From the Easy Chair

National Suicide

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 192-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161N26

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161N26, National Suicide, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair 105, September 9, 1985.

Today Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and myself will be discussing national suicide.

A book of that title was published over 10 years ago written by Antony Sutton, a very important book. In a sense, our subject parallels that although it is in an entirely different area. We have chosen that subject because we see today a growing temper in this country and, in fact, throughout the western world that is suicidal. We are told by Solomon in Proverbs that God declares that he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me love death.

We would have to say that in this century, with a growing rapidity, the western world has been committing suicide. This marks this country. It marks Europe and, indeed, nations beyond the frontiers of Europe.

With regard to the United States we see it in the fact that Otto has so well described in this book The Other End of the Life Boat that we are working against South Africa whom we need. Our survival depends on strategic items that can be bought only from South Africa. South Africa in the hands of a Marxist state would spell death for us.

Then in the Far East we have worked against Taiwan. We are working to destroy the Philippines. We are hostile to Japan and despite the fact that there are problems there and in the Philippines and elsewhere, we must say that these countries are still basically our friends, that while they are not perfect and have serious faults, so does the United States. Japan is one of our two best customers. Japan driven into the Marxist orbit—and we can do that very readily with our present trend—can become the death of our future in the Pacific. And the Pacific basin today is very important to us because economically the center of the world is no longer the Atlantic. It is the Pacific. It is the Pacific basin where we do most of our trade.

So we are working against our national self interest.

Let me cite one little item as an instance of this. This is from human events some time ago calling attention to a Supreme Court decision which said that no public teacher, public school teacher can be fired for advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging or promoting public or private homosexual activity. Now that is suicidal, that kind of decision.

Los Angeles has just passed an ordinance saying that there can be no discrimination against anyone because they have AIDS. They cannot be fired from any kind of position, nor discriminated against in any fashion. And as two medical men said, this made their work very difficult in the future medically very difficult. And yet city after city has called Los Angeles to get the text of that measure because they intend to pass the same laws and some already have. We have to term that suicidal.

Now that is our concern in this hour. Otto, do you have some observations to make?

[ Scott ] Yes, I do. It is an interesting topic. And just before I came over here I looked up a book that I have in my library called Decadent Societies by Robert M. Adams, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983. I don’t agree with Mr. Adams in the entire book as I seldom agree with anybody in an entire book anyway. But he has an interesting definition of decadence. It is in Adams’ view, quote, “A deliberate neglect of the essentials of self preservation, an incapacity or unwillingness to face a clear and present danger.”

[ Rushdoony ] Very good. Let me add that I picked up a book last year on decadence with that title, a trifling book, because the gist of it was that decadence is a subjective term and is worthless so we cannot call anything decadent because someone else might consider it to be quite advanced.

Mark, have you any observations?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, by way of example we can look at our ... our foreign policy. And I think particularly as you said regarding Otto’s book on South Africa and what has been our policy ... the policy of our state department since World War II, if not before, is to destroy our friends and to support those who are against freedom and liberty. We did it to China. We have done it... we did it to Cuba. We have done it elsewhere as Otto brought out in his book. And the policy of the state department even now with regard to the sanctions against South Africa... now I understand that Reagan is supporting these sanctions and proposing some of his own. It is to destroy a country that is friendly to us whose only enemies are Marxists. And we do this over again... over and over again in our foreign policy. And our foreign policy seems to be to destroy liberty, to destroy governments around the world that allow any type of freedom and to support those that are Totalitarian. And so it is not just at home. It is not just our society that is suicidal, but it is our approach to the world at large. And it is where we are... where we are moving, it is suicide on all levels.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, that suicide is not only in foreign policy it is in domestic policy. An example of that is the ecology movement. Now long before the term ecology became popular I had written a paper on the need for ecological common sense from a biblical perspective. No one was interested in publishing it and I lost it somewhere over the years. However, today ecology has become a form of hatred for man, hatred for civilization, a means of destroying it. I have referred on another occasion to the fact that we have a law against killing rattle snakes in California unless your life is in danger. Well, rattle snakes are not an endangered species. But we certainly are doing all we can to protect them.

Then we here in Calaveras County are in an area of state and national forests. In the nearby county just to the south of us the forest service last year planned during the winter to poison gophers, because they were eating their way through stands of newly planted pine trees in the Stanislaus National Forest. They were destroying all the work that the forest service had gone to to replant a particular area. However, the Sierra Club said they opposed the poisoning program because of the chances it might endanger other wildlife.

Well, the poisons were placed in the underground burrow of the gophers. So their chances of affecting birds and other animals was very minimal and yet it was opposed. You would have to term that kind of activity suicidal. But it does mark our present environmental movement.

[ Scott ] Well, we have a ... I agree with that. I think that the environmentalists have cost us as much as we would have lost if we had lost a major war. They ... and the environmental movement is responsible for the beginning of our industrial decline, much more so than international trade, because it takes now where it used to take a couple of years to put up a factory, it now takes between eight and 15. And it is an almost impossible to create jobs if you can’t put up plants.

I have a friend in San Diego who was going to use a territory in the desert that he owned for motor cycle off... off the road vehicles to entertain themselves. He had to spend 60,000 dollars in an environmental impact report first. This was in the middle of the desert.

But I would like to get back to the business of the protection of sentiment against Japan, et cetera. This morning’s Wall Street Journal had an article by an interesting write who said that the real problem is the overseas debt to American economy which has been expanded through our bank and through the government’s encouragement and so forth.

Now the only way these countries can repay that debt is to collect dollars from trading with us. And 300 billion dollars is owed to the United States by Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico.

These countries would be affected by a high tariff as would Taiwan and Korea, not just Japan so that if we put up high tariff walls, these Latin American countries that all owe us so much money would not be able to repay. That would set off a ripple effect which would probably plunge us into a much worse depression then the 30s.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is just one instance of short sightedness. I mean the South African thing, of course, I wrote a book about it. And I am horrified at... the book was researched in 1982 and 83. We hoped it would be published in 84 in September. The publisher dragged his feet, which they often do, because he thought it was an unpopular topic. Now it is only everybody’s lips. But at any rate it didn’t come out until this year, 85. I had no idea when I turned that manuscript over that anybody could whistle up a storm like this with this rapidity, with this unanimity. It is frightening to see how effective the Kremlin’s arguments are in the West. We have no professors in the Communist countries teaching Capitalism and yet when a Marxist journal was introduced about five years ago it had 12,000 professorial subscribers before it appeared. Now who blows this whistle at these dogs here inaudible to human ears, I don’t know, but the dogs of the press are barking.

Now it is true. If we didn’t have the minerals from South Africa there would be only one place ... only a few places we could get them. We could get them from Zaire. We could get them from Zimbabwe and we could get them from the Soviet Union. Now if the Soviet Union is the sole provider of the minerals we need to maintain our establishment, to build a computer, an airplane, a tank, a bridge, an automobile, to operate an oil refinery and many other areas, we couldn't function. What do you suppose would happen? My feeling is that they would have a summit conference and out of the summit we would not be able to withstand them at a summit conference. Out of the summit conference will come peace like Chamberlain, only peace on our time, a new world order which Dr. Kissinger used to talk about all the time.

We will send troops to the Soviet Union and they will send troops here. And it will be all one wonderful world. And it will be the end of the United States.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I... I gave it five years. J. B. Saunders last night in conversation said three. He has already made his plans to move to Switzerland if this program continues.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Otto, you mentioned protectionism and a tariff. I think it is amazing that people are so short sighted that they forget that the stock market crash in 1929 led to one and a half million unemployed. That is all. Then, when the Democrats and Republicans united in a protectionist tariff in 1931 the Smoot Hawley Act, they doubled the unemployed almost overnight to three million, because if you cannot sell to foreigners, if you cannot... if you do not buy from foreign countries they have no money and you cannot sell to them.

Well, Roosevelt came in with even more protectionist measures and economic controls on domestic industry. The result was that by 36 the unemployment rate reached 16 million. And yet people look back to Roosevelt as the man who solved the problem. He compounded it. And yet we are going not back to the same measures as though we had no knowledge of the past.

[ Scott ] Well I forget who it was that said that the lesson of the past is that people don't learn the lesson of the past.

[ Rushdoony ] Disraeli had a good comment like that, too. He said, “Practical men are men who repeat the blunders of their predecessors.”

[ Scott ] Disraeli was a very interesting person.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He said about free trade—and I will take the devil’s advocate not his now—he said it is a fine principle, but not a religion. Now one of the things that free trade did for Great Britain in a world where tariff walls were going up, where the Germans began the business of putting up high tariffs and when the United States always had a high tariff. This was a protectionist country from the beginning. New England insisted on the high tariffs and it was on of the cause of the Civil war is that the South wanted those tariffs reduced.

Well, when England had a... released... lowered its tariffs against agricultural products, the importation of agricultural products, the so-called corn laws, the first result for about 20 years was a great boom upward in which the industrial revolution took another spurt forward and English trade benefited immensely. But after that, because English industry built so well, people left the land. And they went into the factories and the cities which was a phenomenon we see over and again when industrialization begins to pick up. And by the 1880s and 1890s, England was no longer able to feed itself. In World War I this almost led to its defeat because the German u-boat blockade almost starved England out. And I would have to say that free trade is a marvelous principle in a free trade world. It is like disarmament. If the other guy disarms it is good. What do we do when the other fellow doesn’t?

Now the European economic community has got high tariff walls around it. It will not accept Japanese goods. It will not accept our goods. Europe is composed of a multitude of small nations who are dominated by the most narrow minded people in the world. And the United States is only lately only since World War II gotten around to the idea of international trade to begin with. So it is a difficult situation to maintain.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, but we have to recognize, too, that Europe has made itself peripheral in the world economy by its protectionism.

[ Scott ] We helped make it peripheral.

[ Rushdoony ] True, but, you see, consider what Singapore and Hong Kong have become in the world. One of our own group, Grace Flanagan, her brother Bob is much of the time in Singapore because his California based corporation is now doing more and more out of Singapore because they find that there is much more freedom that way. And Singapore now is becoming a center of world trade.

[ Scott ] That is interesting. It was fascinating for me to discover last April at an economic conference in the East that as a nation we are exporting agricultural products and importing finished products.

[ Rushdoony ] That is true, but what we are doing I read a book about that not too long ago. And the these was that industrially we are way out in front. What we have done is to surrender things that we developed, because we are more innovative. For example, for a while the center of world manufacture of automobiles was the United States. Now other countries are picking that up. But we are pioneering in other areas so that industrially we are always out in front. And the American ability has been to concentrate on they innovative and let other nations pick up something a generation or two or three after we have developed it and then take over. And we move into the new areas constantly.

[ Scott ] That may be true industrially. I think it is true industrially, because the private sector contains the best brains in the country. Although they are very overly pragmatic, in my view and overly short sighted. Other commentators have discussed this, this every three month quarterly report syndrome, which keeps us from a long range in terms of a large corporation.

But to get back to your title, national suicide, one of the things that seems to have over taken the United States, not since Vietnam, but since the Soviets got the atom bomb has been an inability to use our power anywhere in the world. Domestically the United States ... the forces of the United States government are afraid to use their... to use their powers and authority to suppress crime. Now on the whole question of South Africa, in 1984 there were relatively few murders in South Africa, 350 or so. Detroit had more. It had 450. Over the span of the United States there were 18,000 murders. If we are 10 times larger than South Africa. You know we are being quite a bully here. Great big power like the United States is beating on a country one tenth its size where we cringe before all our other enemies, our real enemies. But the point that I am.... want to make is that the government has lost its nerve, internally, externally and everywhere else. They are afraid of the newspapers. I never remember anybody being afraid of a journalist. Why should they be afraid of a loud mouth?

[ Rushdoony ] Well, Reagan more than any other man in the White House is afraid of the press and reacts to it.

[ M Rushdoony ] I... in... in that regard I can remember even back when I was in high school being amazed at watching presidential press conferences where the reporters whose qualification must include having a big mouth would literally scream at the president to get his attention.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] And...

[ Rushdoony ] And be insulting.

[ M Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Scott ] Can you imagine? This is what Solzhenitsyn said. He said, “They are awfully strong... awfully brave in the West.” But he said the same reporters will go over to an iron curtain country and along will come the smallest functionary who will say, “Shut up and move along there.” And they shut up and move along. When they go... they... the... our newspapers do not refer to the leaders of the Soviet Union or to the leaders of any other country in the terrible terms that they customarily apply to our own elected officials.

[ Rushdoony ] I was doing a little bit of cleaning in my library this morning and I threw away a cartoon which was a delight, but I can’t save everything, because it stated things so tellingly. It was of a bureaucrat sitting at a desk and saying, “Just a moment, Mr. Gorbachev. We will make sure you get everything you want, but first we have got to get rid of these farmers who we ... whom we have got to foreclose on immediately.”

[ Scott ] That is awfully close to the truth.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is almost like our police force. The ... the greatest effort of American police is to stop traffic violations on the highways, speeders, et cetera. If they applied the same energy to ordinary crime there wouldn’t be any, because when you get in the car you know you have got to watch yourself. Criminals don’t have to watch themselves as much as the motorists.

[ Rushdoony ] To turn to the paper again, there was something in the neighboring county’s paper earlier this year about phantom forests, forests that had been burned over, had been given appropriations to replant, but somehow or other the replanting had never been done, although these phantom forests appeared on the books and were growing steadily every year. The money had been deflected one place or another or there had not been enough. But at any rate these phantom forests were on the books of the forest service.

I was reminded of Gogol’s Dead Souls the man who did business in serfs, serfs who were actually dead, but if you bought and sold them you had status. You had so many souls.

I would like to call attention—because I think it fits in this context—to something in Antony Sutton’s Phoenix Letter, a very excellent statement as he reviews the future of the country pro and con, inflation, deflation and so on. And the point he makes is that the federal debt is out of control. The federal budget is out of control, that we have reached the point where Congress is no longer in charge. It is simply inflating. It is appropriating. It is doing nothing to bring the deficit or the budget under control.

[ Scott ] Well, we can talk about these various manifestations of a sickness, spiritual sickness and malaise. It is worse than a malaise. It is a real honest to goodness disease. In that book on decadent societies he set aside the social decadence as not really the core of what we are talking about, because—and he pointed out—and it is true—that even in declining periods great works of art appear, et cetera, et cetera. There is always a ...a... a core, a remnant of the sincerely religious. I think can think of the crowds that used to listen to Billy Graham and the ... I mean to Billy Sunday in the early 20s. And yet the 20s were a very downward period.

What we are really talking about here is an inability to confront reality which is a complicated way of committing suicide. An alcoholic evades society through liquor and liquor, of course, kills him slowly. A drug addict flees from reality with his drugs and the drugs, of course, kill him slowly. The United States, the government of the United States appears to be absolutely determined not to regard the growing Soviet menace as real. They refuse to admit what this book, The New KGB made very clear, that he Soviets from the beginning have considered themselves at war with the ... with the West, at war. And anything that you do in war is fair.

The West insists that the Soviets are not at war with us, that there is no danger, there is no peril and therefore we can go blithely on our way throwing one baby country after another out of the sled to placate the wolves.

[ M Rushdoony ] To what extent do you think this is a failure to face reality and, or on the other hand, a determination to move in a particular direction?

[ Scott ] I think it is primarily a failure to face reality because this is cowardice. And cowardice and fear are parts of lack of faith having no... nothing to believe in, not believing in anything. And therefore you tremble. If you really believe in the Christian doctrine, for instance, there is nothing in life that you can really fear because the next life is going to be better than this. And even the Mohammedans are told ... I mean Khomeini’s young boy they are told if... that they will go to heaven and they believe and they go. And they look upon us with contempt because we have lost this. Our forbearers had it. They could fight. And anyone who has ever been in a fight—and I don't think the average American boy today is allowed to get into a fight—but you know that once you are in a fight you forget all your fear. You are involved in the action. And we can’t die any quicker with the atom bomb than we could from a bullet. Death is death. But the United States right now is going to a summit meeting with the Soviet Union for what purpose?

[ Rushdoony ] Last month in Geneva, as you know, there was a conference held with regard to the Soviet Union. And one analyst stated flatly that the Soviet Union, despite its military strength, had so many internal problems that a collapse was likely in five years or so unless, of course, we try to save it again.

At the same time other economists have said that our collapse economically and in other ways is likely by the end of this decade and that this is true of a good deal of the world. So the love of death marks the whole world. And the whole world is moving on a suicidal path.

Perhaps we ought to concern ourselves now with the counter trend to this, which, as we pointed doubt in the last session we had together, are entirely on the side of Christian faith, Christian reconstruction.

I received a copy of a book that one attorney in Montana, Douglas Kelly, who may be a distant relative of our Douglas Kelly, has written. And the title is From the Monastery to the Market Place. And it is an account of his own pilgrimage from life within a church and looking at the church in a monastic sense as the be all an end all of his life to the recognition that the faith has to be carried into the market place and into all the world. I think his title is a good one, From the Monastery to the Market Place. And I think this is beginning to mark the Church increasingly.

[ Scott ] Well, that is really an... an... an individual progression similar to the Reformation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is an exact repeat. And the new reformation, which we refer to as a Reconstruction is going to have to overcome the errors of the first reformation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which was destroyed by internal disunity, by arguments over dogma, doctrine and I remember at that... giving that speech recently in Valley Forge that I angered some of the high school teachers who were in the audience and one sitting in the front row interrupted me, which is rare in those sort of things and hollered out, “What is a Christian?”

And I said, “Anyone who believes that Jesus is God.

And there as quite a bit of silence. It was a very simple answer.

I don’t know if that same sort of answer would be given by the members of a great many denominations, but to me it covers the subject. And if we have a reconstruction on that level, then we will stop the suicide because I don’t know any Christians or any believing Christian who are suicidally inclined.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. There is an interesting analogy to the pre Reformation era and our own times. In the pre Reformation era medieval theology had become extremely pietistic. Its concern was with the inner world. This temper which had not even marked monastic life to the same extent previously became very popular. You had all kinds of lay groups that were totally concerned with their inner spiritual condition.

Now this was not a healthy development, although some tend to look upon it as pre Reformation development. Actually it was anti reformational because it did not see the relevance of the faith to the world. It was concerned with the individual and his feelings, his status before God in an emotional way. The result was the Reformation and then the counter Reformation became concerned with the world. Then, with the 17th century, Pietism arose again in both Catholic and Protestant circles. The Enlightenment took over and began to command Europe. And Christianity progressively became what it is today, a sub cultural fact.

Saturday when I was speaking in San Francisco I called attention to the fact that this past month or perhaps it was even this past week the world championship Monopoly games were held somewhere on the east coast. I didn’t know such a thing existed until I read an account of it in a magazine. Well, now Monopoly is a sub cultural fact. It has no effect on our culture. It is a game. Christianity, Protestant and Catholic has become a sub cultural fact. Here it commands over half the population . You have, what is it, 55 million who claim to be born again Christians. But they are sub cultural. They are not molding the culture or haven’t been until the 80s.

Now they are beginning to have an impact. Now I see the hope for the future in this and in the Christian school movement which is going to mold a generation to relate their faith and is going to produce superior students.

Mark, you might report on what the school is doing under you leadership and Darlene with the test results.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, we give at the end of each school year a standardized achievement test. It is the oldest one we can find. I believe it is a 1972 edition. And our students are running in the lower grades two and three years ahead and in ... our eighth grade graduates last year tested at... in... in the 12th grade which was the top of the chart.

There is a lot that can be done in education. One of our teacher’s sons who is in high school and too old for our school which only goes through junior high, himself has come to the conclusion. He would love to go to a Christian school. He came home at the beginning of this year, the school year which just started in biology somehow they brought Satanism into the textbook in biology. It has been in literature textbooks and such before, but how they managed to bring it into biology I didn’t even want to ask.

And we are not doing miracles at the school, but we are teaching them. And we have a good foundation and we develop character and we develop discipline. We develop courtesy to the teachers so there is obedience and the children know what is expected of them.

It is certainly no more than was done in schools commonly a few years ago. And it is just one small case of... of how our educational system has been suicidal. We have designed schools that do not teach and they produce children who think alike and that will accept what their... what they read in the newspapers, what they are taught on television.

When I was a kid it was a commonly told fact that newspapers catered to about a 13 year old mind. I don’t know where that came from, but I think that is pretty much true. And it is that mentality on the news report on the evening news what they get on the evening television and what they get in newspapers that that pretty much controls what that average person today thinks. And this is what our educational system has to get away from. We have to stop producing clones that believe what they are expected to believe.

[ Rushdoony ] Let me add, Mark, that if we discounted the grades of the students who came in late, the average was about five years ahead of grade.

[ M Rushdoony ] Oh, there... there is no problem. That is a... that is a problem for all.... for all Christian schools, but you can’t take somebody who is in junior high and put them back in third grade. The parents won’t stand for it. It is ... it is... it is too much. It is the children you take from the beginning and you take all the way through that just... there... there is... we haven’t even seen the limits of what the capabilities there are and, unfortunately, a lot of parents don’t even think about Christian education until their parents... their children are in the middle grades and they... and they have problems or they see what they are getting and they finally figure it out from the finished product. And they say, “Now, can you do something with my child?”

The same thing often happens when the kids get to junior high or high school. They see this awful stuff in the text book, this garbage. They say, “Maybe if I put them in a Christian schools I can straighten them around.” And so you have this wide divergence of academic abilities in one classroom.

It is a... a problem that it is going not have to be faced increasingly by the Christian school movement and ... and it is a difficult one.

[ Rushdoony ] And they...

[ M Rushdoony ] It is where home schooling has a real advantage. That is... that is the ultimate way to educate a child is one on one with a parent educating a child and it is why it is, I think, an increasingly effective ministry.

[ Rushdoony ] And it is spreading with great rapidity. It used to be that conventions, regional conventions in some states would have 50 or 60 home schoolers. Now they number one and 2000. And the movement has just begun to take off. This is a program for life, for control of the future.

Then the number of Christian groups that have involved themselves in politics, have involved themselves in working with teenage drug addicts, convicts, delinquents and so on. In one area after another the amount of Christian activity is increasing. On top of that we are seeing things like this children’s initiative in California. It is a Christian product. It is going to be on the ballot. And more and more Christians are saying, “This is what we want and we are going to work to get it.”

[ Scott ] Well, I think of this. I think the parallel is probably closer to the Renaissance and the Reformation. The excesses of the Renaissance led to the Reformation. The excesses of this period are leading people to this kind of a reaction. And, of course, one of the things about the Renaissance and the present period, which is interesting, is the focus on the inner man. The... a few years ago they kept talking about I... people who were looking for themselves.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They... they were trying to find out who they were, looking for their own identity. And you reminded me of it when you talked about the scholastic pietists who totally focused on personal salvation. The hell with the rest of the world. Let the rest of the world go to hell. Let me be saved and go to heaven. And the road to heaven isn’t, I don’t think, paved with that particular desire. It is paved with doing something about the world in which you live and standing up for the faith in you own society. If you don’t do that, you are nothing, you are nobody.

[ Rushdoony ] If you focus on salvation it is good evidence, probably, that you don't have it, because if you have it, then you begin to live in terms of it.

[ Scott ] Well, then, that... that brings us back to the question of the courage. You know that a mutual friend of ours whose name I will not divulge because this tape is going all around the world, a retired general told me at a meeting on the occasion when the United States armed forces lost its soul. He said it was in the Kennedy administration. He said the heads of the chiefs of staff decided to brace the President about his flaccid policy visa vie the Soviets. And somebody leaked this to the press and Time magazine ran a warning article. So the President Kennedy beat them to the punch and called the generals into a meeting and our friend was among the lesser officers, a colonel, a lieutenant colonel who accompanied his chief and then waited outside the closed doors. And when they came out, he rushed to his superior and said, “What happened?” And his superior said, “We caved in.” And he said two weeks later his superior retired and the army has never since stood up.

Now we know we have lots of Christians—we used to have, at least—in the army, in the armed services. Yet they are not expressing the courage and the faith that the should in the face of the suicidal policies of their civilian superiors.

[ Rushdoony ] I think that is going to change. There are signs of a resistance to this developing, a feeling that some one in the military is going to have to head up a stand against suicidal policy.

[ Scott ] I certainly hope so. There... there is...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] These are the people we hope to defend us.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, things are happening and it is encouraging now, as one travels back and forth across country to see the growing concern for Christian Reconstruction, the feeling that people in Washington have no direction, that they are suicidal and that Christians have to express themselves.

[ Scott ] Well the Christian school movement is relatively recent.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And it is a real race. Paul Johnson in the Commentary magazine ran an interesting essay on the South African situation. He called it the race for South Africa. He started off in the article by commenting on the fact that the world’s richest power is beating on what is still regarded as a third world country and what a shameful thing it was for the United States to adopt this bullying tactic. He also pointed out that the United States is going to inure the economy of South Africa and yet we are supposed to be for industrialization. We are supposed to be for a private venture. We are supposed to be for free enterprise and for jobs. By injuring the economy of South Africa, we are going to interfere with a process which has been ongoing down there. As they have increased and improved their technology they have been able to hire more and more blacks and to train them and to skill them into higher and higher jobs. So Capitalism is creating more democracy in South Africa all the time. By injuring that economic drive, we are going to injure the blacks. We are going to injure the whole country and we are going to do it in the name of goodness.

Now my feeling is that this whole campaign is something that we have been very much accustomed to watching in recent years and has not been labeled. And this is Racism in the name of anti Racism.

[ Rushdoony ] Very definitely. I think our equalitarians are very often the worst racists, because what they are, in effect, saying with their Equalitarianism is that we don’t like what you are. Therefore we are going to treat it as non existence... existent and obliterate it, instead of respecting the differences. Therefore obliterating them and treating them as non existent.

[ Scott ] Well really the differences are the crucial to know. I recall my grandfather in Caracas pointing out the fact that his children had a Christmas tree at time when nobody around there had any such Christmas. They had a piñata. He said, “We celebrate Christmas in this house differently than our neighbors.” There is no reason to remind them of the difference.

But it is very important to know the difference. We all know that people have certain basic similarities, child birth, death, et cetera. It is the same with all members of the human race. But what we really need to know is the differences, not to eliminate them, but to respect them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Exactly. Any comments, Mark?

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, it is what we have... what we have touched on here in the latter part of our conversation is that our national suicide is a moral problem which manifests itself in a... in a character of our... our leaders and in the character of our culture. And to the extent that we are looking for an answer to our national suicide, we have to look to God. And the manifestation of any reversal of this we are going to see in... in the Christian community. And we have seen a great vitality in the Christian community in recent years. Christian schools, a lot of the stands churches have taken against state interference and such.

And I think that if we... if the activity we have seen of Christians had taken place 20 years ago, things would be far different. But then, again, we could also say that if Christians had been 20 years ago, say, in the mid 60s where we are... where they are in the mid 80s, things might have been quite different. But it would have been an easy way out, perhaps too... more easy than... than we deserve.

Now the problems we face we have to acknowledge as the problems that come with our actions. Any answers that we see are going to come from God and through the Christian community. It won’t be an easy answer, an easy way out. We won’t be able to, well, reverse this policy in time to have our economy turn to a financial stability in time to prevent collapse. We are going to have problems no matter what we do. If we were to reverse things today we are going to have serious problems and that is good because we deserve them. And I think we need that judgment. We have to feel that pain somewhat. But any... any good that is going to come out of that is going to come from God and I think the worst things are now any good that comes out of this is going to be obvious that this is a Christian community and this is by the grace of God that we get out of this.

[ Scott ] Well, I think that is true. We have inherited, as a nation, many of the liberties for which the English spent their blood. We have failed signally the founding generation. We have given away and abandoned many of our constitutional rights and liberties, our control over the government, our control over ourselves. Nobody has any rights that they will not defend. The world is not so constituted that it will respect the rights of the coward. If you want to protect yourself you have to stand up and do it yourself. The United States... the people of this country are going to have to earn. They have been living off their capital. They are going to have to restore the property, restore their inheritance and they are going to have to work and suffer to do it. I agree with you on that.

[ Rushdoony ] Of late there has been a renewed interest in one of the really remarkable men of the early years of this country, Fisher Ames. Fisher Ames was a congressman in the first Congress. Some have said had it not been for his bad health he very well could have been one of our first presidents. Fisher Ames wrote a long letter in which he predicted that this country, because of its resources and location and because of the freedom it has, was going to be a tremendous force in the world. But he felt that with it would come a heedlessness and a self destruction, as it were, because people would lose the character that was important for the development of freedom and for this country.

So he expected somewhere down the roads this country would come to a major crisis created by its lack of character and then would have to face up to the issues in order to have the future it could have.

I was reminded of Fisher Ames and also of a sentence in Whittier as the two of you spoke. Or, no, I believe it was Lowell, James Russell Lowell the poem On Shipwreck. I read it when I was, I believe, a junior at the university and it had a profound effect on me, because I recognized that it was true even though I didn’t like it. It spoke of us, human beings as we who by shipwreck only find the shores of divine wisdom. So the shipwreck is near and the divine wisdom is near. And we can rejoice in that because God is preparing for us that. God is giving us a growing and a revived faith whereby we can face the world crisis that is very near and come through it with wisdom and a renewed power and a renewed freedom, God willing.

Our time is virtually over. Is there something in the way of a final comment, Otto?

[ Scott ] I am never very good at final comments. I will have to skip.

[ Rushdoony ] Mark?

All right. Let me just add this note. I have in my hand a card that Otto brought home recently. He was in Seattle and in Detroit as well to speak at monetary conferences. And while there he took a tour of the Puget Sound area on one of the harbor tours. And the captain of the boat was someone who reads our reports and listens to the tapes, Captain Steve Dudley. Well, it is interesting how in so many places we do encounter those of you who are listening to us and are reading us and are previously unknown to us. We do enjoy these sessions with you and we do appreciate you interest and your support. God bless you all.

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