From the Easy Chair

War & Peace

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 188-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161L22

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161L22, War & Peace, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 89, January 18, 1985.

This morning Otto Scott and Mark Rushdoony and myself will be discussing an area of major concern to all of us. We have an original title for it suggested by Otto, War and Peace.

Now this is not an easy subject to discuss. When you discuss War and Peace in our era you enter into the twilight zone, I ... I do believe, because there is such a total lack of realism, an unwillingness to face the ordinary facts of life that it is impossible even to start an intelligent discussion of war and peace with most people. They are determined to have reality mean what they say it should mean and, therefore, they begin a discussion of war and peace in terms of presuppositions that have no relationship to the real world.

Let me illustrate. I have in my hand a high school text book in use all over the country—although it may have been replaced in the last year—the title is A Global History of Man. If I may digress a moment, this global history of man has very little in it about the western world and all history up until the present gets only a limited number of pages. Then you come to the major world cultural areas. And the first is the Soviet Union, the second Latin America, then China, then India, then sub Saharan Africa and the Middle East. There is nothing about the United States or Europe. Previous sections speaks of Europe as though it belonged to the past.

As it deals with war and peace, this text book tells the students, and I quote, “In 1953 the cold war began to ease a little. One reason for this was the death in April, 1953 of the suspicious and dogmatic Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. His successor Nikita Khrushchev was just as much a Communist, but he called for peaceful coexistence rather than cold war with the rest of the world. Another reason for the improvement was the ending of the Korean War in July 1953 and the Indochina war in August 1954. Perhaps more important was the growing feeling on all sides that war had become an impossible way of setting international disputes,” end of quote.

Now this is on page 204 in a book of, well, about 750 pages. And the rest is written on this premise. The Soviet Union wants peaceful coexistence. The inference is: Why are we in the United States making problems? Why are we the suspicious and distrustful ones? The concluding sentences of the book deal with the future of the United Nations as the world peace keeping agency. And it says of the U N, “Consequently, the fate of the U N, like that of the League of Nations, will be settled by the policies decided upon by the great powers. The league was doomed because certain great powers were willing to resort to war in order to gain their ends. If this happens again, then the organization inevitably will go the way of the League. Perhaps the knowledge that nuclear war will leave no victors will prevent a repetition of this dismal past. This is the world’s biggest hope and if this hope is realized then the United States ... Nations has a future,” end of quote and end of book.

Now I have gone to this book because I began by saying that the discussions are in the twilight zone. Two presuppositions of this book, among many that are false, one that the Soviet Union wants peaceful coexistence, that they are a peace loving country and we need to understand this. Now that is an illusion. How can you have a realistic discussion of war and peace with that kind of illusion? Then, second, as the concluding sentences make clear, their hope is that a knowledge, to quote again, that nuclear war will leave no victors will prevent a repetition of this dismal past, unquote.

The world’s great hope is not a faith, but fear. They are pinning their hopes on the fact that if we make enough people afraid of war it will bring about peace. And so the peaceniks today are dedicated to this kind of thinking. Create fear among people. Create fear through television programs, through films, through text books like this. And then we will have peace.

Well, this is twilight zone thinking. It is an illusion. And this is why to discuss war and peace is difficult because it is hard to get through to people who are determined to believe things that are nonsense.

Well, with that introduction, I will open the floor. Otto, do you want to make some comments now?

[ Scott ] Well, I don’t believe this is new. The whole argument was mounted by the intellectuals at the turn of the century. At that point they argued that the world had become so educated and so civilized that are was impossible and unthinkable. And they mounted a determined campaign against the empire builders of their day, Theodore Roosevelt on our side, the Churchills and his sort on England’s side and so on. And as we know, that whole era culminated in the blood bath of World War I.

Well, if Mr. Roosevelt had won the election of 1912 it is very possible that we would have gone into World War... World War I would have been very brief, because he wanted to go in immediately on the side of England against Germany. And if he had, if the United States had in 1914, the chances are that war would have lasted a year or 18 months and we would still be living in the world of our grandfathers, our great grandfathers.

Unfortunately, we got Woodrow Wilson and Mr. Wilson expressed all the shibboleths of the twilight zone people that you are talking about. He argued that World War I could be turned into a war to end wars. He argued that the League of Nations could freeze the boundaries of every nation in the world so that there would never again be a war because a war wouldn’t be allowed. And in 1921 after the League was set up without our official participation, but what most people are not taught is that we unofficially participated in all the crucial decisions of the League of Nations. In 1921 the peaceniks mounted a big campaign for disarmament. It culminated in 1927 in a disarmament pact in which capital vessels of our various navies were sunk and what was called the five, five, three ratio was set up in which England’s navy was put equal with ours, our ours equal with theirs, which would be a better way to put it. And Japan’s navy was three fourths of the size or three fifths of the size.

Now the effect of this was to weaken England. And the argument was that the real threat of war came from the big navies and the competition between the United States and Britain on the high seas with Japan coming up as a... as a new competitor. That was the argument in 1927. And the Kellogg Briand Pact which was signed and which led to the scrapping of ships resulted in the various participants receiving a Nobel peace prize. In fact, however, at that point Germany was arming to the teeth inside the borders of Russia. And Russia was arming to the teeth using German technicians so the rising threat of war was from Germany and Russia in 1927 and not a single public statesman in the West was aware of it. All we succeeded in doing was pulling down our strongest international allies and opening the gates to our strongest international competitors. And that is an illustration of just how cuckoo these kind of campaigns can be.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and it is interesting, too, that World War I would have ended in a stalemate with no nation collapsing if Wilson had not given assurances that we would ultimately be in the war. There would have been a negotiated peace very early, but they continued waiting for the U S to come in and the result was they created an atmosphere of collapse and revolution among the losers.

Mark, is there anything you would like to interject at this point into our discussion?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, when you were talking about this great fear, there is a... I think... I notice there is also an attitude that it is not worth fighting, that we don’t want... it is not worth the fight to win. We have too much to lose by defeat. And so, therefore, give up. Let the other guy get ahead. It is... it is a surrender.

[ Rushdoony ] Better red than dead.

[ Scott ] That is... well, this was the argument that as mounted in the Vietnam War, that it was ridiculous to talk about victory. We were told time and again by the left and by the liberals that victory was impossible. But it proved not to be impossible for the other side. And when the other side won there were people who came in New York and danced in the streets in exultation at our defeat.

[ M Rushdoony ] It is not worth fighting for anything and we don’t believe in anything worth fighting for. So we don’t want to lose and we really don't believe in winning.

[ Scott ] Right. What does the old Greek saying? A coward dies a thousand deaths. A great brave man, but one. But, you know, during the 20s the great scare was air raids.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] An Italian military expert had wrote a book in which he said that air raids would make it impossible for anyone to survive. And he went into horrendous details about great cities in flames and people buried in the rubble and so on and so forth. And I remember one of my early memories as a boy, I guess, well, I wasn’t too young, 12, something like that, seeing All Quiet on the Western Front in a movie in New York and the place was so packed that they had camp chairs sitting behind... placed behind the aisles to allow all the ticket buyers to have a place to see.... to sit. And I recall as we left the theater my mother saying, “Well, I hope my boys never go to war.” And that all... All Quiet on the Western Front, What Price Glory there as a whole spate of anti war films and books.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And then the moral rearmament began.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The moral rearmament movement they had four perfect absolutes, perfect truth, perfect justice and several other perfects. And this in... of course, in a... in an imperfect world. By that time Mr. Hitler had come along and the German foreign office took a look at moral rearmament and decided that it would help their foreign policy. So they decided to send some spies in, some agents in to diverted into disarmament in Britain and in France and in the United States.

Now these agents were given unlimited funds and I was told about this by an intelligence expert and he paused at that point and said, “How many agencies do you suppose they sent in?”

I said, “Oh, a hundred.”

“Oh, he said, “No. They sent in three with unlimited funds.” And they did divert moral rearmament into disarmament.

[ Rushdoony ] The liberal temperament was as intense then as now and it has learned nothing. I was in school. I recall the Briand Kellogg Pact to outlaw war which almost every nation in the world signed. And we were told in school that this was the death of war, that war was now illegal and no nation henceforth could go to war.

[ Scott ] Well, they had all signed.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And it is the same kind of liberal illusion which dominates our thinking today. They do not believe in the depravity of man. They are convinced that all of them as good Humanists have an awareness of truth as they see it and, therefore, they are all working for a common objective.

[ Scott ] Well, there is a... a number of arguments that fold into this. One is that they are people the same as we are. Well, they are people, yes. But to say that they are same as we are is to argue that everybody is created by some sort of cookie factory and that we all come out the same. We don’t. It is a big world and there is room in it for a great many diverse ways of looking at things. Time and again, now, we have been told that the Soviet military journals, military lectures, military academies and military leaders have decided, a long time ago, that nuclear war is winnable and they have set up the world’s largest and most elaborate self defense system of the people. They have underground tunnels. They have factories in the Urals behind... beyond the Urals. They have cities that are not on the maps. They have factories that are underground and so forth. They have tunnels, air raid shelters. They have regular drills and they do, in effect, what Switzerland does. They have set up a planned program of survival in the event of nuclear war.

The United States has been told that any effort at self defense, at defending the population of this nation would provoke the Russians and increase the chances of war.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, with regard to the high frontiers project or star wars as the press calls it, within the past week we have been told that it will be used, if it is at all installed, to protect our defenses, our installations, not the people.

[ M Rushdoony ] That even goes to what Otto was saying about not defending ourselves. It even goes to the extent of a lot of hospitals and doctors will not participate in planning for a nuclear attack because, well, that is to say that we could accomplish anything by ... by trying to do anything after a nuclear attack. If there is a nuclear attack it is all over. Therefore, let’s pretend, let’s act as though it can’t happen. And it must not happen. Therefore we don’t... we don’t plan to help people in case something happens.

So all our hospitals have refused to do any planning in such an event.

[ Scott ] Well, they have adopted the Soviet argument that any effort at our self defense is a provocation. Now the Soviets constantly use this word. If you have a complaint, that is a provocation. You are trying to bait them. You are trying to start trouble. And, you know, on a personal level you have been... we all have been in situations where you ... you raise your voice or you put your hand up to the teacher or you walk to your employer and say, “Now I have a complaint.” And he begins to treat it as a provocation. You are trying to start an argument with him.

Well, this, of course, is the response of a bully. And, in effect, we have been bullied out of the right of self defense. And if we want to go into that, the recent shooting of four would be muggers, intimidators might be a better word for it, in the New York subway, was treated as a provocation and not as an act of self defense.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] He shouldn’t have been mugged, but he shouldn’t have defended himself.

[ Scott ] Her certainly shouldn’t have defended himself. No. That is... he is taking the law into his own hands when he defends himself.

[ Rushdoony ] That is our attitude not only with regard to that man in the New York subway, but with regard to our foreign policy. Anything we do to defend ourselves is provocation.

Well, let me throw in another aspect. We do have a liberal leadership the world over that is very much dedicated to liberal illusions. The exception would be the Marxist leadership which has no illusions. It is radically cynical and skeptical.

Now these people really are bent on what amounts to a policy of surrender. But at the same time there is another factor. I am not talking now about the liberal sympathizers and the public at large, nor all the peaceniks that have been sold the gospel of total fear. I am talking about your good, stable, God fearing citizenry. These people are by and large totally distrustful of any military engagement, because they do not believe that the leadership in this country will do anything but sell them down the river, that they will go to war and give their lives in vain. They are ready to die for their country, but not for the leadership.

Now for some years—and I do believe that it began in World War II—there has been a growing distrust by the average draftee towards not the military leaders, but the political leaders, that they are not interested in fighting to win. This was true in Korea especially and in Vietnam so that I have known and I have mentioned this once or twice in the past, a very militant, hawkish people, very, very conservative who after Vietnam told their children—and they had been very hawkish up to that point—if I ever catch you fighting for this country, I will disinherit you. It is not a country worth fighting for with its leadership today.

Now that attitude is very prevalent, I submit. I have encountered it all over the country. And it is by people who are very patriotic, who would be glad to defend this country if they felt the leadership was ready to defend it. But they feel that they will be so much sacrificed, human scarified in the event of any war for a political game which is not geared to the best interest or the defense of the people.

[ Scott ] Well, there is pretty good basis for that suspicion. At the end of World War II the United States combined with the Soviet Union to strip the west of all its colonies. At the same time the United States stepped back and allowed the Soviet Union to pour into many of these areas unopposed.

In Korea we didn’t fight to win. We fought for a stalemate and that stalemate is still in existence and no peace treaty has ever yet been signed. In China, before Korea, we decided that the Chinese Communists presented a ... a better appearance than our war time ally in Chiang Kai Shek, the Nationalist. So we embargoed China and, in due course, the Chinese Nationalists ran out of ammunition. They ran out of bullets and we lost China to the Communists or China switched to the Communists.

The same sequence was played out in Cuba, another long time ally. Batista was embargoed. His troops ran out of bullets. This sounds very simple, I know, but it is a fact. And Castro entered Havana without even having to fight a battle. Then we did the same thing in Nicaragua to Somoza, another long time ally. We are on the verge of dumping our allies in the Philippines and allowing the Communists to take over there and our allies in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica. Every ally of the United States so far has been betrayed and Israel is foolish if it believes that its turn will not come because our history under the present leadership has been one of persistent, constant and inveterate betrayal all the way down the line.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, going back to what you said on... on the... fear. Fear is cultivated. If you notice there... there one of the popular tactics of the media now is to publicize elementary school children’s protests about their fears of nuclear war. What do elementary children know but what they are taught? Their... their efforts are ... are getting rather absurd even to bring children they have taught to mimic their lessons about nuclear into the... into the argument.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. As a matter of fact, parents are reported children come home crying because they are not going to live very long, because of nuclear war and what our Fascist leaders are going to do if they gain power to provoke nuclear war.

[ Scott ] Well, this is, of course, is a method of spreading panic, spreading fear. The bears in Wall Street periodically try to spread panic, because when the stocks plummet and fall, the bears make money. And much the same is true of politicians. Now the press will turn around on one hand and argue that fears of war are an instrument of the Pentagon to get a bigger budget while at the same time the school teachers are preaching surrender. Right now the atmosphere in the United States is very similar to 1937 and 38 visa vie Hitler, only worse. We regard the Soviet Union as Medusa’s head. We turn to stone at the thought of it, let alone looking at it. And no discussion of the Soviet Union is permitted on a public level if you listen to Crossfire, for instance. Braden interrupts and diverts any criticism of the Soviet Union. And so do most of our liberal commentators. They will say immediately, “Well, we are just as bad. And it take two to... to make a war.”

The man who shot the robbers in the subway was joining in violence. So self defense is violent and violent self defense is to be abjured.

In the meantime children are being taught all kinds of wrong lessons about the human race. They are being taught about the Holocaust. Now the Holocaust is a terrible event, an awful, ghastly event of which everyone should be apprised, but they should be apprised of all the other Holocausts as well. And they should be apprised of the fact that these have continued through the centuries under bad leaders, under people who have whipped up hysteria and led the massacres.

And also they should be taught lack of self defense can be result in the destruction of a people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Let me now turn our attention in another direction for a while, back to ancient history. Assyria and Babylon refined a technique for the destruction of countries. One of the things the did to make it possible to invade any country was to send in state controlled merchants. These merchants would go in with all kinds of goods which were sold on credit to the peoples. They created a debt economy among the people so that the people would be heavily burdened and oppressed with debt. Instead of living simply, they were living in terms of all kinds of luxuries which now had become necessities to them. Only when Assyria and Babylon had created this kind of a debt culture did their armies begin to march. And then what they did to add to the weakness of a people who were debt ridden and, therefore, were not truly a free people, was total terror.

Assyria, in particular, perfected this method. They would make a point not only of total terror, creating mountains of human heads, mountains of human bodies, skinning prominent peoples alive and making sure that news of that and pictures of that would circulate throughout the entire Middle East. They would terrorize these people who had lost already a sense of freedom through debt.

Well, this correlation between debt and loss of freedom which Assyrian and Babylon perfected has held over the centuries, although nobody has called attention to it apart from an article or two I have done on the subject. But it is a very important one. Today we have a world, the free world, so-called, is debt ridden. The political orders are head over heels in deficit financing. The people are head over heels in debt. And this is always a prelude to disaster, to a loss of a will to fight or a will to freedom. The sad part is that this time we have done this to ourselves.

[ Scott ] Well, actually our bankers have done it to us. And our government has done it to us.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] When my grandfather bought a house along the Hudson at the turn of the century he paid 700 dollars and at that time he was working on the brick yards for 10 dollars a week. That was about 1900. So he paid a little over a year’s salary for a house. If it were possible to buy a decent house for a little over a year’s salary we wouldn’t have 30 year mortgages in which people pay three and four times the price of the house. And the government connives in this usury by making the interest that you give the bankers free from income tax, which is a big break. The don’t force you to pay income tax on money you have paid to somebody else.

But going back to the... to the fear business. Psychologically, I was taught and... and by print, by film and by lectures and so forth that most people get terrified in moments of war and risk their life and so forth.

And in World War II I discovered that that is nonsense. I was in London during the blitz. I was on the ocean when the u-boats were roaming around. I saw ships go down and men drowned and so on. And I never saw anybody show open signs of fear or hysteria or dramatics. There were no weeping. There was no shouting. There was no cursing or anything else. The average person is physical very brave. The human race is physically very brave. Otherwise, of course, wars would have been impossible a long time ago. There is a great deal of moral cowardice, but very rare physical cowardice. That is... that is a very big point that people are being misread. They are being mistaught about one another. The children are being taught erroneous things about human nature. Human nature is better than this. Now I am not going to argue that panic is impossible.

I think it was Adam Smith who said, “You can have a group of gentlemen in the field fighting and strict discipline isn't necessary, because the gentlemen are disciplined.” This is not true of non gentlemen who will turn into a disorderly crowd. What is going on here is an effort to turn this nation into a disorderly crowd. And to reduce and eliminate the idea of the self disciplined individual who doesn’t need the same kind of controls.

[ Rushdoony ] You mentioned earlier the films that appeared in the 20s like All Quiet on the Western Front and What Price Glory, which were anti war. An interesting fact is that when I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley and I understand that this took place elsewhere across the country, during the time of the Hitler, Stalin pact suddenly there was a tremendous drive for peace. And these old films were trotted out and shown in Wheeler Hall. And the students in the history classes were told that this was going to be their class session for a particular day.

So we would pile into Wheeler Hall, fill it to watch these films. Of course, once Hitler and Stalin disagreed, the temper changed and we no longer saw those films. But I wonder now how much in the way of anti war films and propaganda takes place in grade and high schools across the country.

[ Scott ] Well, we have a very peculiar world situation. The fifth column for the Soviet World for the Communist world operates throughout the west with impunity because the West is democratic and liberties are allowed and so forth. Dissent is allowed. And I heard on the air the other night this was brought up by {?} talking about this information. And Braden immediately said, “Well, we do the same thing.” Well, that is not true, because we don’t have spokesmen for our side inside the Soviet Union occupying lecture platforms, university seats, jobs on the leading newspapers, in television and on the radio. We don’t have the same disinformation operating in Red China. We don’t have our spokesmen in our enemy’s camp. The spokes... the dialogue is taking place only in the free world, only in the West. And it is amazing that as soon as press freedom vanishes in Vietnam under the Totalitarians, our press is no longer concerned about it. When it vanishes in Nicaragua, the New York Times doesn't care. It only cares when they still have friends of the United States involved.

And I wonder ... I recall years ago being told that disloyalty begins in the mind. And this was a rather extreme Latin friend of mine at the time in Venezuela who was discussing marital fidelity and he... he talked ... he tossed it out as though it was a... a... a given. He said, “Well, a woman’s infidelity begins in the mind.” And I thought, you know, there is something to this. If you begin to examine your own culture with disdain, you have already left. You have already parted. And we keep being told that the far left in the United States is animated by patriotic motives. They were against Vietnam for the greater good of the United States. But the greater good of the United States never seems to involve helping the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, let me go back to something that I said earlier, this whole business of distrust of leadership plus debt and what it does to a culture. I think the classic example of that is Rome. We have an illusion that Rome fell under the assault of the barbarian tribes and that this a myth. Rome was not destroyed as a result of a series of military attacks and militarily overwhelmed. There were millions of Romans. There were only a few tens of thousands of barbarians that marched into the empire. What happened was that the Romans had reached the point where with oppressive taxation plus corrupt administration and leaders none of them could trust, no one felt Rome was worth fighting for.

The general of the Roman imperial armies, a marvelous man who could have saved Rome was executed at the command of the emperor and the senate. The reason was simply they knew that he could defend Rome. The troops would follow him to the death. They knew that he could then make himself the emperor.

[ Scott ] They were afraid of him.

[ Rushdoony ] They were afraid of him. So they ordered his execution. And because he was such a law binding... a law abiding man, he allowed himself to be executed in front of the troops and told them, pleaded with them not to make any resistance. They told him, “We are ready to take over the empire with you and to defend it.” And he said, “No, we cannot have lawlessness,” which was a mistake on his part, because when they executed him, the army disappeared. Nobody felt there was any reason now to fight for Rome. And, as a result, the barbarians did not meet with resistance. They simply walked in.

[ Scott ] Well, there is a modern parallel on the eve of World War II. France was in a state of advanced decadence. Its Communist movement was the largest in Western Europe. And in the period before Hitler invaded Russia they called it a phony war. In other words, this is a war that doesn’t mean anything.’

There was a long period in which Hitler waited in the hopes that France with his agents working inside it and the Communists working inside it, that it would collapse of its own accord. It almost did. When the Germans attacked they had less tanks, they had less planes, they had less men, less guns than the defending French. The French had almost impregnable Maginot line.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which had to be out flanked though Holland and Belgium and that restricted the fighting to a relatively narrow sector of the French frontier. They could have mobilized their forces in that area, but the French leaders were arguing and maneuvering for political advantage over each other in the endless parliamentary elections for office.

Up till a week before Hitler invaded, when he invaded, France collapsed. There was no resistance and I never will forget my horror, my shock. I was a young man, but it exploded the myth that all men ill fight to defend their country, because nobody in western Europe fought to defend their country. France did not fight. Sweden did not fight. Norway did not fight. The Dutch did not fight. The Belgians did not fight in any true sense of the word. And in the east the Romanians, the Bulgarians, and so forth did not fight.

So it convinced me that men will not automatically fight for their country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The interesting thing, too, is the illusion under which France operated. In World War I Germany had attacked through Belgium. But they refused to believe that that kind of violation of a peaceable neighbor could take place twice in history.

[ Scott ] The Germans would never do it again.

[ Rushdoony ] Their... they would never do it again.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] That was something that was such a violation of decency, you know. Not even Hitler would do it. So it would have cost a fraction of what the Maginot line cost to extend the same line across the Belgian frontier, but that was somehow provocation. It would be taken unkindly by Belgium, for example. So they didn’t do it. And they made no attempt to station troops there or to defend that area.

Now that is the kind of liberal illusion that w are still operating under and it is the kind of liberal illusion that marks every opponent of high frontiers.

[ Scott ] Well, the illusion at that time as based on an argument mounted, first, by Ruskin and continued for a long time, still in existence and that is that if you remove the causes of discontent, the other fellow will no longer have a reason to fight. Now this is an argument that rules out hatred. It rules out resentment. It rules out evil thoughts. It rules out the thought of loot and power and so on. But this argument was applied to Hitler so they removed the various disabilities against German implanted by the Versailles treaty on the theory that if these were all removed Germany would have no further argument.

The same argument is being presented to us now in terms of Central America. If we stop opposing the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, then there will be no problem.

[ Rushdoony ] I think we ought to look at what we have implied before, the religious factor. Proverbs 8:36 says, “He that sinneth against me, wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me love death.” So the Bible tells us that a people or a person who are not godly will be marked by a love of death. Now this love of death can manifest itself in two ways. You can be on the one hand suicidal, on the other hand murderous. And we would have to say that the United States today in its foreign policy is suicidal and the Soviet Union, murderous so that we have world wide a love of death marking our world cultures, simply because they are godless. So we have to look realistically at the future and say the love of death is governing the policy of this country, of the Soviet Union, of Britain and of every other country. The love of death clearly marked the British parliament when they had a Soviet leader there recently who could indulge in a tantrum over a question and nobody wanted to be critical of him for that.

[ Scott ] Well, it comes out in the United States in the denunciation of life. Our public entertainment channels, with the exception of sports, portray the United States culturally speaking as one of the levels of Dante’s hell. So does our literature. It is filled with despicable types, characters and behavior and the ... the net result of this kind of diet is that your stomach turns over and you begin to wonder if anything is worth living for. And that, of course, is the point.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now all the joy in life—and there is lots of it, the endless opportunities is left unmentioned. The idea that we might outwit the Soviets, that we might cause trouble for them behind the lines amongst other people, we might goad other individuals into attacking them, we might hit them in unexpected places, we might do all kinds of things to them, is absolutely verboten. It is absolutely forbidden to even speculate about.

[ M Rushdoony ] That is one of the main reasons for the opposition to the strategic defense initiative, which Kennedy calls star wars to make it sound like an offensive devise, but we can’t outwit them. We can’t change the whole game plan of... of military strategy. We can’t... we can’t move into a new area and get the advantage to them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And there is this factor which you touched on, Otto, and I think it is extremely significant. The vicious disposition of our literature and our entertainment. I know someone as does Dorothy, a very able, very intelligent and I would say a right wing extremist. I couldn’t disagree with this person’s opinion and assessment of things political and international. But they are not Christian. And as a result they have been living for 15 years or more in a ... well, a sense of hopeless gloom. This person is an able musician. But you cannot get this person to touch a beautiful musical instrument that sits in the living room and the reason: Well, there is such joy in playing that instrument and it is a terrible thing to seek joy when the world is falling apart.

Now it is not surprising that this person has cancer now. There are many, many people who are willfully gloomy and pessimistic and they forget that idiots and moral idiots and moral imbeciles, evil men rule in Moscow and Washington and London, Paris and elsewhere but the almighty and all just God rules on the throne of the universe. And, therefore, we have no right to be cynical or pessimistic.

So the element of joy must be there always. As Nehemiah said, “The joy of the Lord shall be your strength.”

[ Scott ] Well, of course, this gets us around to kenosis, the idea that has been propounded by so many that it isn’t Christian to defend yourself, to stand up, that it isn’t Christian to even criticize what is obviously obnoxious and terrible, that it is the duty of a Christian to not only turn the other cheek, but to get down on all fours and put his face in the dirt, that Christianity is antithetical to all the elements which make for masculinity or femininity in the proper sense.

This whole idea that ... and I have had it said to me when I gave a sharp reply to a fellow in New York, he said, “That is not a very Christian thing to do.” And I said, “Well, you are not a Christian brother to begin with.”

[ Rushdoony ] Well, as I told you, Otto, when I wrote the paper on kenosis I had some very heated responses to it. People who felt that I had violated all Christian decency by writing such a statement. How dare I say that to surrender and to be a doormat to evil doers was unchristian. So there are a lot of people out there who think it is the Christian thing to do to lie down and let people walk over you and to surrender to evil at every turn. As a matter of fact, I have had some correspondence with someone who in his personal life has subjected ... has been subjected to a monstrous evil. In fact, I had a telephone call from him yesterday. And the reaction has been that because he made a stand, a very godly, principled stand, he was somehow a bad person. He had a duty to love this evil doer and give in to them, because how by offending them, by making a stand against what they were doing could he ever hope to convert them.

Well, here he is a businessman of some prominence who has been one of the most important members of this congregation, very, very generous in his help financially and otherwise to them. And they are treating him as the evil doer when he is the victim simply because he made a stand. So he said, “I am leaving the church,” which I think is a very healthy step and he is telling them in a letter what he thinks of their kenotic faith, that it is un Christian.

[ Scott ] Well, look at the results in the Soviet Union. Look at the results in the areas where peel were convinced that defeat is more interesting. I remember thinking during a bad period of my youth that the failures of life are more interesting than the successes, that a successful man, as somebody once said, is ... presents a smooth, unbroken façade like an egg and it is hard to tell what goes on inside. And, of course, failures are apt to show you their intestines. They will tell you all about themselves at enormous length and they are interesting, but after a few years, I began to realize that they were failures because of their inadequacies and their errors to a very great extent. That is not to gainsay the fact that misfortune can’t hit anyone and you go through a period of failure. But a life failure is not possible to a person of quality, because even if he fails in obvious ways, he is going to succeed and leave something of himself behind. And I think now that this identification of dramatic value to failure was part of the conditioning of my day.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because when you are young, you spend all your time trying to catch up with a culture to find out what the culture is doing because you want to be with those who are in the avant of the culture. And as you get beyond that, you begin to see the difference between observation and what you were told and that is, of course, when you begin to come to other conclusions.

I think that the United States as a nation has a chance if the constitutional convention is convened, to adjust some of the things which are causing us so much trouble now. And I have had people object to the possibility saying the wrong people might take over the convention. Well, that, of course, is ridiculous, because it then has to be ratified by all the states and I doubt very much if the states are going to ratify something crazy. I have much more faith in the American people than that.

But I do think we are at a critical point in terms of leadership because we are being driven into the greatest Munich of all time. Munich was when the English gave away the Czechoslovaks, the English and the French. Our Munich we have no one else to give away except ourselves and this is a very serious thing.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Our time is almost up. Mark, was there something you would like to add?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, speaking of the... the... moral and theological consequences of ... of our attitudes about defending ourselves and it reminds me of wasn’t it David who prayed that no... realizing judgment was coming that he prayed to God that God would judge him directly but that he wouldn’t fall into the hands of his enemies. I think that can be our attitude. Maybe the Soviet Union is here to judge us. Maybe for our obvious sins. Maybe God is going to use us to judge the Soviet Union. We don’t know what the future is, but the future is in the hands of God. And we can certainly pray that our moral weakness isn’t an indication that Soviets are going to be used by God to judge us.

[ Rushdoony ] That is a very good point, Mark. And I do feel that we should pray with David that we fall not into the hands of men, but into the hands of God. For as great as his judgment so great is his mercy. We need to fall not into the hands of our enemies, but into the hands, also of our leaders, because nowadays there sometimes isn’t much difference between them.

Otto, would you like to add something?

[ Scott ] No. I think I have exhausted my possibilities on this enormous subject.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it has been good to be with all of you again to go into this subject. If any of you have ideas of subjects you would like to have us discuss at some future time, let us know. Now we can’t promise we will discuss whatever it is you are interested in, because we don’t claim to know everything about everything.

[ Scott ] Oh, don’t say that.

[ Rushdoony ] But... but we will give it a try. So let Chuck Wagner know what it is you are interested in. Thank you for listening and God bless you all.

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