Easy Chair Series

Terrorism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 66-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC368

Year: 1986

This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 368, August the second, 1996.

In this session Douglas Murray, Andrew Sandlin, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss terrorism.

I have over the period of time read a number of articles and some books on terrorism. One of the more interesting in its insights was written in 1979 by Michael Selzer, S E L Z E R, Terrorist Chic, C H I C. And his analysis, I think, is the most enlightening, because this is what he says and I quote, “Terrorist chic expresses fascinated approval of violence, brutality, sadomasochism, evil and degeneracy in general. It apotheosizes meaningless and indecency,” unquote.

Now with that he has defined a high percentage of modern films and television. We do have the emphasis on violence, brutality, sadomasochism, evil and degeneracy in general. Moreover, one of the points he makes is that the attitude of this mentality is that civilization is violent. Therefore there is no reason why they should not indulge in it. Or, as one person he quotes says, “I believe in selfishness.” Another finds beauty in depravity. And so on and on.

We are living in an age of depravity, some assert, and therefore everything goes.

Now, another point he makes which is very, very important is that these people who are involved in this cult of depravity and in terrorism are people without feeling, that some of them—and he quotes sadomasochists, for example—cannot experience anything because they are so dead emotionally unless they are being tortured or torturing someone. They can only find life or react other than with a deadness to terror. And, as a result, our culture is inclined to terrorism, because terrorism carries to full fruition what is the popular mentality of teenagers, of the films, of more and more adults who are trying to be a part of the modern scene and it involves contempt for the proprieties of life.

For example, baseball caps with a visor worn backwards. Now that is nonsense, because the visor is to give you shade. But it is a way of expressing contempt for the realities of life. Or hats and caps are worn to protect one from the sun. So you wear them indoors. You wear them into a restaurant or a fast food place or in the house. Little things like that to show your contempt of meaning and of order. On all sides we see this, this kind of thinking and activity. It has taken over one country after another.

The punk mentality which sprang up a few years ago is very, very radically wedded to this and youth feels that it must express contempt one way or another for manners, for order, for everything that smacks of decency and civilization.

Let me cite this paragraph from page 110.

“Honey is, in the words of the aptly named John Rockwell of the New York Times, a symbol of the restless energies of a youthful subculture that found industrialized bourgeois society hypocritical, self satisfied and stale. This critic discovers in punk a profoundly concerned idealism. He reports a concert given by an English group, the sex pistols in Atlanta. The SPs were signing a song called ‘Pretty Vacant.’ After a few repeats of the refrain, ‘We’re so pretty, oh, so pretty, vacant,’ the crowd bellowed out the word vacant along with the singer. A young gentleman named Johnny Rotten, capped it all by screaming, ‘And we don’t care,’” unquote.

Well, there is no exposé of hypocrisy or anything at such behavior. It is just a rejection of civilization.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And when you reject civilization and its forms, even if it is no more than wearing your cap in the house or at the dinner table or at a restaurant, it means you are finished with the niceties of life, that anything that is disruptive and disorderly pleases you and you are contributing your small bit to that disruption. You are adding to the general tenor of meaninglessness and indecency that prevails in our culture.

[Murray] Well, look, the rock groups seem to only... or seem to be exploiting the anger and apparent frustration of the youth, because the youth are the ones that are paying the money. Most people after they reach the age of 30 years old don’t waste their money on that sort of thing, but all of these various rock groups that have come out of England, see the United States as an enormous market for marketing this form of intellectual anarchy and anti God feeling. And it seems to have run its course because the rock groups pretty much died out and they can’t fill an auditorium because of the production costs of putting on one of these big rock concerts. They cannot, they can’t make money anymore unless they can, you know, get several hundred thousand people to attend one of these things. They can’t make any... enough money to interest them.

So it seems to have run its course, but it... it is... you know, it is... it now seems to have metamorphosed into this teenage feeling of desperation where kids feel compelled to commit suicide, that there is no longer an outlet for this frustration via the rock groups. But the ... I think the kid of terrorism that is on most people’s minds today is the ... the, you know, political terrorism, politically motivated terrorism. And, to me, terrorism is simply the ultimate form of cowardice. You know, it comes out of this feeling of impotence which turns to anger and frustration and they only seem to be able to ... to vent this with a terrorist act. But it is always in... it is an act of cowardice, you know?

[Voice] Yeah.

[Murray] It is always the sneak attack, the knife in the back, the bomb, the letter, the letter bomb. It... it is... really it is a despicable kind of violence.

[Rushdoony] Well, the interesting thing to me is that this popular culture that is described in Terrorist Chic has its basis in the same thing that leads to political terrorism.

I want to quote another passage from the book by Selzer. He says, “Yet in one respect terrorist chic is quite novel. For it has succeeded in transforming into a publicly acceptable posture, what hitherto had existed only in furtive and antisocial privacy. Degenerate fantasies of sex and violence are not new. Making them into fashionable pose is something of a departure...

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] ...in the history of culture. It is only in the context of terrorist chic that it becomes permissible, even appealing for penthouse to offer the{?} the f word and killing are the same to its three and a half million readers. Only now by the same token might sadomasochistic symbols figure unabashedly in high fashion or the rewards of stardom be conferred on the singer of a song whose refrain is a joyous, ‘I am born to kill,’” unquote.

Now, some terrorists who have been interviewed and the interviews carried in one magazine or another, profess political goals. But what comes through is their pleasure I creating terror, in killing. And, in fact, the general of the anarchistic forces in the Russian Revolution told a man who wound up in Lodi ultimately and wrote a book about his experiences, that the end of the revolution would be his end. And, of course, he was executed by the Bolsheviks, because what he wanted was continuous terror. And he admitted to Schroeder that his pleasure was in killing and looting and raping and he did not want peace. And the terrorists don’t want the vague political answer that they profess.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] They basically want continuous terror.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] They don’t thrive on anything else. There is a deadness in them.

[Murray] Do they think they are going to escape the terror themselves?, that it is not going to be turned on them? It is a double edged sword.

[Rushdoony] It doesn't phase them.

[Sandlin] It is a love for chaos.

[Rushdoony] Just as with so many of our teenage killers today, life doesn't mean anything, so death doesn't mean anything and they are simply vicious. They enjoy perpetuating viciousness on all sides. The difference between a terrorist and the street gang is... is only that the terrorists profess some kind of noble cause. But it is a façade. There is no nobility in them. They enjoy the terror.

[Sandlin] I think, too, that terrorism is violent theater.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] What is crucial about it is that it is seen and experienced, the putting on a show. There is the histrionic aspect of it is ... is crucial. It is a religious statement. The worship of violence for all to see on the plain of history. And that is why there is really, ultimately, no such thing as covert terrorism. I mean, even the so called covert terrorism is designed to... to make a public statement for people to see. And that is where... I think there are twinges, too, of Romanticism in it, the glossy and the glitzy and the bloody, really typified in, you may have heard of the movie... what is it... Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone’s movie which was something of a satire, but there certainly was some truth in that idea. I... I think people sort of acting out their fantasies on the stage of history for everyone to see.

[Rushdoony] That is very, very important, because what we find when we go back in history is that the theater had an important part to play in the French Revolution.

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And the essence of the theater is drama. How do you solve things? By a crisis. Well, there are millions of crises without resolutions. Nothing comes out of them except more trouble. But the theater very early for dramatic purposes saw crises and what we could call a revolution as a solution, overturning everything supposedly will right everything. And so we have the theater of revolution. And the terrorists like to put on a performance. They want publicity and attention. They call attention to it and to themselves as much as possible.

I was not happy today to read that one expert in the field predicts that we will be the target of more terrorism, that Britain and the United States, all the world, but especially Britain and the United States will be the target of terrorism because we have been so successful and are successful and therefore are resented. And that is all important. Some of these terrorists are in countries where conditions are far, far worse than anything in the countries that are the object of terrorism. That doesn't concern them. It is a hatred, a resentment, a feeling that we have to destroy these people because they are superior. They think they are so good. Well, they have forgotten about us and we are going to make them pay for that.

[Sandlin] You know, another point, Rush, another angle, a materialistic culture is very vulnerable to terrorism.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] Because for that culture this life alone has meaning. A culture that worships this life, that has no hope of ... of heaven is going to be especially vulnerable to terrorism because terrorists know that they can blackmail a culture like that.

[Rushdoony] I hesitate to bring this up, because some people are prone to go overboard here. But some years back I read a history of secret societies. There were none in the Middle Ages. The inequalities were there, but there was a different spirit so there wasn’t the kid of resentment that leads to terrorism and revolution and violence, but that with the beginning of the modern age, various secret groups began to form, because their premise was rationalistic to the core that some kid of overturning, some kid of revolution was a solution rather than regeneration. They had abandoned Christianity and therefore they had to believe in some kind of hidden work by which they were going to take over so that in the modern age they ... there have been hundreds, maybe thousands of conspiratorial groups planning to take over the country or the west or the world, because for them change comes through revolution rather than regeneration. So the whole mentality of terrorism is radically and totally anti Christian.

[Sandlin] It is not only on the left wing either, unfortunately. We have right wing people who feel that solution is in revolution.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Sandlin] And we need to be warned about them. They recognize the evils of society, the evils of the strong centralized government and think that the solution to that problem is to pick up guns and start shooting. And that is not the ... that is not the solution. We meet injustice not with injustice, but with justice, with obedience, and that is how God works, regeneration rather than revolution.

[Rushdoony] Well, there are portions of Selzer’s book that I really cannot read, because it describes the kinds of practices that prevail now in our anti Christian age, the sadomasochistic crowds, their adoption of things that market hem as {?}. I won’t tell you what the word means if you don’t know. And all of this is so endemic in our culture so that we see minor forms of it all around us. And it indicates that our culture is wedded to violence. I this to have it for entertainment and for the solution to problems.

[Sandlin] Well and it tends to be very addictive and people need more and more of it to ... to please them. Sort of like a drug in some ways. And that is true of all sin, of course. It tends to be very addictive and one has to have more and more grandiose and perverse aspects of it, because we really see that in modern violence and terrorism and the relationship we talked earlier to modern music is a prime example. When I mentioned Pattison’s book, The Triumph of Vulgarity that points out this very thing and there is a relationship between the two.

[Rushdoony] Turning to Selzer again, under the flamboyant and self righteous rhetoric of terrorist ideology and proclamation, two qualities stand out. Terrorism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right. He also says, “One indication of terrorism’s irrationality may be found in the tenuous connection between terrorist deeds and the goals that are ostensibly, they are ostensibly designed to serve. This lack of connection, in turn, owes much to the vagueness of many terrorist goals. It is all very well to say that one wishes to destroy imperialism or racism or whatever. But where do these alleged evils reside? One does not want to attack manifestations of them merely, but the essence of the evil itself,” unquote.

Now we would add the essence of the evil is in man in his fallen, depraved nature.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And the only way to alter that is through Christ’s regenerating power.

[Sandlin] But they don’t have that hope. That is why they have to rely on this.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] Well, if you have a materialistic world view, you are going to have a materialistic solution and revolution is one.

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Terrorism is the essence of revolution.

[Sandlin] Yes. It is interesting you pointed that out, Rush. This is really is a romantic phenomenon, too, an obsession with violent feelings, that anything can be justified if it can be based in feeling rather than reason. And that is really prominent in our culture today. The important thing is not whether it is morally right and wrong, the person had a deep passion about it and therefore the passion itself...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] ...justifies the action.

[Rushdoony] Quoting again from Selzer. “There is no purpose in this, no contribution to the attainment of the revolution, but simply and almost sufficiently the enjoyment of disgustingly meaningless brutality.” Even terrorism’s pseudo rationality expresses the terrorist’s disdain for human life from Emile Henry’s There are no Innocents to the PLO’s How Can You say Who is and Who is not a Combatant? It provides license for indiscriminate and meaningless slaughter and destruction. There are no ideas, then, to be conveyed by terrorism’s propaganda of the deed, only an angry, senseless lashing out at the world in which the terrorist feels discontented.

Now an interesting aspect of it all is that beginning from the early {?} with their talk about what bad people are doing to the environment and what this or that evil group is doing to the world or to peoples, children are taught this kind of hostility and resentment that marks the terrorist mind. This is why more and more of them graduate from school to join in on the terror in the streets.

I think one of the things that we have to recognize that we are living in an age of particular depravity, people who enjoy their depravity and yet are unwilling to see the connection between what goes on in the films and the media, in the schools and elsewhere and terrorism by organized groups the world over. Countries all over the world now are engaged in an ongoing battle against the forms of terrorism that confront them. And this is occurring in countries that have been a hallmark of order, public order, such as Japan.

Some of the acts of terrorism that have taken place there are horrifying to Japanese because they have never known that sort of thing. Authority has been so strong in their culture, but it is now breaking down and, as a result, terror is everywhere. And very often in some countries as in Ireland, both sides will resort to violence. They justify it in terms of their cause. And as a result they are slowly, but steadily giving credibility to mindless violence. And this is infecting all segments of society. Every now and then we see something about police overreacting in a situation or the border patrol overreacting. Well, in such instances even though it is wrong, there is provocation. But there is no provocation for what goes on in families, violence towards the wife or the husband or the children. All that is related to our world of terror.

More than one person in our time has written about the growing instability that marks people here and abroad, the discourtesies, the crudeness of remarks, the hostilities that are manifest publicly. Some have said it is not as bad in this country as it is elsewhere which may or may not be true.

When I read one such article it took me back to the 20s when I was a child. And I recall this being commonplace, almost every boy that I went to school with had experienced this at some time or other, going someplace with their parents and seeing somebody who was very, very fat or somebody who was very ugly or very dirty, ragged and without thinking you would say, “Boy, she is fat, or he is ugly or that person is really dirty dressed.” And smack you got it across the mouth immediately and you were told you never talk about people like that. You don’t know them.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] You have no right to be so unkind. That was routine. I witnessed it more than once seeing a kid in a street car or department store or on the sidewalk getting smacked. Today not only children, but adults make remarks like that.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] No one thinks anything of it.

[Murray] You know, but there... there is a difference, a subtle difference. Instead of being unjust or unkind today, it is called being judgmental.

[Rushdoony] Except they don’t call that kind of remark judgmental. They tend to call a moral judgment, judgmental. And if you are morally right in saying what that person did is wrong, you are judgmental.

[Murray] It is... it is used also in being judgmental about people’s appearance or behavior.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Murray] Someone who was ... clothes are dirty or ragged or whatever. It is a... I have heard that parents use that term quite a bit. Don’t be judgmental.

[Rushdoony] Yeah. But no smack across the mouth.

[Murray] No. Well, they don’t dare.

[Rushdoony] No. That is true.

[Murray] The cops would be there in minutes.

[Sandlin] Aren’t we saying here that, then, that we are descending into a new barbarism because...

[Rushdoony] Yes, we are.

[Sandlin] Christianity refines the manners. Of course, that is not the main thing Christianity is about. But a byproduct of Christianity...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] ...is the refinement of manners. And we see the results of secularism in the barbarization, I think, of modern culture and things you mentioned and many more, I think, Rush.

[Rushdoony] The marvelous thing is that there is a counter movement and the home schools and Christian schools are a major part of it. The difference between the behavior of the products of such schools and the products of public schools is dramatic.

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And it is being recognized more and more so that by their fruits ye shall know them and we are being known by our fruits.

[Sandlin] My family and I were eating in southern California, Rush, a few months ago and we saw a school group come in, very well dressed, mannerly, obedient, not loud. And I said right away that has to be a Christian school. We didn’t know it for sure. We leaned around, looked at the window and saw, sure enough, it was a Christian school bus had brought a ... I think a basketball team, you know, and the cheerleaders and so forth. Had it been a secular or a government school it would have been totally different.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] Well, unfortunately, the kids have be exceptionally strong to stand up under the withering assaults that they get, you know, in their... among their peers, particularly if, you know, they... either have to attend a public school or if they, you know, play a... in sports with a ... a public school. It is... it is difficult for kids. It really is.

[Sandlin] Yes, it is.

[Murray] It is a major challenge in their lives to... to try to, you know, behave in a...

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Murray] ...civil way without sticking out like a sore thumb and drawing the ire of their peers. And it... it really takes a superior individual with ... with tremendous self control and self discipline to do that.

[Sandlin] And faithful parents and the work of the Holy Spirit of God in covenant children. And that is what we have got to constantly emphasize. They are not to be transformed by evil. They are supposed to be doing the work of godly transformation in society, but just the opposite, too often, obtains. They are influenced by the culture rather than reshaping the culture. We have got to train children to reshape the culture for the... for the grace of God and for his sake and with the dominionist impulses.

[Rushdoony] One of the things that Selzer quotes someone as saying is—and this is someone who likes depravity—“Anonymity is an important part of depravity as well as of terrorism. You wouldn’t want the world to know that you personally are depraved. One element of the mystique of depravity is precisely the mystique of it all.”

So this is very, very interesting. Now what Christianity did was to make people more personable, personal, because it stressed man made in the image of God with righteousness, holiness, dominion, man was somehow set apart. He felt more of a person and therefore because he was created for eternity, he had a different status and every other person had a different status. One of the reasons given in the Bible in Genesis 9:6 as to why murder is wrong is that man is created in the image of God.

Now, one of the things that marked he world of antiquity was that you were not as much a person. You were replaceable.

I recall years ago and I wish I knew where it was, a letter of consolation from someone to a... another person about the loss of a child. Well, it is no problem. You are young enough to make another baby.

Well, it would be hard for a Christian to say that, because each child is a person. And there is distinct quality, an eternal quality that is irreplaceable.

Well, with the modern materialistic view, what are people?

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] One goal of the terrorists is to eliminate people. And their attitude is the world is over populated. So if we kill a few to achieve our goal, it is no problem. They do not see murder as murder. They see it as part of their goal. And this is a totally different world. It is a world that is growing up around us and Christians are either going to have to get busy and convert these people or pay the price of their failure. God will raise up another people to himself somewhere else if we fail to do our work.

[Sandlin] Well, unfortunately, Rush, too many Christians don’t recognize what you and Van Til have wisely called the antithesis and they are easily influenced by that culture and seduced by that very culture and, therefore, they don't feel a call to cultural transformation. They feel a call toward getting along and having nice weepy or happy spiritual feelings.

Well, I don’t think they recognize the gravity of the warfare that we are involved in, because they have been so influenced by this particular culture that we are talking about. I think they need to step back and recognize the severity of the situation.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Selzer calls attention to the kind of thing that is considered art now and relates it to terrorism. She cites one ... he cites one photographic show which packed in huge crowds at the museum of modern art. The woman photographer had done everything in photographing people to show their absurdity, to show flaws, to show kinkiness. They crying baby she photographed looked like they were mentally disturbed and insane. And she was highly praised and had for the time, at least, until then, the record turnout for a photographic show.

Our tastes all around us in our popular culture and in the aesthetic world are inclined in the direction of terrorism. And anyone who stresses meaninglinessness as our culture leaders do, is preparing the way for terrorism.

[Murray] I am happy to say that I missed that exhibit.

[Rushdoony] Who is that one male photographer whose show created such a sensation? Mapplethorpe.

[Murray] Mapplethorpe.

[Rushdoony] Mapplethorpe.

[Murray] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Very, very degenerate. And yet praised as though it was great and no one had the right to censor the showing. He was a homosexual, a horrible monster.

Now tied in to all this I referred to it earlier briefly, but it goes back to a very brilliant psychoanalyst, Theodore Reich, a pupil of Freud. In some respects the only wise man in the field, because he was brilliant. And he observed at one point with regard to masochism on which he wrote a book that the masochist enjoys the pain because at least he is experiencing something.

[Sandlin] It is offering meaning.

[Rushdoony] He is... yes.

[Sandlin] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] Well, he is so dead within that he has to have pain inflicted upon him in order to feel alive. And our culture is like that. We have to have wholesale murders, wholesale massacres and even those are not very important if they are not of the right kind.

[Sandlin] Right.

[Rushdoony] Who is paying attention to the mass murderers and the slave markets in the Sudan, after all?

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Rushdoony] The enslavers and murderers are Moslem Arabs and the enslaved and murdered are Christian blacks and animistic blacks. And in their eyes they are dispensable.

[Murray] Well, we have a... a rather perverted criminal justice system that weights murder, for instance, you get a more stringent punishment if you murder with special circumstances.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Murray] And the law defines these special circumstances. There are degrees... different degrees of murder.

[Rushdoony] Well, Selzer say, “Our age is marked by an incapacity to find anything interesting.” And so it has to be hit harder and harder and shocked more and more...

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] ... in order to get any kind of attention from it. And this we see in the progressive horror that is emphasized on the screen.

[Murray] Spiritual death.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] So terrorism, more than almost anything in our society today expresses our culture.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] This means that it is a very deadly thing that apparently is here to stay. It has too much appeal. The number of terrorists are likely to grow. The one answer is to Christianize the world.

[Sandlin] Rush, do you think?

[Rushdoony] And that is our calling. Yes.

[Sandlin] Oh, I am sorry. Rush, do you think, too, that there is a... an element of, you know, the Marxist idea of creative chaos that if we can produce all of this finally some good will eventually come. I know some of them, it is just the act itself they are obsessed with.

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is closely tied with the ancient cults of chaos. They believed that ritually they had to return to chaos every year. The Saturnalia went for a number of days. There was no law when a murderer was made king and possessed the queen, when every kind of sexual crime and every kind of other crime was legal.

Since we came out of chaos, they believed we had to return periodically to chaos as a kind of a revival meeting.

Well, some years ago I wrote a little monograph which was published on the religion of revolution. And I pointed out at the time this was early in the 60s, that we were returning to the cults of chaos and would have to have more and more chaos in the form of revolution and overturning of things in order to be able to revitalize our culture, it would be held.

And this is what we are seeing. The only alternative is Christ.

[Sandlin] You know, Rush, it is sad that there are so few Christian organizations dealing with these issues. I was thinking how many Christian groups or Christian foundations or churches would even be dealing with the issues that we are dealing with tonight. They are so pietistic and ... and so separated.

[Rushdoony] Well, they are withdrawn from the world.

[Sandlin] That is the point. They have ... they are so withdrawn themselves from reality and the world waiting for the rapture and that sort of thing.

[Rushdoony] And if they don’t wake up, the terror will hit them. You hear about all the church burnings.

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Well, what is the reason for it? They have seen race as the reason, but in one or two cases it may have been true, but they don’t talk about all the hundreds of white churches that are also burned. It is a hatred of Christ. It is a hatred of the Church. It is a form of terrorism by isolated individuals.

[Sandlin] Well, John Brown did somewhat the same thing, didn’t he?

[Rushdoony] Oh, very definitely and brought on the Civil War, a terrible catastrophe. But we are seeing terrorism of that sort now and we don’t have the honesty to deal with it. And only when they decided to feature the black churches did some kind of public notice result and the White House took notice of it and the Congress apparently is planning to.

[Sandlin] Peter Hammond also wrote to remind us that there are many more black churches in the Sudan in Africa, many more that are being destroyed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] ...than here in the U. S.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] And while he says we certainly have sympathy for those in the U. S., why is it that this church burning and this murderous rage that is going on in Africa, why is that not emphasized, you know?

[Rushdoony] Yes. They want to ascribe it to Racism, because that will blame, say, the whites who don’t like blacks and take the heat off the culture generally.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] It is an expression of our culture.

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Rushdoony] It is going to spread unless we confront what it is, what terrorism has its roots in together with rock and roll and our media entertainment and so on, all part and parcel of one thing, a deadness within which needs to have the most vicious kind of expression in order to feel alive.

Can you imagine these sadomasochists who have to have all kinds of torture, have to have things driven into their flesh, have to subject themselves to screaming agony in order to feel alive. Three is a deadness in our society.

[Sandlin] That is right.

[Rushdoony] And imagine the wholesale murders that are a part of television and the films now.

[Sandlin] That is exactly right.

[Rushdoony] There is a deadness.

[M. Rushdoony] It is a whole genre of movies that are the most popular form of movies is the action movie and the reviews even talk sometimes about how they are thin on plot. That is not the point. The point is the special effects and what they blow up and how ... and how fast paced it is and how much destruction can take place over the course of... of... of the movie. And this is the most popular form of movie now.

[Sandlin] Yes.

[Rushdoony] I was watching the other night a dramatization of a story written by a woman writer in her 30s and the thing that struck me. I didn’t realize that this particular writer was the author of this story until it was over. Well, nowadays the motivation is some kind of deep psychological problem, a hurt and so on. In this story I kept trying to figure out the plot until it suddenly dawned on me, well the problem is sin.

[Sandlin] That’s right.

[Rushdoony] And the ... suddenly I realized how old fashioned the whole point of the story was. The plot had a reality and I was trying to see it in an unreal way because I didn’t realize it came out of the 30s.

[Sandlin] Modern man works so diligently to rationalize sin. That is the whole point of everything. The whole point of life is to get rid of sin. I mean, sin is evident, but it has to be explained away in some other terms. That is the whole... that is what modern psychology is all about, the attempt to rationalize sin and redefine it, of course.

[Murray] And excuse it.

[Sandlin] And excuse it, of course. Yes.

[Rushdoony] Let me—our time is almost over—cite Selzer’s beginning point. “Through a wide range of artifacts and posturings, terrorist chic expresses fascinated approval of violence, brutality, sadomasochism, evil and degeneracy in general. It apotheosizes meaninglessness and indecency.”

Now the terrorist simply has pursued that to its logical end. He has said that I am going to employ these strategies to express my discontent with the world. And, of course, there is nothing that can take away his discontent. He is wedded to it. That is so much a part of the modern mentality that there is no curing it apart from Christ.

[Sandlin] Not so much the hatred of man as the hatred of God.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Sandlin] That is what it is really after.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any last comments, Andrew, Douglas? I mean, Douglas and Mark?

Well, thank you all for listening. And God bless you.