From the Easy Chair

Christian Schools, Communist Interrogation, Foreign Debt

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 182-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161H16

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161H16, Christian Schools, Communist Interrogation, Foreign Debt, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 64, February the 16th, 1984.

Well, I just got back from Wichita, Kansas and San Diego and I am glad to be home again and to have this opportunity with you again. While on the flight from San Diego to Sacramento I picked up the PSA magazine, the airline magazine for Pacific Southwest Airlines, a west coast airline that services the west coast states, New Mexico and Arizona. There is a very interesting article in this by Carol Schwalburg entitled “Why Hiroshi Can Read.” And it is about some Japanese schools outside of Japan and in the United States as well.

I would like to read just a little bit of this.

“It is a rambling one story yellow stucco school house, a cousin to dozens throughout the West. Inside walls sprout the usual cluster of notices, Mercator maps and juvenile artwork. The air carries the powdery scent of chalk. Outside the late June sun burns through the morning fog and an ocean breeze laps against the corn, pumpkins and sunflowers fringing the asphalt school yards. All the schools’ 98 pupils line up by grade before a painted dais. Boys and girls alike wear the California uniform of t-shirt, shorts or skirts and jogging shoes. Teachers dot the sidelines.

“As the principle appears a tall boy leaves the rank and mounts the dais. The loud speaker erupts in curiously tuneless but repetitive music as a voice rasps {?} one, two, three four. The boy leads pupils and faculty through slow stretches and bends. After 15 minutes of languid calisthenics, the principal addresses the pupils. He tells them that this exercise was not for its own sake. Good exercise freshens the mind for work.

“Later in the same yard first and second graders prepare to play kick ball by lining up in two teams and bowing to their opponents. It is important to honor you opponent the guide explains. Still later the guide takes the visitors to the home economics classroom. The fourth grade girls are sewing. The fourth grade boys also sit with needle in hand. They are embroidering flowers in chain stitch. Although the teacher is not in sight, in fact, is out for the entire day, there are no spitballs, no blizzard of paper planes. The children work quietly without any supervision.

“These are actual scenes from {?} the international bilingual school of Los Angeles, a private Japanese school for kindergarten through the ninth grade.”

Now there are 87 such Japanese schools all over the world. In part, it is to enable the industrialists who are here for a few years and diplomatic personnel to keep their children up to date in terms of Japanese language studies. But there is another reason as well. They give superior education. As a result, they do not want their children corrupted by our public schools. This is why the article is titled “Why Hiroshi Can Read.”

I would like to give you a quotation from a book of a few years ago entitled The Year 2000 by Herman Conn. He said, “The 21st century will belong to Japan. The Japanese will have the highest standard of living in the world,” unquote.

I would like to add something to that. If that comes to pass it will be because of the Japanese schools, K through 12, because in those schools there is solid and basic training. Now I don’t believe it is going to happen because I believe our Christian schools are going to replace them steadily, the public schools, that is, and provide the best education in the world. However, we see meanwhile the fact that the fanatical humanists in our public schools are determined to destroy Christian schools. They would rather see us decline as a nation that for them to relinquish their strangle hold on education.

So that we are very definitely on a toboggan slide downward simply because Humanism controls our public schools, is destroying our public schools and has turned them into fanatical schools which do anything but teach the basics. Their basic concern is to turn the child into a Humanist like themselves.

So the educational issue is an important one. Other nations are unhappily imitating us. Too many nations abroad in the western world, the English speaking and European speaking countries have picked up the ideas of John Dewey. The nation that has done this most logically, by the way, is Sweden. And this is why Sweden is so far down the road into Totalitarianism.

Well now on to another subject. On my trip I read, among other things, Eugen—or we would in English say Eugene—Loebl, L O E B, as in boy, L. My Mind on Trial. This book is not in print currently. It was published a few years ago in 1976.

Dr. Loebl is an economist teaching at Vassar. He describes his experiences in Communist Czechoslovakia. He was a Communist, a good Marxist who was persecuted simply because he did something for which the Czechoslovakian government gave him a medal. He came to the United States shortly after Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Marxists. Since he had been here before the war, could speak English and had contacts, or rather been here during the war, he was used. What the Truman administration had done was to freeze all the orders and assets of Czechoslovakia at the time that it turned Communist.

Well, they had a huge order of between 40 and 50 million dollars... excuse me. An order of 100 million dollars plus in various goods that were seized plus funds and assets running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. And they wanted those materials. They needed them for the development of Communist Czechoslovakia.

So it was his job to try to get them relinquished, released for Czechoslovakia. And so he said, “I knew that in the United States as in other countries, personal connections were more important than political ties or ideological affinities. Therefore I had picked as a member of my delegation a former director general of a Czech bank who had been enjoying successful contacts with the U S for decades. That man knew a lawyer who was willing to forget that I and my country were Communists for a one percent commission. As the sum involved was 40 million dollars, that was pretty handsome, especially in those pre inflation days.”

Well, the lawyer, I believe it was, with whom they made the connection, yes, the lawyer, did get his 40 million dollars. He persuaded the state department to talk to Dr. Loebl and his associates. And what they agreed on, finally, was to allow the Czechs not to take the material direct to Czechoslovakia, but to sell it to another country which would then take shipment and resell it to Czechoslovakia. That way they maintained the façade of having kept the ban.

Well that meant a little extra cost for Czechoslovakia because, of course, besides the 40 million paid to a Washington lawyer, it meant that they had to pay the country that did this for them. But they went through with it.

Now what happened subsequently was that although on his return he was given the highest medal available to anyone in Czechoslovakia, publicly honored, given every kind of honor and advancement possible, with people fawning on him everywhere he went, word came that Stalin did not like what had happened.

Stalin decided that it was wrong to accept anything from the West, even though the Soviet Union was going to profit by the production in Czechoslovakia which they were going to use. And so it was decided to make a scapegoat of him and all others and this was done. And the party went along with it because, after all, the Czech Communists were jumping to the tune of Moscow and Stalin.

And so he was arrested after having been given this medal and honored. And so when he was taken to prison he had to take off all his clothes, empty his pockets and then while I stood there naked, he said, asked me to sign it. Next they ordered me to open my teeth and check to see if I had false teeth. Later I learned that prisoners had to surrender false teeth each night to their guards. After they were satisfied that my teeth were my own they ordered me to bend over and searched my rectum of concealed weapons or vials of poison. Finally they made me stand still naked with my face to the wall while they waited for their superior.

Then he was given the prison rules. It was strictly forbidden to tell anyone his name. He was given a number. He was to answer only to that number.

Well, not only was he in prison, but he was asked to sign statements against everyone in the Czech government, including people right up next to the top who had in any way been involved in the deal and many who had not been. The whole thing was used as an excuse to say that these men were American agents and they were acting in behalf of the USA.

And so he stayed in prison, them working to break him... break down his will until finally he signed all the papers as did everyone else who was arrested. Everything was done to destroy his ability to resist.

For example, Loebl had not been particularly faithful to his wife. And he says, “They were constantly looking for the smallest chinks in my armor. One day they asked me whether I was faithful to my wife. I admitted that I was not. And immediately {?} wanted me to put down in writing that I admitted that if someone was unfaithful to his wife he could also be unfaithful to the party, to the working class and to the nation. Every small personal item was used to destroy me,” unquote.

Or, to give you another example of how they operated, he was asked about his love of soccer. Well, soccer, the football of Europe was a particularly delight of his and he went to the soccer matches very faithfully. He had gone to one prominent match involving a number of important players, key playoff championship of something and he was asked, “Where did you sit?”

“Well, I sat in the stands.”

And he had a reasonably good seat as did other prominent Communists. And so they immediately went after him as an enemy of the working class. How dare you have a seat when there were thousands of working men who had to stand through the match. Anything to lay a guilt trip on him and to make him feel that he was not a good Marxist.

An interesting aspect, too, of his stay in prison and besides the Czech agents who were working him over, there was a Russian overseeing it all. And they said these men who worked him over and broke him down finally would practically slobber at the thought, the delight they had in having every one of the great figures of Communist Czechoslovakia in their hands sooner or later. And he says the interrogators would speak of ministers who were still in office and he gives the name of the prominent ones with voracious anticipation, like beasts in a zoo eagerly awaiting the carcasses that would be thrown to them before log. They knew that any one of those men might end up in prison and that he would confess sooner or later and they would be the ones who would force him to say whatever they wanted. These men, some of whom could hardly read and write were suddenly potential rulers of the country.

This sense of power also gave them patience. It did not matte whether a prisoner confessed I a month, three months or a year it did not matter whether I would be sentenced in the next four months or the next two years. I could even die in prison. They could wait. Having the certainty that every one would confess sooner or later they knew that time was not their enemy, but their ally.

And so they would sit and wait in anticipation. Of course, the men who were over him in the prison as interrogators and torturers in due time were arrested when there was a change, but they only served two years. Such people did not get the worst of it.

The ironic fact is that Loebl, a Humanist to the core and still a Humanist and still essentially not a free market man to the best of my knowledge, although he has broken with the Marxist doctrine of labor and value, which is a key break. However, at one critical point he comes to an awareness that he skitters away from and never comes to grips with in his book.

He says, “I felt that I was becoming schizophrenic, that there were two personalities inside of me and that they were fighting each other. One half of me argued that there was no meaning in fighting and resisting. This was a world without morals. Why should I stick to the truth? Nothing would change if I confess, nothing except the conditions under which I lived. That would change for the better.”

And so he really knew that given his Humanism, there was no real alternative. What else could you do? If you don’t believe in an absolute truth you are going to say, “Well, what difference does it make?”

And this is why one of the top men when arrested and executed made a statement at the very last affirming his faith in the party and the world revolution. And he was determined to die as a member of the party which he felt in 15 years would rule all over Europe and in one day ... and some day all of the world. And he believed he would be rehabilitated and be a hero of the future. Here was a man who knew how evil Communism was. But he couldn’t see the future except in Humanist terms. And so he was determined to be a part of that however evil it was.

The author doesn't come out looking very well, because when he expects to die, in fact, is sure that there is nothing ahead of him for death, he served 12, 14 years finally in prison. But at this point he was going down hill and thought he would die in prison. And so what was there left for him? Facing death what did he have? What would you look back on in your life if you were facing death and treasure? Well, he looked back on his erotic memories, all his adulteries, rehashing them in his mind and trying to derive pleasure. He says, “I tried to remind myself of my erotic adventures. My mind worked like a film editing machine. I would picture a certain episode, stop it, run it back, run it forward again, analyze it. I tried to recall the details of women’s bodies, of our love making and I was pleased that it had many happy memories to look back on. I would sample them one by one and in those that were not so happy I tried to determine what had gone wrong so that I could replay them differently.”

That is all his all is life amounted to, looking back on that sort of thing. He is a man to be pitied.

Well, another book which I read on my trip, a book which was published in 1983 and is, I think, still available by Christopher Weber, W E B, as in boy, E R. Bailing Out a Bankrupt World, Investment Insights Publishing Company, 1446 14th Avenue, San Francisco, California 94122.

This is an important book on what has happened in the way of our involvement I foreign debts. We have loaned money, our banks have, to all the Marxist and third world countries. A number of these have gone bankrupt and we are bailing them out. And he says that virtually no bank today and certainly no major bank is without some loans to either Communist block or third world countries in its portfolio. And he says he does not expect to see a world wide banking collapse for a few years. He expects those debts to be monetized and the United States to go into a radical hyper inflation which will be destructive of the United States. He has suggestions for things to do to protect one’s self.

It is a grim book, but it is an important book. You need to read this to see what is happening, because here, the whole of our current monetary policy is spelled out in detail and factually. He is very blunt in his language. He calls the whole thing a monumental deceit on the public and he says the Reagan administration has backed down on many of its early stands. It hasn’t really cut the budget. It has been responsible for the largest single tax increase in peace time in American history. He doesn't see much of hope in what either party has to offer.

So he has written this book to spell out what is happening and to offer suggestions for individuals to avail themselves of so that they might be less vulnerable in the crisis ahead. He sees both default and hyper inflation and he sees the Soviet Union in very serious trouble. It has been exploiting its colonies, the central European countries for decades. And it is actually, in spite of that, poorer than its colonies.

The central European colonies actually have a higher living standard than the Soviet Union, in particular Hungary. The Soviet economy is stumbling and faltering. It has only one direction, down. Incidentally speaking of the Soviet Union, we have seen the fawning respect with which the media and television greeted the death of Andropov. I was interested in one paper alone did I see this. It could have been in many others, references made to the fact that {?} apparently has seriously health problems, too, that his speech was blurred as he paid his respects to Andropov.

Also, apparently, he has had a stroke because, while the TV cameras didn't show it, he had problems with his hand as he was trying to salute. We saw the pictures of the salute, but not the fact that he had serious problems handling his own hand.

So by the providence of God we do have a very weak regime in the Soviet Union Andropov 16 months in office and sick most of the time. Now if Cherenkov lasts a couple of years and is sick a good deal of the time, that is a major blessing, an undeserved gift from God, because it enables us to buy time, time to grow stronger, time to turn the scene here around politically and morally, religiously.

Speaking of turning things around, I was very happy this morning to talk for a while with Antoinette Nelson who called from the White House. And she was getting some names for a conference there on alternatives, Christian alternatives to abortion.

That is marvelous. I first met Antoinette Nelson at Gainesville, Florida when I was there for a training session with Maranatha campus ministries to train their workers and she was one of them. I met her almost a year ago again in Washington when I was there to speak, I believe, for the conservative caucus. And now she is working in the White House and this is a marvelous effort, because it is not enough to oppose abortion. It is not enough to oppose evil. We must develop constructive alternatives. And this will be a conference in which 200 prominent Christian leaders hopefully will be present to work on the subject of alternatives which can be then promoted. I may or may not be able to go. But at any rate, it is an important step and I wanted to tell you about that.

Now to another book. This one is not in print. It was edited by Sylvia. L. Thruff, a medievalist, Changes in Medieval Society. And she has an interesting section on something I have dealt with in other tapes and in writing not yet published, about the Christian reconstruction in the early Middle Ages, the reclamation work, for example, that the dyking drainage in Finlands and so on so that many, many areas were made fertile and productive because of the work in the early centuries of Christian Reconstruction. Irrigation canals were built and so and so forth.

But the point that I think is very well made in this book by J. R. Strayer, S T R A Y E R, in the {?} of French and English society in the 13th century is one that most people miss. {?} is the political aspect of secularization. What happened by the 13th century was that the Church had lost much of its influence. In what people think of as still the Middle Ages the Church now was replaced as the key institution by the state. And so secularization had taken place and he says, “In every field of human activity in art and literature as well as in politics and economics.” And so he says that leadership had passed from the Church to the state.

Now I am working on a book, or have been for the past year and lately I haven’t been able to get back to it to finish it because of the press of work on Church and state. And one of the points I do make is that not only did leadership pass by the 13th century into the hands of the state, but the state began to control and corrupt the church deliberately and systematically so that all kinds of evil bishops, for example, were forced onto the Church. Some of its worst enemies were made bishops. Moreover, everything was done to control the college of cardinals, to keep a thoroughly competent and godly man out of the Vatican so that by the time of the Reformation, while there was wealth at Rome, there was not power. Power was in the hands of the emperor and the kings. And their concern was to use it for their ends and not for the Church.

So they used the façade of the Church. They corrupted the Church. And the Church got the blame.

Now on to something quite different. A book that I read also recently was Helen Hazen, H A Z E N, the title Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance and the Female Imagination, published by Charles Scribner in 1983 for 12.95 and still in print.

It is a very interesting book by a very able writer. It is not a Christian perspective, but the point that Helen Hazen makes is that the books that are selling more than any other book today and you will find whole racks full of them in any grocery story, any drug store, any book store, are the paper back romances for women. And she describes their comments. And their perspective as they write these books and she says that these books are very interesting. The plots are usually a few centuries back, 17th, 18th centuries and there is a great deal of kidnapping and rape in them.

Well, why, then are women attracted? Well, says Helen Hazen, it is because the rapist is really a good man at heart who has done this because nobody has set him straight on things. He is wild. He is usually a nobleman. He is very handsome. If you recognize the similarities to Rudolf Valentino and he sheik and the son of the sheik it is very real. And here you have all of this. He kidnaps her. He rapes her. He degrades her in one way or another. But he can’t get rid of the idea of that woman in his mind and finally he comes back to her a new man. Her love has saved him.

And so she says this is what women go for. And her comment, “Rape occurs I the woman’s world of illusion. It is a ritual of love that exists in fantasy. A man says to woman that she is so desirable that he will defy all the rules of honor and decency in order to have her,” unquote.

Then having done it, he is ... he can’t get her out of his system and is finally ready to come back to her as her husband.

Well, she says, “We have to realize that these books are very popular.” In fact she says, “I like them myself. I read them.”

This is a very well educated woman and she isn’t poking fun at the women who read these. She says moreover very often the writing in these books is exceptionally good. The writers are outstanding and their ability to handle the language is quite remarkable. She gives examples of this and how ably these people write.

Let’s see if I can find the one which I though was particularly revealing, because there is no question she is right. Some of these women have written with remarkable ability. She says, by the way, “I hope to read romances forever.”

Oh, here it is. This is from a writer whom she regards. And the woman writers prevail. They are all woman writers. She regards as particularly outstanding Lola Burford, Vice Avenged: A Moral Tale published in 1971. This is the way the book begins. I quote.

“They were sitting I hell one night, the marquis and his special friends. They were tired of cards the hour was close to four and they had tried a touch of the new weed that certain of the more unconventional bucks were using in place of snuff. They cast about for further amusement idly. They sat like beautiful birds in their bright shining colors, their hair elaborately dressed, their long graceful fingers lying carelessly on the table among the equipment of the game. Seeming frail, their hard and very real power masked under the lace. In reality they were a kind of bird of prey. The lines of the downcast, nose sever and beat, the glint in the eye, hooded under an effect of ease,” unquote.

Well, then she says, “The story is perfect. The grey eyed marquis in his boredom accepts wager from his friends to rape a virgin. He accomplishes the act and is found out by the maidens father and brothers who beat and torture him until he agrees to marriage. He makes such a poor husband that the father packs him off to a French pre revolutionary Bastille cell where he almost dies before he is finally released. He wanders around France until he discovers that he loves his wife and comes home to her.”

Well, says Helen Hazen, “Before you start poking fun at these books, let me tell you something about them.” The front runner in sales is Barbara Cortland with more than 120 million sales. That many copies of her books in print. But, she says, there is another side to this. Men read their own kind of book. Cowboy stories, western tales, detective stories and they identify themselves as much with the hero in all that he suffers and comes out triumphant as the woman does. And she says the best seller here is Louis Lamoure who recently topped the 80 million mark with his cowboy novels.

So, she says, “Men have nothing to laugh about. If their middle aged wives are identifying themselves with these virgins who are raped and wind up a princess or a countess, don’t the men identify themselves with these gunslingers who are lean and strong and capable of all kinds of impossible adventures?”

Well, at any rate, it is a delightful thing. In the process she makes clear that she is not a Feminist and how stupid the Feminists are to attack this kind of book which they do very savagely. And she says she sees no future for Feminism. Why? She says, “Any movement that is as rash as the women’s libbers are cannot succeed.” And I quote from just the last part of it. “They are at war with half the human race and with a lot of their own sex.” And she says, “No movement should be allowed to advocate the full scale alteration of the lives of every person on earth without the demand that it explain itself more clearly. And the only hope for a clear explanation lies in clear and honest thinking. If it is not forthcoming Feminism will become one of the more foolish movements of the century,” unquote.

Well, it is thoroughly delightful book. I bought it because Dorothy reading the review wanted to read it and it is well worth reading.

Own on to another book and I am debating which one to pick up first, because time may run out on me. Well, I think I will take one that is a bit older, still in print and you may have a chance to get it if you hurry. It is by Paul Johnson. Now I dealt with Paul Johnson’s book Modern Times in a recent tape. Paul Johnson’s Modern Times is an exceptionally good history of the world from the 1920s. This one was published in 1980 in England by Basil Blackwell. And it can still be obtained. The title is The Recovery of Freedom, The Recovery of Freedom. A series of essays written by Paul Johnson from about 1975 to the last one in 79. During that time Paul Johnson moved from the labor party in England and Socialism to being a very much a free market man and a conservative.

These articles tell the story of his change. He begins by saying that he was once a person who regarded the state as the means whereby man could achieve self expression and moral fulfillment. But he says, “I no longer have any confidence whatever in the state as a means towards dissent. On the contrary, I have come to see it as the biggest obstacle.” And he says further, “Of all those lessons the one which history most earnestly presses upon us and which we most persistently brush aside is: Beware the state.”

Well, he then goes on to tell us six reasons why we must work against Statism. First, is the idea which we must disabuse ourselves of that the state is the prime if not the sole instrument for the human ... for the improvement of human welfare. And he said that is basic to the modern world. It is radically false. Then he says the state necessarily and always exalts the compulsory principle. So the minute you begin to look to the state as the answer, you are going to exalt coercion over freedom and you are going to destroy society and men. The third, he says, the state is, of necessity and by its nature an inefficient instrument for the allocation of resources and the taking of mercantile decisions. So you are looking at a very inefficient means of accomplishing anything under the sun. Fourth, the state is not only inefficient, he says, but very prodigal and it of necessity breeds parasites because the state, after all, is a parasite to a large degree. The minute it grows large, the minute it gets ambitious ideas it becomes a parasite. As a result it is going to favor parasites over producers. Then, fifth, he says that the parasites consume and destroy wealth. So the bigger the state becomes, the more destructive it is of wealth, the more it destroys the future of the people. And, finally, he says, sixth, the state promotes envy. And envy brings every kind of evil into a society.

So, he says, we must work against Statism. He gives examples in these essays of what has happened, of what the closed shop has done in Britain, a remarkable chapter he devotes to it is worth the price of the book. It leads to a lust for power. It works against the individual and the rule of law and it penalizes honest men.

For example, he says and I quote, “Indeed, once a closed shop is established and enforceable at law, there is literally no limit to the power of the trade union bureaucrats. They are not only above the law, they can openly laugh at it. The Voxall Motors, Ludden, Stephen Rosengrave had caught more than 100 pilferers in six years saving the firm 100,000 pounds. Leaders of the three biggest box hall unions, the TGWU, the engineers and the electricians formed up and forced the management to shift Rosengrave from gate duty to harmless test track four miles away. An official of the joint union works committee said, ‘This man has been a problem for a long time.’ Of course he had. He had caught red handed union members in good standing stealing property. Certainly ordinary people who see militants break the law or who are themselves the victims of their increasing violent activities are more reluctant to apply for legal redress. They know they are unlikely to get it and there may be unpleasant consequences, too. Thus, the union bureaucracy tightens its grip.”

So he says the closed shop is a threat to civil liberties, a that to efficiency, a threat to the honest working of anything. He says collectivism and violence go together and he proves it. He speaks of the tyranny of politics being emphasized. He calls attention to what Statism does. It pumps more and more money into the public sector and this does not produce, he says, better services, but more bureaucrats. And so he says we are full of well meaning parasites. We have them all around. The world is full of them. And they are destroying us.

Moreover, when you create bureaucracies they are devoid of pity. And we have the progressive destruction of everything civilized.

He cites, by the way, a labor leader, Hugh Scanlon, as saying, “Liberty in my view is conforming to majority opinion.” Now isn't that wonderful? Majority opinion. He gives also an account of the church scene and the blindness of the church to these issues, the readiness to be a rubber stamp for left wing thinking. He cites the absurdities of planning and this tickled me. Late professor Richard Titmus, one of the key figures in the huge expansion of public spending in Britain used to argue that as soon as the technology was developed, we would need to produce a policy for the weather. And, as he says, there is nothing that these people do not plan to control.

In the process he also gives us a great deal particularly good economic information. His chapter on Terrorism is very important. Our inability to deal with it and what Terrorism does involve, frame of mind behind it and how these liberals are incapable of coping with it.

He calls attention to the fact that we refuse to call anything Colonialism if the Marxists are doing it or if racial minorities are doing it. He says, and I quote, “The melancholy truth, I fear is that the candles of civilization are burning low. The world is increasingly governed not so much by Capitalism or Communism or Social Democracy or even tribal barbarism as by a false lexicon of political clichés accumulated over half a century and now assuming a kind of degenerate sacerdotal authority. We all know what they are. Those who do not have only to peer into the otherwise empty heads of an average member of the fascist left that men with colored skins can do no wrong, that those with white ones no right, unless, of course, they call themselves Communists, that murdering innocent people for political purpose is acceptable providing you call yourself a guerilla, that in the right political circumstances a chunk of explosives is morally superior to a rational argument.

“The assumption is that an {?} rifle has, as it were, a spiritual life of its own, depending on white it is in the hands of an American, bad, or a southeast Asian, good. In the old days the civilized powers would have simply occupied a barbarous country like Khadafy’s Libya or Amin’s Uganda and set up a responsible and law abiding government.”

And he goes on to say that while such an operation is perhaps no longer possible or even desirable, there is something to be said for having a healthy perspective on such issues. And so he says Capitalism is threatened today and it is threatened because what is happening in the minds of men is nonsense.

He says that free enterprise is losing the intellectual and moral battle, not where productive capacity is concerned. Then he says the second threat to its future is the absurdity of the ecological panic. And a third factor, destroying Capitalism is, of course, the growth of government. Fourth, the trade unions. They are busily working to undermine everything in the way of the free market. Then, fifth, he says there is the threat from without, the Soviet Union.

And so he says, “Does Capitalism have a future?” And his answer is it all depends on the United States. And he says if the United States makes wrong choices there is always another dark age waiting.

I strongly commend this book to you. Paul Johnson, The Recovery of Freedom, published in England buy Basil Blackwell and his book Modern Times which I dealt with in a previous Easy Chair is also outstanding.

Well, our time is nearing its end. It has been good to be with you again and to...

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