From the Easy Chair

Hispanic America; Tree of Hate

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 211-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161Y45

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161Y45, Hispanic America; Tree of Hate, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 147, May 26h, 1987.

This evening Otto Scott and I are happy to have with us Dr. Philip Wayne Powell, a University of California historian. Ross House books has brought out his Tree of Hate and you can get it from Ross House Books for 20 dollars.

Now the importance of Dr. Powell’s work is that he has destroyed some of the historical myths that have had so powerful an influence. We fail to realize how much of what passes for history is really propaganda. I would like to cite a couple of examples before we give the evening to Dr. Powell’s work.

Jeffrey Bertrand Russell a few years ago wrote on Witchcraft in the Middle Ages and came to the rather reluctant, but frightened conclusion that the witch cult was a very real menace, that it involved human sacrifice, cannibalism, homosexuality and a great deal more and had they not dealt with it, civilization would have been destroyed. Again, I have in my hand some articles by a Kent State University professor, history Jerome Freeman on Servetus and how the whole of our history with regard to Calvin has been dramatically altered.

Well, what Dr. Powell has to tell us is something very far reaching, very important to us, because as he will tell us in a minute or two, a very, very important and much neglected and bypassed portion of the world is Hispanic. And we have all kinds of false assumptions about that portion of the world. And it is a serious mistake for us to misunderstand it, to misrepresent it and not to recognize its contributions to the world and to the future of our history.

Bill, it is a pleasure to have you here. Would you like to describe very briefly what The Tree of Hate is about and its thesis? And then just whatever else you want to say.

[ Powell ] Tree of Hate is a book that grew out of quite a few years of teaching in the field of Hispanic history, Iberia and Latin American. And finally a realization that every year I was going over the same material every year to try to explain why we ought to have so many mistaken views about the Hispanic world, the conquest in Americas is loaded with errors of this sort brought on by the English... the English and French and Dutch and German speaking people in the northern part of Europe who inherited it from out of the ... particularly the 15th and 16th centuries and the religious wars, the tremendous amount of misinformation and prejudice and propagandas which produce the prejudices into our whole view of the Hispanic world.

And it begins ... it... it is very heavily related to the Spanish conquest in America where we have such... such mistaken ideas as that Cortez conquered Mexico with the sword. It was... it was a conquest of diplomacy far more tan the sword. This is a common error. But we like to think of the Spaniards in their killing off Indians, swords right and left. It gives us a kind of superior feeling because we supposed that they didn’t do this kind of thing or it was... it was rather uncivilized, barbarous behavior. And especially, of course, when done by Catholics Those... in the days of the 16th century the Catholics were the enemy to ... to so many of the English as you all know from your reading of history. And the Dutch, The famous writings on Dutch history and {?} and so forth paint these Spaniards in very, very black terms, of course in the William of Orange and the... is virtually a saint.

And all of this builds up. We inherited it in this country. We inherited this kind of what I often refer to and others do, too, is the Nordic, the Nordic complex or the Nordic complex and {?} Iago one of the Spanish... the Spanish thinkers and philosophers and writers whimsically referred to this as the ... due to the fact that the maps are hung with the north up and the south down. Does that mean this is... this is just fun with it, but it is... it is a tremendous influence in anyone who faces, year after year, university students coming into the university with this tremendous batch of prejudices growing out of the British Isles past and the North European past. And cultivated, after all, our beginnings were in the ninth... the 18th century particularly at a time when the enlightened and was ... was re... redoing the Spanish crusades to help the Indians. Bartolommeo {?} the Spanish bishop who is so famous. But there were many, many other Spaniards and bishops and churchmen who were even more effective than {?}, but he gets the reputation in our world, particularly, because his terrible descriptions of the Spanish conquest in America, an indictment of his people that is almost incredible, something like some of our Americans do today with regard to the United States taken up and used in Russia or wherever.

Well, the North Europeans, the French, English, Jews and Dutch and Italians, those who had some reason to be anti Spanish for some reason or another, they all had some gripe against some of Spain. Spain was a {?} in the 16th century. They took up the {?}. After all he was a Spaniard. He must know what he is talking about. It is like today in our schools or any place, you... if you want to know something about Mexico you ask a Mexican, of course. But it... but it doesn’t work that way. Mexicans know their history very badly. But the mere fact that a person isn’t excellent and the mere fact that Bartolommeo {?} was a ... was a Spanish bishop and had been in the new world then it became... it became almost automatic reflex and he ... he was the great hero of the defense of the Indians, unfairly so, but anyway this... this is the kind of thing that the propaganda of the religious wars and so forth are built up to tell us about the Hispanic world.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, when I was... if I may interject and then, Otto, we will hear from you. When I was a student at the university all I learned about Latin American history had one source, {?}. And as you commented, I think it is ironic that all we have is the liberal critique of Spain which warped history and now we are suffering from the same thing because our liberals are giving the world a false perspective on the United States. And in both instances it is the leading world of power that is being critiqued by its own people and the world is ready to believe anything about that power.

Otto, you wanted to say something.

[ Scott ] Well, probably it is the destruction of the Spanish reputation internationally it was the first time that that had been achieved in modern times. Now I recall as recently as about three years ago having a man in the over seas press club ask me if I didn’t remember the Inquisition. And Solzhenitsyn mentioned the fact that there are more people who die of violently in Detroit every year than the Inquisition killed in all its history.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And yet the Inquisition has been held up for 400 years as the epitome of persecution and so forth with very little reference to the fact that many of the leaders of the inquisition were converted Jews. And it was a really a very complicated problem. But in this century we have seen the destruction, you might say of the German people in terms of reputation, because of the Holocaust and then destruction of the American people since World War II. Now what we have done to deserve all this I don’t know, but the Hollywood movies, the... the ... I... I turned on short wave radio and I have listened to the New York Times being read aloud without change by the commentators from Moscow as an evidence of our decadence. But, of course, since my father was born and raised in Latin America and I have many relatives there, the indifference of the United States to the people of the South. It amazed me.

In 1936, remember, when President Cardenas was killing priests and nuns in Mexico...

[ Powell ] A little bit earlier, but ...

[ Scott ] Earlier.

[ Powell ] In the early 30s.

[ Scott ] In the early 30s.

[ Powell ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Yes. They were... I don’t know how many they slaughtered. Nobody in the United States paid any attention.

[ Powell ] Well, something is... like that about civil war is true, too.

[ Scott ] The Spanish Civil War.

[ Powell ] The Spanish Civil War in the 1930s was a very few people understand that there were two sides to the war.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Powell ] Because we are automatically prejudiced against the religious and military of the Hispanic world. We don’t know them. Commonly we just don’t know them at all, what their role is or institutional role or record and everything else.

But getting back to what Otto mentioned a moment ago, I refer to the Hispanophobia complex in our society today in the western world generally to a first grade success... to the first successful propaganda campaign in modern history and the summit powers like Spain in the 16th century and the United States in the 20th are particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Powell ] And Spain was and the propaganda in Spain because of its summit power status, is a first great... the first global power was ... was tremendous. And I advise in my book that we look upon Spain as an example of what is happening to us today.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It is very interesting. I have been looking into that a little bit. Vivas, I believe it was, was taking about one of the reasons why Spain collapsed economically when the full gold and silver began to fall off from the new world, that the Spanish spent so much of their goods... of their money in building churches and schools neither of which were productive in a material sense and they buying all their goods from the manufacturers of Europe. They didn’t set up any factories. It was, they said, we have the money, why should we bother? We can get the goods just by paying for them. And her we are following the same pattern. We have got more schools than any country in the history of the world, less educated kids, but more buildings and we have got just this evening for my birthday cake my wife had bought a plan based a dollar and a half. It came from West Germany.

I said, “You mean to say we have no bakeries?”

And she said, “Well, they don’t bake this sort of thing over here anymore.”

And... but you are right. It is the Spanish example that we should be studying.

[ Powell ] Yes, I insist that we instead of studying the... the decline and fall of Rome we ought to be studying the decline and fall of the Spanish Empire. But however there is one... I just through, as you were talking of one little... I will put a little sour note in here. The Spanish Empire was bankrupt, practically all the way, but it maintained a great global empire and it didn’t maintain its reputation, you see. That went. But even with bankruptcy, they... they held this...

[ Scott ] They held their colors.

[ Powell ] They held the empire and that was due, too, mainly one thing that most ... most don’t recognize. Loyalty to the monarch.

[ Scott ] Loyalty to the monarch.

[ Powell ] The thing that was derided by the 18th century Enlightenment. They laughed at the Spaniards for being loyal to their monarchs, but it was loyalty to the monarchy, poor as it was at times, that held the whole thing together. And once the monarchy was gone, look at it today.

[ Scott ] That is interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] Your book on Mexico’s Miguel Caldera The Taming of America’s First Frontier; 1548-1597 is another case in point. It is quite a vivid account of... of the conflict the men on the field had with the politicians from the liberal {?} who had no recognition of the realities of what was happening out in Mexico.

[ Powell ] There was an early version of what happened in the United States, too, where the people in the eastern seaboard who managed the country since its beginning anyway, managed to get... they... they would discuss the Indians somewhat like the court of Madrid would in Spain in the 16th century as a kind of distant abstraction that we, oh, it must be... and the {?}, {?} the defender of the Indians, so-called and all that, but as he was, really, the... the whole legislative process, the management process, the empire in America was based on {?} ideas more than any others.

[ Scott ] Well, the word liberal comes from Spain.

[ Powell ] Oh, yes. Yes and, in fact, they are very nearly indebted in the... in the late... early 19th century.

[ Rushdoony ] About 10 years ago you will be interested in this, I was cancelled out at one western university because in speaking to the law school I was talking about the change in language since I was dealing with problems related to law and how words come from a particular situation and I sited a farmer which once spent tax collector and I said our word cannibal doesn't speak of the Americans to us, but its origin was carribal because it was among the Caribs that they first encountered the eating of human flesh.

Well, the whole university was in a turmoil for days over that.

[ Powell ] I can understand it.

[ Rushdoony ] And their attitude was: How dare I say anything like that? Even though it was in the process of defining words, because given the record of the white man, how dare a white man speak unkindly of Indians in any frame of reference.

[ Scott ] That is really amazing. Only the white race eliminated slavery. No other race ever did anything against slavery. Only the white race brought in men of other races and made them equal in our culture. No black man or black tribe has ever made another black tribesman equal in his tribe. And no oriental has ever done that.

[ Powell ] In today’s Israel there are three or four different classes of society.

[ Scott ] So. And yet the Caucasians get loaded with all this nonsense from races that have never indulged in any of the things that any of the privileges that they demand as a right. Christianity is being called bigoted and intolerant when it is the only world wide religion that has taken in people of all colors, races and everything else. It is really astonishing.

[ Rushdoony ] And nothing is said about the fact that every year 330,000 Christians are verifiably known to have been martyred for their faith and the number is growing. Now that is the major Holocaust of this century.

[ Powell ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] But what do you read about it?

[ Scott ] Well, it all adds up, I guess, to the fact that you have to ... you can’t check your brain. You can’t let the world tell you what you are supposed to know, because if you do, you are the world’s number one patsy. Will Rogers used to say, you know, imitating an idiot, all I know is what I read in the newspapers. Well, if he were alive today he would say, “All I know is what I see on TV.” And The Tree of Hate when I ran across a copy, I ran across a second hand copy at a strand book store in New York. I thought so highly of it I Xeroxed copies and sent them around to friends, because I couldn’t find any anywhere else. And I thought, of course, that I knew something about the nature of anti South American prejudiced which my father used to talk about it all the time. He would go to Wall Street to try to sell Venezuelan bonds and they would tell him about the default of Latin America in 1930, 1929 and all that. And he said in the meantime the Canadians have been stealing them blind year in and year out and they have never said a word.

But I am delighted... I was delighted to see this book back into print and I am astonished at the general slow sales, because this... especially at a time when we are faced with an influx from Mexico and from Central America now to Mexico. You would think that More Americans would take the time to look into who these people are and where they come from.

[ Powell ] I would especially like to see that book read in Washington, DC, where our relationships with Latin America are manufactured now by more of overnight experts on Latin America than you can shake a stick at. And they are practically all of the left persuasion, I mean liberal, liberal left.

[ Scott ] Well, right now they are all in Japan about seven to 800 Americans in Nicaragua helping the Communist government.

[ Powell ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] We are listening to the senators and the representatives abusing people who have tried to help the anti Communist forces in Nicaragua.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, it is interesting that when the found out what was in this book the publisher in the original printing killed the book.

[ Powell ] In effect that is what it amounted to.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You know we had a terrible time getting the rights to reprint.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I had to threaten. They... the book... the legal department.

[ Powell ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They held you off for how long?

[ Powell ] Oh, a long time. It was five or six years anyway. They just wouldn’t even answer. And I even paid personal visits to the place to talk with them about it and got promises that I would get the copyright and, what, six weeks or whatever. Never happened, year after year.

[ Rushdoony ] They don’t want the truth to be publicized.

[ Powell ] Well, the truth hurts.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, I am... from time to time I have been introduced as a historian and I always correct the people and say I am not a historian. I am a writer. A historian is somebody that goes down and blows the dust off old parchments and manuscripts and translates antique language into the modern idiom and so forth. You are a historian. I am not.

[ Powell ] Well I like to think I am a writer, too.

[ Scott ] Well, you are a writer.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Powell ] I gave up calling myself a historian some time ago, partly be... for that reason, the reasons that you are mentioning.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Powell ] The historians of my time in the academic world, the United States are ... are not really historians. They can be coming to a {?} ideologues.

[ Scott ] All right. On the Miguel Caldera book you had to go into the archives in Mexico City.

[ Powell ] I dusted off quite a few of them and it wasn’t just dust that was on top of those documents either. I found... I found archives in odds and ends of places all over Mexico and enjoyed every minute of it, adventure in archives.’

[ Scott ] A marvelous... marvelous book and The Tree of Hate.

[ Powell ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But did you have to go into the archives to retrieve {?}?

[ Powell ] Yes. I went into the archives of Holland and... and in England and oh, among other things I was... I ...

[ Rushdoony ] Spain.

[ Powell ] I was in the archives of the ... of the Rosenthal collection of the University of Amsterdam, because there were many, many Jews centered in Amsterdam in the 16th and 17th centuries.

[ Scott ] Yes, they went there...

[ Powell ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] ... they had... they fled Iberia.

[ Powell ] And it was part of the Spanish Empire, but a part that ... that... that they thought they could sort of ...

[ Scott ] Survive.

[ Powell ] Survive a little better in. And then also one of the synagogue archives in ... in ... in the Hague. I worked there. So I have worked in a... a lot of places for The Tree of Hate book as well as the Caldera book and ... and while it is not the same kind of documentary research that the Caldera book is, which I think Mexicans in this country particularly ought to know. It is where most of their ancestors come from.

[ Scott ] {?}

[ Powell ] And their very heroic ancestors, a lot of them are... they make Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett look... look a little sick by comparison.

[ Rushdoony ] I haven’t found any Hispanics who have heard of Caldera.

[ Powell ] Oh he is... he is.... partly because he is a... he is a mixed blood.

[ Scott ] They still have that.

[ Powell ] Yes, well, in his own time it could be noticed already that... that he was the only frontier captain on North America’s first frontier, the only frontier captain that was born in the wilderness and... and became a hero with his father’s people fighting against the people that his mother came from. Now we have a few cases of that on our own frontier, but they are sort of... they are sort of minor by comparison. This man shaped...

[ Scott ] Yes, he did.

[ Powell ] Much of... much of the development of the peace policy...

[ Scott ] The policy that pursued after that was the policy that he designated.

[ Powell ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So there is a very important historical figure which...

[ Powell ] ... Mexicans don’t know it either.

[ Scott ] Well, Mexicans don’t know their history.

[ Powell ] That is right.

[ Scott ] The Mexicans today have the only Communist constitution, the first Communist constitution ever created even before the one in the Bolsheviks.

[ Powell ] Well... yeah, go ahead. This was about the same time anyway.

[ Rushdoony ] The thing that struck me so forcibly in the Caldera book was that it was like reading today’s paper. The mythology which with people have surrounded events.

[ Powell ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And they couldn’t face up to the fact that what was happening in their world and refused to recognize the reality. And therefore caused no end of trouble for Caldera and the colonists. Well, it is like our foreign policy today. The same liberal presuppositions destroying things.

[ Powell ] Oh, yes. Now this frontier was the very opening into the heartland of North America. And even today Mexican historians know every little about it and care less. They are all concerned about, as the valley of {?} in Mexico City and environs and so forth and so on. They are perishing in the smog, in their own smog, but still they ... they concentrate their history in that area and maybe they go as far west as {?}. {?}

[ Rushdoony ] At a conference a few years back and I read one of the copies of the original printing some years ago, I mentioned the thesis to a Latin American who was in politics and he was furious.

[ Scott ] Furious?

[ Rushdoony ] He had never heard of any such thing. Who invented that kind of nonsense.

[ Scott ] Really?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. yes.

[ Scott ] Not invented here?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, well, they had to have the theme of oppression. It gave them an... a political ploy.

[ Powell ] Sure. Oh, no, you don’t ... you don’t find any sympathy towards... towards Spain in a lot of Latin America today and, in fact, the more Indian a country the worse it is. It is really racist to the circumstances, anti white.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well this man was insistent on the black legend and how the Spanish had enslaved our people and raped our women and he went on and on emotionally.

[ Scott ] And the cities and the cathedrals and the... and the colleges, notwithstanding.

[ Powell ] He didn’t mention the Indians that helped the Spaniards conquer the other Indians.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They didn’t like being eaten in some cases.

[ Powell ] The... the numbers of allies of Cortez, Indian allies raping and running around in Mexico City after the fall of the Aztecs nobody, I don’t think has ever...

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] Nobody has ever taken notice of that.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Powell ] No. You never hear it said...

[ Scott ] Any more than they take notice of the barbarities of black Africa today.

[ Powell ] No, not today.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have a problem today because we are at the most critical time in history. Never before has there been a world crisis, I believe, equal to ours, and important, as you have often said, Bill, to our future is to have the right kind of ties with Latin America. We have far more in common than we do with almost any other part of the world.

[ Powell ] Beginning, simply, with Christianity itself.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, there is that. There is also the fact that if we had good relations with the southern hemisphere and with central America the whole West could endure without Europe, without Asia, without Africa. But if we are divided in the hemisphere, we will not be able to endure.

[ Powell ] Because, you know who is interested in dividing it.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Powell ] And they are actively at work in Washington and particularly and going out...

[ Rushdoony ] Phil, as we continue I think we ought to look at the contemporary scene and the question of relations with Hispanic America on the part of the United States. This is an area where most Americans have viewed the situation with indifference and have failed to show the interest that is, I think, necessary for the welfare of this country.

[ Powell ] Yes. Much of this condescension on the part of the United States with regard to the Latin third world originates in what we were talking about before, the ... the Hispanophobia content of so much of our history which causes us, then, to have a kind of a superior air about us. It is a kind of a... well, I don’t know what you would call it. But, anyway, what it results in is this. We haven’t had a respectable policy with regard to Latin America in the 20th century. And very particularly here the time when we should have really begun it, we only did it in a very juvenile fashion and incompletely. That was the so-called Roosevelt good neighbor policy which had its roots earlier, but FDR gets the fame of it. And it was... that was abandoned as World War II came to an end. We were... we were thinking in terms of what is left of us if Europe goes down and were... in the ... in the 1930s we began to be rather scared. I can remember being very scared the Hitler Stalin pact and so forth.

But even before that it was recognizable that we would need Latin America of the oncoming struggle. And that is why the good neighbor policy really originated and why it was so quickly abandoned because it was never very... it didn’t have real depth. It did among the united people of this country, but that government, no, which was... started out to be the leader, ended up abandoning it for the end of the war and turning towards Europe and the other problems of the world and so forth and so on. We went back to our indifference with regard to Latin America.

Had we had... I cite this as an example. Had we had in place a real Latin American policy when Reagan come... came into office, there wouldn’t have been a Falklands War, for example, had we had first class diplomats and a personnel worth of the job in Latin America, this would have been ... would have been forestalled and by velocity wouldn’t have happened.

But there are so m any other things that... that show up, for example, the naming of people to high positions in Latin America. The highest one we have got is assistant secretary of Latin America which isn’t very high. But still it is the highest and the people who get appointed to them.... that post regularly, are those who don’t know anything about Latin America. Once in a while there is an exception to this, but very, very little about it. And ... and the Reagan administration is doing the same thing the Kennedy administration did in that regard, pointing overnight experts fresh out of Harvard Law School or someplace like that.

They don’t know the languages. The don’t know the people. Some of them have never been in the area. And these are the ones who lead our Latin American policy.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I think a couple of classical examples of stupidity. One was sending a woman down to Latin America to represent us a few years back. I believe it was Claire Booth Lewis?

[ Scott ] Now it was...

[ Powell ] It was...

[ Scott ] No, she was to Italy. Mrs. Carter.

[ Rushdoony ] Mrs. Carter. Yes. Now that was ...

[ Powell ] Not Amy.

[ Rushdoony ] No, no.

[ Scott ] Amy wasn’t old enough or she would have been sent.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Powell ] Or she would have been sent down, yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] That was not taken ...

[ Powell ] No, no.

[ Rushdoony ] Kindly. And, Otto, the question of height. Perhaps you could tell that story which it think is really...

[ Scott ] When Perez Jimenez...

[ Rushdoony ] Incredible.

[ Scott ] Perez Jimenez was dictator of Venezuela, five foot four, I believe and we sent down an ambassador that was six foot four.

[ Powell ] Well, we... we had in charge of our Latin American policy assistant secretary of state for Latin America not so long ago under the Reagan administration a man who was six foot eight.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, my.

[ Scott ] For Latin America.

[ Powell ] And you imagine a gathering of the United States and Latin America in Washington, DC, the Organization of American States and here this fellow is talking to the ... to the...

[ Scott ] Well I recall I told in an American school when I was a boy that the Spaniards were poor colonists. And I asked why they lasted 400 years with their colonies and was sent out of the room for impertinence. There is also the idea that the Catholic Church in Latin America is an evil institution in the past when it was the only institution that achieved spiritual equality for all the people of Latin America. The Indians worshiped in the same church as the plantation owner. And in almost every respect, we seem to know more about Czechoslovakia, France, Germany or any other country than we do about any country nearby. I mentioned the massacres, the anti Christian massacres in Mexico in the 30s. Most Americans had never heard of it.

[ Powell ] No, no, no.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They have never heard of it.

[ Powell ] Oh, that is true.

[ Scott ] And yet it was right next door. They don’t even know that the Catholic Church is still officially outlawed in Mexico. And the tourists that go there go in and out all the time.

Now there is really very little excuse for ignorance if you can read and write and have a pair of eyes.

[ Powell ] That is true.

[ Scott ] The idea that we should... the Americans now seem to have developed that they should be told all these things and, of course, the... the information is available. I mean your Tree of Hate will bring them up to date. If you read that one book they would know more about Latin America than most of the people that the U S I A sends down there that I met.

[ Powell ] That is why I am sorry it isn’t distributed in Washington where it is needed. But the trouble is if you do get a book like that in... in... in Washington, they ... the ones that need it won’t read it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, the Humanists are ready to retail any kind of lie with regard to Catholics and Protestants. And Catholics and Protestants are ready to believe anything bad about each other.

[ Powell ] Yes, indeed.

[ Rushdoony ] So we have a situation where the Christians are the losers.

[ Powell ] That is right. This is a matter of Christianity being asunder and the advantage taken of this. Now let me go back to the black legend or the Hispanophobia complex again. The Russians, since 1917 have been following this very carefully. They have been in Central America for a long, long time. In fact, they are even said to have something to do with the execution of Sandino himself. And yet he is yet ... yet his name is a term for the...

[ Scott ] {?} Yes.

[ Powell ] But there are... there are two... there are two lines that they anti propagandists, again, don’t think the Russians have been the only ones. We have had the English and the French as propagandists. The U S is, too, in Latin America in an earlier day, maybe even still in many cases. But they follow that line of the Hispanophobia complex. The Communists, especially, because this also involves race. There is a... there is a kind of a ... if... for example, India and Mexico which is... whose very nationhood depends on a kind of a racism built on Hispanophobia or the black legend. And anybody operating against the United States in Mexico all they have to do is take that one. Of course, Mexicans are ready... and Latin Americans are generally ready to blame Spain and the United States for anything rather than themselves as I think Otto pointed out a while ago. But to go right down the line of the revolution in Mexico in the 1920s and 30s, I used to see professors ... the desks in the 1930s piled high with all the stuff out of the Russian Revolution. And, of course, the Latin America Yankee phobia which is the other side of the coin of our Hispanophobia, the Nordic Hispanophobia is just made to order to asunder Christendom itself in the western ... in the western hemisphere.

[ Scott ] I think the Soviets really caught the message when they lost Spain. They had Spain. They had Spain. They owned the government of Spain. It was a Communist government.

[ Powell ] Including its money.

[ Scott ] Everything. They got the gold. They sent the gold to Moscow. They the plant... the... the estates. They outlawed the Church and they began to kill the priests and the nuns and that started a rebellion.

All right. That taught Moscow that Christianity was... Hispanic Christianity...

[ Powell ] Very Hispanic {?}

[ Scott ] Hispanic Christianity, Hispanic Catholicism was a formidable force that cost them Spain. So then the really concentrated upon working into ... in roads into Christianity in Latin America. And now we have liberation theology.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Powell ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] And all the rest.

[ Powell ] Oh yes.

[ Rushdoony ] You mentioned the Yankee phobia in Hispanic America. {?} something extraneous which I ran across today. It was a letter by someone Boston Irish businessman who was in the South a great deal of the time and it infuriates him to be called a Yankee down there because he said, “I am Boston Irish. I hate the Yankees.”

[ Powell ] Well, you can imagine the Southerners in the United States in Latin America being called Yankees.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Powell ] They don’t care of that at all.

[ Rushdoony ] A friend of mine in New Zealand was in the South speaking to a group of people in Mississippi and innocently he began his speech by speaking to the audience as you Yankees.

[ Powell ] That is not like the President Carter in Mexico talking about Montezuma’s revenge. That was a case of the... of the not knowing anything about Latin America. And we sent... we have sent so ... so... such a great amount of personnel in to Latin America who are by their very backgrounds and nature anti Catholic that this also has a bad effect. It has had in the past and probably not so much nowadays, but certainly in an earlier day there was this abrasive... abrasiveness in the relationship. But, again, the... the bigger picture is something else and that is our superiority complex with regard to them as true of Africa or any place else, too. It doesn’t make any difference, but most any place. And ... and the people in this country simply do not realize they have this complex.

[ Scott ] Well, Venezuela in the 50s instituted 40s and the 50s instituted in the late 40s and 50s instituted an immigration policy. They would pay the passage of any Spaniard or Italian who would come to Venezuela as an immigrant and, of course, they got great numbers, specially from Italy, because Italy at the end of World War II was devastated.

[ Powell ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And there was opportunity in Latin America. I remember at the end of the war, World War II, Italians standing in street corners in little knots all talking about America. They meant South America. They didn’t mean the United States. The understand didn’t attract them. But Latin America attracted them because of its Latin quality. And I said, “Why... why only those two countries? Why not immigrants from other countries as well, northern countries?”

They said, “Well, the northerners will not intermarry. The will live with our women, but they won’t marry them and the Italians and the Spaniards will. And we want to improve the quality of the race.”

[ Rushdoony ] Well it is interesting how little is said about the fact that Hispanic America has had a fairly sizable Germanic element.

[ Powell ] Ah yes, and certain.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Powell ] In certain areas in particularly.

[ Scott ] Chile especially.

[ Rushdoony ] And... and this is not Nazi refugees. This goes back to the beginning of the century.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Powell ] How do you think those breweries in Mexico ever got started?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Powell ] That is how they got started. I mean they are.... they are... there are many Germans in Mexico, of course. Some of them came over in the 19th century in a sizable scale.

[ Scott ] Well, you see all these strange mixtures of names and, in fact, all America is very similar. It has a frontier. It has Indians. It has backwater areas. I remember in the streets of Caracas seeing an Indian walking and his squaw following behind, behind him straight as an arrow, both of them. And... and there are large areas of outlaws, of people using guns to acquire land and having range wars and all that sort of thing.

The similarity is... is even increasing because Protestantism is moving around Central America and Latin America. San Paolo is one of the great cities of the world. Most Americans have never heard of it. They don’t even know where it is, a tremendous cities all through Latin American proper through South America. Now, of course, we have guerilla war going on in Peru, in Colombia and in various other countries and Latin America. It is becoming like the Balkans. The power keg of the Americas. And most Americans don’t pay any attention to it because Dan Rather isn’t interested.

[ Powell ] Well, that is true, yeah. I can remember when Walter Littman back in the days of the Kennedy fiasco with regard to Latin America. He decided he would go down and take a look at Latin America. He had been writing about it. He had been writing for years and years by that time. In fact, he died only about 10 years later, whatever it was. But he... he was astonished. He went back there and he says, “In my life, this is the first time that I have ever set foot in Latin America.” He was astonished.

[ Scott ] In all those years.

[ Powell ] Yeah. He made some comment like that. I believe it in the Tree of Hate book somewhere. A comment of that sort. And the first assistant secretary for Latin America, they had the six foot eight one that I mentioned.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Powell ] He didn’t know Spanish or Portuguese and hadn't really been in Latin America. He had been in our foreign service, but in Canada and southeast Asia or someplace else. And his wife was an Italian contessa and so forth and so on, but he... Latin America. {?} it was a closed book to him. In charge of our policy.

[ Scott ] I am very surprised that more people haven’t come to this realization. Every so often you run a little notice of the availability of The Tree of Hate. And we have people, of course, who buy our books, listen to the tapes, and so forth who are very keen, especially the young people that I have, very keen to find out what is really going on in the world and what is important and what isn’t important and so forth. I think this... I hope this will be a reminder to them.

[ Rushdoony ] What are you working on now, Phil?

[ Powell ] Well, I am working on a... on a long essay type article on the United States and Latin America along some of the lines that I have mentioned here, but naturally a little more concrete and a little more structured. And I am doing a... I am doing an article on Isabella Castile, Isabella I of Castile, partly because there begins ... of course the discovery of America. That is commemoration is coming up in a few years, but there were a lot of other things happened in 1492 besides Columbus. Isabella and her husband Ferdinand defeated the Moslems, the first great anti Moslem blow that had been struck, of a long time and it finished Moslem rule. And 1492 was the expulsion o the Jews which of people think was the beginning of the downfall of Spain which isn’t true at all. But she was applauded in Europe for this, because finally she had gotten around to a big problem. The others didn’t have the problem. They had expelled their Jews earlier, for example.

Ands then also the publication of the first really great grammar of any romance tongue, the Castilian tongue by a Renaissance scholar {?} 1492. And all those things 1492 were very important. And she was the centerpiece of that particular year. Of course, we know of Columbus, but that is about all. We don’t know the end of things and how important they were. She also reformed the church in Spain before Luther. She began doing this and Luther was just getting into swaddling clothes, I guess. A real reformation...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Powell ] ... of the religious orders and the... I mean cleaning up the kind of thing that Luther later on was to... was to complain about.

[ Rushdoony ] It is interesting you refer to it, the expulsion of the Jews. England did it, what was it, a couple of centuries earlier.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Powell ] 1300... well, I can’t remember the date.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Rushdoony ] And yet the Spanish are clobbered for it, but not the English. That is a part of the...

[ Powell ] I mentioned it.

[ Scott ] The...

[ Rushdoony ] ...unfairness of so many of the Historians.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, they had a choice in Spain. They didn’t have a choice in England. They were just all thrown out. They didn’t get back legally until Cromwell, although, of course, they got back long before that.

[ Powell ] The Jews could change over to Christianity and they did in great numbers, some with sincerity. For example, well I don’t know about the sincerity of this case, but as soon as the edict of expulsion by Isabelle was known, the head rabbi of Castile and his son both turned to Christianity and Ferdinand and Isabelle became the godfathers. They are the ones that stand by on those occasions, their sponsors in entering Christianity.

[ Rushdoony ] And very little is said about the expulsion of Germans.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Rushdoony ] They took quite an anti German stance and went after even Franciscan monks as far afield as Mexico.

[ Scott ] Well, very little has been said about the expulsion of the Moors which took place later.

[ Powell ] Oh, yes, the ... the expulsion of the Moors was...

[ Scott ] {?} as though it is totally unimportant.

[ Powell ] Not even. But to Europe, those two events, the expulsions of the Moslems, the defeat of the Moslems first and the... their expulsion later and the expulsion of the Jews were great blows in favor of Christianity, because in those days all Christianity was one Christianity. The protestants hadn't yet started their... their...

[ Scott ] Well it was true and also it was a following of Old Testament teaching that a house divided against itself could not stand and that a nation that had two religions could not endure. The whole question of the 500 years of interracial, inter religious regime in Spain remains in the end it collapsed. In the end it collapsed. And this is not what a modern scholar wants to see. He believes that this is possible. We are in the process of trying to prove, once again, whether or not it is possible. We have tremendous tensions. I just received in the mail the other day a large color photograph of an enormous Buddhist temple here in California. And we know, of course, we have got this great temple in Kentucky, which another Asiatic religious group has put up. So we are going to be the port of all souls, so to speak.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, in England today the Moslems far out number the Methodists and no one knows what their relationship is really to the Anglicans because every one is technically an Anglican, a member of the Church of England. But they are growing rapidly. In this country we had an answer that was quite workable and we have abandoned it. We have said there can be no established church. But our law structure is established on the Bible and on biblical law. And in terms of that, the orthodox Jew and the orthodox Christian were able to have a common part in the United States. And since a civil government is a system of laws and the law has a religious foundation, we began with the right solution to the problem that has long bedeviled Europe and the world. But in recent years we have abandoned that. So we do have a crisis.

[ Scott ] We have a crisis because we are trying to substitute social science for that physical foundation.

[ Powell ] For the cultural roots.

[ Scott ] And for the cultural roots. And social science is not even a profession. It is not even a subject. It is a sub subject. It is almost... it comes close, in my opinion, to a series of cults: psychology, et cetera, et cetera, sociology and so on.

[ Powell ] You can see... I am sorry. Did I interrupt you?

[ Scott ] Go ahead.

[ Powell ] You can see, for example, what I meant when I mentioned the grammar of Castilian. It became one of the great bases of Spanish Empire and the spread of Christianity.

Now in the United States there are quite a few people pretty active almost to injure that language with a kind of approach from all these other languages and descendants of other languages coming in and this hodge podge. And we are... we are ... we are even losing our English language in the colleges and universities anyway, because...

[ Scott ] Well, are... the American language is in such dire straights.

[ Powell ] Disarray.

[ Scott ] The... the latest unexpurgated, unabridged dictionary, totally useless. And now for international treaties we have to use the Oxford dictionary. We have no reference for the American language, none.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, they have been very hostile to everything Noah Webster did, because Webster began with a Christian premise. And in the original edition he consistently went to the Bible for many, many definitions and to a theological position. So he gave a sharp clarity to the English language.

I was reading the other day on the fact that language does represent culture so that when a culture declines language reflects that decline and although in Britain and the United States, for example, we speak what is ostensibly a common language, the psychological differences are very great.

[ Scott ] Indeed, they are.

[ Rushdoony ] For example, all the variations in the meaning of the word go in American English take a few pages. And the cultural difference is apparent, the author, in the fact that in Britain men stand for parliament. In the United States you run for Congress.

[ Powell ] That is {?}

[ Rushdoony ] And he went on to cite how we are basically a nation of post adolescents because throughout most of our history until late in the last century, the average age was 16, because of the high birth rate and the fact that immigrants came over in their 20s as young people leaving the old country.

[ Powell ] Yes, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And in the beginning of this century the average was 25 in this country. Only since World War I has the average age of Americans begun to climb. But our youthfulness affected our language and we still have that post adolescent temper for language.

[ Powell ] And lingo. Yeah, lingo is ... What the young... what the young people in this country speak isn’t English, I don’t think.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Scott ] The language is getting less precise all the time.

[ Powell ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And do you notice that even on the radio mispronunciations are becoming common.

[ Powell ] Oh.

[ Scott ] And I am threatening... I have been threatening for the last several months to get a cheap camera and to take photographs of every misspelled sign that I see, because I see them all over the place. Of course, there is one right across from your place, Rush. Sandy Loam and the loam is spelled L O A M E...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... which I am... I am very fond of.

[ Powell ] That is a good one.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have about two minutes. Is there anything you would like to say, Phil, by way of conclusion?

[ Powell ] Well, I might just go back to this language business again in another sense. I am a great believer in the importance of the Castilian tongue in the formation of the Spanish Empire which is the first great global one, as you see. But now when I think of the decline of English I... I {?} always leaning, kind of hoping, being hoping all this time that the English language, which is now number one in the western world, would be a kind of alliance with Spanish, but that might ... that might crummy up the Castilian.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, thank you very much, Phil, and it has been a pleasure to have you with us.

[ Powell ] Thank you, Rush. I enjoyed it very much.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you all.

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