Easy Chair Series

Trip to India by Walter Lindsay -Part 2

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 22-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC246

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 246, June 15, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott and I are discussing with Walter Lindsay his trip to India and his observations of the situation in that vast subcontinent, an area of conflicting cultures and really warring peoples.

Would you like to continue, Walter, with your observations?

[Lindsay] Yes. Let me begin by telling a story of shopping on Mahatma Gandhi Boulevard in downtown Bangalore. I went there and I was going in to buy various gifts and things like that and I ran into a small child, a very, very small child holding a very malnourished infant. And as usual with the beggars the child made certain hand signals where you... takes the right hand and they wave it up and down and back and forth and they say certain words and they bow their head in a certain way and some sort of ritual bowing. And not being quite certain what to do because I am ... I had observed by then that giving money to beggars meant simply that they asked for more money. So I decided to go ahead and walk past this person and I walked into the place. And another beggar had seen me come in.’

And so this other beggar was a boy, maybe 12 or so. One leg was a normal leg, but the other leg dangled to just below the knee and he went around on his hands and legs with his rear end high up in the air and his damaged leg kind of dangling there. And he waited outside the shop where I was for a considerable length of time and I went out there and went into another shop and finally the shop keeper drove him away.

And another misshapen person waited outside another shop that I stopped in for a moment.

I was struck by a number of things by my interactions with the beggars. One, they didn’t seem to have any sort of gratitude. The various times I did give money they never thanked me for anything. In fact, they often said, “Please, can you...” And then they named some bigger number, more rupees that they wanted as well. And they came to make a display of showing the very worst of what they had. That...

[Scott] Their handicaps.

[Lindsay] Exactly. They used that very prominently in order to try to get money.

I only saw one Indian give money to any of the beggars and that was one of the drivers that I had. There was a beggar woman. And this particular driver had different mannerisms and he struck me differently. And I don’t know what was different about him, but he behaved significantly differently than most of the other people I gave. He also actually gave money to a beggar, the only person that I ever saw besides a westerner doing it.

[Scott] Well, somebody must, because there wouldn’t be so many of them.

[Lindsay] That is true.

I saw one beggar being driven around on a cart by a perfectly well person and they tried to get money of the person’s handicap and apparently their business was driving around with this... being pushed around in this cart or pushing the cart.

[Scott] Well, it is a... I hate to use the word, but it is a profession over there. Maybe you should call it a trade since they didn’t go to school. But it is a definite occupation. And I also understand that many of those handicaps were the result of special mutilations.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...to create a beggar from early childhood on. That, incidentally, was once done in Europe.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Balzac has a novel about it. I remember where this child was given an artificial smile. He couldn’t change it. It was an eternal smile.

[Lindsay] I did some disfigurements there that I have never seen before, shrunken limbs, things like that.

There was also a great deadness to that. I talked to one westerner on my way out of India. This person had spent about four months on seven different trips there.

[Scott] An American?

[Lindsay] An... actually a Canadian.

[Scott] A Canadian.

[Lindsay] He described a... a... a cycle that he went through on his various travels for business there. At first he gave lots of money and then over time he became very dead and the low period for this man was there was a millionaire apparently getting into his Mercedes who had to step right past a beggar woman, a leper who had her legs gone beneath the knees, arms gone above the elbows standing side by side on the sidewalk there and he didn’t notice her and she was begging. And the... not seeing this... this misery there and thinking it is a very normal part of life.

I found that I began to go through a very... to a cycle of ... of kind of deadening at that point and then I began thinking about the Scriptures in there and realizing that this deadening process occurring in myself was not ... it did not fit with the Scripture.

I wasn’t able to resolve that by the time I left, but this particular man that I mentioned who passed the beggar... who saw the beggar woman and the millionaire with the Mercedes, at that point he said that he could have... somebody could have died at his feet and he wouldn’t even notice it at that point, the kind of deadness he picked up there.

[Scott] Well, yes. There are so many. They go in crowds in some parts of the orient. You pick up a whole entourage. As you give money to one four more come or more than that. And I suppose it is somewhat similar in any large crowded city. You reduce your area of observation. We pass beggars in the streets ourselves. We have beggars and I don’t really know why we do have beggars because we certainly spend enough on welfare. The government spends enormous amounts of money. We still have the homeless. We still have beggars. And we turn off ... the sights aren’t as horrendous as they are in India. You don’t have lepers.

[Lindsay] I was fascinated that throughout all of this there was a lot of rhetoric about helping the poor and that that was a stated goal of the political candidates. Well, it is also true that the great mass of voters are extremely poor and in general highly uneducated. And so that was good politically. But they also carried through with that. You mentioned some about the last time we discussed about tax rates soaking the rich. Apparently if you make more than 2000 rupees a month or so the tax rates rise to very high levels. Well 2000 rupees at the moment is 100 dollars a month US.

[Scott] So they give you a surtax if you get over that.

[Lindsay] That is right. And so what tends to happen is that there are... is that there are government schemes. You invest your money in the government schemes and then you get it when you retire.

[Scott] That is tax free.

[Lindsay] I am not certain, but it is certainly advantageous to invest in the government.

[Scott] I see. Something like treasury bills...

[Lindsay] Or IRAs.

[Scott] Or IRAs.

[Rushdoony] It assumes the integrity of the government.

[Scott] Yes, we...

[Lindsay] That is what I thought.

[Scott] We do.

[Lindsay] However, apparently from the various people I talked with it is a very common practice to invest extra money. That way in government schemes as they talked about it.

[Scott] Did you see any factories? Any signs of industry?

[Lindsay] The company that worked with did build computers and so I did see their assembly center. I...

[Scott] Where did they get the components?

[Lindsay] That is a good question. I don’t believe they make them themselves.

[Scott] They are, perhaps, just an assembly plant.

[Lindsay] That is the way... that is what they called it.

[Scott] Yes.

[Lindsay] Good point.

Some other things that made business extremely difficult there, they... is that they have the goal of improving life in the villages. They have a lot of enormous economic hurdles to making that happen.

[Scott] How do they plan to go about that?

[Lindsay] I never figured that out, except by government programs.

[Scott] They talk a lot about it.

[Lindsay] They talk a lot. And yet as far as producing, there are some very significant problems that these peoples face. Calcutta is one of the great business centers apparently in India. Unfortunately the power goes out several times a day in the summer which makes it a little difficult to do anything with a computer, for example.’

[Scott] It certainly would. It wipes everything out, doesn’t it?

[Lindsay] Yes, indeed. In fact, while I was teaching there the power was out an entire morning and I that day had planned to use overhead photos in the overhead. So I talked a lot that morning and drew lots of pictures on the blackboard. It made life very interesting that way.

[Scott] Well, of course, we have environmentalists who are against power plants. They drive to the demonstrations against them.

[Lindsay] Driving.

[Scott] And they have electric guitars for their protest songs.

[Lindsay] I didn’t run into too much of that there in India, but they certainly did have some big problems with the power systems there.

Something else that is conspiring against industry and the welfare of the people is the water problem. I read briefly an article about the water shortage that they are having there at the moment. Well, another reason why the people might have been very interested about the Persian war and about what happened there is that apparently the burning of the oil wells in Kuwait may shift the monsoons further to the south and there are various areas where I have never seen reservoirs quite that low. I have seen Lake Shasta recently and I have seen other reservoirs in California that are quite low, but this reservoir was significantly lower than anything I had seen here.

[Scott] Well, it is hard for me to believe that man can do anything to change weather patterns. I can understand a change of weather pattern as a result of the volcano, but fire even as extensive as a fire as 500 oil wells in Kuwait, I can see discoloration over a large period, but I really can’t see alteration of the weather pattern.

And I did notice that in some of the third world countries their... they get very superstitious and they get all kinds of ideas. I was in Caracas during the rainy season and it rained and rained and rained. And I asked the maid, my father’s maid, why it was raining so much. She said, “The moon is cracked.”

Well, that is as good an explanation as any other, I suppose.

But the monsoon theory sounds to me that way. I think they were fearful. Certainly if they have a drought they have a lot to be afraid of, because that earlier when we talked before you read from the paper this politician giving a very emotional speech about water. I have heard some emotional speeches about water in California recently.

[Lindsay] Well, God does seem to be conspiring there.

[Rushdoony] Did you... excuse me, go ahead.

[Lindsay] I found out that in one area the water tables had dropped from 160 feet down to 400 feet in the last three or four years.

[Rushdoony] What about Christians? Did you encounter any?’

[Lindsay] I saw two churches and one Bible mission, but I did not run into any.

[Scott] Well, you did... you told us earlier that the Hindu politicians said that the white man nor the westerner couldn’t impose his religion. And, of course, there was never an attempt to impose Christianity on India. The English preferred to rule through the native rulers. There were some who became Christian, but I think by attraction more than anything else. And at no time was the native religion ever forbidden although some practices like {?} were stopped. I understood recently that some of the ... some... some Indian men are burning their wives again. They are not waiting for them to die, are they? They are just burning them so they can get another dowry, another wife.

You didn’t... did you... you didn’t see that?

[Lindsay] No, I did not see any of that. No.

[Scott] You wouldn’t. But they didn’t have anything in the paper about it.

Do they carry crime news in the papers?

[Lindsay] Assassinations were mentioned. My perspective may be a little skewed in that area, because the elections were going on and that dominated quite a bit of the news.

I did notice that one of the people that I worked with who was supposed to take me to a naval officer’s mess for a special dinner they were giving, I don’t know why there was a naval officer’s mess, because there is non significant body of water nearby. But we had to ride on his motorcycle in order to get there and his helmet had been stolen that day. And so I did notice that.

And there were various signs about being careful and reporting people to the police in order to reduce crime.

But I personally felt much safer than I have in many places. I didn’t feel like I was going to be attacked. But I also felt that if I left something, it probably wouldn’t be there when I got back.

[Scott] Yes. But some of our cities are dangerous at night particularly. Did you go out at night?

[Lindsay] Around the grounds of the hotel, but I never went outside those at night.

Apparently if I had been out right after Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated I would have been in significant trouble. You mentioned earlier that westerners had to hide right after.

[Scott] Yes, Rush said it was a anti western... I don’t know why.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I read somewhere that after the assassination there was a lot of anti western sentiment, just a general expression of hatred. So westerners had to stay in hiding for a time.

[Scott] Well, it is like Mexico. If it rains in Mexico it is our fault. Perhaps the whole third world is that way.

[Rushdoony] I suspect it is. We do enough things wrong, but in a world that is ruled by envy we are the nation that attracts the greatest envy.

I was interested the other day that in the Soviet Union no country in the world is more damned than the United States is being a greedy, materialistic power. And the overwhelming majority of the people there...

[Scott] Want to come here.

[Rushdoony] Want to come here.

[Scott] Yes, yes. And the problem is that they do come here and they maintain the same arguments.

[Rushdoony] Yes, very true.

[Scott] I long of the day when some foreign statesman will get up and say something in gratitude to the people of the United States.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I have never heard it.

[Rushdoony] No. No. When I was a child we were referred to by Europe as Uncle Shylock and it has not improved since then. This is not to say our foreign policy hasn’t been full of stupidities, but the stupidities have been at the expense of the American people and at the benefit of the peoples of the world on whom we have poured out so much wealth.

[Scott] Well, that is the reason for our deficits. They just about equal... our foreign expenditures just about equal our deficits. It is amazing that in all these years I have watched this. Nobody has ever written an article about it. I would, but I know nobody would publish it.

Did you see any entertainments while you were there or was it all business?

[Lindsay] I didn’t see too many entertainments. I spent enough time preparing for my work that I didn’t get too much chance to get out, but I did notice that there were a great many films that were shown. That... that seemed to be a very common occupation going to the cinema. And of late it is has been VCRs. There are quite a few people that I have talked to have been buying VCRs and spent a lot of time with them watching various movies.

[Scott] So were the movies Hindu movies or foreign films?

[Lindsay] There were some foreign films. There were the Godzilla sort of films.

[Scott] Godzilla, yes.

[Lindsay] There were....

[Scott] I saw Godzilla once. I was fascinated.

[Lindsay] There was one yeti that was advertised quite a bit. There were films that were shown at various points in the US that were the current runs that were being shown in the theaters. And there were quite a few Hindi films as well.

[Rushdoony] I don’t imagine TV is common apart from the hotels and the wealthy people there. Is it?

[Lindsay] The... well, give the housing conditions I saw and the number of people living in little grass huts with now power and no water and I am sure the rain would probably have made it through the hut, I think you must be right.

[Scott] It was a.... it is an upper class thing.

[Lindsay] But much desired from what I could tell.

[Scott] What about the other people in the hotel? Where there many foreigners?

[Lindsay] Most of the people who were at the hotel looked like wealthy Indian businessmen.’

[Scott] I see.

[Lindsay] There were a few foreigners.

[Scott] I don't think India is really a tourist place, is it?

[Lindsay] Most people that I talked to...

[Scott] ...were there on business.

[Lindsay] Yeah. And there were a few people that I met who had been there, but I didn’t many tourists there. It seemed to me almost entirely business

[Scott] That is interesting, isn’t it? Because it is a very picturesque country. Some of the photographs and what not, slides and what not of India the Taj Mahal and all that, just fascinating geographically.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think the amount of travel has declined. We don’t have as much money as a people to spend. It used to be there were numerous guided tours to India. But I think the social disturbances the world over are causing Americans to think twice before they travel.

[Scott] Well, we are told not to appear like Americans when we do travel. I don’t know how we can manage that. Then you said it was a 20 hour flight from San Francisco.

[Lindsay] That is right.

[Scott] That is a long way.

[Rushdoony] I recall some years ago someone who went to Russia and he did everything to be inconspicuous and he wore one of those Russian fur hats and so on and so forth and got a great Russian coat. It was winter. And he was recognized at once for an unusual reason. His shoes did not squeak. Everywhere they went they knew he was an American at once.

[Scott] I told you this friend of mine who went to Mexico from San Francisco who had previously lived in South America and spoke Spanish and he went with his wife and daughter to Mexico City just for a vacation. He went while he was there to a barber shop to get a haircut. And the barber was delighted to discover that he could speak English... uh, Spanish. And they had a chat and the barber finally asked him if... how he was enjoying Mexico and my friend said it was fine. And he said, “Are you alone?”

And he said, “No, I have my wife with me.”

And the barber said, “Oh, well, life is finished.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lindsay] One of the most interesting areas for tourists to go to, one of the most beautiful areas is the Cashmere Valley and that has been one of the most violence torn. So that may have cut down on tourism.

Also I was in a rather out of the way area. I was not in Delhi at all because I got sick and so I missed what tourism there might have been. So my perspective may be a little skewed that way.

[Scott] Still you were dealing with some computer people who couldn’t be in very large supply in India, at least I don’t get that impression.

[Lindsay] No.

[Scott] So you were with a rather advanced group.

[Lindsay] That is true.

[Scott] Was their English good?

[Lindsay] I had to work in order to follow what many of them said.

[Scott] It was probably more visual and mental than it was speaking then.

[Lindsay] Usually in order to understand them, I had to walk over next to them, lean over and watch their mouth and their face as closely as possible and then I could begin to understand what they were saying. And then I would have to repeat it back to them to make sure I got it with some of them.

[Scott] Heavily accented.

[Lindsay] Many of them, yes.

[Scott] But they knew the terms.

[Lindsay] Yes. That is... they did.

[Scott] How would you rate them as...? Were they going to individually run the machines, the computer or were they themselves managers or what?

[Lindsay] The people I was speaking with were people who were to provide expertise for this company’s customers.

[Scott] I see.

[Lindsay] So they were the people who were supposed to develop expertise to help the customers run their systems.

[Scott] Right.

[Lindsay] And some fascinating things I noticed that way. This means a lot to me, but it may not mean too much to most people, that the largest system that they had ever seen was 300 megabytes, in other words 300 million pieces of information there. That is very small. I am used to dealing with things where I deal with multiple billions of pieces of information. So an order of magnitude larger, at least, to be a large system. This is the largest system these people could imagine.

[Scott] How many years behind would you say that would indicate?

[Lindsay] I saw many of the kinds of attitudes that I ... as I read articles, that I would have seen maybe early 70s.

[Scott] Early 70s. And this is the... This is 91.

[Lindsay] For example, there was a great bias towards redoing work if a problem happened rather than buying equipment that would keep them from losing information. They were willing to spend a day or two retyping, rekeying in information when they could have every easily protected themselves from losing that, power outages and frequently lost information.

[Scott] That is right.

What do they do with the power outage? It wipes you out, doesn’t it, and you have to start again?

[Lindsay] In general...

[Scott] Did they have surge protection equipment?

[Lindsay] I never saw any.

[Scott] You didn’t see any.

[Lindsay] But most systems are smart enough that they can recover in general if there is a power outage, but unfortunately power outages mean that you do lose data fairly often.’

[Scott] Sure. And these are the fellows who are the trouble shooters that you were talking to.

[Lindsay] That’s right.

[Scott] They must have been having trouble or they wouldn’t have sent for you.

[Lindsay] Part of my goal was to give them a competitive edge. This... the particular software I was discussing with them has been in common circulation in the States for a couple of years. It is just being introduced to their market place.

[Scott] I see. So it is really a new product area.

[Lindsay] It is very new to them, yes.

[Scott] And was their company a large company?

[Lindsay] 1.8 billion...

[Scott] That’s a pretty good size.

[Lindsay] Rupees....

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Lindsay] Eighty million dollars US.

[Scott] Eighty million US.

[Lindsay] Yes.

[Scott] Nevertheless that is a pretty good size.

[Lindsay] Yes, it was.

[Scott] If you go back to ... you go back to the early 60s a company of 100 million was a good sized company in the United States. You forget the impact of inflation.

[Lindsay] And it was fascinating that in various areas of the work it seems to be a generation behind, a generation of people.

[Scott] A generation.

[Lindsay] So that is why I picked somewhere in the 70s there.

[Scott] Right.

[Lindsay] Many of the attitudes towards the systems were that way.

[Rushdoony] Walter, one of the things that I think is very, very telling to me is this. The whole world of ex Colonianalism, I think, has done an about face. I was a student in the 30s. And at that time there was a book written by Katherine Mayo, Mother India.

[Scott] Oh, very famous book.

[Rushdoony] Very famous book, a best seller which described a great many of the evils that were a product of their religion and of their backward ways. And students I knew who were of an Indian background at Berkeley welcomed the book. They thought it was important that these things be exposed and that India be brought up to the modern age. But by the 60s when I did a great deal of speaking at university campuses—at one time as many as on three a day—the attitude was that it was bigotry to call attention to any of those things and I had one person refer to the mythology created by Katherine Mayo.

Are they willing to face up to the very serious problems they have inherited over the centuries or are they still trying to whitewash things? This seems to have been since World War II the attitude of many of the ex colonial groups.

[Lindsay] One politician I mentioned in the papers that it was expected in Mahatma Gandhi’s generation that within these unique cultural heritage and with all the advantages they had, that surely they would assume a place of leadership among the family of nations. And there has been a great deal of disillusionment that I could tell from talking with people and in reading the papers that this unique cultural heritage that they are very proud of hasn’t given them what they hoped it would. But I never heard anybody talk about fundamental changes. So I would say the latter. You put it in terms of white washing, that is probably closer than ... than...

[Rushdoony] Well, you see, you have what is called Islamic Fundamentalism now and Hindu Fundamentalism as though there was an ideal past there that the white man shattered and therefore it has to be recreated. And I think this is creating international problems because it is dividing the world as it has not been divided for a long time.

[Scott] Well, Mahatma Gandhi had a great deal to do with that.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He... he wanted to go back to a bygone India, remember the spinning wheel.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...and all that. And much of the third world talked about their own native culture. What they wanted was a return to their original culture with all the white man’s improvements.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And unfortunately that doesn’t work. You can’t have both ways.

[Rushdoony] One man wrote a book embodying the Gandhi ideal, Small Is Beautiful.

[Scott] Yeah, Schumacher.

[Rushdoony] Schumacher. And I was appalled at the extent to which that book was being used a couple of decades ago in American colleges and universities.

[Scott] Still is.

[Rushdoony] ...including—yes—including Christian colleges, so-called.

[Scott] Well, of course now we are seeing some other weird things. The book by Cassina that you have.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The argument by certain elements of the black population here that Greek culture and Egyptian culture was all Negro and that the Greeks and the Egyptians stole from the black Africans all signs of the West. Now, I ... before that we had some strange figures from India who went throughout the west to the United States and to England, other countries, who were going to bring great philosophy to us.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Not simply Yoga, but all kinds of Tagore and others. For an awfully long time the idea was that there was something spiritually superior about the people of India. And we do have today an invasion of Hindu ideas into the American society in the name of the new age. The new age cults are all Hindu.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They are using... they are using English terms for Hindu concepts. This is Hinduism. And we have ... who was it? The actress who claims to be a reincarnated so many times?

[Rushdoony] Oh, ye, Shirley McLain.

[Scott] Shirley McLain. I remember that a friend of mine gave me this sticker, bumper sticker. It said, “I strangled Shirley McLain in a previous life.” But that is Hinduism. It is incarnation. It is the stair step toward Nirvana or extension which is the goal, extension into the bosom of the deity.

So this has been a... to a certain extent we have been affected by the colonial world. It is a two way street. I remember that when I was in Amsterdam noticing all the dark mixtures that came out of Malaysia... The Dutch controlled Malaysia for 400 years and you see a lot of Eurasians in Holland. The same thing is true in Indochina and, of course, India is speaking English because the English were there. But India had a great affect upon the British. And very recently I read in The Spectator, I think we were discussing it, where Enoch Cowell said that we taught India, he said, everything we know and then we pulled out and we watched that balloon go up in the air and we hoped it would be able to fly. But, he said, it now appears that it has fallen to earth. They are rejecting everything that we taught and from here on India will take its own course.

How this fits into a technological society, I don’t know, because to some extent, I think, we are running into the same problem. We are continuing to progress technologically and we are regressing spiritually.

[Rushdoony] I mentioned to you a few days ago a book newly written which I have not yet read, but I read about the book. As you know, Ralph Waldo Emerson borrowed ideas from India, cleaned them up and then promoted them as a kind of higher wisdom.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] And then Rabindranath Tagore, the Hindu poet borrowed back the Hinduism of Emerson as the true Hinduism, as something noble and uplifting for all mankind and became immediately very popular in the western world for what he had done.

So we do have a synthetic Hinduism in the world of culture and ideas. And then a popular one on the bottom level that is far removed from that at the top.

[Scott] Well, I have run into young people recently who tell me that they are Buddhists. And I have not asked them what that means, because I knew I really wasn’t interested. But I was a bit surprised the first few times.

[Lindsay] When I ran into those kind of people at Cambridge, Massachusetts they were typically Zen Buddhists. And they described it as a philosophy and not a religion. And I couldn’t get too much beyond that.

[Rushdoony] That is a believe in nothingness, ultimate nothingness. Zen Buddhism is the negation of all meaning. That is why I think it is popular on university campuses.

[Scott] Well, it also puts it in the eye of the old folks at home.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is part of the... what would you call it? The rebellion stage.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, Buddhism is almost non existent in India, the land of its birth, but almost everything else thrives there. It is interesting. The Mar Thoma church goes back to the apostle Thomas. It is a small group in India that has survived over the centuries and some attempts have been made in recent years, especially through England, to revitalize the Mar Thoma group, because they have deep roots in Indian life. And to make them more than merely a traditional group hanging on to the faith of their fathers, but a vital force in that country.

[Lindsay] One thing that I found that I began to despair of in my time there was would Reconstruction come to India? And I began to feel rather hopeless when I looked around I saw even on the hotel grounds where I was a little Hindu shrine. And when I saw you mentioned the popular religion that people processing around a bowl wearing flowers and dancing a little bit and the various shrines across the country side, how deeply that is embedded in their life and in every aspect of their culture I found differences that I could... that my limits at understanding I could only trace to the religion.

I felt ... found myself feeling rather dismayed and disheartened when I realized how far there was to go there.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is exciting to know that there are indigenous groups like that.

[Rushdoony] Well, India is a great mission field. Apart from educators and doctors, Christian missionaries have not been permitted to enter. However, almost everything that is good in India has a Christian origin. A great deal of their agricultural advancement came through a Presbyterian missionary Sam Higgenbottom. They owe so many things to the Christian West.

Now there is a nucleus of Christians there. Their number is slowly but steadily growing. The Church of England is very strong in some areas and a number of other groups. But the new order in India has been very hostile to Christianity and the hostility is a part of its hatred of the West and they feel that Christianity is an invasion from the West.

Of course, they feel like Islam does, that it is their duty to invade the West. But if Christianity in the United States regains its faith and gains muscles it can begin to influence Asia once again.

[Scott] Well, there is no question about that. As it is, the world is still dependent upon the Christian West.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And those inside the Christian West who are not Christian are dependent on the Christian West. As a matter of fact without the Christian West, they wouldn’t be alive. Or they wouldn’t live long.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because nobody else protects their lives.

[Rushdoony] That is right.

[Scott] And that is something that you never hear.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Our medicine has done wonders for Asia and for Africa. It has extended the life expectancy of peoples greatly. And this was overwhelmingly done by Christian missionary doctors and hospitals. And with their disappearance the life expectancy is diminishing. Certainly in Africa it has become a major problem.

[Scott] Well, they actually drove the physicians and the nurses and the missionaries out and closed the hospitals and then ran in towards South Africa to save their lives.

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. I read not too long ago an account written by a Catholic woman, a writer of her travels in what was French Africa. And she stayed at places which had once been convents, closed down now. And the work that was being done that was so outstanding disappearing steadily.

So they are paying a price for their hatred of the West.

[Scott] Well, hatred always exacts a price.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And there is always a price when you will not face up to reality.

[Rushdoony] Civil war now marks Sri Lanka of Ceylon. And I think the seeds of it are there in India and it will increasingly fall apart.

[Scott] It is quite a shock to the American Liberals. They keep talking about the world’s largest democracy. And they haven’t changed their tone even since the latest Gandhi has been blown to pieces.

[Rushdoony] And with the Dictatorship ended in Ethiopia they are demanding democracy when the only thing is {?} has pointed out that will hold Africa together is the return of a monarch.

[Scott] Yes. Isn’t that something?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, our state department has never heard of a monarchy. They have never heard of religion. They don’t believe in it. It doesn't exist.

[Rushdoony] Yeah.

[Scott] It is... it is true, they think, there are a few superstitious elements of the past remaining. But thy are not important.

[Rushdoony] Well, you have in Ethiopia diverse groups as you do in India. You have the...

[Scott] It is an empire.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Ancient Hamadic people, true Ethiopians who are not black. Then you have the Arabs and then you have the Negroic peoples who are still very backward and looked down upon by the other two. And nothing has kept them together in the past save a loyalty to the emperor. Only brute force on the part of the Marxist regime, buttressed by the United States kept {?} going this long.

[Scott] Well, let’s see. Did you see any crowds or any of the candidates talking during the elections?

[Lindsay] Rajiv Gandhi spoke in Bangalore.

[Scott] Oh, did he?

[Lindsay] He was delayed and so he didn’t arrive until midnight.

[Scott] [affirmative response]

[Lindsay] So I wasn’t able to do anything there, but hundreds of peoples came and stood for many hours waiting for him to speak.

They seem to ... they talked about tour beloved leader, Rajiv Gandhi. And there were posters covering most... many of the walls throughout the city center. It is a very big, important deal. There were cases where... reported in the papers where a number of devotees of various leaders would prostrate themselves before the leader. That was fascinating.

[Scott] Before the leader?

[Lindsay] Yes.

[Scott] Really? Ancient salaam.

[Lindsay] [affirmative response] There were some cases of that reported in the papers.

There were ... there seemed to be, from what I could gather from the papers, an idea that these people were a messiahs of a sort. And yet many of them are extremely opportunistic and criminally oriented in many ways as well. So there is an inherent contradiction there.

[Scott] These ... I don’t know who said it, but the oldest and the original form of government is a monarchy. And Russia still has a monarchy. I mean, Lenin, Stalin, what is the difference between those and the czars?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They are not trying to contend who is going to be the new czar. And I think India also...

You were fortunate to get out before Rajiv...

[Lindsay] Yes.

[Scott] ... was killed.

[Lindsay] Yes. I am very grateful for that. Both of the major parties, the Congress and the BJP agree on one fundamental point, that a hung parliament of the kind that has caused some problems for the last 16 months and brought about three elections within that short people, that a hung parliament is unthinkable and would be deadly at this point. And yet neither party is wiling to give. And so you spoke about the problems in democracy. Well, there aren’t enough people willing to agree at the moment to vote in a certain way that one clear voice can come about. It looks like the momentum may be with the BJP since that is where the young are.

[Scott] The Hindus, yes.

[Lindsay] Various foreign papers have called the Hindu Fundamentalists.

[Scott] Of course, that is taking a term from the West. What is the difference between a Hind Fundamentalist and a Hindu anything else? It doesn’t make any sense. Everything is being cast in American political terms. But it is a template that doesn’t fit.

[Lindsay] That means that they are taking their Hinduism seriously.

[Scott] Yes, yes.

[Rushdoony] Which they always have done.

[Scott] Of course. What can you say about the people who... how many Americans remember what the word {?} means? I remember when I was a boy in school they had an illustration of it. Don’t you remember?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The big machine where the worshippers would throw themselves under its wheels and they would...

[Rushdoony] Crush.

[Scott] They would be crushed and then they would go to heaven or whatever.

[Rushdoony] I remember vividly.

[Scott] Yes. That is really...

[Rushdoony] Even in newsreels they had it.

[Scott] Yes. That really... I have never forgotten that.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Lindsay] I was also fascinated that the words usually reserved for various rulers are beloved king.

[Scott] Beloved?

[Lindsay] Beloved was a quite a frequent term there.

One particularly beloved king from the beginning of the century had built a palace on {?} that I visited. It was also interesting there that as the tour guide said everything was imported there except the king. The chandeliers were from Czechoslovakia. They mirrors were often Belgian. And most of the beautiful things were completely non Indian and completely western. That is what their great leaders sought after. The guest house would have been a wonderful, beautiful European manor house of some sort. But beloved was the term they used for this ruler.

[Scott] Well, maybe it is like our term honorable.

[Rushdoony] Well, what the western thinkers, because they are anti Christian and humanistic forget is that rulers all over the world historically have had a religious mean and throughout Asia the ruler has been a kind of a divine figure. He has had religious authority. We have tried to separate religion from politics and the result is politics has become nothing but chaos. And it never will have stability because it has been separated from religious faith. That is our problem also.

[Scott] It is the effort to take religion away from life.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And it cannot be done without disaster.

[Scott] I mean it is to be... religion is to be taken out of public life. It is to be held as a private thing. Well, then what point... what is the point of religion?

[Rushdoony] Yes. So I think the disintegration that you are seeing in various parts of the world is a disintegration we have helped to create by our secularization of life.

[Scott] Well, we ... the Soviets carried the farthest.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Politics was the complete elimination of religion. So then politics pervaded every element of Russian life up until recently: art, music, literature, the factory, personal life, social life, everything had a political meaning.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, it is... didn’t work.

[Rushdoony] The French Revolution began this trend of secularization in our time, although you had had it in the Renaissance and I think Khadafy is right. We have exported ruin to the world with our anti religious stance.

[Scott] Well, by abandoning our own religion.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The business of the Hindus... The Hindu... Hinduism will at least solidify the majority of the Indians, because they are in the overwhelming majority. And it may be a bloody business, but the majority will prevail. So much for affirmative action because Hinduism doesn’t fit affirmative action.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Lindsay] That is true.

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is about up. Would you like to make a closing comment or two, Walter?

[Lindsay] I came back rather numbed. I heard of people being ready to kiss the ground when they came back. About a week after coming back I actually felt myself ready to kiss the ground here. Being extremely grateful for the heritage that God has left us here. Being a fairly young person, I... many have been shaken in many ways by having seen things in India and I find that things about the faith that once were abstract are becoming vibrant and real because I have seen a culture that is almost uninfluenced and proud of being uninfluenced by the faith.

I also understand that the culture that ... that if we continue the direction that we are going, I have great concern for my children that they would face and find that, indeed, Christian Reconstruction is a better necessity.

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