Easy Chair Series

Fascism & Nazism and Its Importance for Us Today

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 47-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC349

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 349, November the eighth, 1995.

In this session Douglas Murray, Andrew Sandlin and Paul Biddle and I will discuss the subject of Fascism, Nazism and its importance for us today, why it is a continuing problem. Mark Rushdoony, by the way, is out of town and so is not with us.

Now a couple of books have been published of late, the most recent by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. The book, I think, is very much worth your while and it can be ordered from Oregon. I will tell you more about... well, I will tell you now from Founders Publishing Corporation, PO Box 20307, Keizer, K E I Z E R, Oregon 97307. The cost is nine dollars and 95 cents and two dollars for shipping.

The authors were men who fought against gay rights measure in the state and won. In the process they found they were very much subjected to a great deal of abuse and accused of being Nazis. That interested them enough in the subject to make a study of the Nazi party and of the movement.

Now most people today are really ignorant of National Socialism because we have been subjected to a great deal of propaganda on the subject and a radical revisionism. Since I was a university student in those days and everyone listened in among the students to Hitler’s speeches by radio translated phrase by phrase into English or idea by idea, depending on the particular broadcast, we know a great deal.

Now one of the things that is forgotten today is that the main support for Hitler was from the universities. University faculties totally approved of his measures. He expressed his heart felt gratitude to the universities and for their inestimable support which made his movement a success. He planned, after the war, to build at his birthplace, I believe, a super scientific center to be, in effect, the church, the temple of the new age he was going to usher in. It was to be thoroughly anti Christian. In fact, Hitler went so far as to say on one occasion, if I can locate the quote, that the worst blight for humanity was Christianity. Nothing equaled it in the evil it had done for mankind.

But even more his movement was a pagan movement and homosexuality and paganism were essentially related in the Nazi movement and in all subsequent developments. For example, someone has written and Lively and Abrams quote as follows.

“Many aspects of Shamanism had homosexual content. And many of the god spirits and divinities of the world have been associated with gayness. Into Haiti there were special divinities for homosexual worship. The ancient Shinto temples of Japan displayed scenes of sexual ritual orgies similar to those of the Bacchanalia of the Romans. The great mother goddess of China Quan Yen was worshipped with several rites that included homosexuality. When the Spanish conquistadors reached Central American and the Yucatan, they found a prevalence of gay priests and sacred statues and stone sculpture depicting the homosexual union as a sacred act. In the Yucatan the god Chen is said to have established sacred homosexuality and a gay priesthood serving in the temples just as it was true of the temples of ancient Babylon and Samaria,” unquote.

The Nazi movement was homosexual to the core. Hitler himself had lived for a time in a homosexual housing development. As prime minister he did everything to cover his tracks in that regard and in other ways, but the evidence is still rather compelling. The one man who did not apparently engage in homosexual acts was Goering, but he was a transvestite. So great big Goering would prance around in high heels and party dresses.

The whole movement was saturated with this at the top and down to the bottom. Some assume that the execution of Rome and his associates meant that Hitler had cleaned house on the homosexuals. Quite the contrary. Rome and his associates felt they had made Hitler and they could break him and replace him at any time. So he moved with a great deal of rapidity to eliminate them.

Now the interesting thing is that the Nazis very, very clearly raised the charge of homosexuality against their enemies. After all, they had seized the media. They controlled the news. And so they could do as they pleased in this regard.

Now their anti Chrisatinity is very much down played now, but their hostility to the Church was instsense. Let me quote from page 138 this brief paragraph.

“In March of 1935 700 Protestant priests,” he says, but he means pastors, “were arrested by the Gestapo in Prussia for issuing condemnations of neo paganism from the pulpit and later a similar number of clergy in Wurtemburg had their teaching credentials stripped for violating the moral instincts of the German race by references to Abraham, Joseph and David in the course of their teaching. The Nazis confiscated protestant seminaries in Wurtenburg and Catholic convents and monasteries in the Rhineland,” unquote.

Well, I am going to stop for the time being and let the other men comment on this subject. The relationship of homosexuality to Nazism was an essential one. It was also a relationship to Paganism and everything was done to conceal the very great evils that were perpetrated, offenses against children, offenses against youth and generally their very evil anti Christian behavior.

Douglas, would you like to comment on the subject?

[Murray] Well, there has been numerous historians who claim that history is dead and, of course, it is dead if you don’t teach it. We have got a culture that we live in now where we have had the probably.... the last couple of generations with little or no historical perspective whatsoever. They know nothing of what took place prior to the rise of Hitler. In the 1920s they are many, many parallels between the 1920s and today.

[Voice] That is right.

[Murray] Homosexuality, the rending of the social fabric, the narcotics use was ... became widespread, particularly among the... the progeny of the nobility in German in the 1920s. And opium was widely used. The ... the motion pictures, pornography was widespread in the press was sympathetic to all of this in the 1920s and the parallels are alarmingly similar to what we are seeing today in our own society. And for those people who say that history is dead and ... we had better take a close look at the 1920s because we seem to be living, you know, in that same period right now.

[Voice] I read an interesting book several years ago. The title was From Calgary to Hitler. It dealt with that very issue, especially as it relates to the motion picture industry and the final republic. I can’t remember the author. Rush, maybe you have seen the book. I can’t remember his name.

[Rushdoony] I don’t recall.

[Voice] But that is very true. In fact, it demonstrates how that that decadent democracy really just laid the groundwork for what Hitler was later to do.

[Voice] Well, it was a.... it was a witch’s brew of Nationalism and Socialism.

[Rushdoony] Yeah.

[Voice] And we... we haven’t seen the ... the ... the nationalism part of the equation in our culture yet, but when the money runs out and people have their backs against the wall, somebody is going to come along and pose some of the same answers and find perhaps this same or different scapegoats for the root of everybody’s troubles. And that is where it gets scary.

[Voice] I think we need to remember, too, that traditionally homosexuality has been an elitist practice, the elite in society have always felt that heterosexuality and monogamy are sort of middle class or lower middle class values. This was especially true among the Cambridge group even over the last 50, 60, or 70 years. It certainly is an assault on the family, but there was probably something of that in Nazism, I would think, as... as Rush has indicated.

[Voice] I was always struck by Goering’s powder blue uniform, very light powder blue.

[multiple voices]

[Voice] It looked like a woman’s suit. It looked more like a women’s business suit than any man’s uniform.

[Voice] Well, at that time that you are speaking of, I think of the play... the Liza Minelli was in the movie Cabaret and that was a time of terrible decadence, but it was tolerated in many instances, by the same people that fell victim to Hitler. The Jewish community was very liberal and tolerant in their acceptance of alternative lifestyles, of the formation of political fashions that in years subsequent would just hammer them so badly. I think that if you look at some of the tolerance we have... Yeah, I go back to the parallel that... that you were speaking of earlier, that we have situations of accommodation and tolerance and acceptance that is the precursor of a spiraling down into a position of conflict and contentiousness.

[Voice] Well, the... the problem is that the current generation doesn’t realize that this is a repeat performance from the past and they don’t link this cultural behavior with the consequences.

[Voice] That is right.

[Voice] You know, we have been cut off from the historical perspective because they simply don’t teach history any more in the schools. They teach a very selective form of history and, you know, there is... there is no cause and effect.

[Voice] I just wrote an essay for the report on hatred of history. The reason these people hate history is because history imposes restraints. And they don’t like those restraints. They like to spin political Utopias out of the recesses of their own mind and history shows them that that can’t be done. It is always a failure. So they want to wipe the slate clean every generation and ... and that is what we have lived to see today.

[Voice] Well, the macro history that you obtain through formal education and dates, times, treaties, presidents, premiers, what have you, Is not so important. I think it is the micro history, how things effected community family life during the 20s, the 30s. And if you talk to people who were in Germany during the 30s, I don’t know of anyone who was alive during the 20s, but I have spoken to people who were there in the 30s and their community and family life, it sounds like I am listening to people talking about our own country at times.

[Voice] Yeah.

[Voice] Because on a family level, on a personal level, they were asking many of the questions that we ask today about these influences that are coming to bear on our lives. So I ... I think that more than anything that you bring up here, Rush, in my own mind and I am sure it is different for people with different background in different ages, but I tend to see that we have a lot of corollary experience at the... at the micro history level, the family, the community, the state, possibly, that occurred in Europe during those times of the 30s.

[Rushdoony] I would like to read from the introduction by Scott Lively a very interesting statement. I quote, “I came to be interested in this compelling and sobering topic by a route familiar to many in our society today, that of a victim. I did not seek this status nor did I exploit or claim it. Yet, for many months, I and others experienced what it was like to be on the receiving end of a full scale no holes barred liberal establishment assault in a state where the liberal establishment reigned supreme. The occasion of the uproar was a serie of initiative campaigns aimed at preventing local and state level legislation granting minority status based on homosexuality. The details of the initiatives and about the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance, a grass roots organization which sponsored them, would fill at least one book by themselves. But the long and short of what led me to this book and its topic was the astonishing tone of the rhetoric which is routinely leveled by post 60s liberals at people who publically dissent from their canon. Amidst this rhetoric, the favorite names and metaphors were nearly all drawn from Hitler’s Germany. Leaders and even petition carriers on our campaigns were characterized as every kind of Nazi, Fascist, Racist, hate monger and Aryan Supremacist. Bricks wrapped in swastika emblazed paper were hurled through the windows of businesses who had contributed to our campaign. Always the Nazi rhetoric was loudest and most extreme among the homosexual activists and their closest political allies. Governor Barbara Roberts characterized the ballot measure as almost like Nazi German. Some of the worst abuse came from homosexualists in the media,” and so on and on.

Well, just today Paul and I heard a portion of the Limbaugh program in which a congressman would portrayed as describing the Republican budget bill as having this goal in mind, the castration of all blacks.

Now that kind of rhetoric is so routinely used today that we really have descended far down into the abyss of not only instability, but barbarism.

[Voice] Well, this is a device. It is a device to cut off rational debate.

[Voice] Absolutely.

[Voice] Because out of rational debate comes the truth just like in a court case. You know, out of rational debate between the two sides, generally the truth emerges. And they don’t want a debate on the ... on the merits of the argument. They don’t want the truth. They want to cut off any debate. They want to shout down the other side and you see it time and time again. I was watching Firing Line the other night and Susan Estrich and Govern Moonbeam Brown and a couple of others were on there trying to have a discussion with Thomas Soul and two or there other people and Soul finally got exasperated and he said to former Governor Brown. He says, “You take the first half of the program and make your presentation and then the rest of us will have our discussion in the latter half of the program. So this same pattern of abuse of rational debate takes place day after day, month after month, year after year. And it is a device.

[Voice] Well, because they don’t have the truth on their side, they are forced to, excuse me, resort to ad hominem arguments and all this impassioned pleading, you know.

I wanted to bring up something. Rush pointed this out in the review and, incidentally, those of you listening to this tape, the report will also have Rush’s review of this book, I believe the December issue. But why is it that Hitler is so demonized and yet people like Stalin and Mao and Communism is given such a free ride. You see anti Fascist, anti... especially anti Nazi movies and books all the time, but for some reason Stalin and Communism get off scot free. I have my opinions about that. Why... why do you think that is?

[Voice] Well, this is the great question that never seems to get answered is why the academics and the liberal academics are selective in their criticism. They... they were very laudatory towards Stalin. I mean, Stalin by any measure killed somewhere between 40 and 80 million of his own people.

[Voice] Yes.

[Voice] And Hitler...

[Voice] He doesn’t quite measure up.

[Voice] Yeah. Hitler not that, you know, you can play down the number of people that he killed by any means, but yet he is ... he is used as a demonizing factor in arguments. They are very selective.

[Rushdoony] I was a student at the university when Hitler was in power. And it was very interesting to see the attitude of the faculty. They were schizophrenic on the whole issue. First never in my life have I encountered hostility to Jews equal to that of the academicians. And there was a reason for it, a very practical one. Jewish scholars had fled from Nazi Germany and come over here.

[off mic voice]

[Rushdoony] And very often they were much more qualified for some of the positions than were the American professors. And they were bitterly hostile.

[Voice] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] To these Jews coming in and getting the top positions.

[Voice] This was before tenure.

[Rushdoony] I don’t recall.

[Voice] It would be interesting to know.

[Rushdoony] But...

[Voice] Those people who championed the free market, yet they don’t want to give up tenure. I love it.

[Voice] That is right.

[Rushdoony] Well, they resented these people. And if you were, as I was, a reader grading papers and around faculty members a certain amount of the time, you would hear their very, very angry comments about the Jews.

And at first some of the professors thought I was Jewish. When they found out I wasn’t, they really let their hair down and made all kinds of horrifying comments about the Jews. So that was one reason why they were of a divided mind. The other was they knew they had to be to retain their credentials once things went beyond a certain point as true blue liberals. They had to be anti Hitler. And so they were both really anxious to see Hitler destroy the Jews totally and at the same time they wanted to be liberally respectable. So it was a very, very mixed bag.

[Voice] Isn’t it true, Rush, that in the 30s and 40s it was hard to find an intellectual that wouldn’t support Stalin and wasn’t...

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Voice] It was really remarkable.

[Rushdoony] You were treated with contempt if you were at all anti Soviet.

Now what Lively and Abrams say... I am not... I would like to quote from again.

“The pink swastika documents a hidden aspect of German history. The authors contend that homosexualism, elevated to a popular ideology and combined with black occult forces, not only gave birth to Nazi imperialism, but also led to the Holocaust itself. The militarists in Germany were happy with Hitler. His teachings on total war and of his secret Jewish conspiracy against Germany provided a good scream for their own veiled preparations. From its very inception it was a goal of the Nazi party working as a front for the German military industrial complex to overthrow the Weimar Republic by whatever means necessary. The pink swastika documents how from the beginning the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi party were animated and dominated by a militaristic homosexuals, {?}, pornographers and sado masochists.”

Skipping a big, “The pink swastika documents how the society for human rights founded by members of the Nazi party became the largest homosexual rights organization in Germany and further how this movement gave birth to the American homosexual rights movement. Its influence has grown,” unquote.

Now that is the situation today. We have a continuation of the tactics of the Nazis as well as the same exaltation of homosexuality that prevailed in the 30s in National Socialist Germany.

[Voice] And an abject tolerance of homosexuality in the church.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

The Nazi church did better. I mean, the German church did better than the American churches are doing now.

We have about three and a half minutes. Would anyone like to get a last word in here?

[Voice] These breakdowns that you mention, Rush, the things that we are... we are ... we see hints of today in our own country, that in Germany during the 30s was principally located in Berlin. I am aware of that. But was it also located in other parts of Germany?

[Rushdoony] Primarily in the big cities. In the country side you still had old fashioned Lutheran and Catholic piety. And you had a real awareness of what Hitler was on the part of the Catholics because he first began an all out attack on the Catholic hierarchy.

It is interesting. He is spoken of as having been a Catholic. He was bitterly anti Catholic, anti Protestant, anti Christian to the core. But he ordered his associates to maintain an nominal connection with the church just so they could prevail in propaganda matters.

I would like to call you attention to another book on the subject written by Gene Edward Veith, V E ... V as in Victor, E I T H, Jr, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo Christian World View. This book was published by Concordia in 1993, but I understand it is still available.

This is an important study. There is one gap in its presentation. I will deal with that subsequently. But perhaps this is a good point to start with. Quoting him, “Christianity, insofar as it is based on the Bible is also intrinsically Hebraic. And it, too, was the object of Fascist contempt. Hitler insisted that Christianity was the severest blow mankind had suffered. Saint Paul was a Bolshevik. Christianity allowed slaves to revolt against their masters. Christianity destroyed Rome. And it was all an invention of the Jew. ‘With the appearance of Christianity,’ wrote Hitler, ‘the first spiritual terror entered into the far freer ancient world.’ The terrorist and quencher of freedom Adolf Hitler here condemns Christianity for terrorizing people spiritually in restricting pagan freedom. Such ghastly irony is one of the implications of the Fascist assault upon Judea Christian objective morality.”

Well, as the author goes on to point out, Fascism has been very, very powerful and determinative in its influence on modern art. It has been influential in literary circles. Its arrogance has been remarkable. He cites, for example, this attitude of a speech given at a Nazi student rally.

I quote. “I do not want to blaspheme God, but I ask. Who is greater, Christ or Hitler? Christ had at the time of his death 12 apostles who, however, did not even remain true to him. Hitler, however, today has a folk of 70 million behind him. We cannot tolerate that another organization is established alongside of us that has a different spirit than ours. We must crush it. National Socialism in all earnestness says, ‘I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Then ours is the kingdom and the power for we have a strong Wehrmacht and the glory for we are, again, a respected nation and may God will in eternity. Heil Hitler.”

Well, there is a great deal like this dealing with the influence on Postmodernism, on literary figures, on universities and so on. The whole point is that we have swept under the carpet the fact that Fascism has been very closely allied to the academic community, to the arts and to the media. Now they are trying to put the blame for these things on the Christian community.

Well, with that comment, Douglas, would you like to comment on it?

[Murray] Well, it seems like they want to invoke slavery. They want... they seem to desire a totalitarian regime. I wonder what the... the point of that is. You want to speculate on what...?

[Rushdoony] Well, they are closely aligned with a program that we see today. The Nazis were the first modern type environmentalists. They expressed a fanatical concern for the environment. And what we are getting from our American environmentalists is the same thing in the same spirit. They enacted conservation and wilderness protection programs and a great deal more. In fact, it was said by one of their leaders that humanity has ravaged nature and that human beings are an evolutionary mistake and cancer on the earth. This scholar rejected mankind to the point of saying that he was more sympathetic with insects.

Now a great many philosophers, most notably Heidegger, one of the major figures in Existentialism were Nazis.

[Voice] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And we cannot understand National Socialism apart from the fact that it did appeal to the intellectuals, to the existentialists. It created environmentalism and a great deal more.

[Voice] How did they make the leap from insects over human beings to the master race?

[Rushdoony] Well, that is a very good point and they were illogical there. But by human beings they meant those that held to their particular ideology. You have a great many environmentalists who believe—and a couple of books have been written on the subject. I am trying to think of the titles, but the escape me at the... Ectopia, I think, is one. The idea being that most of humanity must be dispensed with. We must restore most of the continent to its original ecological condition. And only on the coasts of the Atlantic and the Pacific should a limited number of people be allowed to live and these will be the guardians of the environment. So really they are saying, “You are expendable, but we must be here to protect he earth.”

[Voice] I think that was demonstrated well in that book that we reviewed. I think it was about a year ago at this time Intellectuals and the Masses by John Kerry, I believe. He also dealt with that wanting to get rid of the masses and the concern for environment and this perfectly antiseptic society, you know. It was quite prominent.

I think another problem, an example of this that we are talking about is the most prominent one in academia today is the so-called political correctness movement, which is, of course, fascistic to the core and its leaders like Stanely Fish make no bones about that... about that point. And they... they have given up on the idea of reasoned academic discourse which they consider a farce. And they say we want to impose our views on everybody else and we are quite honest about it.

[Voice] Well, the thing that they... the lesson that escapes the.... the liberals in the academy is that every time this period comes along in history, they suffer, too.

[Voice] Yeah.

[Voice] They are just as much victims of what they create as everybody else.

[Voice] Intellectuals tend to like all other humans fall into fads and are susceptible, especially to intellectual fads. And so when something like this comes along they tend to be very susceptible to it. But you are right. It eventually destroys them. Why they keep falling into that, it is a testimony to the frailty of human nature, the sinfulness of human nature.

[Voice] The excert that you read, Rush, having to do with a youth rally, I can imagine some {?} wanting to become {?} and get one more star from presenting this in an effective fashion before young people. But it... it brings to mind another thing when I ... the people who were living in Germany, they... they told me that they would be aware of these things going on and the rising power of the Nazi party, but they said in their churches there was not strident criticism of the Nazi movement from the pulpit even though they were aware, especially as the Nazis became very powerful, that the impact of the Nazi party was not only on the Jews. It was on Catholics and on Christians

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] And, but they said the church never rallied to speak from the pulpit against the government.

[Rushdoony] I don’t agree with that, Paul. After, I cited from Lively and Abrams the fact that in two areas alone, Prussia and Wurtenberg about 700 pastors from each were imprisoned. That is a considerable number.

[Voice] Now is this because of what they spoke from the pulpit or because of their actions?

[Rushdoony] Well, I wouldn’t know in every case, but the bare fact that they were teaching from the Old Testament was enough to imprison them. So there was a great deal of punishment of Christians.

[Voice] Oh, yes, I ... I don’t dispute that. My... my point is that there was not an activism from the pulpit so much as there might have been actions that within the Christian church...

[Rushdoony] Well, yeah, that is possibly true. It was a state church after all. And therefore they were tightly controlled. And it was easy to control the church from within because in state churches the church officers are state officials, very commonly.

[Voice] That, by the way, is a very good argument...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] ...against state churches and, of course, much of Lutheranism at the time has been justly criticized. Certainly not all Lutherans, thank God, but much of Lutheranism at the time did capitulate to ... to Hitler, no question about it.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the things they did, Paul, was to bypass the elderly or the parents. They figured, we can make them go along with us. But they are not important. They are going not be dead in so many years. We are going to get the youth. And you heard, of course, of the famous {?} song which was the hymn of the youth groups. And this is what it said in part.

“We are the happy Hitler youth. We have no need of Christian virtue. For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor and our redeemer. No priest, no evil one can keep us from feeling like Hitler’s children. Not Christ do we follow, but {?}. Away with incense and holy water pots. Singing we follow Hitler’s banners. Only then are we worthy of our ancestors. I am not Christian and no Catholic. I go with the assay through thick and thin. The Church can be stolen from me for all I care. The swastika makes me happy here on earth. Him will I follow in marching step. {?} take me along.”

Now this was an open disavowal of Christianity by the youth of the country. The parents did not dare say anything because they were reprisals against them. So the idea that they were merrily go along people is not all together true. A lot of them paid a price. And the clergy certainly did.

In some instances everyone in some groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses wound up in the slave labor camp. So there was a battle. It is, I think, been a bit malicious to say that there was a radical surrender by the German people. They were helpless, but many of them paid a price all the same with their opposition.

[Voice] And that quotation demonstrates, too, that what we are dealing with here is a rival religion.

[Voice] Yes.

[Voice] As is modern Liberalism which is Fascist to the core. And as Van Til pointed out and as you have, Rush, for so many years. It is always fundamentally a battle of religion and religious presuppositions. We can’t say it is just differing political ideologies. And that is what we are fighting today. We are fighting an intensely religious battle.

[Voice] And I think that fits into the... with my concept is that you had people in the pulpit in Germany who would not speak out from the pulpit, but that there were people within the Christian community who were very much opposed to the Nazi movement. And I... I wonder, you know, how if... if we have a similar condition now where in the pulpit no one feels you should criticize the improprieties of government, but that the people within the churches are like the Christians in Germany, standing up and being counted, what is the outcome? What does it portend for us?

[Voice] I would say that is very true. I would say that on the whole often times it is the lay people that are stronger in their convictions than many of the ministers. Of course, there are notable and gratifying exceptions to that, thank God, but on the whole lay people today often see the issues more clearly than the ministers in the pulpits. And it is very sad.

[Rushdoony] One of the things that we need to remember which Veith points out is that we have an aspect of the Nazi program as founded here by Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood.

[Voice] Right.

[Rushdoony] And she was a militant Nazi, very, very outspoken...

[Voice] A racist to the core.

[Rushdoony] Racist to the core. And yet we are not told that today. And it doesn’t make any difference to the federal government. They have made Planned Parenthood almost a part of the state apparatus with their support of it.

So we are surrounded by groups that are in full accord with National Socialism on one issue after another, are militantly anti Christian and are determined to alter the country.

[Voice] What we see then as a great façade all of these attacks on Nazism and yet individuals and groups adopting Nazi tactics. It is just a huge lie is really what it is. And it should be exposed.

[Voice] I keep harking back to the fact that you have... that you have man’s law and you have God’s law.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] And most nations cleave to man’s law and walk away from God’s law.

[Voice] Definitely.

[Voice] You... today when we heard the Vice President Gore on the... on the radio saying due to the type of legislation and the content of it regarding environmental protectionism, even more people will die.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] And...

[Rushdoony] Because of the legislation that conservatives have introduced in Congress.

[Voice] Oh.

[Voice] The... the first premise is that even more...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] That means that after 30 years of Democratic congresses, we are losing people out there. It is a concession at least.

[Voice] Well, the tact is being used by many of those people in Congress are just nothing but sheer lies and that has been exposed. But they are more interested in rhetoric than they are the truth, scaring the elderly and scaring public school parents. That is... that is their name of the game.

[Voice] Political methods don’t change over time.

[Voice] That is exactly right.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the things that is important to us today is to recognize, too, as Veith points out, that behind all this was a chain of thinking that was scientific in origin. It began with Darwinism and Darwinism implicitly, if not explicitly depreciates man. Man is a product of chance, variations and accidents biologically. And such a creature has no value, per se. He is expendable.

I was interested some years ago in something that an English physicist wrote and he said, “We all look forward to the abolition of Christianity from the public scene. And we felt that when men no longer believe in a life after death they will prize this life more and the world will become a carrying place because nobody will want to destroy life when it is so precious and there is no life beyond the grave and all you have is what you have here.” And he said, “But to our dismay, what we are seeing is that with the abolition of Christianity life has become worthless.”

[Voice] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And there is a radical destruction of the quality of life and of life itself, because we have rendered it meaningless and therefore contemptible.

[Voice] There is no basis for value in life apart from transcendent belief like Christianity.

I think another one we need to mention, too apart from... in addition to Darwin, Rush, is the effect Nietzsche's thought had on Hitler.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Voice] He was a Nietzchian. There is no question about that. Shot through with Nietzchian views on the whole idea of the super man and the over man and all that sort of thing was prominent in Hitler thought and Nazi though in general.

[Rushdoony] He, Veith, makes clear that Nietzsche is one of the fathers of Fascism.

Of course, some scholars become quite vehement in denying that since they are very partial to what Nietzsche represents, but Veith comments, “As Nolte says, Nietzsche was the first to give voice to that spiritual focal point toward which all Fascism must gravitate, the assault on practical and theoretical transcendence for the sake of a more beautiful life. Nietzsche turned Romanticism in a Fascist direction.

[Voice] Yes. I just finished reading this past year beyond... Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and I think people need to read that to recognize why Nazism was what it really was. You really see the seeds of it right there, even in the titles like that, Beyond Good and Evil that of the old Christian values, you know, quote values Nietzsche would say are gone. We have to create our own. And of course, that is exactly what Hitler did.

[Rushdoony] One prominent Nazi said that whoever says, “Heil Hitler” is at the same time praising and exalting Nietzsche.

[Voice] Yes.

[Rushdoony] They knew who Nietzsche was and their relationship to him.

[Voice] It is really interesting, just like Hitler in Mein Kampf when you read Nietzsche’s writings he doesn’t... it is no holds barred. He is just very plain in what he believes.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the staterments, for example, by Veith, “Nietzsche’s ethic of cruelty became the rationale for all the Nazi atrocities.”

[Voice] Yes. That is exactly right and you see that in Nietzsche’s writings that he is always emphasizing rigor and that men need to suffer if they are going to go through things. And, of course Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for the masses, and of course...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] ...Hitler did to... Hitler would make jokes before hand and say, “You know, I have to go talk to these people. If you would whip them up into a furor,” and that sort of thing. That sort of thinking was really prominent and he got it from... from Nietzsche. No question about it.

[Voice] Don’t the political organizations and gobernments always try to vouch for their own agendas through the authority and canon of intellectuals, whether it be a Nietzsche or whether it be anyone? There is something...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] ... that we are supposed to have absolute trust in people who are intellectuals or academics or what have you. And I just see so many governments that hang themselves on to some intellectual concept that most people don’t comprehend or understand the... the unfolding of it.

[Rushdoony] Well, on the other hand there is a cause and effect relationship. One scholar observed many, many years ago that Emmanuel Kant was very methodical professor. People could set their clock by him as he took his walk or went to the university to lecture. He was extremely regimented in everything.

And he seemed to be a totally insignificant person and yet as the statement was, in a generation or two armies were marching to his tune. And the same is true of Nietzsche.

[Voice] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And armies all over the world were marching to his tune.

[Voice] And Karl Marx. That is exactly right.

[Rushdoony] We fail to realize how not only do ideas have consequences, but ideas are interlaced with life. When the civil war was fought the German generals had their men here soon after going over the battle fields studying the military tactics which they then applied in the war against France and in the ... in World War I and II, modern total warfare.

Veith quotes Hitler to this effect, something I had not heard since the 30s. I quote, “Conscience is a Jewish invention.”

[Voice] Oh, dear. That is a remarkable statement.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Voice] Do you know if Russians troops training today at For Riley, Kansas ready to intervene in Bosnia.

[Rushdoony] Well, we live in a confused world and I think not many are as confused as we are. We are so foolish where are our own advantages are concerned.’

To quote another sentence from Veith. “Italian and French Fascism always stress sexual freedom.” And, of course, we have picked that up also.

[Voice] Yes.

[Voice] I think we need to recognize the malevolence of the enemy. I think too many Christians are soft toward the enemy and too tolerant, but Christianity does not support that sort of tolerance. It supports a godly tolerance, but I don’t think we recognize who the enemy really is and that is why so many Christians refuse to take a stand, a relentless stand today. And that must stop. It must stop.

[Rushdoony] Here is another passage from Veith which is revelatory. “Hospital chaplains were especially active in defending their flocks, that is, against euthanasia. One of them, pastor Karl Gerhardt Braun wrote a powerful document addressed to Hitler himself which refuted the moral arguments for euthanasia and forcibly attacked medicalized killing. Whom if not the helpless, he wrote, should the law protect? Pastor Braun was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned but his paper was widely circled and had its effect.”

Then there was a Catholic bishop in Muenster who was a German countess well, Van Galen who attacked the euthanasia program and I recall vividly the attacks on him at the time.

Well, our time is over. Thank you all for listening and God bless you.