From the Easy Chair

The French Revolution and Its Influence

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 212-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161Y46

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161Y46, The French Revolution and Its Influence, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 148, June 4, 1987.

Otto Scott and I are going to discuss a subject this evening which is very important for us to be informed about, the French Revolution. The French Revolution, in a sense, brought the modern age into focus. Everything that had developed since 1660 with the Enlightenment and with Romanticism came to focus in the French Revolution and we are today living in the world that revolution created.

All the absurdities and the insanities of our age, its errors are traceable to that event. Otto Scott has written a book a few years back on Robespierre, the Voice of Virtue which is, of course, about the French Revolution. We still have a very limited number of copies which can be ordered from Ross House Books.

Now by way of a preface, we need to recognize that the French Revolution was a logical development of the modern age, of the thinking of men like John Locke who, to a very great degree was, especially in France, regarded as the Father of the Enlightenment and the grandfather of revolution.

John Locke believed that man has a morally neutral nature and, therefore, by what we now call brainwashing and which he called education man can be made into whatever the educational system chooses to make of him. Locke created modern education. He also created the modern Pharisee and hypocrite. The man who believed himself to be the voice of reason and the voice of virtue and, therefore, has the right to reshape the world according to his thinking.

Now all this came to focus in the French Revolution. It is with us still. We need to understand the significance of that event in order to counteract it, because it is going to destroy us otherwise.

Otto, let’s hear from you now about the implications of that event.

[ Scott ] Well, the French Revolution has never stopped. I think that is the first thing to say about it. I was astonished when I began to research that period at how contemporary it is, how modern it is. As I read it I thought I am living this. It was like the morning’s newspaper. It was like an evening TV, astonishing. We have never gotten out of it. It never really came to an end.

What happened, of course, in a general way, was that eventually the junta was overtaken by Napoleon and Napoleon tried to put the eggs back into the shell. He tried to unscramble the omelet. He restored the aristocracy or an aristocracy. He restored the Church. He restored the army. He restored the courts. He restored the absolute rule of the Ancion regime, but the whole country remained divided. All those who had been downcast by the revolution and had lost their properties and their estates resented the Napoleonic regime. All the people that Napoleon elevated were considered {?} or, you know, nouveau riche and all that. And under the surface the argument between left and right continued through France forever. It broke the back of France. It divided the people in irrevocably. And the argument that the revolution was a good thing was raised in the chamber of deputies by Clemenceau who was the leader in the final victorious phases of World War I. His father knew some of the revolutionaries. Clemenceau was a man in his 70s in 1917. He was 75. His father knew some of the veterans of the revolution. And in the 20s there were 20 different governments in France between 1920 and 1929. The country just goes back and forth between de Gaulle and Mitterrand. It is still operating the same way. And that divide cuts all the way though all western civilizations.

[ Rushdoony ] To this day, I believe, the birthday of Napoleon cannot be celebrated in France. Isn't that right?

[ Scott ] That is true. And yet Napoleon is the greatest hero in all of French history.

[ Rushdoony ] And the most popular to this day.

[ Scott ] Most popular, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the hypocrisy that marks men like Robespierre and politicians on all sides does go back to John Locke and to the premise that the intellectual elite, the political elite, the scientific planning elite represent the voice of reason and of virtue in the world and, therefore, they are exempt from the ordinary laws of humanity and they have a right to rule us and to make decisions for us and they know better than we do what we need.

[ Scott ] Well, what is good for us. James I said, “I govern not according to the common will, but the common weal.” And that was the most succinct expression of their attitude. They brought up the will of the people. This was supposed to be the will of the people, but they were the people and everyone else was cattle. They spoke for the people. Robespierre and his crowd spoke for the people. No one else was allowed to speak.

Now this is a pretty familiar situation for the modern Americans.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. If you oppose this same revolutionary elite, you are a Fascist. You are a reactionary. You are, by definition evil because you have opposed the voice of virtue.

[ Scott ] Well, that is it. It was a satiric phrase, the voice of virtue. And Tom Lipscomb, the editor used it as a title. I... my original title was Robespierre: The Fool as Revolutionary. And I hope some day to see a second edition out carrying the proper title. Robespierre is interesting. He was dictator of France, although actually, technically, he was only head of the committee, the committee of public safety, but he was the unchallenged dictator for 90 days.

Now 90 days is not a very long time. It is about the lifespan of a fruit fly. And yet he was elevated into the pantheon of historic personalities by the left and he has been maintained in that high position ever since. Have you any idea of how many men have risen to the top and fallen in a period of weeks or months? I mean they are all dismissed as footnotes of history and yet this one idiot, this one murderous idiot is held aloft.

R. R. Palmer, who was with Princeton University for many, many years and is considered our leading American authority on the French Revolution, 30 years ago wrote that when Robespierre was guillotined that destroyed the last best hope of democracy in France. And I called him up when I was writing this book. And he wasn’t with Princeton. He was at another school. I found him and I said, “I cannot get over what you had to say about Robespierre.” And I quoted. And he was immensely flattered. He said, “Why...” he said, “I wrote that 30 years ago.” He said, “I think it is just marvelous that you feel that way.” I said, “Well, don’t misunderstand me.” I said, “I really called up to find out if you had changed your mind in view of events since then.” And there was a hesitation and he said, “Why should I?” I said, “After Stalin, after Lenin you see no reason to change your mind about Robespierre?” He said, “No, not in the least.” I said, “Well, then I feel sorry for you,” and I hung up.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, very few people realize to how great an extent both Marx and Lenin wrote on the French Revolution, studied it and made it their pattern. Now the interesting thing is that Robespierre, who is regarded as so great a man that all the way through school I was taught that he was one of the greatest men of all history, did very little other than kill a sizable portion of the population of France.

[ Scott ] Well, they set prices and wages. They made it a criminal offense to use gold. You had to use their paper money. He suppressed Christianity and he persecuted the Church, of course, but he allowed all kinds of strange cults to continue. Officially the revolutionary government was against all religion, but in practice it was only against Christianity.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, they worked to promote free masonry, occultist and satanic groups, any group that was hostile to Christianity.

[ Scott ] They did several things that were unusual. The first thing, of course, was to overthrow the religion of the country in the name of anti religion. I don’t believe this ever happened before in the history of the world. But, of course, to say that they had no religion of their own is untrue. They had a religion which every liberal in the world today believes in, the religion of the elite.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The religion of the self appointed elite that has a right to teach all the rest of us and tell all the rest of us what to do and what to think. The other things that they did that were rather interesting is that they introduced the idea of the purge. I think we have referred to this before...

[ Rushdoony ] I think it is important to go into again.

[ Scott ] Well, the purge, of course, is a medical term to get rid of the feces and so to use the term for human beings is to epitomize that they consider the people whom they are going to purge as simply feces, the waste product of society. And it was accompanied by public confessions in the Jacobin club and the other left wing clubs, radical clubs. You had to get up and confess your sins publicly. This was, of course, stolen from Christianity, the idea of ... of confession originally was public in the early days of Christianity. You got up before everyone in the congregation and you admitted what your sins were and you were given a penance and you were forgiven. Well, every one of the revolutionaries had to get up and purge himself of his sins. He had to admit that he had done this or done that. That was, I think, somewhat unusual. And that, of course, has been carried on through the public confession episodes of the Chinese cultural revolution, the early stages of the Soviet revolution and every left wing revolution ever since.

Every one of these steps and I guess the most original of all was to destroy an entire class of people, to murder an entire class of people for the crime of having been born in the wrong group, babies, young women, old men without distinction. They were out to destroy all the aristocrats, all the priests, all the nuns and anyone else who didn’t agree with them. Now I don’t... can’t think of any precedent in all history where a government set out to slaughter its own people when the people were unresisting.

[ Rushdoony ] I think it is very interesting to the... realize how we have been given a warped idea of the French Revolution. All the way through school, as I mentioned earlier, I was given all kinds of false ideas about it. One scholar actually held some years back that the reign of terror was misnamed, because only a handful of people, perhaps 40...

[ Scott ] Oh, oh.

[ Rushdoony ] ... were executed.

[ Scott ] Did he...

[ Rushdoony ] And then...

[ Scott ] Did he have a doctorate? Was he teaching in the schools?

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] That criminal?

[ Rushdoony ] Of course, it was by the millions. But I think one of the greatest illusions propagated by teaching concerning the French Revolution, the Russian and others is that these were spontaneous rebellions against despotic rule and they were anything but spontaneous. They were led from the top. And instead of improving things, however bad the regime of Louis XVI may have been, that of the revolution was far, far worse.

[ Scott ] Well, Louis XVI felt that it was criminal for a monarch to order his army to fire on his own people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, which was a weakness on his part.

[ Scott ] And, incidentally, the Shah of Iran had the same idea.

[ Rushdoony ] And both fell....

[ Scott ] And both fell

[ Rushdoony ] ... as a result.

[ Scott ] ... as a result, because if you don’t defend yourself, of course, you will be defeated. But the... the French events carried every single step of the formula so well that at the... by the time I got through and I was ready to write this book I felt anyone who understands the French Revolution will understand all left wing revolutions.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And anyone who doesn’t understand the French Revolution will... is going to be doomed to be victimized by a left wing revolution. That is the reason that they teach it in the Kremlin to the leaders of the various national groups in various parts of the world where they intend to subvert. They bring them in and they have the greatest record. There is a number of mysteries as Lord Acton said about the French case. He said, “Every so often the smoke appears to diminish and we think we are going to see the hands of the managers.” And then he said, “All is covered over again.”

There is a persistent argument that arises again and again that there is a particular group who are... who created and masterminded the French Revolution. Nestor Webster and others think it was the Jews. I don’t. I don’t think it was the Jews. I don’t think that it was any particular national group. I think that it was a combination of factors. I think the masons had something to do with it. I think that English money and agents had something to do with it, the agents of Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great, they had a hand in it. There were a number of people who combined in this great historic event. But prior to it, there was this long period of attack upon the French culture from within by the intellectuals who severed all the roots, you might say the fabric which held the French culture together. They attacked the history. They attacked the religion. They attacked the Church. They attacked the priests. They attacked the nuns. They attacked the court. They attacked the army. They attacked every group and the ... at the same time that they attacked these groups and invented all kinds of dirty stories about them, they took on an aspect that we see today where pornographic publications get holy and indignant when they discover sin in others.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And it is amazing when you see the people who are indignant.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And you know the way they live and you wonder at the nerve of them talking about any kind of scandal anywhere. But if this is continued, and it did continue, Robespierre read this kind of literature when he was in school. It was forbidden, but he read it. He went to a Jesuit school. Or, rather, he went to a Christian school. The Jesuits had been thrown out of France at that point.

At the end of that time there wasn’t anyone left who would defend France. One of the late... one of the last ministers of France was... called in a bunch of very wealth people in an attempt to help the government deficit and the tax system and so forth. And he prefaced his remarks by saying, “I realize that the history of France is one of criminality.”

[ Rushdoony ] I was given all kinds of material to read, assigned reading, heard lectures about the oppressive system of taxation under the Louis and it was only about 15, 17 years after I finished my studies, undergraduate and graduate, that I began to encounter the data about taxation, which made clear that taxation before the revolution was very, very light compared to what France has had ever since.

[ Scott ] And compared to what they have now.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Compared to what we have.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I mean, you know, that the only difference, I guess, is between them and now is that there was not a great technological gap in terms of weapons. If you had guns you could have guns just as good as the army. Now, of course, that is no longer possible. So we have weapons of control today that were... didn’t exist then, though rebellions were easier to mount in a physical sense. But the real control was taken away from the king, first the long build up and then the gradual infiltration of the idea all through the middle class that there was a possibility to attain power.

Now the leaders of the revolution were young men in their 20s and early 30s. There were no old men involved. The old men had written the books and laid the groundwork, as you say, Locke and all the rest. And don’t forget the Age of Reason had a big season in England after the restoration. After Cromwell there was a great swing against the Church and there was a corrupt clergy. If it hadn't been for John Wesley and so forth, who knows what would have happened there. But in any event, the revolutionaries were journalists. They were lawyers. They had... Murat was a physician. They were what we would call today the ... the rising professional class. Now there is... there is something about the modern professional which is interesting. He feels that because he has a certain amount of education and skill in a certain area that he really should have commensurate power in society.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] This is a persistent illusion. The idea that if you go to school for 25 or 50 years you are then entitled to give people orders and tell them what to do. We have a system here where professionals can conduct experiments with human beings which an unprofessional would go to prison for doing this.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, at any rate, these fellows, and I think about Ralph... one of my friends read this and said Ralph Nader, talking about Robespierre... that... that self righteousness.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That hatred of luxury, the hatred of... of wealth. He was... he was crazy when he saw the Corvette. It was too racy looking.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we have the same self styled elite who are convinced that anything they did not plan and design and control is, therefore, degenerate and immoral. And, as a result, then as now the same type of person is working to subvert and destroy anything that he has not made.

[ Scott ] Well, it is interesting. Some of the... some of the things... You know that in Germany, western Germany about 10 or 15 years ago there was a very popular soft porno publication, soft porno and political radical publication. It was quite... got a big circulation. And then it was discovered with a certain amount of shock that it was funded by the Soviets.

Well, the same thing is true in the French Revolution. All kinds of publications, semi pornographic, which combined radical politics with pornography appeared all over the place and they ranged all the way from cartoons up to scholarly journals. They covered every aspect of what you could put on paper in terms of persuasion, even posters. And the odd thing about it or the unusual thing about it is after the revolution succeeded they turned very puritanical. All those publications were immediately suppressed as in Cuba after Castro, as in the Soviet Union after Lenin, as in Berlin after Hitler and the revolutionary, you see, is really... is sort of a reverse priest. You might say almost a priest gone bad. He... he calls on all these kind of idealistic slogans. He prides himself on being austere, on being above the weaknesses of the flesh and if given a chance would lock people up.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, we are living in a revolutionary climate, in other words.

[ Scott ] Very definitely. There isn’t a single thing that I found in the pre revolutionary climate of Paris, 1788, that we don’t have.

[ Rushdoony ] This is why it is so important for the opposition to destroy the growing Christian movement in this country and this is why some of these television personalities who have exploited Christianity are so evil, because they have played into the hands of these people who are out to destroy our world, to destroy Christianity, to take over and become the lords over men.

[ Scott ] Well, they ... it isn’t simply the scandals that have appeared at the PTL and that sort of thing which I really deplore alone, so much as I do the fact that they attain tremendous audiences. They have... These are men of great eloquence who slide it over every one of our national problems.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Never attack any of the conditions that are threatening our liberties. They put everything into a sort of musical chorus of theological banalities.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Banalities is the word for it. What we have seen is the evasion of the problems of life in terms of a kind of thing that I think was summed up after World War II in a book written by a rabbi, Peace of Mind, as though the goal of life is to find peace of mind. We have had Catholic and Protestant and Jewish leaders writing as though having what you want, having peace of mind, finding yourself, finding your own space, all these trivialities have replaced the kingdom of God.

[ Scott ] Well, there is the whole ... the whole perversion of being born again.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I mean you don’t get born again by an excess of enthusiasm. You... you get born again after a long walk through the desert, after great travail. I mean it... resurrection begins first with defeat.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And anyone who thinks that this is an easy or a pleasant experience has never gone through it.

[ Rushdoony ] That is right.

[ Scott ] And here we are faced with these trivial monsters who claim to be our betters, telling us that they have got a plan to bring heaven on earth and it is the kind of heaven that would kill us all.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, we are, thus, in a revolutionary climate. We have some very serious problems and the answers are only soluble from a Christian perspective, a Christian perspective that applies the whole Word of God to every area of life and thought.

One of the problems we face in this country is that so many people, as a result of their schooling, have been trained to believe that there is a similarity between the French Revolution and our War of Independence. The two, of course, were very emphatically different. And ours was not a true revolution. It was anything but a revolution. It was a separation from a country that was limiting the liberties of free colonies. However, the French Revolution is increasingly regarded as the model, as the attempt by man to take over his own destiny. And that perspective marked one book written a few years back and I forget the title of it. But it was a sociological study of a popular sort which held that in order to appreciate what the future could offer us, we would have to understand the implications of the French Revolution, man taking control of his own destiny.

[ Scott ] Well, man trying to take control of his own destiny has been part of the original sin since man was created. And, of course, our destination is beyond our control. We don't know when we were not in command of being born. We are not in command of dying. And command very little in between, for that matter. I ... I think the practice of calling it the American Revolution is a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And to... and to make the word revolution and the idea of revolution respectable.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And, of course, they re constantly quoting Jefferson who says the tree of liberty should be watered with the blood of martyrs every 20 years or so. Jefferson was a many sided individual and you can quote him on almost any topic and find three opinions in his writings. The ... the fact of the matter is that anyone who gets out of school and carries what he has been told around in his head without reviewing them and without some time later on doing some more reading in that area, is not an educated person, is just a person who has had some schooling. And the American version of the French Revolution would astonish the French. they know better. They still have family records. They know who was killed. They know that it was a bloody mess and that they have never gotten off their feet since. They have never had a stable government since then. They have never been able to maintain an ongoing administrative structure since then.

The Church never recovered in France. The army never recovered. The aristocracy never recovered. The French Revolution, just to put you into one industrial phase, one of the things it did was it broke up all the big estates. It limited French farms. So it thereby and it also passed legislature, in one form or another, against Capitalism, because they weren’t going to be a nation of shop keepers like the English. Consequently, France industrially lagged while Germany soared, England soared, the United States soared, France remained moored in the past, babbling about liberty, freedom, equality, all this nonsense. I mean to this day you argue with a Frenchman and it is a really difficult and distressing situation because they take absurd positions and they get very passionate about them.

But France is only recently joined the industrial world. The French Revolution held France back for at least 80 years.

[ Rushdoony ] There is another aspect of this that we are rarely told and I had a glimpse of it in a most telling manner. About 15, 16 years ago I was listening to KFAC, the good music station in Los Angeles. And they played a short symphonic piece or, perhaps, you could say, a symphonietta, a small symphony, breathtakingly beautiful, very, very remarkable piece which I have never heard since. And then said this was one of the two surviving compositions by the man who before the revolution was recognized to be the greatest composer in France and perhaps one of the greatest ever known in Europe, but nothing else had survived except two short pieces.

The amount of the past and its culture and its achievement.

[ Scott ] {?}

[ Rushdoony ] ... that was destroyed by the revolutionaries.

[ Scott ] Fire.

[ Rushdoony ] ... was far reaching.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] So that we have a very limited knowledge of many of the areas of cultural achievement in pre revolutionary France.

[ Scott ] Well also, don’t forget that one of the pre revolutionary conditions in France, one of the conditions that led to the revolution was the rise of female power.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] No this is... this is never discussed and, of course, this is a very bad thing to bring up in this particular period of time. But when Napoleon decided to put an end to disorders, which had persisted for quite a long time, he sent the army out and he said, “Have the people pick out the demonstrators and mischief makers and give them summary justice.” Some of his advisors said, “What about the Jacobins?” And he said, “Who are they?” Well, of course, he was their boy. He was their protégé for a long time. He was a protégé of Robespierre’s. So, of course, he knew who they were, but he said, “Oh, well,” he said France had no government. France was governed by women. Now France has a government and the French will obey.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they did. Now it was true. Pompadour and the various mistresses of the Louis, the last three Louis exerted an enormous influence. Marie Antoinette was very influential. Louis XVI was not as intelligent. And there was a great feminist movement. I was looking up, I had to look up, because I can’t remember these things. One of the feminine leaders of the revolution during the ... on page 83, during the attack upon the Bastille which was empty at the time, there was a... a pretty woman whose real name was Anne Turin, a well known courtesan who rode along on the barrel of the weapon wearing a tricolor. Now Anne become one of the great female leaders of the revolutionary group and at various demonstrations she was very prominent and the women were following her and she made speeches and, of course, she wasn’t the only one, but she was the most outstanding. After the revolution turned sour, after the people began to lose everything that they had, after Paris began to look like... one visitor to Paris at that point said it looked like an old clothes shop because the women were lined up on the sidewalks with pictures and pieces of furniture and clothing and what not to sell for food which is the same sort of thing that happened in Leningrad or... or... or Saint Petersburg, rather and in Moscow and in Berlin and all in these ends of the revolution... after the revolution.

Then the women turned on Anne and beat her up, beat her up. And then along came the revolutionary authorities who picked her up and threw her into prison, because she had become an embarrassment to them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now it was interesting that the same thing was true in the Spanish revolution. The... the left wing movement that overthrew Alphonse XIII and set up the Spanish Republic was straight communist revolution which most Americans never heard of because our press never reported the stages of it, but it went down the line of the French Revolution.

One of the aspects was the feminist movement la {?} got up in the Cortez and said to one of the conservative members, “For your position, you will be punished.” And he was murdered later that night. After Franco took over she fled to Russia. She came back, by the way, after Franco’s death, 83, still spouting the same things.

You know, history, as it really was, is the most fascinating of all stories.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, one of the things also that marked the French Revolution was thinking like this {?} statement, “Children belong to the state.” As you point out on page 224 of your book. And {?} thought boys should be taken from their families at five. And history was revised as a part of their new Enlightenment. And the past was seen only as a record of barbarism. So to this day we look on the past as barbaric and wisdom was born with these...

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] ...media elite.

[ Scott ] They renamed the years.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They started with the year one. They renamed the seasons. They renamed the months. They renamed the days of the week. They were going to... everything was going to begin from them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They were going to start the new world and the new humanity, the new everything.

[ Rushdoony ] The new creation, very literally.

[ Scott ] And...

[ Rushdoony ] And we need to take that seriously.

[ Scott ] The... the Soviets picked up the theme, but every time there is crisis in the Kremlin they say there will be no Thermador. They will never allow any of their military men to get to the point that Napoleon reached of popularity, never. That is why Marshall Zuckoff and all the rest were put down by Stalin as soon as World War II was over.

[ Rushdoony ] {?} before the war.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, right now there is no voting member from the military on the Politburo.

[ Scott ] Well, look at what we have done. We have muzzled our military.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They are not even allowed to speak without the permission of the state department.

[ Rushdoony ] And...

[ Scott ] The... the secretary of defense’s office must have a copy in advance of their talk and it must be censored. General Singlove was destroyed. His career was destroyed because off the record he told a reporter who asked him what he thought about Carter’s plan to pull our troops out of South Korea, off the record. The reporter broke the promise, went ahead and printed it. That was Mr. Singlove’s, General Singlove’s great crime, having an opinion.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, we saw what putting civilians in charge of military strategy has done for us in Vietnam.

[ Scott ] Well, yes. We had this Texas school teacher Lyndon Johnson. I always think of this with real amazement. Here is a man who got into office with ass out of his trousers and no shoes, practically, who wound up with 25 million dollars, never had a job that wasn’t on the government payroll and there has never been a word raised about his ethics.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And his wife who had nothing is supposedly the source of the money.

[ Scott ] But going back to this revolutionary thing. Muzzling the military was a very important step in the diminution of American liberty.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because that set up a barrier between what we could know about national defense and what we can’t.

The theater, the theater in those days, they had homosexual costume balls, you know. They had homosexual dances. They had a group of child prostitution. It was amazing. The prostitutes were... went around accompanied by little children and there was the children that were for sale.

To read about Paris in those days and not only Paris, but Marseilles and all the other cities in France is ... is to take a walk through Greenwich Village.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, as you point out, anything their critics did or said was automatically bad, because they were critics of the government. But they issued a statement which began, “All is permitted those who act in the revolutionary direction.”

[ Scott ] That is exactly what Bernard Balin said... Bernard Balin, the great {?} of American historiographers right now. When this book came out, this nonsensical book called Roots somebody pointed out that it is replete with historical error. And they said to Dr. Balin who is hailed as a great historian, “What do you think about that?” He said, “Well, it is all right so long as it is in the right direction.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I thought of the French Revolution.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. You can lie and it is the truth provided you lie for them.

[ Scott ] You are lying in a good cause.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes.

[ Scott ] And none of this... the interesting thing about it is that none of the final stages of the revolution were accompanied by any explanation to the people of what these men planned to do. They went step by step. First they demanded more democratic voting and that they changed the Estates General into the General Assembly. Then they demanded a constitutional ... a new constitution and a referendum on it. And that was achieved. Then they demanded new votes in order to send in a newly elected General Assembly under the new constitution. Well, by that time they had a constitutional government similar to that of Britain. This is what {?} had wanted. But they weren’t going not stop there. The Jacobins then pushed inside the general assembly to push the monarchy further out. Louis finally got scared and tried to flee the country and they seized and arrested him, because that was a crime.

Suddenly he had betrayed the revolution and that was the beginning of the trials in the legislature and the guillotine.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now here we are moving more and more toward putting the president on trial. There were a great many of this sort of persons who were deeply grieved and disappointed and angered that President Ford pardoned President Nixon. They wanted to put him in prison. And they would like to put Reagan in prison.

[ Rushdoony ] And they never considered putting Lyndon Johnson in prison...

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] ...given all of his...

[ Scott ] Of course not, nor... nor.... nor were they shocked at the call girls that Kennedy had.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In the White House.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, the banner of the French Revolution, its slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” is always given to us in its truncated form, as you point out in your book, because the full slogan is, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.”

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] Agree with us or die.

[ Scott ] Absolutely. You are a contra. You are a counter revolutionary.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... if you don’t agree.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I noticed that the word contra is... is... it has been accepted here. You are countering the revolution.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... in Nicaragua. Well, of course, the difference between France at that time... now France did have international enemies, because it was the largest and the richest country in Europe. The government was broke, but the people were wealthy. As the revolution progressed the enemies of France began to gather and eventually, of course, the Germans sent in an army from various parts of Germany. An army was assembled that marched against the French. Well, then the French produced the people’s army, you might say. And since guns were interchangeable in those days and cannon didn’t really mean a great deal, horses were horses no matter who had them. The battles were interesting because, in effect, the revolution conscripted all the people and the rhetoric was beautiful. I will tell you. The rhetoric... Robespierre’s eloquence was so great that I didn’t dare quote him in this book. I did not quote any of the revolutionary leaders deliberately because if I did it would have distorted the book. The rhetoric of the revolution was so arresting and so exciting and so noble that it sweeps the mind away from the facts of what they were doing. So therefore I wrote only about what they did and not what they said. And it is a very unusual book on the French Revolution because of that. And it was a deliberate technique.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] Now...

[ Rushdoony ] ... the rhetoric of politics today is full of concern for the poor and the needy, the downtrodden and it is just as dishonest as the rhetoric of the French Revolution.

[ Scott ] Well, let’s listen to the contra hearings. Did you ever hear anything like the expostulations and the indignation of these highly moral representatives and senators that we have? I mean there they are. Their... their chins wobble in indignation as they question what happened to the money. Who did you... who knew what? They are... they are succeeded in confusing everybody in the United States.

But what I was leading to on the question of France, France revolutionary armies defeated their enemies and, of course, they had a general like Napoleon. They had some other good ones and went on to create for a while the French Empire. Short lived, but, nevertheless, it left a lasting scar in the culture of Europe.

But we in the United States, if we get embroiled in an internal revolution, can rest assured that many of the agents of that revolution are allied or will be allied with this great international Goliath that is moving against us.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] So what we will see here is not only a domestic revolution in the sense of new rulers, but rulers allied with the worst rulers that the world has seen since the days of the pagans. And we would be maneuvered like Czechoslovakia, be maneuvered like Romania into the hands of the Soviet.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is... because the revolution today is Marxist. It is a left wing revolution. It isn’t a right wing revolution. And that is the thing that we have to ... one way or another Americans are going to have to wake up to the fact that this is not simply words, this is real. They are going to have to be ... Christians have moved well, but they have not realized their common danger. I think the time is long gone when people can afford denominational disputes in the Christian community.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] We are up against Satan.

[ Rushdoony ] Some few years back state senator Bill Richardson said something to me when I was speaking to the state senators that I have never forgotten. He said, “Most people underestimate the intelligence of these people here in Sacramento.” He said, “They are highly intelligent men.” Their problem is not a lack of intelligence, but a short range vision. They cannot visualize anything beyond 90 days because the average voter is like themselves, existentialist, has no vision beyond 90 days.

[ Scott ] Not going anywhere.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] Just trying to live well.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And what a politician has done more than 90 days in the past...

[ Scott ] Is forgotten.

[ Rushdoony ] ...is forgotten except in very rare cases. Well, this is our problem. The men in the senate right now are not thinking of the future of this country.

[ Scott ] Oh, they are thinking only of the next elections.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They want to get the white house.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And they think everything is going to go along just as fine as dandy. The next president is not going to have any problem. If he is a Democrat he can do anything he wants. Well, they are wrong, because the revolution doesn’t go backward. It doesn't go backward.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] Mr. Hart couldn’t do what Mr. Kennedy did. The press didn’t protect Mr. Hart because the press is loose. It is like a jackals in the street.

[ Rushdoony ] Do you remember Garrett Garrett who was editor in the late 20s, I think, and in the 30s...

[ Scott ] Did he write...

[ Rushdoony ] ... for the Saturday Evening Post.

[ Scott ] Oh, no. I am ... I don’t think so.

[ Rushdoony ] Or...

[ Scott ] Did he write A Mess of Pottage?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Yes. I remember that book. Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And he also wrote a little book after a few years of Roosevelt and the title of it was The Revolution Was.

[ Scott ] Yes, he did. He did. He... he... he...

[ Rushdoony ] A tremendous work.

[ Scott ] He was right on target.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] The only thing that surprises me about it is how long it is taking. This, of course, is ... is an advantage. This is a great advantage, because perhaps because of the American addiction to euphemisms, the American language today is becoming a... a... a... a mask for communication, a... a... a substitute for communication. I mean, I hear the weather man saying rain activity. And ... and that drives me right up the wall. They ... they will never use one word where 17 will do.

[ Rushdoony ] I think the abysmal level of thinking came out in that account you gave at the staff meeting last week about the U S navy. Why don’t you cite that in the Persian Gulf? How shall we protect our navy?

[ Scott ] Oh, yes. The... I heard that on the radio. The fellow said the.... the issue that is beginning to arise to many people in Washington is how shall we protect our navy?

Well, perhaps because the revolution is proceeding in this snail like, blind fashion, there is a chance. But I have seen—and you have, too—the Christian community take on all kinds of new and invigorating life and then begin to fission off into single issues. The right to life people, the prayer in school people, something else over here, something else over there, all individually fine, but all cottage industry stuff.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] In the meantime the revolution is moving along a single track and they have a slogan, “No enemies on the left.” We seem to have a slogan, “No friends on the right.”

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, there is not future for this country except in terms of a genuine reawakening of the Christian community and a concern for Christian Reconstruction in every area of life and thought. We have a problem unparalleled in all of history because for the first time all the world is involved. And the future of the world in a great measure depends on what happens in the United States.

[ Scott ] Well, I think that is true. And I do think that we are in a better position than the French were in the 1780s or the Russians in the teens or the Germans in the early 30s. We do have a Christian community and neither of those countries did.

Do you remember that book From Under the Rubble?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And do you remember what the Christian thinkers had told the revolutionaries? They said, “You are descending into the abyss. They predicted everything that was going to happen to them and they said, “You are moving into hell.”

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] Now the revolutionaries killed every... every copy of that book but one, but one.

[ Rushdoony ] Edith Meyers will have an article, a long article on that in the next issue of the journal.

[ Scott ] Marvelous.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Marvelous. Well...

[ Rushdoony ] The...

[ Scott ] We do have what they don’t have and therefore we could, really, if the revolution succeeds here there is no excuse for us.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because we know all that has been happening and I have got one other thing I would like to say and that is that with all the faults of the American people which are faults of prosperity and ... and ignorance and naïveté and so forth, nevertheless, when you look at the other side...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... we are a great tolerant nation.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, thank you, Otto. And thank you all for listening. It has been a delight to share this time with you and we trust you have found interesting what we have been discussing.

Let me remind you that if you are interested in Robespierre: The Voice of Virtue by Otto Scott, I have only a limited number of copies now remaining, not very many. So do write to Ross House Books. It is 9.95 and a dollar and a half for postage and handling. It is P O Box 67, Vallecito, California 95251.

Thank you for listening and good night.

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