Profound Questions and Answers

Government Involvement in Socialization of Agriculture

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 8-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 8

Dictation Name: RR202C5

Location/Venue:

Year: 1967

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I don’t believe that that was any problem to them, I believe doctor (chivago?) was greatly overrated in this country because they wanted to portray the post-Stalin Russia as a Russia of new freedom; it was the official line, but they had been through a difficult time which was necessary, and now they had reached the thaw. And so this period of self criticism was extensively tolerated, and we were given to believe that this meant a changed Soviet Russia; it meant no such thing. It meant that their attitude towards their past was given an official sanction which the novels could now make use of. Actually there is less freedom now than there was 10 years ago. The persecution of Christianity in the Soviet Union has never been more savage than it has been in the last 5 years, but we have through these books that are promoted, a false picture of what goes on there. Yes?

[Audience Member] In the same vein would be in the so called anti Semitism in the Soviet Union today?

[Rushdoony] Yes, I believe that it is 9/10ths mythology, because first of all the basic fact there is anti Christianity, and it is anti orthodox Christianity. Second, the very slight amount of hostility has been to the old fashioned orthodox believing Jews, who are a very small minority, and they have been given very minor trouble, they are not too many and they don’t figure they are too important, but most of it has been propaganda for our benefit, and I believe that it is a fearful thing that we have seen so much attention given to that and none to the persecution of Christians there, and that the Congress of the United States has gone on record condemning this persecution of the Jews, which is virtually non-existent, but saying nothing about the persecution of the Christians. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, if the persecution were a reality in the Soviet Union then you would find Israel protesting also, and they haven’t protested, they are on very cordial diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R. and these very limited, ultra old fashioned Jews are hated both there and in this country, and are very much on the outs with the others. Is there another question over here? Yes?

[Audience Member] I was very interested in Mr. Ingram when he was talking about a way of taking care of people when they were, when they had done something wrong, but the state didn’t have to support them, in other words they were …?... Now I have heard some reports about Siberia and Ingram …?...

[Rushdoony] No, what it does is to send them to slave labor camps…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, much of Siberia is beautifully wooded country, but the slave camps have quite a few million peoples in them, and…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, of course not, definitely. I believe some years ago it was Wallace or (Wendell Wilkey?) or both, made trips and were shown these camps, and were stupid enough to believe that these were work camps and not prisons. But what Mr. Ingram had reference to were the cities of refuge, and the cities of refuge were certain designated cities where a man who had committed involuntary manslaughter could run to for refuge, and as long as he stayed there- and had to work there of course for his living- he was safe from punishment. So it was a kind of prison sentence at no cost to the state, as he pointed out. It was not a life sentence, although it could be, because he had to stay there until the high priest died, and the high priest freed him and he could return home; in some instances if the high priest were young it could be a life sentence, in other cases a relatively short one.

The Biblical system of criminology is very different from ours in that it has no prison sentences. The only prisons in the Bible are temporary detention places pending a trial. In the Biblical system, you had capital offenses punishable by death; murder, kidnapping, certain forms of rape, and other things. Then you had all other crimes punishable by restitution. Thus every form of theft had to be punished by restitution, if you stole a hundred dollars you had to refund the hundred dollars, plus a hundred dollars, the exact amount you hoped to make. If you stole a cow you had to restore four because the cow could multiply. You restored the one plus four, with sheep I believe it was the one plus five, they multiply faster. Restitution then was required, and there was a form of restitution for every kind of crime, so that when you were found guilty you immediately had to work out your sentence at your normal occupation.

There was another aspect of Biblical law which prevented when it was observed, any great amount of criminality from developing, and that was the law with regard to juvenile delinquents, and the law with respect to juvenile delinquents was this: if a juvenile was found to be incorrigible in his delinquency, he was then brought up for hearing and if this was confirmed he was executed, and as a result the amount of trouble they had was limited; you didn’t breed criminals, in other words.

Now this may seem hard hearted, but this is God’s law, and it is actually merciful to all of society, and this was clearly the Biblical law, and this was by the way enacted in the colonies very early, they had such laws. And that is why they didn’t have the amount of crime we have nowadays too, and you would be surprised at how quickly juveniles turn into model children when there is a law like that. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?... In a country like the Soviet Union where you can barely make a living, barely enough to live off and provide for your children, how would a Christian tithe?

[Rushdoony] The question is, in a country such as the Soviet Union how would a Christian tithe because in such a country you are robbed, really, by the state, so that you have a very modest income. I would say in such a case you would not figure your tithe in terms of the gross but in terms of the actual amount you received, so that after the government had taken its share from you, you would give in terms of that. Because the rest is not real income, it is a pretense.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, they don’t have a church, and that is true in such a case it is I would say yours to use for the Lords work in whatever fashion it can be used. There is a great deal underground there, the visible church in the Soviet Union today of course is just a front, it is a department of the Soviet Union, it is maintained for propaganda purposes, it has no reality; particularly in those areas where tourists can go. However there is a fair amount of underground religious activity, there are people for example copying Bibles, they are not printed, the only way you can have the Bible there is to have someone copy vast portions of it for you.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, and a great many believers there are doing precisely that, they are helping having the Bible copied and circulated. This is a tremendous work, they are doing the Lord’s work thereby, they are subsidizing it.

[Audience Member] Do you feel that the church of Rome, the ecumenical movement, is now pretending to (?) is that apparent or do you feel that (?) pharisaic force beyond their ability (?)

[Rushdoony] Well, I believe the ecumenical movement in all the churches today is not genuinely Christian, I believe it is working towards a one world church and then a one world religion, and I believe they are all working together in very close union behind the scenes toward that end.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I think we have to go along with them, because it is futile to go to the courts we have now; what justice can we get from most of these courts? There are occasionally some judges, older ones, that are good men, but on appeal what happens? We are far worse off than we were before, and it is really futile to resist when evil sits enthroned as it does. Now, I am not saying we should stop resistance, I believe there is a lot of resisting we can do, politically especially. There is a great deal of resistance that can be done in the political arena, because we still have a great measure of opportunity there. But in the legal realm, in view of the fact that our courts which I believe along with the churches are the most subverted areas of American life are so far gone, what can we do? And this is so deep and so far-reaching. In insurance cases for example the kind of thing that prevails is appalling, and this is established by the courts; and this goes way back a good number of years before WW2 when this subversion began.

It just brought to mind something I had forgotten about years before, but I recall how this whole business of liability took the turn it has in recent years, it happened in the 30’s when I was a youth worker in San Francisco and a church in the neighborhood about the same time we had our daily Vacation Bible School and had a picnic at the end of it also had one, and these kids went from this church to the same area we were going for a picnic, and there was this one kid who had been nothing but a problem through the entire time and finally he had been such a problem the day before the picnic that the superintendent of the daily vacation Bible school sent him home, he said: “You’re through, you have been a disruptive influence the whole time.” Well, he sneaked back the next day to go on the picnic, and he was ordered away from the church and from the premises by the youth worker, but after they had all piled into cars to go to the picnic he got on to the back bumper of this one car and hung on, (this was in the thirties, the latter part of the thirties) to the spare tire. And they stopped at a signal and a car came along and hit them, a drunk, and the boy was injured. It was the first they knew in the car that he was there.

The parents found that the man who had ran into them was drunk and had nothing so they sued the church. It was rejected by every court except the Supreme Court which ruled in favor of the boy and his parents to the tune of 150,000 dollars. Now that was the landmark decision, and that is how all your liability cases have opened up, and I remember at the time because I knew the incident from the beginning the shock it created. It was a deliberate overturning of all justice, deliberate. There wasn’t a judge in the country until it hit the Supreme Court that could make sense of the case, they threw it out.

Now, this is the kind of entrenched evil, and just as insignificant a things as that, that we face. So that we cannot expect justice of unjust men, we cannot expect (Earl Warren?) to think like a Christian. So we have to deal with that reality. In areas where we can do something we must do it. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I have forgotten now.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. After all the Supreme Court surrendered after 36’ and with one or two replacements within a year it was changed, and I believe the year was 39’. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Very good. Before I do I will give you one point that I ran across just this last Tuesday along the other line as to what things are today. This is a news item from Sunday January 23: “Mrs. Gladys Kyle’s, 38, the mother of 11 children, is our Sergeant (schrivers?) choice to represent Chicago on the nationwide 28 member advisory council for the war on poverty. A recipient of aid to dependent children and an active civic worker, Mrs Kyle says that she has not seen her husband since 1957 when they were separated. Her eldest son is 21, her youngest children are 5, 4, and 2 years old. (laughter)

Now, I submit she is as fine an appointment as any we have seen in the last 5 or 6 years, and the government is running true to course in appointing her. What are you going to get by appealing to people like this?

Now, this question of swearing; it does not have reference to the courts, but it had reference to the casual taking of oaths that was so commonplace. People were swearing by this and that, and taking oaths, apart from the courts of law. And so what our Lord did was to ban this kind of oath taking. Oath taking was only to be as required under legal procedure, so that apart from that our word is to be our bond, there should be no needless oath taking. An oath taking is something before God, before a duly constituted authority, so that the only places where an oath legitimately can be taken since it is unto God and before God, are in some court of law or civil authority, and in the church.

An interesting point by the way since we are the subject of oaths and this involves of course not only truth telling but perjury; the Biblical law required that anyone who was a perjured witness should be punished by the same punishment as the person against whom he swore falsely would receive. If it were a capital offense, in other words a murder trial, and a witness were guilty of perjury, he would die. If it were a civil offense and there was say 5,000 dollars involved, the perjured witness was guilty to the tune of $5,000. This was the Mosaic law, and this was once Christian law, but unfortunately today perjury has really no practical penalty in the United States except in a very few cases where the Federal government is involved, and witnesses I have seen rebuked by a judge for every obvious perjury and trapped in it, and just let go without any punishment because it is not taken seriously any longer.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Because they are of course social gospel advocates, and second, this is a part of a tremendous effort to organize agriculture. Now one of the problems about socializing agriculture is this, that agriculture is a little harder to organize than industry because the farmer is, as long as he is paying his own workers, and as long as he can to any degree do his work himself, a little beyond the control of some organizer. And California agriculture has been fairly independent; hence there has been an all out move to organize farm labor, first to prevent the (vucaros?) from coming in, second to insist that American labor be employed, third to organize this American labor because it can be controlled, and thereby to control the farmer.

And the idea of course is to break him, because if you can organize agricultural labor then you can destroy the farmer, you can say: “We will have a strike against you unless you meet our terms.” In which case the man is faced with the fact that his crops which have to be picked in terms of the day are going to rot on the vines or on the trees, and he is helpless. So this idea of the total control of these farmers is behind this, and it emanates from the big labor bosses and their desire to reach out to these people and have them in their power. It is a very serious thing. And a tremendous amount of money has been spent in this effort, and as I say it did begin by barring the (voceros?), and of course, what can a farmer do? Supposing you set as the wages a particular sum, let us say $3.50 an hour; but what if the man is not making that much money out of his grapes? And in the last ten years it has been impossible from year to year to know what the price of grapes would be. They have been very, very low many years, and other years they have done very well on them; the same is true of peaches. In peaches I think one year in 3 they have made money in the last ten years, and in the other years they have barely gotten by or taken a loss.

Now the price of picking has varied in terms of what the farmer can make and the supply of labor; the farmer will be completely helpless if the price of labor does not fluctuate in terms of the price of his produce. He has no way of getting by then, he is hog-tied completely. Now one thing this has done is lead to the mechanization of agriculture steadily, which is not all to the good, in fact there are some very serious drawbacks, but that is another question. But consider cotton. Cotton pickers were invented because it became increasingly impossible to contend with labor, it was becoming organized steadily, there were strikes, there were problems, and what can you do if your cotton gets rained on? You hope maybe it will dry out between that rain and the next one, but it has perhaps become second or third grade as a result, and you have lost money.

So, cotton pickers were invented to get away from the problem of farm labor that was paralyzing the cotton producer. Now, the amount of cotton that is picked by hand is very small, but the waste is tremendous because a cotton picker, even though it is one of our best means of mechanized agriculture, leaves at least half the cotton, or let’s say at best a third, because it depends on the size of the vines and so on, how it takes; it leaves it on the vine so that you have wasted a tremendous amount in the process of using your mechanized picker.

Now they have invented mechanized pickers for almonds and walnuts and other things, so that we are destroying agriculture steadily by introducing wasteful methods to get away from this total control, and because agriculture is so sensitive to market and bounces up and down so rapidly from year to year, labor control is the death of free agriculture, and this is the issue; and these people as socialists want to see free agriculture destroyed. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the Federal government is involved in this, it has cooperated fully, it cooperated by eliminating the (Vaqueros?). So they are cooperating because this means more power to them, more control over the people, and when people are drunk with power of course they only want more and more power. Two or three years ago there was a concerted effort on the part of the Federal government to break the cattle men; the cattle men have been the most independent element in the United States in the realm of agriculture. As soon as the war was over they threw off controls, and the Federal authorities warned them, they said: “If you drop controls and if you don’t let us control the price of meat and so on, why you are liable to have a terrible collapse.” And they said: “That’s all right, we’ll take it, we will depend on supply and demand.” Well of course they did have a tremendous crack-up, in the year 1951 beef hit a top U.S. price of 36 cents a pound on the hoof. Fantastic price, this was top grade beef. But since controls were now removed you see there was a tremendous demand, and the price shot up. But every Tom, Dick, and Harry across the country who had a little extra acreage was in the cattle business, next year it dropped to 11 cents top price on the hoof, and as low as four cents for inferior grade.

Now a cattle man has to have 15 cents a pound on the hoof to break even, so they took a beating in 1952, a terrific beating. But what happened? Supply and demand readjusted the situation, and it knocked out the marginal producers, many of whom were in California who were using extra acreage to graze some cows on, well they sold out it wasn’t profitable. Next year the price went up to 18 cents, a very good price. And since then consistently they have done well. Well, 2-3 years ago with the drought in the Soviet Union, throughout China, and in much of South America and elsewhere, the beef shortage throughout the world was critical, one of the most fearful shortages of meat in our era; and in Europe beef from South America and Australia was selling for up to $2 a pound on some instances, just very ordinary cuts; and strangely foreign beef was being bought at the same time at these high prices and dumped on the American market, and without the usual inspections apparently. Why? To break the American cattlemen, to force him to look for controls from the Federal government.

Now they haven’t succeeded yet, but they hope systematically by one tactic or another to break down the farmer and the cattlemen so that they can be controlled. Because in order to control man you have to control what he grows, and what comes out of the ground in the form of minerals, and the wilderness bill has taken a major step towards that end, and third you have to control his money. When you control these three things you have man completely in your power, and so you have today this systematic attempt to control, and hence the effort to break the backs of these great producers in the valley, and hence the rallying of all these socialists around this cause. I understand Steve Allen has come out in their support and is going to write a book or a pamphlet about the matter, and certainly every issue lately of the peoples world has been full of stories about the strikers delay now. It is a bid issue. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, there are three basic texts of the Old Testament; there is the Masoretic text which is in Hebrew, then there is the Samaritan Pentateuch which is just the five books of Moses which the Samaritans had, which is basically the same as the Masoretic with minor differences which the Samaritans introduced, it is not a significant text. Then there is the Septuagint which is the Greek Translation, which was made in the inter-testamental period, between the closing of the Old Testament Canon and the New Testament. Now the basic text of course is the Masoretic, it is the Hebrew text. The Masoretic text has been confirmed over and over again in its validity, for example the Dead Sea scrolls, Isaiah for example, is exactly the same point for point, word for word, as the Masoretic text. The Septuagint is a translation, but it is a very important text for this reason, that it was translated by people who were close to the original meanings of the words, and therefore very often we know what an original word meant because we know how they translated it, and this is important because words change their meanings. We have seen tremendous changes in English in the last four hundred years, for example ‘farmer’ once meant ‘tax collector’, and ‘silly’ was once a very kindly term, it meant ‘dear’ or ‘sweet’ or ‘innocent’ but you couldn’t tell your wife she was silly now without getting into trouble, the word has changed its meaning.

Now, it is through the discovery of old manuscripts, inscriptions, and documents that we have been able to find out in so many instances the original meanings of Biblical words where there is a question mark as to interpretation; the Septuagint has been very very valuable because here you have a translation of the whole thing. And for example, one word that is very important in the Septuagint, has been very helpful in the translation of it, is ‘fornication’ because the Septuagint makes clear what is involved in the meaning of this word in the way it translates it.

[Interjected Statement by Mount Olive Tape Library] The following statement given by Dr. Rushdoony was approximately 1967. We regret that there is a waving in and out on the tape for the first 2-3 minutes; when Dr. Rushdoony refers to the Southern Presbyterian church in this statement, he is referring to the old Presbyterian Church in the United States commonly called the Southern Presbyterian church. This church later merged with the Northern church of the Presbyterian church USA and now is the United Presbyterian church in 1992, as we record this tape.

[Rushdoony] It was my first trip to Mississippi …?... of the Reformed Theological seminary, a new seminary established in the south many of whose faculty members are graduates of Westminster, it is an excellent seminary, it will open this fall, but the faculty are there already and working. And they have a couple hundred ministers and another couple hundred or so laymen, men and women, from various southern states Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi of course, Arkansas, Texas, and on or two other places. It was a (?) very stimulating conference. I spoke four times to these men and the response was tremendous, and the messages were all taped and they are going to be reproduced there at the seminary to be circulated throughout the (?).

I was very interested in talking to the men there, one man who delighted me quite a bit, was a man who came up to me and I thought: “Well, he is a very trim and vigorous, (?) 70 perhaps. He was as muscular as a wrestler and as fit as they come, he was a Baptist preacher from Arkansas, and he told me how pleased he was with what I said, it was the first time he’d felt good since his birthday in December, and he had been feeling pretty miserable, and my talk had really perked him up, and I wanted to know what was the problem about his birthday, and he said: “Well, he had to give in to his wife, his wife sometimes had contrary ways, and she told him any man who was over 85 had no business going horseback riding.”

But he told me, he said he knew all that country, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and had lived his life in that area; and he said we have got to raise up another generation of men, because we don’t have them now. And he said if half of what is going on now had taken place 40 years ago, he said men would have taken to their guns throughout that whole mountain country. But he said not any longer, and he said they are all living at the hog trough, feeding on it. And he said one way or another, he said it started in the 30’s they began getting handouts, and he said that is what they are living on, and they think they are smart, and they ceased being men, and they ceased to stand for anything; and he said it is hard to get hickory wood in this country any more, but he said the woods are full of it, and all through the mountains these men have got all kinds of hickory standing on their land and they won’t cut it because it is a lot easier to say you don’t have an income and get some kind of government check.

[Mount Olive Tape Library] We regret the irritable waving in and out at the beginning of Dr. Rushdoony’s discussion on the trip to the Reformed Theological (?) institute in 1967, but I believe it has cleared up now.

[Rushdoony] I was interested too to see what the situation was like in Mississippi, and I began to understand why there is such an all-out assault on Mississippi, because it is the stronghold of the south. The old life, it flourishes there more than anywhere else, it is the most Christian area in the country.

And incidentally, while the standard of living may be lower dollar-wise it isn’t any lower reality wise, for colored or for white. Because wages are lower there, there isn’t the same inflation. Phone calls are a nickel, not a dime. So that even phone calls are effected, and the dollar goes a lot further in most of the south and especially in Mississippi. But it is a very Christian area.

The Southern Presbyterian church today has become very largely modernist and social gospel, there was for example in Southern Louisiana, as far as the people I asked knew, just one Presbyterian church that was still faithful to the gospel, a (carolton?) Presbyterian church in New Orleans, quite a large and a strong one, and I spoke there Friday night to their current teacher, Lee. But in Mississippi the Orthodox men have recaptured the Synod of the Presbyterian church in Mississippi. In the central Mississippi presbytery they are all Orthodox men without any exception, and these men of course have been influential in establishing this new seminary which is independent, they are going to train their own men and recapture the churches that they don’t have a hold of, and branch out into the surrounding states.

But of course they face the all out assault by the Federal government on their way of life. In the county in which Jackson is located, it is forty percent negro, but much of the delta country, the counties are 90% negro. 90%. And the reality of life in the South is that they have more integration than anywhere else, they are far more integrated; and there will be Negro homes side by side with white homes, and very often you will see as in New Orleans and in many of the cities throughout the south, this street will have the homes of prominent citizens and in the street in back of them will live Negro’s who will work for these white families, and the white families have helped them buy their homes, which are often very fine homes; not as well cared for, but very good homes.

The situation in Mississippi is that you have the federal government trying to turn the vote over to the negro’s, or the control, by this voting rights bill. And there is no getting around it, these people are very backward, these negro’s, by no means capable of exercising citizenship. One minister who lived in the Delta country, an old man about 80 I believe, and had been a minister there all his life was describing his work, and he said all his life there he has been trying to train the negro clergy, he has held classes for them regularly every week through the years, because he said they are often men who can barely read or write, and he has had classes for the laymen too; and he said that the primitive superstition and paganism behind their thinking is very strong, and he said for example an elementary thing like stating that fornication is a sin, it’s hard to get across to them, and he said when he tried to tell the Bible classes that he has among the negro laymen that this is wrong, they say: “But our preacher says it is just a connection and there is nothing wrong with it, if the girl isn’t married there is nothing wrong with it.” And that is their outlook on life, and they don’t want to break with that.

Unfortunately lately he has to give up the work because the KKK has threatened his life, he insisted on continuing, but his church session told him: “You are getting a little too old, your wife is becoming crippled and will be bedridden very soon, and if something happens to you we will take care of your wife, but we feel that your energies are not up to all that you are doing, and we think it is best for you to quit.” And the men in Mississippi felt very hostile, all those I talked to, the clergy, to the KKK, and they said: “We are facing the fact of terroristic groups on both sides, the KKK on one hand, and on the other hand the Negro terroristic groups which are bent on destroying them.” and when I told some of them that the Scott Allen Report had indicated that there was a strong possibility that communist funds were being fed into the KKK to create disturbances and give a bad picture to the south they were ready to believe it.

But there are these two organizations that cause a great deal of trouble on both sides, however they are still definitely in control in Mississippi; and the attempt to break it is from the Federal level, and it is a powerful, all out attack. It is through the voting rights bill, and attempts to buy out all wealthy people there by government contracts, so that they will say: “Well, the Supreme Court has spoken, this is the law of the land.” And they are beginning to hear this from men with government contracts.

This is the situation briefly, in Mississippi. In New Orleans and Southern Louisiana of course, the situation is out of hand, and people are increasingly living as prisoners in their own homes, they go to bed with a gun by their nightstand, and all of them are heavily armed. And I thought it was significant there, there are only two kinds of conservatives; those who are Christian, they can face it, and then a very limited number who are not Christian and have seen what’s coming and what is around them, and are really nutty, they have gone off their rocker because of the horror of the whole thing. And the Liberals of course are just running away from reality and are almost hysterical about preaching race relations. In flipping a TV on in a hotel room late at night and whenever I had a little while in the afternoons, I was amazed at the amount of integrationism that was coming over T.V. in New Orleans, and the interacial type of thing that was being proclaimed from the pulpit this Sunday according to Saturday mornings paper, this was race-relation Sunday, by the way. And they are almost saying: “We are going to save ourselves by believing in this with all the passion of our being.”

But their problem there is a desperate one, because consider this, in the cities here you have this long time integration as far as living together, helping one another, but having strictly segregated social lives; so that on this street there will be magnificent white homes, and in the back street often good or modest homes owned by negro’s, the next street will be a very fine residential one, wealthy families, and right in the back of them Negro homes, thus everybody is surrounded unless they fled to some of the suburbs which are new, and there they are not too far away either, very close, they are surrounded by Negros’. There was no problem, 10-20 years ago, but now they are surrounded by them, women will not drive at night it isn’t safe for them to be out alone in their car, nor to drive during the day time through certain streets.

And what about the country side? Well, one prominent family there at whose home I was repeatedly does have a country place about an hour and a half or so away from New Orleans, it is as good a place as you can get in that country, 80 acres, well wooded with a stream, and a modest but very comfortable home on the property. But there are Negros throughout the area. Then they have there too, the Free-Jacks. And I said: “What are the Free Jacks?” and they said: “Well, we don’t know how far back they go, perhaps well into the French period and into the Spanish period possibly, when a lot of criminals and others fled from New Orleans and they went up into the woods and settled there, and they intermarried with any stray Indians that they found in the area, and any runaway Negro’s, and they produced a type that is racially different, it is not white and not Negro, and you can spot a Free Jack when you see him. And they said, what they have done is to stay off to themselves and they have intermarried extensively, they are a people who are as close to being animalistic as can be; and he said many of them are so low in intelligence that they can’t speak properly, they just mouth words rather vaguely and mumble. And in that particular area only two Free Jacks are industrious enough to be passably good citizens, so that in the countryside you keep dogs all the time to guard yourself, and are armed as well. There is no place to go, in city or country. And this is why the conservatives there are either Christians or they have gone off their rocker, you can spot them very quickly, there is such a discernible nuttiness about them, they cannot face reality without faith, and so they take flight of their senses or go into liberalism.

This briefly is a picture there, I had very good audiences everywhere, I was especially pleased at one because I thought when I spoke at (Sillay?) college, the student body in New Orleans, that I had really been a dud because this was a last minute thing, and appointment, and I prepared hastily some notes on something I’d had my notes here at home on, a chapter I am writing on the return of slavery; and I thought: “Well, this is really ultra, ultra Christian and conservative, but maybe it will jolt them into seeing the issues, it will be such a stiff dose.” And they just sat there and looked at me blankly, and when it was over I couldn’t get any questions out of them, and 2-3 of the faculty raised some polite questions, and then finally at the last minute two students raised questions about incidental points. And not a student said a word as they left, and I thought this was really a complete wash out; and peculiarly next morning the students began pouring into the office steadily, stating that they wondered if I could come back again and talk to them, that they spent the night thinking about it, and worrying about it, and they decided at first that I was off my rocker, that anybody who’d gone that far in his conservatism had to be crazy; and then they had decided that I was absolutely right and that there was no other way about it! So they kept coming into the office wanting to ask questions about it, so it turned out quite well although I felt very uncomfortable when the hour was over to find them so, just staring at me kind of wide eyed and wondering who I was and what I was.

But it did finally register, and so I was quite pleased about that, I was quite jolted when I left the college.

Well, our time is up, but you did ask for that report earlier and I felt that I should take time for it. you stand dismissed.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Oh, a good question, (Suleigh?) is a college established in 1856 as a commercial college, I think it is probably the oldest commercial college in the United States, they do get some foreign students there as well. Now, it is different from regular business colleges, because what it did was to attempt from the beginning to give the most thorough kind of training, far beyond what colleges give in certain fields, any kind of mathematics related to business. To make them more proficient in the mastery of English, grammar construction, speech, than colleges do. In other words, in certain areas much more basic than any four year college is, but always with an entirely practical context, so that in the chosen fields they will be better prepared than college graduates. Their textbooks are amazing, they have developed them themselves, their mathematics textbook which is almost like an Encyclopedia on mathematics, when it was first written not too long after the civil war, I was reminded over and over again I shouldn’t say that down there, it was ‘the war between the states’, they for years advertised that if anyone could locate anything in mathematics that could surpass it they would give them $5,000 for producing a better textbook, and they had no takers, and I can well believe it. It is going into another edition, and they promised to send me a copy when it comes. It is quite a remarkable work.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It is quote famous throughout the south, and they do get students from everywhere, it is a lay college, and the founder was a very outstanding citizen of New Orleans, the original (Suleigh?) came over on the Mayflower, and then they moved south, and then they became good southerners, and the founder of this college during the war was in the Confederate army as an officer, and it is a very prominent name and a very prominent family, in New Orleans, and the college has been in the (Suleigh?) family, that is there has been a (Suleigh?) president ever since 1856.

Last week as I was reporting on my trip to Mississippi, I called attention to the fact that when I left Mississippi and went to New Orleans, what an unhappy situation the conservative picture there was; that there where they see most definitely what is happening, they are running away from the knowledge most of all, and the only conservatives who are standing up in the face of what New Orleans is going through are the conservative who are Christians; the others are in headlong flight. And the liberals are working all the more fanatically in the face of what is being driven home to them, the reality of this situation, to give everything to the Negro’s and the civil writers, under the illusion that this will suddenly miraculously changed everything when they get all that they want.

[Mount Olive Tape Library] Bear in mind that this tape is recorded for historical purposes, the material that follows was given by Dr. Rushdoony, a report on a book by a man named Taber on guerilla warfare, and delivered on this tape in 1967. This is for the purpose that we may see how far we have gone since 1967.

[Rushdoony] I have been interested in this book, Robert Taber The War of the Flea, it is a very, very important book on Guerilla warfare, and it is all the more interesting that the students for a democratic society are having a retreat in this area, with Robert Taber giving them instructions in revolutionary warfare.

Now, one of the things that Taber says guerrilla warfare must accomplish is to create the climate of collapse, and the Negro’s will be important in doing this. There are three things which are the basic principle powers of the Negro: One, to stop the machinery of government; Two, the power to hurt the economy; Three the power of unleashing violence; and this is the kind of thing they are planning to do, to create extensive sabotage, blow up pipelines, start revolutionary activity in all the armed forces, begin guerilla warfare in the cities; the new concept, dislocate the organ of harmony and order, and reduce the central power to the level of a helpless, falling (octopus?). During the hours (?) sporadic rioting takes place and (massive?) sniping. Night brings all out warfare, organized fighting, and unlimited terror against the oppressor and its forces. Such a campaign will bring about an end to oppression and social injustice in the U.S.A in less than 90 days. The idea is to concentrate on the big cities, and all cities if possible.

“The U.S. is very vulnerable economically and physically. Riot youth with the right orientation can stop this entire country. Small bands can damage the eight major dams that supply most of the electricity. Electricity means mass communications. Gasoline can be poured into the sewer systems in major cities, and then ignited, this would burn out communication lines in an entire city. What would emerge from this chaos? Most likely, Guerilla warfare. I don’t think the entire white community will fight, but the entire black community will be fighting, we call the whites cream puffs. We feel that when T.V. stops, when the telephone no longer rings, their world will almost come to an end; like during a major air-raid they will stay in the house. They sit and wait for television to come on.”

Now, I read this because this has been of course widely circulated, this is a library copy, you can get it in Los Angeles libraries, it is known across country, this has been reproduced widely, and the reaction of men in the face of this knowledge for the most part is to run away from it, or to take courses of action that are only going to bring this down upon them more surely. And we need not be surprised, because when men are masochistic, they are going to invite in one way or another, judgement upon themselves; they court it. They are suicidal in their activities, both in the opposition camp and in our camp where they are not Christian. So that, facts will save no one. You can inform every American of this sort of thing and it will not change matters, they already know more than enough and they are running away from the knowledge they have, and there is nothing more offensive to many, many people, than to inform them of these things; because they don’t want acknowledge their existence. They are courting disaster and they are going to get it.

Before we have questions I will get back to this bit about the glass from the glass bottle blowers association in their January 1966 magazine. Near Haifa Israel a 1500 year old slab of glass was discovered recently; this was quite an amazing thing in that they found this huge piece of glass while they were doing some excavating, and they were completely amazed at the size of it. This glass dated from 1500 years ago, from the time of the monarchy, and it is so large a piece and involves so much engineering knowledge that they were amazed. What has surprised scientists is that ancient workers could have produced such a large slab of glass with existing technology, this is remarkable engineering and technology for that time, said Dr. (Brill?). The 8 and 8/10ths ton slab ranks as the third largest piece of glass ever produced. The two largest pieces of glass were manufactured in this century in the United States for use as reflectors for the world’s largest telescope at the Mount Palomar observatory. Each weighed 20 tons and was 6 ½ feet across.

Now they simply don’t know how it was done or what it was done for, but apparently this particular piece they for some reason or other decided it was defective and did not use it, so it doesn’t tell us too much about their technology as a whole, but it does give us a glimpse into the fact that they were not stupid in ancient times and they had far more of a culture and technological advance than we recognize.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I would say that any religious group today, Christian group, that prescribes fasting is in error. The Bible prescribed it for one day alone in the Old Testament, and that was done away; and even that day it ended with a feast, so it was only a partial fast. So that fasting is not required by the scripture. Second, the fasting that was permissible in the Old Testament was for special days; for example if there were a national crisis the king could call for a day of fasting and prayer, which was entirely voluntary, so that the people might confess their apostasy and return unto the Lord.

Now, in this sense it is still legitimate, and in colonial times for example there were occasionally in times of crisis, days of fasting proclaimed; in fact in the early period of the United States the Presidents occasionally called for a day of fasting in terms of some national crisis, and prayer. But to make it a part of the required practice of the church is ridiculous, there is no Biblical ground for it, and it is a form of works, masochistic works.

Now I can understand an individual fasting for other reasons, there are good hygienic reasons for it; I knew a very fine Christian doctor who died about a year or so, close to a hundred years old. He was a medical missionary in China for 46 years, quite a remarkable man, and he fasted every Saturday for health reasons, because he said that medically it was an excellent means of giving the body an opportunity to rid itself of its impurities. But he ate very well the other six days, and he insisted on meat at least twice, preferably three times a day, because he said that meat is the milk of old age. So he took very good care of himself.

Yes?

[Audience Member] This is somewhat of a personal question, but it often is remarked that only through Jesus can we come to recognition of the Lord, however Jesus was not a …?... and were all the people before Jesus and those who deny He exists after, unable to be (?).

[Rushdoony] A very good question. From the beginning they knew that there was someone to come, and every sacrifice that any Israelite performed was performed on this basis, on the knowledge that the messiah was to come who was to shed His life as a ransom for His people, so that in every instance these people when they went to the altar and offered the sacrifice it had to be an unblemished animal of the specified variety; they placed their hand upon it and confessed their sins and acknowledged that this animal, the innocent lamb or whatever it was, was their sin bearer; that he was dying in their place and His death was their release from sin and death and their life. And they recognized that this animal couldn’t deliver them from sin, that he was a type, a symbol, a stand-in as it were, for one who was to come, the savior.

Now not only did every Hebrew know this but every living person, because they were all descended from Noah, Noah knew this, all people everywhere in the world you will find had the two basic rites of the Old Testament, there is not a place in the world where you don’t find them, circumcision and sacrifice.

Now these two set forth the doctrine of salvation and the doctrine of Christ as clearly as could be: first the doctrine of circumcision, that a man could not hope to save himself, and hope for the world was not in generation but as it were dying to oneself, dying to one’s own hope of doing anything, but in regeneration. So the mark of the covenant was circumcision, which indicated that thereby you believed that there was no hope, that men could be born for countless generations and the world would still remain, and your children’s children would still remain, under the burden of sin; so you surrendered that hope and you affirmed your hope in regeneration. And in sacrifice you affirmed your hope that the sin bearer Christ would come, and would then deliver you from the burden and the penalty of sin. They were all saved in the Old Testament era by this faith. We know that there were various peoples apart from the Hebrews who clung to this, for example Melchizedek king of Salem, for example Jethro the Midianite, Moses father in law. We meet many in the scripture who did believe. The 82nd Psalm for example lists many people from various countries who are believers, and says that of the Zion the heavenly city of our God whose springs are in the Lord, this man was born there from Egypt, from Philistia, from Ethiopia, from Babylon, they were born from the heavenly city of Zion.

Now, what happened throughout the world? Well, progressively as the centuries passed men turned their back on this. They knew the truth, and you can find in many, many of the writings of other religions, surprising testimonies to this faith. But they turned the whole thing upside down. They made the sacrifice for example, wherever it was throughout the world, instead of God’s gift of salvation to man, a bribe to God. So for example if you were a Greek or a Roman, what you did when you offered sacrifice was to buy insurance, and you went to the temple and you said to the Gods: “I am going to sail across the Mediterranean and it is late in the season and it can be very, very stormy; but I want to get this load through and cash in on it because if I hit the market with this load I am a rich man. Here is a sacrifice and so much in the way of gifts, I want insurance.” So you are bribing the gods, this is what it became, and if you didn’t get what you wanted, your insurance, you didn’t do business with him, you went to another temple. So you see, it became completely humanistic, it became apostate, so that they all knew the truth, and you can find evidences in all these pagan religions that they knew the truth and deliberately turned their back on it, because the essence of sin is for man to say: “I shall be as God myself, knowing, that is determining for myself, what is good and evil.”

So, you find the evidence everywhere. The American Indians for example knew that there was a great true God, and as the old, old Indians who saw the first white man come across the plains said: “We knew all the stories of old times, that God made man and there was a flood, and all these things happened.” “But why didn’t your people worship?” “Oh, that God was too far away. Too far away, and lots of spirits all around us… keep your peace with the spirits.” Now this was the Indian attitude. This was the pagan attitude. And so the Indian never worshipped God, he knew He existed, he paid no attention to him.

What he was afraid of was the spirit of his dead wife; and the spirit of his dead mother in law or brother in law, and of course I had hundreds and hundreds of Indian funerals, and what did they do? As soon as they died, or were dying… of course they never let him die in the house, if he did they burned down the house. This caused endless trouble in the thirties when in some of the western country (FHA?) came in and built some nice homes for the Indians, and the loan agent just about went crazy as he saw the places go up in smoke when somebody died in the house. But if they can get him out of the house, and if they had to built it out of log cabins they took care not to let him die there, but if it was one the government put up with FHA money that was alright. But they would take him out immediately and put him in a tent, and let him die there. Then before they buried him they would cut branches of rose bushes and lay these wild rose bushes across his body, and then put the lid down so that he couldn’t crawl out. The spirit would stay there you see, every time he would try to get out of the box, why there would be all those thorns so he would stay put; it was a good means of identifying you believer and unbeliever, because the believer was always obvious at a funeral, he did not put rose bushes over the body of his loved ones.

But… I got side tracked, what I started to say is, they knew, they were afraid of the spirits rather than of God. And this is the essence of paganism, they knew.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I believe that the Liberal clergy are deliberately inculcating guilt to deprive us of our liberty. I would say in some instances among some fundamentalistic clergy men, they are inculcating it in order to strengthen their control over people, and I have known clergymen who make people in the pew feel like the most miserable sinners, and milk them endlessly. With some I would say it is just plain ignorance of the gospel, and the root of ignorance is always… the root word is ignore, you are ignorant because you ignore something. Well, we stand dismissed now.