From the Easy Chair

The Other End of the Lifeboat

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 191-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161N25

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161N25, The Other End of the Lifeboat, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 96, April 25, 1985.

Today we are going to discuss South Africa, because Otto Scott’s new book, The Other End of the Lifeboat has been published. It is available for 18.95 post paid from Ross House Books, P O Box 67, Vallecito, California 95251. And Otto is here and we shall be discussing the subject of South Africa.

Before we do, let me say it is a very timely book and a very timely day for the discussion of this because the great hypocrisy of our time has to do with South Africa. The whole world acts as though somehow South Africa has contracted a form of leprosy that it is guilty of a special kind of sin of which the other nations are exempt and we see all kinds of monstrous hypocrisy on all sides. For example, just the other day the news featured students protesting any aid to the freedom fighters in Nicaragua saying the U S cannot police the world. At the same time these students were ready to change hats and then demonstrate against South Africa and insisted we do more than police South Africa.

We have some minor evils in South Africa and monstrous ones in the Soviet Union and a very, very hypocritical attitude prevails.

With that brief introduction, Otto, would you like to begin by saying something about what you cover in your book?

[ Scott ] There ... it is awfully difficult, I think, to summarize in a relatively short period all the points that one covers in a full length book. There are several themes that struck me when I first began to look at South Africa. In the first place, of course, my interest was drawn toward the area because I had finished the study of the Abolitionists and especially of the lunatic fringe of the Abolitionists movement here in the United States.

As we know the Abolitionist fervor finally set off the Civil War which is not to say that mistakes weren’t made in the South by southerners. Their response to the Abolitionists was one of pure indignation. They never really mounted an intellectual analysis of the Abolitionist argument and, therefore, they lost the intellectual war or the propaganda war. But the over riding result of the Abolitionists was the deaths of somewhere between 500,000 and a million men which was an enormous casualty list for a nation of 40 million people. That tragedy, the tragedy of the Civil War still haunts the United States and, in large measure, I think, because it has never really been properly analyzed and dissected, we haven’t learned the lessons of the Civil War to this day, because our school teachers and the victors wrote about it as a very... as a triumph of virtue because it ended slavery.

Now, of course, we know that slavery was ended everywhere else with a stroke of a pen because it was a political and legal situation. And to be the only country in the world that resorted to a fratricidal war in order to accomplish something that was accomplished everywhere else very peacefully, is hardly something I think to boast about. But after I finished that particular study and looked around the situation of South Africa hit me in the face. Here the West and, particularly the United States, the English speaking world, was in the business of acting as the Abolitionists had acted and placing the Afrikaner or the white people in South Africa in the position of the white southern slave owner, as a pariah, as an immoral person, as ... as a sinner who had to be brought to virtue by force at once. And, of course, this adds up to a repetition of the tragedy of the 1860s in the United States.

Well, that parallel drew me. And then, of course, a second consideration came into my mind and that was: What does this mean to us? If all these angels managed to bring their forced virtue onto the South African scene, what does it mean to the American people and to the United States?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and that, of course, explains your title, The Other End of the Lifeboat. As you point out so very tellingly, the United States and the Soviet Union are in this together. We are together the target of a massive assault by world Marxism and if South Africa goes with all its strategic minerals on which we are so dependent, then we, too, will be quickly rendered helpless.

So by attacking South Africa we are, in effect, committing suicide, are we not?

[ Scott ] That is exactly the situation. The way that the Soviets have managed to enlist the intellectuals of the United States into doing their work for them is one of the most remarkable phenomena in all history. Time and again American allies have been first abused and then abandoned by the Americans to the benefit of the Soviet Union. When we embargoed Chiang Kai Shek because he said his government was corrupt and that lesson, by the way, is still going on. Somebody has just written a book about the Sum family in which he describes them as a Chinese mafia. When we were persuaded to abandon the nationalist government of China, the beneficiary was the world and Communist movement. Mao Tse Tung could not have won without our help. The same thing was true in Cuba in Castro. The same thing was true in Vietnam. The same thing is now true in Nicaragua and in South Africa, the Philippines, South Korea, Chile and all the other areas that are now under great critical attack. We have the strange phenomenon that the Soviet ambassador in the U N attacks American allies and our media and intellectuals attack the same allies.

I don’t think there has ever been anything like this anywhere.

[ Rushdoony ] No. We are suicidal in a particular way, masochistic. We exalt when somebody calls attention to our evils, real or imagined. And we are trying to prove how righteous we are with a hypocritical virtue of attacking South Africa.

At one time you said that the picture of South Africa we get today in the press is comparable to a picture of American attitudes towards blacks in the United States in the 40s and early 50s. Would you like to comment on that?

[ Scott ] Well, yes. The black people in the United States are in a really unusual situation that we all know the backdrop and the backdrop is not good. We can thank the British for leaving us in this situation. The British brought the black slaves to the United States as they transported black slaves to the West Indies and as they transported blacks and Hindus to other parts of the British Empire. It was one of the patterns of the empire to import cheap labor.

Well, the blacks that were imported into the West Indies had to... were put to work in the sugar industry. And because in places like Trinidad there was only 50 percent whites and 85 percent blacks, it was necessary for the English in the West Indies to teach the black slaves various skills. They became clerks and bookkeepers, brokers, middle men. They had to perform all the work that involved the interstices and the infrastructure of a whole great sugar industry. So over a period of 300 years the blacks of the West Indies became acculturated, so to speak. Thomas Sowell, the black historian, has written very well about this so that even today the blacks from the West Indies, from Jamaica and places like that speak very good English and are highly skilled and entrepreneurial minded so that when they come to the United States they immediately went into business and they become quite successful. And Sowell says their success in the United States has nothing to do with their color or their lack of being white, it speaks for itself.

On the other hand, the blacks in the United States were confined more or less to the plantations for the South. So they worked either in the fields or they worked as house servants and in both instances they were denied an education. When emancipation came along at the end of eth Civil War, we had a black population that had lost its roots, that had lost knowledge of its own original language and origin and that had very little skill. They had a mulatto minority that was descended from intermarriage. They had been freed and that constituted the aristocracy of the black minority. However, the alternative for the black people in the United States simply didn't exist. They had to integrate into the major culture because the was no place else to go.

Now the blacks in Africa are, of course, in a much different position. They still have their native nations. These are not simply cultures. They are nations. They are groups of people who have languages of their own. They have customs of their own. And these customs and languages vary and their physical types vary. The Bontu races which constitute the blacks in South Africa are different from some of the others. And a black man in South Africa does not have the ... he is not faced with the need to integrate with the white population because he has a culture and nation of his own. He has his own language. Now when a man has his own language, his own history, his own associates, his own social structure, it is impossible, really, to put him down, because he isn’t part of yours. He can always feel proud in his own right and, therefore, the blacks... black minority of South Africa does not look at the white minority of South Africa in the same way that the black minority in the United States looks at the white majority.

There is also the fact that the black people, the black nations of South Africa do not particularly get along with one another. We could compare it to Greeks and Irishmen, Turks and Greeks. They may have the same skin color, but that doesn't make them friends. Now here in the United States there is a sort of a floating feeling amongst all people of color that they are all in the same camp. That is not true in South Africa. So that to transpose the American situation onto the South African scene, is a form of ignorance.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. That is a very good point, because the American media, the intellectuals and the college students assume that the situation in South Africa is black versus white. Whereas in reality there is, unless it is among Marxists, no hostility against the whites. The hostility is between one black culture and another to the point that when they set up these home lands they cannot even have the boundaries touch one another because it will lead to very serious troubles due to the hostility of one black group to another.

[ Scott ] Well, yes, because the wars between the black tribes or the black nations or whatever you want to call them, have been constant as long as we know. They were in existence. They were fighting with one another. They were warring before the white man arrived. They have only stopped those wars when the white man was in control and acted as a sort of super power. One of the now discredited aspects of the colonial period was the fact that the white man introduced Christianity and also introduced peace between people who were killing each other. As the white man has retreated from these various places the wars have reoccurred. Most of black Africa today is in the process of resuming, with modern weapons, wars that were interrupted when they were using spears and bows and arrows.

Now one of the results of that has been massacres on a greater scale than ones like to discuss. And it brings up some very curious things about black Africa. We have Christian ministers... missionaries in black Africa who are not reporting to their home offices or to their congregations the massacres that they witness. They won’t even write about it because they are afraid that their letters may be intercepted and read and would lead to their being expelled from their post and their mission closed down. So on the theory that it is better to stay and try to convert a few people than to expose evil in front of him, they are staying silent.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, that is one of the saddest facts of the mission scene today. In the last century if reprisals were taken against a missionary the home country could be depended upon usually to do something on its behalf. Now there is no real friendliness on the part of our state department for missionaries who are going out. In fact, they, I think, would just as soon they didn’t. On top of that they are threatened in many cases with expulsion if they will report the crimes.

So they are silent about what they see. They will not talk about the things that are every day occurrences. And, as a result, they are involved in a serious moral compromise in many, many countries.

[ Scott ] The whole morality of the western position regarding the rest of the world is now in a very gray area. We used to be very clear. We used to be very clear about the fact that to introduce Christianity to the rest of the world was to benefit the rest of the world. I recall when {?} went into Singapore from the ship they saw various dark objects bobbing in the water. They thought at first it was coconuts. It turned out to be human heads because decapitation wais the method of punishment in old China and even when the Europeans managed to establish certain beach heads with trading for trading purposes in China, when the Chinese authorities were dis... were displeased with them, they would line up a bunch of the Chinese citizens and cut their heads off in front of the Europeans to make sure that they got the point that this was a very serious matter.

Now we could go on. The human sacrifice, the dreadful customs, the barbaric practices, the cannibals of the South Seas, the satee, the burning of the widows in India and all those dreadful practices that the white people interrupted and ended around the world, are now longer taught to school children.

In ... in a... in a... in a very peculiar rewriting of history we now have the situation where Colonialism is considered to be the epitome of evil, the absolutely the worst terrible thing that ever happened.

Well, the railroads, the roads, the bridges, the factories, the cities, the whole paraphernalia of modern life was introduced from the West to the rest of the world. Black Africa is regressing as we know. Medical facilities are decaying. The doctors have fled. The nurses have been massacred and raped. The spread of disease, including AIDS is beginning to go from Africa to other parts of the world.

South Africa is a remarkable jewel in the midst of this picture. Here we have a very advanced technological first level civilization operated by a minority of white people, managed, you might say, by a minority of white people and a large pool of black labor. The blacks in a period of only three generations have moved fantastically. There is absolutely nothing to the argument that black people are less intelligent than any other race. That is not so. When we have black men, black young men who were raised, one professor told me, without electric lights, they became superlative students of physics. It is a remarkable thing to watch. But we are running up to the peculiar superstition of the 20th century in which people do not believe in the passage of time. They want to see miracles.

Ponce de Leon and the fountain of youth is nothing compared to a modern student at Berkeley who wants to see the entire structure of South Africa transformed tomorrow morning at eight o'clock.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And since Rousseau there has been a myth that man apart from civilization is naturally good and man in civilization is corrupt and evil. As a result, you mentioned Cannibalism. You actually have scholars who deny that Cannibalism ever existed, that it was a myth created by missionaries and others. When the records are very clear how much there was and still is in some areas and how many missionaries actually lost their lives to cannibals and were eaten.

Now let me add parenthetically one of the things that led to a diminution of eating missionaries and white men generally was that cannibals found their meat too salty. White men eat a lot of heavily salted foods and that makes their meat a little difficult to take. But you find people trying to deny, for example, that the Germanic peoples, the Saxons in particular, practiced human sacrifice and other abominations, that various of the northern European peoples had ritual homosexuality and so on. They were primitive then. Therefore they had to be naturally good. And the blacks of Africa, the natives of the jungles of South America, everywhere where you have primitive men, by definition in our humanistic culture, they are good and civilized man is evil.

So we clobber ourselves. We are the polluters of the world and so on. I think I told you once of the episode that happened at a major university when was asked to speak at the law school. I referred to the changes in words and so on to illustrate a point with respect to legal history and I said a farmer was once a tax collector and the word cannibal was once carribal, because the first encounter with cannibals on the part of European men was among the Indians of the Americans, the Carib Indians in the Caribbeans first of all.

Well, it created quite a sensation. In fact, I was canceled out at another law school immediately when word of that got that. All through that week there were problems. Faculty members objecting to my continuing to speak because I had spoken about the Cannibalism of the Indians. And it was summed up by one faculty member who said, “Whether it is true or not makes no difference. Given the record of the white man, he has no right to speak about the sins of any other peoples.”

The faculty member who invited me had to leave later, go to another school.

Now that is what we have as we approach South Africa and the situation in there, this total lack of any reality.

If I may say a little more, Otto. One of the things that strikes me as very ironic I was, as you know, on an Indian reservation for eight and a half years. The great change in American Indian policies on the part of the federal government came in the 30s with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who brought in John Collier. Prior to that while very real mistakes were made by the Indian service, the goal was to Americanize the Indians, to absorb him into American culture. And despite the mistakes, this was taking place.

But Collier said we must indianize the Indian. And his concept of the reservation was exactly what South Africa has done with the Apartheid. The Indian must be the citizen of the tribe. This tribe must be an enclave unto itself and so on. Apartheid was ... I wonder, perhaps borrowed from the American Indian policy by the peoples of South Africa, because we first instituted that policy and were pursuing it unrelentingly today. We are increasingly trying to indianize the Indian, but we won’t allow South Africa to have their version of the same thing.

Now some will say, “Well, they insist that there can be no dual citizenship, but we were ready to allow that.” But at present they are working towards that. So we are very hypocritical in approving of the reservation system here and disapproving of a far more independent Apartheid in South Africa.

[ Scott ] It is a toss up as to whether we got it from the South Africans got it from us or whether we and the South Africans got it from the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union under Stalin set up a nationalities division shortly after the Bolsheviks took over. And, of course, the are more minorities in the Soviet Union and more different languages than there are in any other single nation in the world. And their method of treating the minorities was to give each one its own territory and Stalin, a Georgian, was in charge of this. So you had a territory for the Armenians, a territory for the Jews, a territory for every group. The Jews were the only ones that refused to live in their territory. The others were transported and to a large extent accepted what they couldn't resist

And the great Russians... the great Russians, as the Russians call themselves, remained the government minority of the Soviet Union. If you look at the roster of the Soviet parliament you will find that it is almost all great Russians. And certainly the ... the head offices of the Soviet empire are occupied by white Russians, not by Tartars, not by Mongols, not by Armenians and so forth. They also instituted a system of passports in Russia in which every person born in any of these homelands—and I believe they call them homelands. I am not sure—have to declare at the age of 16 which nationality he is going to bear for life. If he is the product of a mixed marriage he has to make his choice then. It is not just the Jews who have this nationality on their passport, but everybody.

The Jews have made an international issue of it, because they say that it leads to discrimination or that it is discriminatory. But if it is discriminatory, it is a discrimination that applies to everybody across the board.

Now the system that was set up in South Africa resembles the Soviet. It has a certain resemblance to our reservations, too. But it resembles the Soviet with certain crucial differences. The Soviets still control all these different homelands even though Mr. Roosevelt allowed the Soviet Union to have three votes in the U N on the theory that the Ukraine and Belorussia are separate countries. The fact is that they are not separate countries. They are governed by Soviet law. But the homelands that are being set up by South Africa are not governed by South African law, which is something that you never read about in the American newspapers.

In each of these home lands they have abolished all the South African rules of Apartheid, all of the South African restrictions on intermarriage, et cetera, although the South Africa government itself has recently done that. And set up their own laws. So they are enclaves of black freedom in the midst of larger South Africa.

Now if you are going to have your own laws, if you are going to have the right to govern an area, then you have your own citizens. And the people who live there or belong there are no longer considered South African subjects. The South Africans are very logical in this. the Afrikaners have that strange Teutonic logic in which they begin with a point and they go trudge, trudge, right through the whole structure. And I think that is a fascinating aspect.

[ Rushdoony ] I think it is timely in view of the fact that your book came out this month that a libertarian magazine based here in California, Reason, in its April 1985 issue has an article by John Blandell, “Siskai Independent Way.” Siskai is one of these homelands for blacks in Africa of a particular tribe. And in Siskai some dramatic things are taking place. It is becoming a libertarian paradise, another Hong Kong or Singapore with a growing prosperity, with all kinds of freedom and privileges so it is quite a remarkable picture. And it is ironic that South Africa is not particularly happy about it because South Africa is inclined to a controlled economy so neither the Marxists nor the South Africans, nor the Americans want to take it seriously. But it is a growing and exciting thing.

[ Scott ] Well, there are other homelands that are doing other things. One of the homelands has set up a sin capital for southern Africa with porno films and gambling houses and all the things that go with that. And I remember asking one of the leading South African Afrikaner politicians how that squared with the some what puritanical pattern of the Afrikaners. And he said, “Well, we don’t like it, but,” he said, “We gave them their independence and we can’t complain if they use their independence.”

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I would like to read a few passages.

[ Scott ] Go right ahead.

[ Rushdoony ] From Blandell’s article. Let me quote here. “There is a small black African country where new factory openings are so frequent people are losing count of them, where employment in some areas has more than quadrupled in the last four years, where blacks are setting up small businesses in droves and soon will be able freely to own property for the first time in nearly a century, where urban blacks are becoming home owners under a privatization of government housing plans and where all manner of white man’s laws inherited from neighboring South Africa, including the detested race laws are being swept from the books.”

And the article continues calling attention to the fact that these people in the Siskai refuse to believe the liberals that their forefathers lived communistically. Hey are insistent on having a free economy. And they are moving increasingly for the wholesale deregulation of business, for the reform of land ownership to introduce security of tenure, eliminating taxes and permits, privatization of a large part of present government assets and activities and the establishment of Siskai as a tax haven to attract corporations from abroad. And it is doing that already and the corporate income tax is gone. So they are doing remarkable things. They are accused of denying civil liberties to dissenters and supposedly all kinds of people are in jail because of their secret police. The author found that to be a ridiculous charge.

As a matter of fact, he says that one English South African declares, and I quote, “As Siskai was abolishing taxes and South Africa was increasing them, he, Parkins, predicted that within five years neighboring South African towns would beg to become incorporated into Siskai.” And he found there even a former Californian, Don Saul, who was working with Siskai’s small business corporation. And he said he stopped between towns, and I quote, “We stopped at {?} to visit Taylor Patrick {?} whose payroll has soared from zero to 50 in under a year. But {?} was out hunting for more workers. His wife and brother showed me their small two room factory which was turning out 1400 children’s jogging suits a day for a U S chain of stores. And black business, church and other spokesmen were just as enthusiastic about the economic reforms.”

The article goes on to describe the fact that while he was there Blondell never saw a police officer. So instead of being a police state, there was a minimum of police. And he said the charge that Siskai is dependent on South African subsidies is false. They receive a total of 12 million dollars a year which is next to nothing.

So the article is very, very interesting and a good companion to your study in showing that the kind of propaganda we get has no relationship to the reality of the situation.

Now for Reason a libertarian magazine to give such excellent coverage, a 10 page, 12 page article, to send a man there, indicates that Siskai is leading the world in developing a free market economy.

[ Scott ] In black Africa.

[ Rushdoony ] In black Africa within South Africa.

[ Scott ] Within South Africa.

[ Rushdoony ] ... as a separate and an independent country and the South Africans, because they like so much a controlled economy, do not like Siskai’s independent way, but they are doing nothing about it, because they respect the freedom that is theirs.

[ Scott ] Well, look at the ridiculous nature of the propaganda campaign.  Here we have students in Berkeley and Columbia arguing for disinvestment and not for investment in Siskai to help the black people of Siskai.

[ Rushdoony ] They don’t want to promote freedom anywhere. They want to promote tyranny, Soviet style. They have a will to death.

[ Scott ] Well, the ... it is very difficult for me to understand how anyone could be bright enough to get into a top university and at the same time stupid enough not to understand that if the American businesses pull out of South Africa that their places will be filled by Frenchmen, by Britishers, by West Germans and by Italians and by businessmen from other parts of the world. Not to speak of the fact that the Afrikaners themselves will gobble up at bargain prices all the business in South Africa that the Americans want to abandon, just as they did take over at bargain prices all the businesses that the British abandoned in 1961.

The American withdraw from South Africa, in other words, is not going to fundamentally weaken South Africa, nor is it going to teach them anything. It is just simply going to say, well, if you don’t do ... it is something like a rich kid’s argument. If you fellows don’t elect me captain of the ball team, I am going to take my bat and gloves and go home.

[ Rushdoony ] I don't think it is a lack of intelligence. I think it is a lack of morality. These students, intellectuals and media men are evil. They are unregenerate, ungodly men. They hate Christianity. Therefore their moral perspective is warped. The current auto club magazine has an article which is typical of many and, perhaps, a little more honest than most. It is about Red China. And the author visited there and is full of gush about the beauty, how marvelous it is, how wonderful the people are. These people go there and they love it because they can look down on these people. And when they see the gap between themselves and these people living the way they do, they are happy. They as the elite can be on one level and these people should be content to be backward and primitive.

The author says that some of the hotels are excellent, American built ones, and others were horrible. They smelled. They were crumbling, although they were new. The toilets didn’t work or were rocky. They were in one hotel with a 17... with a room on the 17th floor and no elevator working, which serves these liberals right.

But they are capable of gushing over any kind of evil as long as they can remain the elite.

[ Scott ] Well, that has always been true to an extent. We have always had people here and in England, too, who enjoyed the experience of going to a third world country and feeling very rich, feeling as though they really are members of the upper class. I remember that one of the worst aspects of the British Empire when it was in existence was the fact that middle class English people would go overseas and pretend that they were members of the aristocracy. Now the aristocracy didn’t go overseas because things were too good at home for the aristocracy. Yeah, the only ones that went overseas were those that were in charge of the shebang. But I ran into all kinds of snobby hotel managers and their wives and people of that sort who really thought the colonial world was wonderful because it gave them a chance to feel socially superior. And I have noticed ... I have noticed that in the Americans. I have noticed some Americans who went to the orient and American soldiers who were in Japan and during the end of World War II who really felt that they were conquerors and among an inferior race and they just felt wonderful because of it.

But one of the aspects of the South African and western situation that is very intriguing to me is the fact that the present government, white government of South Africa is a Christian government. Now this is never mentioned. But when you go there the Christian nature of that government is inescapable. It is pervasive. The television opens with a prayer and it ends with a prayer. They teach Christianity in the schools. They have a considerable number of seminary graduates and ordained ministers in the political party and in the government. It is astonishing. They have prime ministers who were ministers. And it is very Calvinist in a sort of traditional Calvinist sense, somewhat like traditional Catholicism in the fact that many of the members of the Dutch Reformed Church are not theologically learned, but they are obedient members of the congregation.

Now as Christians there is a limit to what they will do to other people. They are bound, so to speak, by a Christian morality and they try to do their best. In many respects they take what they consider to be the best way to go from the American pattern. They are gone into deficit spending, for instance, in order to improve the standards, the living standards and educational standards of the blacks. They are building schools. They are educating people. They don’t charge the blacks income taxes. And the blacks get free education, free university education and there the doors are open.

Now this is turning their system of economics down there into a semi socialist situation much like ours. We... we have this situation. We have not only gone into deficit spending for social progress here, but we have also extended our deficit by attempting to elevate the living standards of people around the world. Our so-called budget deficit wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for our foreign aid program. We would have a surplus if it weren’t for that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You mentioned the fact that South Africa has gone in for deficit financing to help the blacks. Perhaps you ought to describe the kind of housing they provide for the black peoples of South Africa.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, the largest black enclave is next to Johannesburg and it is Soweto. Soweto I went through. And I had the vision in my mind of galvanized huts and pigs running though the streets and all that sort of thing. And, incidentally, that sort of illustration is still being paraded around the United States. But that represents Soweto of 40 to 50 years ago at a time when there were hardly any roads in South Africa anywhere for anybody. Today the roads are paved. The homes range from modest to elaborate. And the rents are nominal and they are light tenure, 99 year tenure. The ... there are a number of black businesses in Soweto and a number of black millionaires. And when I was there, there was a huge and hugely expensive electrification project underway in which they were putting in lights, telephones and all the other amenities with which we are familiar.

[ Rushdoony ] I think it is interesting that when there was rioting there a while back we were not told what the rioting was about. It was a protest vaguely we were told and only in one or two periodicals did it come out that it was a protest because these subsidized housing areas where the blacks paid for air conditioned brick homes 20 dollars a month the rent was raised to 23.50.

[ Scott ] Yes. That is the sort of thing.

[ Rushdoony ] So they are providing more generously for blacks there than we are for our welfare blacks here.

[ Scott ] Well, just take a look at the lower Bronx, the bombed out areas that Jimmy Carter said were going not be taken care of which are still there.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now the... the question arises in a practical sense on the business of one man, one vote. The one man, one vote was not part of the American Constitution. We had a representative government originally. The Supreme Court under Earl Warren devised the slogan one man, one vote. And it is hard to think of anything more mischievous. If that were to be instituted in South Africa you would have a situation where the votes of primitives would outweigh the votes of everyone else. And it would probably lead to a Rhodesian situation and to tribal warfare and massacres.

Israel has a similar dilemma regarding the Palestinians on the West Bank. There are several million of them. They have had to restrict their franchise. They are not without representation. But they don’t have one man, one vote.

The Israeli argument is that if they introduced one man, one vote, the Arabs with their rising birth rate and great numbers would soon out number the Israelis and would, in effect, vote the Jewish state out of existence. Therefore, they said, in order to maintain the Jewish state they would not have one man, one vote. I have never read any campaigns against that position. So if you are for one man, one vote, you would have to apply it, of course, everywhere. If you don’t apply it everywhere, then what is your argument?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It is a bit of hypocrisy. And it is malicious because it is aimed at destroying an outpost of Christian civilization which has its faults, like all do. But it is aimed at destroying an outpost and one we are particularly dependent upon.

Would you like to comment upon our dependence upon South African minerals and the like as well as its strategic position?

[ Scott ] Well, there... the overall position of the United States in the world, geo politically speaking or militarily speaking is that we are a two ocean power. We are... we began as... as a maritime power, not a land power, because we already have all the land we want after getting the... after the War of 1848 in achieving a continental spread. This is all the land the United States really wants. We built the Panama Canal because we are a two ocean power and because we need to transfer in a hurry from one ocean to another. By paying somebody to take the Panama Canal off our hands, by putting it into the hands of Communist Panama, we have set up a future obstacle for ourselves. At the time that was done the argument was that we didn’t have to worry militarily because we could always protect or maintain the Panama Canal form Nicaragua. Well, now, of course, we know where Nicaragua is. And we know that the American Congress is in the process of saying that Nicaragua is not strategic to our military needs which is a very strange position, indeed.

The Falkland Islands, on the other hand, guard the cape at the bottom of Patagonia. If Russia were to allow the... or were to assist the Argentines to take the Falkland Islands away from Britain then the Soviets could maintain a control of both the Panama Canal and Patagonia which would mean that we wouldn’t be able to reach the Pacific Ocean excepting by overland routes. We don’t have the freight trains. We don’t have the railroad cars to do what we were able to do in the past to transport all that needs to be transported between the coasts.

Then we move over to Suez which, of course, is very vulnerable to being closed. It was closed twice since World War II to the west. And if Suez is closed to again all shipments would have to be around the cape of Good Hope which is off South Africa. If South Africa were in Communist control that route to the Orient could be changed. The route from the Middle East to Europe could be interdicted, which would mean that an oil embargo could be maintained, which would, first, starve Europe from oil from the Middle East and, second, starve the United States from oil from Venezuela, because control of the Caribbean is like control of the Middle East. It controls the ... two oil pools upon which the West relies.

Since the Soviets have an enormous submarine fleet and a surface fleet and have a base in Cuba and a base in Nicaragua, a growing base in Guyana and since they are already in Afghanistan which is on the northern borders of Iran, and they are in Libya and they have there the largest military... largest air base in the Middle East which we built and which they took away from us. Militarily speaking they have a knife at our throat. And South Africa is very crucial in this.

On the business of maintaining a war, a defensive war, we rely upon South African mineral alloys for the construction of practically every crucial thing that we do, computers, jets, military material and weapons of the most basic sort. We would ... when the Japanese attacked they had two targets. Their primary target was the British navy. Secondary target was the American Pacific fleet. The purpose of those attacks was to take the rubber bearing lands of Southeast Asia, because the Japanese military had studied World War I and had discerned that the German transport had stalled and that was the reason the Germans had to surrender. They had to surrender because stalled transport they could no longer move and they couldn’t move because they ran out of rubber.

The Japanese reasoned that if they had all the natural rubber lands of the south east, the United States could not fight because it took in those days a ton of rubber to make a B-12. It took rubber to make radios. It took rubber to make telephones. It took rubber to move an automobile and so forth. They misjudged because they were unaware or unappreciative of the enormous industrial compatibility of the United States at that time. And a synthetic rubber program was cranked up which saved us from the Japanese success.

Now at that time the synthetic rubber program succeeded because Washington said it didn’t know what to do and asked American business to do whatever it could and it suspended the anti trust laws so that there was an industrial pool of technology and patents and everything else in order to do that.

Now after the war the Senator {?} of Montana had a study made an assessment made of that program and a professor from Cornell put it together said we should never again allow American business men that much authority. If we have to do it again we must see to it that the government itself has the experts and instructs business on what to do, which argues that we would never be able to reproduce a synthetic rubber program or a program similar to that.

However, synthetic rubber was a chemical process, a chemical and oil process. There is no process that can create the metals that we have to have from South Africa. It simply cannot be done. So if we are cut off from oil and if we are cut off from the minerals, we must surrender. The campaign against South Africa is a campaign that only one nation can win and that is the United... the Union of Soviet Republics. The U S S R is the beneficiary of the demonstrations at Berkeley, at Columbia, at the editorials in the New York Times, of the expostulation... at the indignation of Dan Rather and all the other saints that we have among us.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Very, very true. We have just a couple of minutes left, Otto. I would like to remind everyone that this book, Otto Scott’s The Other End of the Lifeboat is available for 18.95 and you can order it from Ross House Books, P O Box 67, Vallecito, V as in Victor, A L L E C I T O, California 95251.

We are very grateful, Otto, that you have taken this time and that you have done the travel and studying that went into this book, because I know that two years ago you spend a great deal of the year in South Africa on two separate trips.

Is there any final statement you would like to make? You have about a minute or a minute and a half.

[ Scott ] Well, at least half of the book, the latter half of the book is devoted to what my wife and I saw while we were there and the people we talked to. I think that Americans and especially Christian Americans will find a remarkable similarity between the South Africans and ourselves. And I... I do hope that they will take a look at what I wrote, because I tried very hard not to turn this into a insect encyclopedia, a dry as dust thing. It is a very human ... it is a book aimed as much at Americans as it is South Africans.

[ Rushdoony ] Well let me add a final word. This is a book that a great many people did not want published. And that story is quite an interesting one which some day in the distant future might well be told. But for the present we do urge you to read this book and we will look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you all for listening and God bless you.

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