
The Easy Chair: Talks & Round Table Discussions
Episode 17
Funding of Left; Millionaire Russian Serfs; Myths
Transcript:
Speaker 1: 00:02 This is R.J. Rushdoony, easy chair number 17, April 29, 1982.
Speaker 1: 00:12 I’d like to start off this time by calling your attention to a magazine that a two of you have a great deal to do with. It is the Conservative Digest for April 1982. If you’d like a copy, and I think you should get one. It’s a dollar and a half. Write to Conservative Digest, 7777 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church, Virginia, 22043. Now the subject of the entire issue is one that Howard Phillips has been talking about for quite a while, how Washington funds the left. Editor John Lofton again, one of you, has given this issue to that subject, including an article by Howard Phillips on the subject, as well as many other very able writers.
Speaker 1: 01:18 This is something you have in hand by the way, as a reference material. For example, on page three, there’s a full page dedicated to the subject. If you thought funding for leftists ended with Carter, think again. And, 30 of the grants to left wing groups, since Reagan took office, are listed. These include, some far out groups, abortionists, feminists, and so on. Well, on the next page, or two pages, lists 175 of the left leaning groups that get your tax dollars. This goes on to the third page, listing legal oriented, aged, handicapped, energy environment, unions, feminist, homosexual, birth control and adoption, and so on and on.
Speaker 1: 02:28 These groups, you are financing. Howard Phillips has pointed out that the feminist moving of our day as well as the homosexual movement got off the ground and has prospered with tax money. It is questionable whether those groups could have ever gotten anywhere or had any impact if they were not federally funded. Later, on pages 16 following, we have a list of 30 very liberal groups who funded them and how much they got. From the Feminist Press, the Gray Panthers, the League of Women Voters, United Auto Workers, National Association of Farm workers Organizations, National Counsel of Senior Citizens, Sierra Club, and much, much more.
Speaker 1: 03:29 The Pacifica Foundation, all these, you finance with your tax money. It’s an excellent issue as I say, and I could spend the entire hour dealing with this. The whole point of it is, as Howard Phillips says in his article, a subject he’s dealt with again and again, lets defund the left. I’m not gonna tell you more about this issue because I believe you ought to send for it, get it, and use it. Give a synopsis of the data in this issue to your friends. Use it in your political activities. You are financing right now, your own destruction, and you had better know it. If you make that kind of statement, people will challenge you. Well, with this issue in hand, you can document everything very specifically. So do send for this issue.
Speaker 1: 04:40 Now, I want to say something to Howard Phillips and John Lofton directly, I’d like to see another issue, on how Washington funds the USSR. How we are financing Marxism, in the Soviet Union and throughout the world, with loans, governmental and federally inspired, credit, the transfer of technology, and a great deal more. We can defund Marxism the world over today if we take the initiative. Well, another article along the same lines is in the April 12, 1982, Inquiry Magazine. It’s a libertarian publication, very often excellent and sometimes rather irritating. But, there is an excellent article in this issue, How To Really Cut The Budget, by David Boaz.
Speaker 1: 05:54 And his point of course is that, we are not having any real budget cutting. The so-called budget pairing today actually means, at the minimum a 32 billion dollar budget increase. And he says, that all the time that we are bombarded with heart rending articles about the victims of budget cuts, the working family dependent on food stamps, the commuters that have to pay more to ride AMTRAK, and so on and so forth. The plain fact is more money is being appropriated, but not enough to suit some of these people. And as Boaz says, and I quote, “Poverty, unemployment, hunger, national security, and education, are real problems. But the government spends more on them every year and they just get worse. Yet our political leaders never propose any fundamental changes.”
Speaker 1: 07:04 Then he goes on to say, and again I quote, “But a lot of the waste is inherent in government. Our government planners aren’t much better than the ones in Poland, think about it. If you could increase your income any time you felt like it just by snapping your fingers, what would be the point in carefully planning your household budget? That’s exactly the situation the government is in and even with virtually unlimited powerless attacks, the federal government has still managed to spend it’s way one trillion dollars into debt. The only way to eliminate this inherent waste is to eliminate programs.” Now his point is excellent. The only reason we’re not in the same situation that Poland is in, is not that our planners are any better, but because they still do not have as much power as the planners in Poland.
Speaker 1: 08:03 If we allow them to continue over taxing us and overspending, we will be in the same plight as Poland, only probably much worse. Then, Boaz goes on to say, and again I quote, “Budget cutting sounds like a conservative idea, it isn’t. The people complaining the most loudly about the Reagan budget are Robert Dole and Howard Baker. Conservatives these days seem mainly distinguished by their extraordinary power of euphemism.” And by the way, I wouldn’t call those two men conservatives as Boaz does. “Ronald Reagan doesn’t want tax increases, but revenue enhancement, and Baker doesn’t want to cancel his scheduled 10% income tax cuts, he just wants to impose 10% income tax surcharge. No real fiscal change threatens the status quo too much to appeal to these conservatives,” as he calls them. “A major budge cut far from conservative would be a bold and progressive thrust aimed at altering the balance of power in America.” And that’s a very good point.
Speaker 1: 09:17 “It would seize power from the bureaucrats and their corporate carters and hand it back to individuals. You might even call it radical and the same sense, those fellows that tossed all the tea into Boston harbor were radicals. So, let’s start tossing the tea overboard.”
Speaker 1: 09:40 He goes on to say that, a great deal of what we hear about the budget needs is dishonest. To quote, “Food stamps for instance are put forward as a program to help the poor. But when Reagan recently proposed trimming them, it wasn’t Teddy Kennedy or Alan Cranston who denounced him, it was Bob Dole, who’s Kansan constituents make a tidy program off the program. Two years ago when the Carter administration proposed a small cut in federal spending for school meals, who stood up to protest? Kellogg’s, Sunkist, Chiquita brands, Archer Daniels Midland, and Keebler, were among the loudest voices. Recently the Navy decided that Lockheed’s P3C anti-submarine aircraft was not worth the money and canceled it’s planned purchase. Lockheed, along with two of the most vocal congressional opponents of big spending, John Russo and Barry Goldwater Jr, appealed to President Reagan and he approved the purchase of 26 planes at a cost of 1.6 billion dollars. That will show up in the budget as a defense expenditure, but it will be a business subside as surely as the Chrysler bail out.”
Speaker 1: 11:11 Now, many, many like instances are cited by Boaz, but let me give a few more. Deregulation for example, of trucking and other things. And, Boaz points out that industry’s go in and convince members of congress and often the public, that the free market can not work, and so federal help is needed.
Speaker 1: 11:45 To quote, “The particular impact of regulation is illustrated by a story told by NAACP Chief Benjamin Hooks. Hooks once bought a donut shop in Memphis, from man who had owned it for 25 years. When Hooks bought it, he had to make it conform to all the health and safety codes that had been created since the shop was built. In those 25 years they had passed all kinds of laws he recalls. You had to have separate restrooms for men and women. You had to have rat proof walls and everything on God’s earth, we were hit with all those regulations and they cost us 35 thousand dollars. We had to close the shop. The point is clear, potential entrepreneurs without much money, particularly men, women, and minorities, are the ones kept out of business by regulation. We have made the business world a closed preserve guarded by federal regulators earnestly protecting us from unreliable new comers.”
Speaker 1: 12:58 He goes on then to speak of the forest service. “The largest item in this category is the forest service, which regulates timber production and the wood using industry’s by maintaining government ownership and control of large portions of American forestland. Government ownership is led to what environmentalists Garrett Hardin, calls the tragedy of the commons, and which since no user has an incentive to protect the future value of the forest. Everyone tries to extract as much as possible, as fast as possible. This has created today’s severe wood shortage. Transferring government forest to private ownership, perhaps to groups like the Sierra Club, would result in more efficient and rational decision making.”
Speaker 1: 13:47 Now, I wouldn’t agree with the Sierra Club, but I don’t think even the Sierra Club could be much worse than the federal government in handling the forests. For example, here’s another item. “Where the agency has been effective in is increasing the cost of automobiles and adding to the burden of American manufacturers. This is the NHTSA. One of the agencies own study showed that NHTSA rules had almost destroyed the Chrysler corporation, until former administrator Joan Claybrook, ordered the study redone to come up with different conclusions.
Speaker 1: 14:38 Another item. In the name of protecting private pension plans, the act. This is the employees retirement income security act. Has raised their overhead tremendously and actually destroyed a large number of private pension plans. Well, it’s tempting to go and on, and cite a number of other examples … the postal service, the department of education, and so on and on. But, the point he makes in all of these, the real constituency is not the poor, they’re not the real beneficiaries. It is the administrators. Let me cite his comments about poverty programs.
Speaker 1: 15:41 I quote, “Finally, it must be understood that these programs have very little to do with the alleviation of poverty. In many cases the powerful business and union groups that close off the economic system through cartelizing regulation, minimum wage loss, and the like realize that the poor can not simply be kept from working and left to starve. That would be a prescription for revolution. So, they support social welfare legislation to keep the same people they have shut out of the economic system from revolting. Not only does such legislation divert attention from the real aims of those sponsoring it, it helps to build a powerful political machine. Such handouts don’t alleviate poverty however. Poverty is more a state of mind than an economic condition. It has to do with hope or the lack of it. Plenty of college graduates and other young people live on income wells below the poverty level.”
Speaker 1: 16:43 “They don’t consider themselves poverty stricken because they see their present jobs as the first step to a career. It is the lack of hope that has spared any finding steady work that characterizes poverty.”
Speaker 1: 17:01 Now that’s an exceptionally good point which he does develop. And today, for great numbers of minority groups and for the lower classes, we are cutting off hope by our over regulations and our destruction of the free market.
Speaker 1: 17:25 Well, the defense budget too, he touches on very briefly. And, let me quote one item. “Some 70%, 70% of our defense budget goes to maintain collective security agreements with other countries. Primarily in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. There are two problems with this. The most obvious is that American tax payers are subsidizing the defense of wealthy countries like Japan and West Germany. Our commitment to Western Europe for example, some 100 billion out of a total 1983 outlay of 216 billion, is the second largest item in the entire federal budget, exceeded only by social security. It is larger than what we spend on education, health, transportation, justice, or even on the defense of the United States itself.”
Speaker 1: 18:38 Now, not only are we not defending ourselves, but we are giving money to these foreign governments to use their own national defense, which means they take their defense money and use it to build plants that compete with our automobile industry and other industry’s. This is insanity. All this was from Inquiry or Inquiry for April 12, 1982, and this issue is obtainable, I trust, form the Libertarian Review Foundation, 1320 G Street Southeast, Washington D.C., 20003, for a dollar and a half. I commend it to your attention.
Speaker 1: 19:45 Well, just a little item now before we abandon the economic and political scene. One of the books I read recently was a collection of studies edited by William L. Blackwell, entitled Russian Economic Development, from Peter the Great to Stalling, the book is not now in print. But, we are so used to thinking in terms of stereotypes that very often these mislead us seriously. One of the interesting items is about billionaire Surfs in Soros Russia, billionaire surfs, yes. All a Surf had to do was to, if he were not needed on the local estate of a nobleman, was to get permission and go to a city. And in return for a certain amount of what he made, he was free to do as he pleased.
Speaker 1: 21:01 And, a number of Surfs did precisely this and became very wealthy. Let me quote from page 154, “The founder of what became one of the great industrial fortunes in Moscow, was Fyodor Alekseevich [Gochgov 00:21:19], an all brook paying Surf who was permitted by his master to migrate to the city at the end of the 18th century, that’s the end of the 1700’s, to set up a weaving shop. In less than three decades he had developed one of the largest [inaudible 00:21:35] factory’s in Russia and had put up the small fortune necessary to buy himself and his family out of [Surftan 00:21:42]. Fyodor Gochgov’s devotion to business was surpassed by his loyalty to the community, which he had joined, and of which he remained one of the leaders until his political exile in the repression of the last years of the Reign of Nicholas the First. He joined a group of the old believers.”
Speaker 1: 22:03 “Devout in his belief, he was content to retain his beard and peasant overcoat, and an essentially old Russian religious and personal life. His factory’s he viewed as congregations of the faithful, and at schools as much as business enterprises. In 1825 he transferred to his sons, who had been trained in the business, the control of his factory’s.”
Speaker 1: 22:30 Now, you may recall in, I believe, the first volume of the institutes of biblical law, I dealt with slavery in the Caucasus. The bitter protest the slaves launched against the Czar when they were freed. Because, the slaves were better off with their masters. They had all kinds of immunities, which the masters did not have. Being subject to taxation, and so on and so forth. So the slaves were the wealthy men and their owners were poor. It was an ironic fact. The slave owners greeted the freedom, the abolition of slavery, and the slaves protested bitterly.
Speaker 1: 23:28 Now I’m going to an older book of 1972, Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race, Alfred Rosenberg a Nazi Ideology. Just about every book that comes out, a serious study on national socialism and Hitler, I have been purchasing for some years, or at the very least, borrowing and reading. The subject is of tremendous interest to me, because I believe it is an area of more dishonesty and lies than almost any area of reporting in history in the modern world, in the 20th century. We simply are not told the truth about national socialism. If we were told the truth, it would make too clear what we ourselves are today.
Speaker 1: 24:33 Now, I could talk for a week on the mythology concerning national socialism, but let me just touch on a few points. Rosenberg’s key work was his myth of the 20th century. This was the philosophy of national socialism. I recall all the time I was a university student and that was during the 30s, this book was regularly damned by the left wing at the university, but no one called attention to the key fact in the title. Let’s begin with this fact. The national socialist were Marxists. They were Marxists. Now, the important thing to realize and this is not original with me, it has been developed and written up in some scholarly monographs. There is a distinction between Marxism and Communism. Marxism is the philosophical position. Communism is the political and economic stance.
Speaker 1: 25:59 Now, Marxism is radically cynical. Communism is for the true believers in an atheistic world salvation. Marxism believes in nothing except it’s own operation. Now, Marxist writers of attacked existentialism bitterly because, they recognized it is a logical conclusion to which Marxism leads, but they do not want an operative existentialism that leaves people cynical of everything. The Marxist thinker wants the masses to believe in the Marxist utopia, while himself believing an ultimate skepticism about everything. This is why Alfred Rosenberg, as a national socialist, developed his thesis, The Myth of the Master Race, The Myth of the 20th Century. The whole point of national socialism was, how can we make this radical cynicism operative?
Speaker 1: 27:18 Man today is not an internationalist as the older Marxists want to believe. The soviet experiment Rosenberg felt, is a failure, because they are trying to force internationalism on simple folk who are not internationalism, they are nationalists. And, even more they often have very strong local loyalties. And so, lets add the national socialism, and that will appeal to people. Moreover, people are wedded to the old forums, so lets retain the forum of private property, the forum of religion to a degree, the forums of the old order while emptying them of all content. So that a man will own his house on paper but it will be totally controlled, regulated, and taxed to the point where he’s paying a high rent to live in his supposedly own home.
Speaker 1: 28:30 Thus, under the facade of private ownership, national socialism effected a Marxist revolution. Now this is what we’re getting, the same thing. We are a nationalist, socialist, country today. We don’t own our homes, the law according to the Supreme Court decisions has made clear that we do not, and a couple of volumes have been published, I believe, by the University of Virginia Press, sometime perhaps I’ll deal with them. Or maybe I have, I don’t remember at the moment.
Speaker 1: 29:07 On the fact that the Supreme Court more than a century ago revived the language of feudalism to make us feudal serves living under the overlord, the United States, Jonathan Hughes was the writer of those. Alright, to proceed. National socialism therefore, invented The Myth of the 20th Century of the Master Race. A good way to flatter the Germans. And, the Nazi leaders regarded the average German as stupid, and someone to be exploited. We know that Hitler had nothing for example, against the Jews, he had to have a scapegoat, so he picked on the Jews.
Speaker 1: 30:02 He was very upset personally, we know this from his biographers, when he heard what Goebbels was doing to the Jews, because for him it was a political stance. Now, this is important for us to realize. Oh, by the way on this master race bit, Hitler was ready to destroy the German people at the end and virtually did, came close to doing it. If Hitler having realized the futility of the war, had made a peace and knew there was no hope of anything say, unconditional surrender, with the allies before the Soviet Union marched into East Germany, he could have preserved the German nation, the German people. But, Hitler said, and I’m quoting from Cecil’s book, “If the war is lost, the people too are lost. It is not necessary to pay attention to the basis required by the German people who are even the most primitive further existence. For they have shown themselves to be the weaker and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger Eastern peoples.”
Speaker 1: 31:40 Do you get the implications of that? Hitler was saying, I’m going to let the Soviet Union win, they’re Marxists after all, and they’re the stronger people. The Germans have proved to be a failure. So, let them perish. That’s how much concern Hitler had for the German people. Hitler thought no more of the Germans than he did the Jews, they were both there to be used and if they stood in his way, to be destroyed. Moreover, Hitler’s one faith, and he was a religious man, was in science. And all the Nazi leaders were dedicated to making sense, the religion of man in the future.
Speaker 1: 32:42 There were plans to create a huge city which would be a center of scientific research. A center from whence they could go forth developing technology, developing theories, ideas, to command the world through science. This is why the German universities went overboard for Hitler. Here was the man of their dreams, here was the man that was going to give science it’s rightful position, and see to the reordering of all life in terms of science. Then indeed, they would have scientific socialism and mankind would not be ruled by the mythologies of religion or race or anything else. Because, Nazi philosophy was very clear, race was the myth that they were going to use in the 20th century. Religion was not important enough any longer to serve as the current myth to browse the people.
Speaker 1: 34:00 Let’s use race. I submit that we are no different today from Nazi German, and they then, almost any country you choose to name in the world. The nations of the world have no religious faith. They aren’t national socialists, including the Soviet Union now. They are all dedicated to one thing, their own power, and their own existence. It is nothing for them to lie to the people and to mislead them. They are going to use the forums of freedom while working against freedom. In every one of these church and state cases that I’ve been in, never once has the state been ready to admit that religious freedom is an issue.
Speaker 1: 35:02 On the contrary, they are indignant about it. It’s a purely technical matter. This or that regulation, which is a very harmless one they assure us, is not being met. They are the sole of reason and we are irrational and unreasonable. So, we have today, everything that Nazi Germany had and then some. We have gained a power over the people that the Nazi’s never fully obtained. We are creating our own myths and our days, the myth of equality, and the myth of democracy. Because, never has the world been less democratic and at the same time, more talk about democracy. Some years ago an important book was published which gained too little attention. It was printed in this country in 1955, it’s first printing anywhere and published by Henry Regnery, never reprinted it.
Speaker 1: 36:35 The author was Lord Percy of Newcastle, and the title, The Heresy of Democracy: A Study in the History of Government. The Heresy of Democracy is an exceptionally fine book. If I had the funds, I think reprint it. The whole point is that the Heresy involved is the Heresy of vox populi, vox day, the voice of the people is the voice of God. Democracy says that the people must prevail and whatever the people want, that is the truth. If the people want all Christians, or all Jews, or all Yankees, or all Southerners, all whites, or all blacks, executed or discriminated against, that’s the truth for the day. And, a Democracy refuses to recognize any law over the law, any God over man. It is interesting that Lord Percy quotes Wellhausen.
Speaker 1: 38:06 Wellhausen was the greatest of the German old testament scholars. Every modernist seminary in this country is teaching the Graf-Wellhausen theory concerning the Pentateuch [gartara 00:38:23], which reduces it to nonsense. Even your so called reformed and Evangelical seminaries, are heavily under the influence of Wellhausen, even as they are trying to combat him, and some of them have surrendered to him. Now, Wellhausen in effect denied the veracity of scripture. He reduced it to myth. The composition of the Torah or Pentateuch was reduced to four different strands by four different schools of writers. It had no relation of course to Moses, supposedly. And, the net result was that if you really believed in the veracity of scripture and the God it portrays, you were naive and unsophisticated.
Speaker 1: 39:39 All that was left of it was a social movement by a man over the centuries which resulted in certain types of thinking. Now, Lord Percy quotes Wellhausen thus, “We must acknowledge that the nation is more certainly created by God than the church, and that God works more powerfully in the history of nations, then in church history.” Well, as Lord Percy says, it was just a step from Wellhausen to the Hitler youth. After all, if your God is only a force in history, and if your God has no law and you reduce the law of God the Torah to rubble, then where does law appear? Why on the place where the maximum force in history is concentrated, the state. The state therefore becomes the source of law.
Speaker 1: 40:55 The state becomes the source of right and wrong. And, as Nazi political philosophy very quickly said, there is no law above the state. And of course, Oliver Wendell Holmes made the same kind of statement in American history. Law is not a logic, it’s only experience, the experience of a people. Right and wrong represent only the experience of a people in their decisions. Very early in the days of the New Deal, or perhaps it was earlier, I don’t recall now, Holmes was seated at a Washington banquet next to a labor leader who upbraided him for his shift from being anti-labor to pro-labor. And Holmes was very amused and rebuked the man. He told him he was very naive, that in the 20s an anti-labor position represented the will of the people. In the 30s, a pro-labor position again, represented the will of the people. And for Holmes, there was no right nor wrong beyond that.
Speaker 1: 42:25 Now, that’s Nazism. It’s the same philosophy in action. Well, for the proponents of democracy, there is no law above man and when you have no law above man, you have created a tyranny. Because, the will of the state, the will of democracy, becomes then, the only law. There’s an excellent sentence on that and Lord Percy, [“Amera 00:43:05] breaker of the law like Fredrick the Great, may always be saved. But there is not salvation for the denier’s of law.” And what you have today is a denial of the law in church and state and on the streets. People are against any higher law and they regard the idea that there’s an absolute right and wrong that binds them.
Speaker 1: 43:49 The state is absolute. As Vichinksy said in 1938, and I quote, “There isn’t can’t be no place for freedom of speech for the foes of socialism. Every sort of attempt on their part to use to the detriment of the state, that is to the detriment of all the workers the freedom granted to the workers, must be classified as a counter revolutionary crime.” And so the president says, If Bob Jones University doesn’t agree with us on race, so much the worse for Bob Jones University. There is freedom only for those that agree with public policy. And that’s not freedom, that’s tyranny. I don’t agree with Bob Jones, in fact, I’m not welcome on the campus of Bob Jones, because of my particular doctrinal position.
Speaker 1: 44:43 But, I believe in the freedom for Bob Jones University to operate according to their religious convictions. You see, in terms of democratic thinking, the idea of a constitution is essentially repugnant. A constitution says, there is something that is valid for all time. Now we have become democratic, the constitution today is what the Supreme Court says it is, totally. It is used with such license as the court chooses to exercise to express the popular will of the moment. And as a result we have, the state now as God walking on earth. We have a situation in which, a doctrine of political infallibility is asserted. And Lord Percy does speak on the doctrine of political infallibility. And, we are required to sacrifice to the state, not to God.
Speaker 1: 46:04 Well, Lord Percy has written an excellent book, one that does need reprinting. Let me just quote from the subtitle and the first two sentences of his last chapter titled, The Choice. “The Fundamental Issue of Belief, the recreation of human nature, there is one final word to be said among all the free worlds political assets of belief and responsibility. The greatest is the belief which is, beyond politics. The belief in the recreation of human nature.” And so the choice he says is essentially between what the Soviet Union represents and what Christ represents. Well, now to go on to something else, also generally related to what we have been discussing, and I have passed over some other things to turn to this.
Speaker 1: 47:34 Again, it’s from an older book that I picked up because, it is in line with the general subject that I’ve been discussing today. It’s a book published by the Viking Press in New York in 1970, by Wilfrid Blunt, B-L-U-N-T, The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria. Now, this book is of interest because, here we have the world of art and of politics, coming together to give us the dream world of modern man. The difference is that we have in Ludwig a Monarch. Today we have it in the modern socialist or democratic state. Ludwig was a man who built that remarkable castle that overlooks the rhyne, The Fairy Tale Castle, you’ve probably seen pictures of it somewhere. It’s like something dreamed up for a [Ocverian 00:49:00] Opera set, or a Hollywood set, and the entire castle, he barely lived in, it was more a place to come and dream in from time to time.
Speaker 1: 49:16 He virtually bankrupted Bavaria building that castle. But, he withdrew into this dream world. For him, the real world was the world of Vockner, whom he helped and financed. The real world was also his castles, and so as Blunt says, “For him the theater and his castles were more than an illusory world into which he withdrew in protest, against the bushwa world which showed no understanding of him. They were his very life in which dream and reality were blended and history lived again, not merely on stage. Here the King acted with an extreme skill and energy which he completely lacked in political matters. In no way did he ruin the state treasury by his undertakings, as is often alleged, but paid everything out of his own private purse. But, when the privy purse ran heavily into debt and building had to stop, the Kings life lost it’s purpose.”
Speaker 1: 50:36 Now, modern politics is based on the same kind of dreams, not Voknerian dreams like Ludwig’s, but dreams which have no relationship to reality. Trying to make a man or to remake out of man, something that the planners imagined he can be. Trying to reorganize society from top to bottom in terms of a plan. This is simply a more sophisticated version of what Ludwig the second represented. It is interesting to note, rather ironic also, that Ludwig was a homosexual. He also is called insane, whatever that may mean, I’m not one that believes in the concept of insanity as it is usually discussed. Because, insanity is simply a refusal to face up to reality.
Speaker 1: 51:49 It’s a deliberate flight from reality. Some years ago someone who spent some time in various of our mental institutions as a supposed case, reported on the conversations of the people. They were running away from life. They didn’t want to get so sick that they had to be restrained, nor well enough to be released, and they would sit down and discuss the various institutions they stayed in, as though they were resorts that a person visited. The mentally sick are simply people who don’t want reality and we’ve made it possible for them to run away from it. Well, defining insanity as a flight from reality, we’d have to say, Washington DC is peopled by the insane.
Speaker 1: 52:51 Our bureaucracy, a very large number of our politicians, a very large number of our men in the white house are insane, in that they do not want to face up to reality. They prefer to have their dream regarded as a reality and then to force man to conform to it. In that sense, they’re all like the men in Greek myth, Procrustes, who operated then in, and as the Wayfarers came, they were welcome, provided they matched his bed. If they were too long, their feet were sawed off. If they were not long enough, they were stretched to meet the bed. Now, this is exactly the methodology of politics today. The politics of insanity. And of course, our Ludwig financed the arts as the modern state does, to prove that it is cultured, and nowhere is more made of culture than in the USSR.
Speaker 1: 54:13 Every crossroads, town, and city, has to have it’s opera house, to make it clear that the Soviet Union is the great bulwark of culture, the most civilized people in the world.
Speaker 1: 54:34 Ludwig once, by the way, had a horse as a dinner guest, so he operated in better company than some of our politicians today. Well, our time is drawing to a close. The material I’ve dealt with is somewhat grim, at points. But remember this, these men are crazy, and if we’re not, everything’s in our favor. They’re gonna destroy themselves sooner or later. Perhaps unfortunately, others with them. But, they’re finished. Time is running out for these people all over the world, in the Soviet Union and in Washington. Now, we need to be alert and active. We need to be studying and thinking, preparing ourselves for reconstruction, Christian reconstruction, biblical reconstruction.
Speaker 1: 55:46 We need to be electing men who can pick up the pieces and carry on. Men who know the score, who know what sound money is, for example. And men who are capable of honest politics. Because, the day is coming when they are the ones who have to take over the reigns and who will take over the reigns.
Speaker 1: 56:16 A few years ago I had a delightful afternoon at Sacramento with Bill Richardson, I was speaking as was Gary North the same day, to the state senators on the economic outlook. These were men, with one exception, all totally to the left, and that was surprising how badly scared they all were of the economic outlook. I commented on some of their private question to me after the meeting, to Bill Richardson in his office, and he laughed. And he said, “Rush, the true blue liberals are few and far between. They’re mouthing the same old policies, but these men up here all have battled diarrhea, they’re scared, and they’re running scared.”
Speaker 1: 57:23 Now, we need to put men of courage up there at the top, who can defeat these men. Well, more next time on some other things, possibly I’ll come back to something I touched on, the religion of equality, the myth of equality. Which, we have substituted for Alfred Rosenberg’s myth of the 20th century. And with since World War two, has been our thesis for our National Socialism. It’s been good to be with you, thank you for listening.

Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder
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