are talking about anarchic areas.

[ Rushdoony ] You mentioned...

[ Murray ] They are not afraid. People in the inner city, they are not afraid.

[ Rushdoony ] You mentioned Russia before the war. It is interesting that before World War I the literature went in for a sexual freedom and was militantly anti Christian. One writer more or less an adherent of Russian orthodoxy was {?}. Now in the 30s his trilogy on Christ versus Antichrist was in print and the modern library had reprinted it and was using it.

It was an interesting and an important step, but, of course, it... I didn’t agree with it theologically, but it was good reading, especially the second and third volumes.

Now, when I took a course in the Russian literature of ... from 1900 to about 1930 the man who taught it was a Marxist. He had been a member of the whole group that was around Lenin and Trotsky.

[ Scott ] Be an interesting fellow.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Now he ridiculed, of course, {?}’s trilogy and he preferred some of the books like {?} {?} which was sexual liberation. He preferred the writings of the Marxist writers in Russia after the revolution. But he still recognized, although he ridiculed {?}, his importance. Now you do not hear the name mentioned anymore.

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] He has been dropped by the modern library. It is as though he never existed.

[ Scott ] Well, the New York Times does not carry Christian books in its best sellers lists. It carries anti Christian books and it carries religious books of other religious writers, but not of Christian writers.

[ Rushdoony ] {?} wrote a variety of things. One of his interesting writings was one of the ... vaguely related to what we are talking about. It was titled The Republic of the Southern Cross. And it was a vision of the future, the organization of society by the state geared to production and the ideal state was formed under the eyes, underground in Antarctica, everything geared to total efficiency. And then the whole thing, beyond good and evil, geared to the ant hill and the beehive, totally utilitarian collapses. Suddenly men start destroying the machines and the whole of the Republic of the Southern Cross goes blank. There are no signals coming from Antarctica.

It was supposed to be a world of efficiency, no crime, everything. But man could not be put into that mold.

[ Scott ] Well, no. I think it is interesting. You are talking about his suppression, that after Solzhenitsyn redid 1914 it vanished from the market. And it was given some scathing reviews and it has now virtually disappeared. As he is going to disappear from the English speaking world and has, practically since he went back to Russia. All of the sudden we are to getting any further reports of what is happening in Russia culturally or socially. Only on the economics.

[ Murray ] Except that Boris Yeltsin drinks too much.

[ Scott ] Well, that sort of thing. Yes. Now what is happening in literature... what has happened in American literature in terms of creating a fantasy society instead of a real society comes under the heading, I think of intellectual crime.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And we are beset with intellectual crimes.

[ Scott ] Yes, we are. And these are crimes. Dishonesty is a crime. It shouldn’t be restricted in our thoughts to the tangible. Plagiarism, for instance, is rampant.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, ever since Martin Luther King’s plagiarism was exposed...

[ Scott ] And accepted.

[ Rushdoony ] ... and accepted, but accepted in spite of the exposure, plagiarism generally has not gotten a bad press.

[ Scott ] Well, they actually said to excuse Martin Luther King was that it was a black practice...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, which is an insult to all blacks.

[ Scott ] Of course it is. What do you suppose somebody like Walter Williams or Tom Sole had to say about that or how he feels about that?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is not too far from closing. Would you each like to make a concluding statement? Take your time, but summarize your reactions to the subject.

[ Murray ] Well, there is a... some glimmer of hope here at least in California. They have passed a... some laws here recently in ... more stringent laws on rapists and arsonists and it will be interesting to see if the courts will apply them. We have so many liberal judges that they tend to find any avenue they can around stiffer laws. And the next challenge may be to make some changes in the judiciary to try to get these laws implemented. The problem is that every time they pass these laws it is a double edged sword, because it ... the prosecutors find some way to apply them more stringently to people who are innocently caught in the web rather than those people who are career criminals. And particularly if they can apply them against Christians. They are... the law is being used as a tool of discrimination. And it is ... it bears watching.

[ Scott ] I tend to agree with that. The income tax made it legal. It... it... it was considered unconstitutional by the court, the Supreme Court when it was attempted in the 1890s. The only way they could put it across was as a constitutional amendment. And it unequally treats people. It... it taxes some people more than others. Ever since then our law has been unequally applied. And I think this is probably at the core of what is wrong with our judicial system.

[ M Rushdoony ] Something that was interesting to me, I know somebody who was on a jury a few years back. It had to do with drunk driving. The man refused to take a sobriety test. He was pulled over by the highway patrol. He did not pass a sobriety test. He refused to take the blood alcohol test, therefore his license was suspended and he was brought before the jury. The gist of what the ... two or three of the jurors held out for not guilty. The reaction was—and I have heard this elsewhere—what if it was me that was stopped? What if I had been stopped after I had had a couple of drinks? Who is to say a couple of drinks and blood alcohol level makes... really makes you drunk? And as long as people have this idea that they don’t believe that something is right or wrong and that they should be held accountable and everybody should be accountable for their actions and there is no morality behind their view of law, they are never going to have any agreement of what should be done about crime, because you can’t agree on what should be done about crime unless people and judges have a concept of morality. Until our society has some concept of morality restored, we are not going to have a proper concept of crime and punishment restored. And that applies to the people in juries just as well as to policemen or judges.

[ Rushdoony ] A few years ago here in California, in Fresno, a very fine black judge was bitterly attacked in the media because his Christian faith came out in the courtroom. This has happened elsewhere in the country. And yet we have had a large number of judges appointed to the federal bench from coast to coast who are homosexual also here in California on the state level and elsewhere also on the state level. But nothing is done about that. And if anyone were to raise a question about it, there would be a hue and cry about intolerance. But there is no toleration for Christianity on the bench. In fact, there was a reversal by the Supreme Court, I believe, of one judgment in a border state, as I recall it, where in asking for the death penalty the prosecuting attorney mentioned that the Bible also approves of it. On that ground the judgment was overturned.

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] So we in a crisis. We have established evil and we have moved against the freedom of Christians and of Christianity.

[ Murray ] Judges no longer say when they pass sentence of death, “And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, our time is up. Our country needs your prayers. But god is going to cleanse house, of that we can be sure. Thank you all for listening.

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