Our Threatened Freedom

Are We a Suicidal People

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 157-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 157

Dictation Name: Vol. M - Part 01 - Are We a Suicidal People

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Are we a suicidal people? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

In the early days of spring this year the administration finally proposed an anti-missile system, which should have been proposed 20 years ago. The technology to provide a means of destroying nuclear missiles before they ever reach the United States has been known for some time. This is not all. The United States has no real civil defense system. We are open to, and virtually helpless, to a nuclear attack. In addition to this, the proposed anti-missile system, called the high frontier strategy, will actually make national defense markedly cheaper. All this and more has been spelled out by Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham in his book ‘High Frontier: A New National Strategy’. It is a sound, reasonable and sensible system of defense. However, no sooner was this strategy announced, then the press and letter writers began to attack it.

Having read ‘High Frontiers’ it was obvious to me that the critics had not read it, did not know what it was about, and that they were expressing wild and hysterical reactions. In fact, I find the critics of ‘High Frontiers’ more to be feared than the Soviet Union and its atomic or nuclear weapons. These people react with total suspicion towards any and every defense strategy ever suggested. To hear them talk, we have little to fear from Moscow, and everything to fear from our own military leaders. I find this to be a paranoid reaction, to put it mildly. Moreover, it is certainly suicidal. Such people are hostile to any kind of defense, and regard defense as a form of aggression. One writer said of the anti-missile strategy, I find it hard to believe that these new weapons are defensive. The plain fact is, that the High Frontier strategy gives us simply a device to eliminate missiles in space, long before they reach our cities. They do not start another arms race, as someone else charged, but are an anti-arms strategy. Another person objected to this High Frontier strategy because, he said, it would not be, he felt, 100% effective, but perhaps only 95% effective. Even if he were right, would it not be better to have only 5 missiles reach our cities, rather than 100? There’s no logic behind such thinking.

Such people claim to be against nuclear war and for peace, and against high military budgets in favor of cheaper ones, we have here a strategy to give them, in 5 years, a good safe-guard against nuclear weapons on a lower budget, and they react hysterically against it. Such a reaction is suicidal, and it ensures death, not freedom.

This has been R.J Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.