From the Easy Chair

South Africa & Related Issues

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 200-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161S34

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161S34, South Africa & Related Issues, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 126, July the 11th, 1986.

Tonight Otto Scott is with us again to discus the situation in South Africa and related issues. As you know, Otto has written The Other End of the Lifeboat which deals with the crisis facing us in South Africa and how it affects us.

Let me add that we have the only copies remaining of this book. The publisher backed off on selling the book. We got the entire printing and the book is definitely not popular in many quarters. As a matter of fact, not even South Africa likes the book even though this book, I think, make the best case possible for our relationship with South Africa. We will go into those aspects a little later, why the book has created problems for some of these people, Otto, no doubt, can best tell us.

But by way of introducing the general subject, I would like to read a paragraph from The Witness written by Curtis Dickenson who says, and I quote, “As I write this, the news is filled with propaganda aimed at forcing the South African government to give place to tribal governments by blacks. Dr. M. P. {?} a South African Zulu chief is strongly against economic sanctions and disinvestment saying, ‘If we destroy the productive capacity of the South African economy, millions of people will starve.’ He is also aware of the blood bath that might follow a Marxist takeover as happened in Angola, Zimbabwe and other African nations. No black country in Africa has been able to set up a successful government. We must remember that South Africa was first settled by white people. There were no blacks in South Africa until the whites built irrigation and established an economy that now is one of the best in the world. The real issue in South Africa is not Apartheid, but an effort to get it under the control... their control,” unquote, an effort, he says, by one world elements.

Otto, would you like to comment on this statement?

[ Scott ] Well, there are so many things that have to be said about that situation. It is awfully hard to know where to begin. Let me begin with today’s Wall Street Journal talking about the depression in South Africa. Inflation is galloping, says the Journal at an 18 percent annual rate and the economy is shrinking at a four and a half percent annual pace.

A subsidiary corporations, foreign owned are operating at less than 70 percent of capacity. For the first time in decades South Africa faces a white unemployment problem. Among blacks, estimates of unemployment range from 25 percent to 50 percent. About 600 whites have taken jobs as casual day laborers in the Johannesburg area at the rate of two dollars a day and of the first time since the 1930s whites are digging ditches alongside blacks. Isn’t it amazing we haven't seen any photographs of that particular ending of Apartheid?

It goes on to say that there is a capital flight from South Africa which began when our major banks cut, curtailed, cut off their credit. Right now they are paying about two billion dollars a year in interest on those loans. When we add to this the fact that there is a prolonged drought, what we are talking about is great suffering and this is a situation that we have created for the South Africans.

[ Rushdoony ] Besides the suffering of the South Africans, black and white, how much suffering will it create for Americans in terms of economic consequences here?

[ Scott ] Well that, of course, is the one issue that is never addressed by our Congress excepting for outstanding exceptions like Mark {?}. It is not addressed by the media. I spoke earlier, I think, of the office of strategic resources and what it said about our reliance upon significant minerals from South Africa. Last month a June report from the department of commerce says hat a ban on South African minerals would lead to a prohibition on all foreign car imports by the United States and force the repeal of the Clean Air Act, not to mention an economic windfall to the Soviet Union, the only other source of the critical materials.

Now here we are working to place ourselves in a position of industrial dependency upon our worst enemy in the name of goodness. The goodness party is the biggest party in the United States. We have got people that are gooder than anybody so long as they think it doesn’t cost them anything and it is at a distance. And we went through this once before. We went through this in the pre Civil War period when the Abolitionists openly said they didn’t give a damn for the United States of America no matter what it cost, they said, slavery had to be ended immediately in the South. They didn’t have any slavery in the North because of the industrial revolution. And if it hadn't been for the magnificent handling of this problem by Mr. Lincoln, there is no question in mind this country would have been broken in half at that time.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes and the interesting thing is, as you pointed out the last time we dealt with this subject, other countries had a higher percentage of slaves than the United States. And every other country in the world was able to end slavery peacefully, but we had an element that did not want peace. They wanted to wage war against the South and the South made the mistake of falling for that propaganda being enflamed by it and going to war and creating devastation for themselves and for our constitutional government.

[ Scott ] Well, we had what Dwight Murphy of Wichita State University called a class of alienated intellectuals. While our business, our industry and many of our manufacturing people export various products around the world which have lifted up the living standards of the entire globe, our alienated intellectuals export criticisms of this civilization so that every country in the world that is the recipient of American aid or assistance or friendship or fraternity, has a double image of us. They have, first of all, the image of the United States as a country from which these very interesting products have emerged and, secondly, a country with deep flaws that not even its own people will defend intellectually.

Now one of the problems of the alienated intellectuals in the last few years has been a recoil by the American people, a collapse of the whole New Deal coalition which was a combination of minorities and big city machines and the intellectuals have been cast in the ground ever since Mr. Reagan got into office for a new coalition, for the ingredients to put together a new broad coalition and they fell on, I think, the issue of South Africa Apartheid as one of those instruments. This is going to, they think, bring back all the blacks. It is going to bring back all the liberals. It is going to bring back the mainline churches. It is going to create a political situation where they can once again ride to power. And they don’t care. They really and truly are so stupid that they don’t care if it brings down the whole nation, just as the Abolitionists didn’t care if it brought on a monster war.

I was very serious about the other end of the lifeboat. The fact of the matter is without those minerals we will not be able to maintain our defense establishment or any of our industrial equipment. Everything we have will go because our strategic stock pile is only enough to keep us going for a year.

Now let’s suppose that we sit it out. Let’s suppose that South Africa is cut off totally the way these people want it to be cut off. And let’s suppose that the Cuban and Soviet troops and equipment that now in the front lines states around northern South Africa, succeed in isolating that country first and then bringing down its white government and setting up a public black regime, that will mean that they will have almost total control of the minerals we have to have. At the end of a year, when we have exhausted what we have, they will call a summit and at the summit they will say, “Now we are going to disabuse you of all your fears. You will never again have to worry about nuclear war. We are going not have peace forever.” And they will dress it all up as they did the Soviet constitution and the regimes in eastern Europe and elsewhere with beautiful words and commission for peace, brotherhood, femininity and what not. And I can hear ht prayers of thanksgiving in the cathedrals. I can hear William Sloan Coffin praising and blessing the Lord because of this. I can hear them on television and the peace marchers going down Fifth Avenue and it will be just wonderful.

The U N will be the world government. The only problem will be that the world we know will come to an end.

[ Rushdoony ] And we will have slavery from pole to pole. Yes, we have Dan Harris with us also this evening.

Dan, do you have any comments or questions?

[ Harris ] Mr. Scott, it appears that the Soviet Union would benefit the most by the collapse of this... the ... the South Africa. Do you think they are directly behind the foment that is going on in America today?

[ Scott ] Well, they are, but not in the sense that the average person thinks of it. For instance, the ... I remember when the Oxford movement came up in the 30s and this... they had four absolutes, absolute truth, absolute justice and a couple of other impossibilities. And they were for peace, absolute peace, total... they called moral disarmament, which would be an end of war like thinking. And the German Nazi foreign ministry looked at that movement. It was very active in France, in Britain and in the United States and in English speaking areas and so on. And decided to infiltrate it to see if they could promote disarmament to benefit the German militarization... military program. And they ... I was told this by one of our top intelligent people. He said, “How many agents do you suppose they used?”

I said, “I have no idea.”

Well, I don’t remember the exact number, but it was less than five with unlimited expenses. And they did... they swung the whole Oxford Movement into a pattern that fit the needs of the Nazis. So we have agents. We have always had agents. This is a big country and every... every other country in the world has got agents working here doing their best, spying on our technology. In some cases buying it, in other cases stealing it, helping the propagandists who fit them. We have got registered lobbyists in Washington who represent every nation in the world.

But mainly we have hypocrisy rampant. We have all kinds of people who go to church and who go to temple convinced that the other guy is the one that is the sinner and that they are going to go to heaven by straightening out the sins of somebody else. The father away the better. And that is our biggest problem.

[ Rushdoony ] When you spoke of the alienated intellectuals a little earlier, Otto, I was reminded of something that Prime Minster Canning of Great Britain said in the generation after the French Revolution. Speaking of the alienated intellectuals and the political liberals of his day, he defined them as people who loved every country except their own. And I think that is very true of the liberals in this country and our intellectuals. They loved to love in every country to the left of center, of course, and to hate the United States.

[ Scott ] Well, what can you say about tan intellectual class that cannot defend its own nation or its own civilization or its own culture? We live in one of the great gardens of all history. Probably no country has ever had as much comfort, as much freedom, nor accepted so many different people from so many different parts of the world. I know of no other people in the history of the world that has opened up its borders accepting, perhaps, early Rome and even then, most of those who came in were in slavery. And yet we hear very few expressions of gratitude. I remember that... well, just last weekend we watched the celebration of the statue of liberty and it was remarkable mainly for being so unusual. And one of the things that occurred to me as I listened to all this is that I made a suggestion to PBS some years back that they put on a series on what the refugees to America left. Why did they come here? That is the great story. And that is the story that is never told.

[ Rushdoony ] No, PBS is much happier giving us the glories of Red China.

Yes, Dan.

[ Harris ] Mr. Scott, is South Africa a Christian nation now or was it a Christian nation in the past?

[ Scott ] It is a very Christian nation, extremely so, probably the most Christian nation that I have ever been to. The television, as in Switzerland, is only turned on at six in the evening and it is off before midnight because they don’t want to interfere with the working day. It starts with a prayer. It ends with a prayer. The churches there are filled. There are more black Christians there than there are white. There are more black members of the Dutch Reformed Church than there are white. The segregation came about through the British missionaries.

The British, you know, had a colonial plan, a pattern of governance which they improved after they lost the American colonies. They decided that it was best not to interfere with the native culture any more than necessary, but they did want to Christianize where they governed as much as they could. So, as a deliberate policy, the Anglican church which was followed also by the Presbyterian, decided to Christianize or to carry the gospel to the black people of South Africa in their separate enclaves and not to try to mix black and white together, because at that time in the 1830s there was a great disparity in the... in the level of the two groups. That really began, set the pattern for the separation principles, which, of course, we are followed here in the United States. We can say now with the hindsight of history that segregation in the American South proved to be a transitional stage and it is possible that if a people had not interfered with South Africa, that two or three generations from now we could say Apartheid was a transitional stage.

Recently I have looked into this. I happened to notice this item here. It says the Apartheid, real Apartheid is applied against the black people in Arab countries of Africa today, but nobody has taken any notice of that any more than anyone has taken notice of the anti Christian nature of Arab countries in the Middle East or the fact that Christianity is forbidden in Mohammedan countries.

[ Rushdoony ] We are, in fact, regularly told that Islam is without racial prejudice, which is absolutely...

[ Scott ] Absolutely wrong.

[ Rushdoony ] ...certainly a myth.

[ Scott ] It is a... the worst kind of a myth.

[ Harris ] Mr. Scott, are the current leaders of South Africa evangelical Christians or just good church going people?

[ Scott ] Well, they... they are cradle Calvinists and they impress me somewhat like cradle Catholics. They go to church and they don’t think too much about the theology of the matter, with the exception that Calvinism is... forces you to think a bit more, I think. And many of the leaders of South Africa are ministers, ordained ministers and many went through seminaries and they are like the American southerners in one... to one extent. They don't seem to believe in putting up arguments, intellectual arguments for themselves.

I talked to the public relations director of the Dutch Reformed Church in ... in Cape Town. And he was a very charming man. He was a minister. And he had only book, which was done, incidentally, by a non South African photographer and writer, about their outreach among the black people. They spent millions and millions of dollars working among the black people. They had only one book which was done by a foreigner called My Brother’s Keeper. And he... he gave me that.

I said, “Well, what have you ... what has the church done? You are the public relations director. What have you done for the Dutch Reformed Church on all these activities?”

Well, he said, “We are really too busy carrying the message, carrying the message.”

Now the other end of the situation is what will happen when they have changed their minds about buckling under to foreign pressure. They buckle under quite a bit. They have eliminated the past laws which is probably going to cause them a lot of trouble. You can imagine if a lot of black people decide to pour into white Johannesburg, what is going to happen? Because they won’t have jobs and they won’t have housing. What ... what then will the government do? But it did eliminate the past laws under pressure. It eliminated the laws against having blacks own property. It eliminated the inter marriage restrictions and, incidentally, the last one that we eliminated was in 1967 in Virginia.

Well, it has gone about as far as it can go, I think, without turning the government over, without committing suicide. Now I understand from Nils Van White, a friend of mine who has been down there very recently, that Botha has decided not to give in another inch and to tell the world to go to hell. Well, he has also said if the United States pressures England and other allies and itself decides to apply even stricter sanctions against South Africa, that South Africa will apply sanctions against all the neighboring black states that vote for sanctions.

That means that something like two million black people, black miners, most of them working in the mines of South Africa will be shipped home and when we count their families in, about 10 million people will be knocked out of a livelihood in neighboring states. They can actually bring down all southern Africa, because most of it relies upon their railroads and their ports to export and to import and they also get food, they get medical supply. They get expert technicians. They get all kinds of things from the Republic of South Africa which is the dominant economic and financial and industrial power in that part of the world.

Now we are facing here, as a consequence of misguided benevolence, or goodness or whatever you want to call it, what John Chamberlain calls the law of unintended consequences, which he applied to my book. Depression at home, a weakening of our industrial and defense establishment at home, distressed in southern Africa affecting millions of black people and possible cut... curtailment of South... cut off of South Africa from the western world, because, of course, you know the cape of Good Hope controls the route to Europe and to the South Atlantic.

We know that the Soviets are already talking to the Argentineans. What they are going to offer the Argentineans is the Falkland Islands. You let us put naval bases in Argentina and we will see to it that you get the Falkland Islands back. So there between the cape of Good Hope and Patagonia you have complete control of the South Atlantic. You have the Caribbean turning into a Soviet lake with Panama, Guyana and Cuba. And you have us unable to build a tank a plane, a ship without these minerals from South Africa. And you have Europe, then, dependent upon Middle Eastern oil which has to come around the cape of Good Hope. You have, in other words, the final link in the encirclement of the West.

Now this is worse than Munich. This is probably the greatest peril we have ever confronted.

[ Harris ] Do you see any time frame when this would happen?

[ Scott ] Well, the South Africans told me when I was there that they have three year supply of food, three year supply of oil. We know they have a small arms industry of their own. They say they don’t have the... an atom bomb and they may not have it, because they are inclined to be terribly truthful. And they have so far been more patient than I would have expected.

On the other hand, the whole storm was whipped up quicker than I anticipated. I never dreamed it was possible to blow the whistle and to have a world wide cacophony of propaganda emerge from Washington and Moscow and London and everywhere else all at once.

[ Harris ] Do you have any idea why this is happening now?

[ Scott ] Well, I think ... let us... let me say this, that the Soviets have an educated class. We don’t. We have lots of people who come out of school. We don’t have an educated class. They have analyzed our civilization very closely. They have watched us. And they have tried a thought, an experience... an interesting experiment beginning in 1943-44. They put together a ... had a large hand in putting together a book called The American Dilemma which was headed by Guenner Midal. And it included Doxie Wilkerson, one of the officials of the American Communist party and a great many other people in which they talked about the disparity between the American rhetoric on liberty and equality and the actual treatment of black people in the United States. And, of course, it was pretty shameful. And then after that book came out in the middle of World War II, a whole spate of books came out of the American universities, main... mainly of New England, resurrecting all the Abolitionist and all the Abolitionist arguments. And that paved the way of the second reconstruction which began in the 50s and raged through the 60s when we had police dogs biting black people, when we had our policemen clubbing them, when the image of the United States was radiated around the world was exactly the same as the image of South Africa today. Remember? That is how we got so holy. That is how we got pure.

Now that experiment didn’t result in the second civil war, but it did result in a very good effort to start one. Now South Africa is an even better instance to set the West against itself and its own interests. We have fallen into a trap. It is... it is like the old swindle, Fields... W. C. Fields starred in a moving thing You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man. And you are right. The people who fall for the swindle are trying to steal some money or... or come in on some sort of a ploy. We have fallen in to the idea that the best thing that can happen is for the white people of South Africa to be murdered and for the black people to take over. That is going to make the world better.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, here is a question, perhaps, a quick answer. Since South Africa has some kind of alliance with Israel might Israel some day share the nuclear bomb with South Africa?

[ Scott ] That depends upon the faction in Israel that is in power. The labor party in Israel has set up a training schools for black South Africans to equip them with the skills necessary to govern. Now the Likud government, which is a right wing government, might take an entirely different attitude towards South Africa. And I asked our mutual friend Bert the coin man the other day why so much thunder... the South Africa foreign ministry. And when it decided to go down there and told them I was a writer, they insisted on seeing my books before they would let me in. And then when I was allowed in, the department of information was supposed to work with me in lining up people for interviews and things like that. And they did a fair job. They turned me over, mostly to small clerks, because they didn’t think that I rated very highly. And while I was there and touring the country, there were several very well known left wing liberal American journalists who came down and they got the red carpet treatment, red carpet treatment. And even the little people who dealt with me wanted to know if I didn’t want to talk to Nadine Gortimer and {?} and Harry Oppenheimer and Helen Sussman, all their critics.

And I said, “Well, do you think they will tell me anything they haven’t told every body else?” And they said, “Well, no.” And I said, “In that case, why bother to talk to them? I am not down here to name drop. I want to find out what is real, what is happening.”

[ Rushdoony ] They haven’t liked your book at all, these people in the information service or the foreign office.

[ Scott ] Well, I don’t know if I showed you the letter that a friend of mine received about the book, but he said that they were aware of Mr. Scott and his views and they did not agree with me.

One of the reasons being, I think, is that I addressed the question of guilt, that the white Southern did not answer, in my opinion the intellectual charge of being immoral and he didn’t... they didn’t answer it in a proper way. And I didn’t think the South Africans answered their particular critics in a very sensible way, either. Everything that has been said about the Afrikaners could be said of the Israelis of people on the West Bank where they are blowing up homes, robbing land, hauling people around by their hair and finally set up complete censorship so that these scenes would not be photographed and reproduced around the world. And it is very difficult for me to understand why if one area can be defended for behaving that way another is an international pariah. But my main point, the main thrust, even when I was down there, was not concern for those people. I think they can work out their problems if they have a decent chance to. I thought at that time that they were on their way, but I didn't take that as a sign that they would always be able to cope. What really bothered me then, and what bothers me now is the Americans, is our idea that we can take the American civilization and place it as a template over other cultures, over foreign cultures and say, “Why can’t they be like us?” It is like the song in My Fair Lady. Why can’t girls be more like men? Why can’t the South Africans handle things the way they do in New York? Well, of course, they have got more murders in New York than they have in all of South Africa, but that is beside the point.

What it am saying here is that there is an inability in the American people to really believe that foreigners are foreign, to really believe that they are different. When Baldwin, the American novelist, black novelist went to the saloons of Paris and ran into some black tribesmen, he said, “I am a black brother.” And they said, “What is your name?” And he said, “James Baldwin.” And they said, “That is a white man’s name. What is your tribe?” He had no tribe. They threw him out. He wasn’t a brother. He was an American. And what we are doing, what our liberals are doing, what our alienated intellectuals are doing is that they are placing color as the criterion for judgment. They are saying all the black people of South Africa are the same because they are black. All the white people are the same because they are white. This is racist. Chief {?} represents the Zulus. The ANC, which is tied in with the Communist party represents the Cosa tribe. The Zulus will never allow the Cosa to take over in South Africa.

[ Rushdoony ] On various occasions, Otto, you have brought up a point to which you referred this time and I was interested to see that the same point was finally acknowledged in the Washington Times for Wednesday, July the second in a column by Lawrence Wade, “Dangers closer to home.” I am going to read a portion of that column because I think this does deal with that point and gives us some good data on it. I quote:

“South African Apartheid tops the list of issues being discussed this week as the NAACP holds its national convention in Baltimore. Apartheid is killing blacks as it does whites both in body and in soul, the spirit. And opposition to it, by the nations premier civil rights group is just even though divestment is wrong headed. But while the NAACP worries about blacks dying some 7000 miles away, in America blacks are dying with a vengeance. Black crime is a major problem for all Americans, but the NAACP seems to ignore it, making me wonder what the letters NAACP have come to stand for. Increasingly, I fear, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has come to mean the National Association for the Advancement of Criminal People. It is not the result of equal intentions, but it is the product of confused priorities, an aging civil rights group confounded by accelerating social problems. The evidence is clear. As the NAACP kicked off its convention Sunday the justice department reported that of all U S households, black households were the most vulnerable to violence. In 1984 more than 40 percent of 18,690 murder victims were blacks, most of them killed by blacks. This year about 650 blacks have been killed in South Africa. When the NAACP was formed blacks were often victims of lynching by whites. High on the agenda was federal legislation to combat lynchings. What, in 1986 when thousands of black lives by other blacks, does this great organization seem to worry more about black lives taken in South Africa? Why without about half of the approximately 1700 persons on death row black and most blacks still supporting the death penalty do the NAACP and the NAACP legal defense fund seem to support rights of criminals? And why has one time NAACP lawyer now Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshal fought for 10 years to reverse the court’s support of the death penalty? In his boiler plate dissent to the court’s upholding of death penalty rulings, Mr. Marshal says the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment. But what could be more cruel than to punish the vast majority of law abiding blacks by excusing their attackers? And what is more unusual than this defense coming from their own civil rights organizations?” unquote.

[ Scott ] Well, we can also see a parallel in their indifference to the atrocities taking place in South Africa. The necklace, they have filled a tire with gasoline, put it around a person’s neck after first chopping off his hands and feet. And then set it on fire. And the pieces of molten rubber, burning rubber fall onto his flesh and burn their way through. It is a horrible, agonizing death. And on Cross Fire a few weeks back Roger Wilkins was debating this with me and Bob Novak and Michael Kinsley. He kept deploring violence and praising the perpetuators, which is what our media is doing, which is what many of our main line churches are doing.

[ Rushdoony ] Moreover, the news real cameras will not tell us what is happening in these instances, such as you have related. All such things are cut out of the newsreels and only what is done by whites to blacks is shown. I have seen the clips that have been eliminated from our newsreels of episodes such as you have described and some even more horrifying.

[ Scott ] Well, we have the phenomenon of our newsreel men photographing these events. It reminds me of years ago in San Francisco there was a fire in which a young woman was trapped as some falling beam held her... pinned her to the floor. The fire was subdued by the firemen and then finally she saw a figure of a man approaching and she thought she was going to be rescued. It turned out to be a newspaper photographer who stopped, took her picture and then proceeded on his way.

Now I remember that, because it was such an outstanding example of absolute cold blooded insensitivity, inhumanity. And yet our newsreel people have actually photographed in South Africa black crowds beating people to death and they didn't interfere. They didn’t identify the perpetuators. They didn’t behave as human beings would ordinarily be expected to behave. And then they give us a selected version, a doctored version.

Well, you... you have mentioned this before, the idea of a wish, a death wish ... a death wish. Societies can be made sick if poison is poured in to their. Intravenously into their bloodstream all the time. In the meantime, I notice here we are only a few months away from Gorbachev’s planned visit to Africa for the Ethiopian revolutionary celebrations in September.

Now people re being deliberately staved to death in Ethiopia and concentration camps have been established. So far the death toll is between two and three million. This has been a deliberate policy under Soviet advice following Stalin’s example in the Ukraine in the 30s, because the Soviet believes itself at war with every country it does not control. And its manner of dealing with rebellion is, amongst other things, to use food as a weapon and to starve people to death. That is the way you get rid of the rebels. They don’t come back at all.

South Africa is being starved to death with our complicity. In fact, we are playing the band. We are... we are providing the music while they are shipping in the men, the guns, the arms.

[ Rushdoony ] I think it is interesting, in terms of your mention of Ethiopia that it was a minor famine in one district caused by bad weather that toppled Hali Salisi. His regime was indifferent to it, did nothing to help or to hinder the progress of the famine. And the international press concentrated on him and toppled his regime. That was for a very minor famine. It extended only to one portion of the country and it was caused by a... bad weather and crop failures.

Now for a major famine affecting vast numbers of people, the press has sought sympathy for the Communist regime, help for the Communist regime and has said nothing about the regime having deliberately created the famine to destroy people who would not submit to its power.

[ Scott ] Well, they are destroying the Eritreans, in Eritrea. But, of course, we could go all around black Africa and see all sorts of atrocities. The... the issue that is being raised in South Africa is not an issue on atrocities. It is an issue of black and white. It is a racial issue. I have... I have debated this thing, this subject with people from the urban league who put it on a straight racial level. They are very clear about it. I say isn’t it... is social discrimination as bad as being murdered? They say no. South Africa is the worst country in the continent.

Now the whole question of one man, one vote is almost an expression of public and international ignorance. The British do not vote for their prime minister. They don’t vote for who the royal head is going to be. That is hereditary. Russia has one man, one vote and if you don’t vote it is going to be too bad and you vote for one man or it is too bad. Voting is a procedural matter. We keep voting on national elections for two men that most of us would never select.

[ Rushdoony ] That is for sure.

[ Scott ] And we do it every four years. So why is a vote going to produce miracles in South Africa? Nobody really believes this. If we want to be absolutely honest which is very difficult in the United States, I think, for a great many of us, we must admit that the official American position right now is that the white people of South Africa must be punished and that the black people should be placed in charge no matter what the cost.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we do face a very grim crisis that affects not only South Africa, but us and the whole of the free world. At the same time that the Soviet Union is stepping up its opposition to and persecution of Christianity, and has millions of people in slave labor camps, our press is silent about that and upset when a handful of people being killed by the police under great provocation in South Africa.

It certainly shows no concern for human beings, but a very doctrinaire kind of liberalism or radicalism or humanism, whatever you want to call it.

[ Scott ] Well, alienation is an interesting to watch, because I remember my father telling me years ago that disloyalty begins in the heart. It begins, he said, with private opinions and finally finds an expression. The Julian Bender wrote about the treason of the intellectuals. We have seen since 1917 over half the world conquered. Now in all the reach of history no power has ever moved so far so soon. And we were talking about this before the mic came on. In my opinion the Soviets have dealt very nicely with David Rockefeller, with all our bankers, with our Armand Hammer types, just as Lenin dealt with his banker who funneled money to him, Parbus. And I think this relationship between the alienated intellectuals and our misguided industrialists and so forth will proceed. Our state department and so on will proceed along the same lines as long as we are useful to those people. But once they have the chain all linked, once they have the Philippines, once they have Cape Town, once they have Argentina, they will have it all. Then they will prove to us that what they have been telling us since 1917 they meant, because they have never made any bones about it. They have said this world will only be run on a Communist level. We will destroy all Capitalists. If David Rockefeller is alive at that point, they will put him up against the wall, a phrase that Mr. Castro introduced to all the liberals of Cuba, up against the wall.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the most discerning men in Washington, DC has said privately that he expects all of this to happen with 12 months. Now he may be right or wrong, but basically he sees that there is no resistance to this Soviet scenario, that people are in process of surrender. They do no want to believe that the worst can happen. Therefore, it is not going to happen. The world is going to go on exactly as it has before and will somehow stumble and bumble along, but it isn’t going to change dramatically. Things may get very bad for a while, but they will get better and so on.

[ Scott ] Well, I have been told that and I... I have had people from the Urban League said, “Why would you suppose, Mr. Scott, that a black government would not sell minerals? After all, a black government would need money.”

Well, this is like asking us why the Ukraine doesn't ship wheat around the world. They need money in the Ukraine, too. This is to assume that if the Soviet empire is able to dominate the globe and we now have... there is now existing the technical capacity to do what could never be done before, to govern the world. Why would they bother to trade with us? Why would they bother to sell us the minerals with which we can make the stealth plane or nuclear bombs or tanks to fight them with? They are not crazy. We may be crazy, but they are not crazy.

A world without money is a world that they are already running. The party card enables you to shop, not the money. Your position in the hierarchy takes care of everything. Most of the world would go to a low standard of living as most of the Soviet peoples have a low standard of living. Our standard of living here might be higher than, let us say, Poland, for a fair amount of time. But in the long run they run... they operate, the Soviets operate a destructive system. So the world would fall to what Spengler called {?}, the masses. And on top of the masses, the overlords. And you would have on a global scale a civilization comparable with new equipment to the ancients of Egypt and Mesopotamia and the Yucatan.

[ Rushdoony ] I was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley when I read Mendez The Treason of the Intellectuals. I have copied out large portions of it, because while it isn’t the best book and it is very wrong headed in many areas, one thing was obvious, the intellectuals then as now were not interested in truth, but in partisan politics.

[ Scott ] That is a very telling statement. Once the language is divorced from justice, everything goes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And it is interesting at the same time I was reading about the fall of Rome and how after Rome fell in southern Gaul on what is now the Riviera, the wealthy aristocracy resumed life as usual because they were sure that civilization would not be overthrown. Everything they had was so superior that everybody else would fall into line and so their parties and their fox hunts would continue as before. And so they continued and disappeared.

[ Scott ] Disappeared, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And disappeared.

[ Harris ] Well, Mr. Scott, a question. Do you think that South Africa can survive with widespread sanctions by the West?

[ Scott ] Not against the entire world. Not against the entire world. It is a country about the size of Texas. It is one tenth the size of ours. Its economy is... is less than a tenth of ours. We, as the leaders of the free world have doomed the government of South Africa and we are pressing Britain today to do it, to come along. And France, of course, being France has washed its hands of the situation. The West Germans will not vote of sanctions, because West Germans, Taiwanese and other people are pouring their investments into South Africa right now, because they see certain short range opportunities. But to be quite realistic about it, unless we change our policy, unless the United States begins to behave as it should, begin to defend its own interests and I mean an intellectual defense as well as a geo political defense because one without the other doesn’t work. We don’t... the army and the navy doesn’t mean anything if the people don’t support it. When the USS Missouri came into San Francisco harbor to celebrate the state of liberty event it was met at the dock by 3500 protesters. And nobody of the patriots appeared to chase the protesters away. And there the absence of the patriotic horizon makes me say, “Well, we are in serious trouble.” And there is no point in kidding ourselves about it. If South Africa, a tiny little country with this terrible problem inside, weapons are being shipped in with money from our churches and the U N and from the Soviet Union and, for all I know, the state department, because the administration and the politicians want to look good for the next election.

It reminds me of the fall of the Third Republic of France when they were maneuvering against one another right up until the week that Hitler struck.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think it is significant, too, that most of our conservative politicians in Washington, DC are ready to give up on this issue. Very few are like Howard Philips and Mark {?} ready to make a stand on it.

[ Scott ] Howard has done a great job.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, he has. I have offered to give away copies of your book The Other End of the Lifeboat to some of these people. And they are not interested. They are ready to surrender on abortion, on South Africa, on gay rights, on anything they figure might hurt their chances of victory.

So we have to say that this kind of expediency represents a suicidal motive among many conservatives politicians and an absence of any biblical faith in perspective.

[ Scott ] Well, yes. Without faith there is no courage. With no courage everything falls. Our only hope is the Christian community. And I have no problem talking to Christians on this matter. It is not Christian to be suicidal. It is not Christian to be a fool.

[ Rushdoony ] We are told in Proverbs 8:36 that all they that hate me love death, that those who sin against God wrong their own souls, their own lives and this is what the ungodly, the humanists are doing today.

Well, we have just a couple of minutes, two minutes. Do you have a final comment?

[ Scott ] Well, I would not give up hope. Great changes take place with great rapidity. The future is unexpected, not predictable. I don’t care who you are or what the situation looks like, what the logic leads to. It never turns out the way you expect. Therefore, I would say we are here. We are strong. We are healthy. There is hope. The South Africans are standing up. Don’t give up.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, we cannot say it can’t happen here. We have to show faith and courage as you have pointed out.

Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you and let your faith and courage be manifest in your life and action.

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