The Easy Chair: Talks & Round Table Discussions

Episode 18

Nuclear Energy and Weapons; Chalcedon Activities; Zaire; Hitler; Castro; Equality; Indians; Poetry

Transcript:

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:03 This is R.J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair Talk number 18, May 10, 1982. First, a few things before we get to the main subjects for our discussion today. [Byron Staff 00:00:21] wrote a very gracious note and asked if I could mention some good books concerning nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Well, I think that is a very appropriate request in view of what 60 Minutes gave us last night. The scenario portrayed by 60 Minutes would have the total devastation of cities, the possibility of the total destruction of life as a result of nuclear weapons. The sad fact is that they interviewed a federal agent in charge of civilian defense, the head of FEMA, who agreed with a picture of these radicals.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:16 Let me cite also something that U.S. Senator Alan Cranston in his report to Californians April 1982 has to say. He sees the fulfillment of a vision in the demonstrations against nuclear buildups. He says, and I quote, “The vast majority of these people are not pacifists, nor do they have any sympathy for totalitarian political systems. They are people who love their country and want it secure and habitable. They are people who know that 30 years of competition for more and more deadly nuclear weapons has not given us greater security. Instead, we are in greater danger now than at any time in history. American and Soviet arsenals, if fired in an all out nuclear war could exterminate the human race.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:15 Jonathan Schell, in a major book due out this month, describes what would follow. “An absolute and eternal darkness in which no nation, no society, no ideology will remain. In which never again will a child be born. In which never again will human beings appear on the earth and there will be no one to remember that they ever did.” So on in that vein. The only way to describe that is as nonsense. Beginning with his statement, of course, that these demonstrators have no love of totalitarian regimes. I think the best book on nuclear energy is the one written by Dr. Petr, P-E-T-R, Beckmann, B as in boy, E-C-K-M-A-N-N, The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear. This is available softbound for $5.95. Write to the Golem Press, G-O-L-E-M, Box 1342 Boulder, B-O-U-L-D-E-R, Colorado, 80306.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:40 You might mention that I recommended the book. Dr. Beckmann knows me. Also, I would suggest that you subscribe to his monthly report, Access to Energy, which costs $22 a year. Just send in to the same address $22 for Access to Energy. It will keep you informed on what’s happening in the world of energy. In the supplement to the May 1982 report, Access to Energy, Dr. Beckmann has this to say, and I’m quoting only a little bit of this supplement. Now, before I do, the insanity of the exaggerations concerning nuclear power are tremendous. I’ve actually heard people say that if a bomb hits San Francisco, which is at least 150 miles west of us, a little southwest, it would wipe out everything up here in the mountains. Now, let’s listen to Dr. Beckmann, who by the way is a professor emeritus, a scientist, at the University of Colorado.

R.J. Rushdoony: 05:09 “Is it not true that each super power has enough nuclear weapons to kill all members of mankind several times over? Yes, and the same is true for kitchen knives. But a single nuclear bomb can wipe out a whole city. No, it can’t. You would need 438 megaton bombs, the power of 22,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs to destroy Los Angeles and none of them could be wasted on pulverizing the rubble or you would need more. Then how come Hiroshima and Nagasaki were each destroyed by a single bomb? They were not. Earth covered backyard shelters were undamaged at 100 yards from ground zero. The day after the blast, the bridges were open to traffic. The second day, trains were operating. And the third day, some street cars resumed service. The people in the two cities had neither warning, nor basements. Yet, in Dresden, where they had both about as many were killed in the air raid of 13 February, 1945 as in Nagasaki.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 06:26 That was with conventional weapons, by the way. “But the Hiroshima bomb was 1,000 times less powerful than the H-bomb used in today’s warheads. The distance of equal destruction varies as the third root of the released energy. 1,000 times more powerful means the same destruction at 10 times the distance. An earth covered shelter would be undamaged at 1,000 yards from ground zero and a wooden house, as above … ” There’s a picture of one in Hiroshima. “Would be comparably damaged at a distance of 10 miles, rather than one mile. Grim, but not the end of the world. But the radiation from nuclear bombs would leave the earth a radioactive inferno for decades and the survivors would die of cancer, leaving genetically damaged offspring. This paradoxically is wishful thinking. If it were so, no one would contemplate nuclear war. In fact, only a few hundred of Hiroshima’s 70,000 dead were victims of radioactivity, and no genetic damage could be detected against the normal background among survivors, though they and even their chromosomes have been examined with extraordinarily thoroughness for decades.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 08:05 Now, I could go on and cite more, but you get the idea. I used to know, he passed away recently, one of the American radiologists who had charge of studying the aftermath of Hiroshima. He told me flat out that contrary to the extensive propaganda, they found no correlation between any kind of diseases and the atomic bomb. The only thing they detected was a slightly higher rate of leukemia, but it was not significant and there was no way of saying this very slight difference is traceable to the bomb. The reports you get about the higher incident of a variety of diseases since the bomb was dropped are nonsense. If you take your high school or college class album, your yearbook, and go through, you will find a tremendously higher incidence of diseases now than when you went to that school. Does it mean that going to that particular school from once you graduated was hazardous to your health? Not at all.

R.J. Rushdoony: 09:38 What it means is that all of you are growing older and you are naturally heirs to the disabilities of age. Well, that’s the situation with the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To make a great deal of those facts is ridiculous and it is fraudulent. Well, another question. This one I thought of ducking. It’s from Keenan Williams asking me to take a little time, and 15 minutes was his suggestion, to review what [Calsedon 00:10:26] is doing and what is forthcoming. Well, how shall I answer that question? We’re doing what the income allows us to do. That’s it. We’re working hard, every one of us, and we’re all overworked. Last week, in a seven day span I spoke four times. On the eighth day, I spoke again. I did quite a bit of writing. I was busy with visitors. Three men, one of them head of a corporation, who were involved in mining who came to see me to talk about some matters of Christian reconstruction.

R.J. Rushdoony: 11:24 The right-hand man of one of the more prominent and better known people in this country was here, a university president. Two young men who were involved in a group that has a campus ministry on almost every campus in the United States. They want me to speak to their campus workers. Three days, six hours a day this summer to train them. I did a few other things, but we won’t go into that. Douglas Kelley was very busy and he spent some of the time with some of these men also. My son Mark was going night and day. Charlies Wagner, who is right here taping, is going steadily trying to get these tapes out and keep up with the work. Plus, all the computer work together with Ken [Thurston 00:12:31] that our ministry involves and the mail-outs involve. The income is what is the gage of what we can do. Last years was our best year yet. Our fiscal year ended on January the 31st.

R.J. Rushdoony: 12:55 But, with inflation, our costs have gone up dramatically and we’re feeling the effect of it. Everything costs more. We’re going to have a journal to mail out very shortly, the first one under the editorship of Douglas Kelley, and it’s an excellent issue. The next one is going to be the best we’ve ever had. Really, tremendous. I’ll tell you more about it at a later date. But, to get those journals to us, the trucking costs are 40 cents to 44 cents each. Then, the mailer that we mail them out in costs about a quarter. Add the postage to that and we’ve spent a dollar. That’s apart from the cost of publishing the journal and the cost of paying the writers and so on. This is the kind of thing that’s hurting us. Even with better receipts, we’re having problems and so far we’ve paid off all our bills at the first of every month and all the staff members. Then Mark and I sit around and wait for the income to come before we pay ourselves. I pay off Mark first and then I wait. That’s the situation.

R.J. Rushdoony: 14:33 What are we planning to do? Well, we have a lot of plans. We’d like to establish a study center here. Now, I told you the kind of people who’ve been coming. This is the kind of thing that goes on all the time. The fact is, we try to keep the visitors down to those who we feel we can help, those who have something important to do, and to make our time count. It isn’t that we don’t enjoy seeing people, but there’s no way we can cope with our work and take care of steady stream of people. All right. We need funds to build a study and research center, a conference center, because we have requests from all segments; teachers, businessmen, ministers, and so on, to set up conferences, to have an operation going. We have one conference now here in Seattle and the results are tremendous. That conference will be held next week Saturday. The only way we can put that one on is because Clint and Elizabeth Miller take care of all the work and they underwrite the expenses as well.

R.J. Rushdoony: 16:02 The results of those conferences are very, very important in Christian reconstruction. We need a great deal of funding to do these things, but frankly it isn’t anywhere in sight. That leads me, and this is why I didn’t really want to get into this subject, there are people out there who could finance us and many other groups. As a matter of fact, we have been helping new groups get started ourselves. Calsedon pays for my services when I go to trials. I’ll be flying out tomorrow morning. In fact, I’ll leave the house here at 4:30 in the morning to be a witness in a trial in Texas. This costs money. It has cost us in the past five years tens of thousands of dollars. But the poor parents, or churches, or Christian school who are on trial, the cost to them is fearful too. We’re going to soon help set up another group. In fact, we have been instrumental in raising $25,000 for them already. I sometimes do pretty well raising money for other groups, but I don’t know how to hassle for money for Calsedon.

R.J. Rushdoony: 17:43 Well, one of our problems today is this. Let me give two illustrations and then leave this subject. Some years ago, a very fine man, a man who was truly a great man and one of the giants of American industry, wanted me to go to work for the rest of my life, or the rest of his life probably is the way it would’ve worked out, he is now dead, on a cause he felt very strongly about. I told him that I felt the cause was not worth the effort, that it was a hopeless one. It was geared to trying to salvage an institution, not to deal with ideas and a cause. He was very distressed and annoyed with me, but being a gracious gentleman he never showed it. Although, I did learn he was very distressed that I had turned him down. Now, his problem was that he, one of the most brilliant men of this century in the world of industry, still felt that he did not need advice when it came to the world of ideas and he paid a price for that.

R.J. Rushdoony: 19:20 An intelligence group has told me that his trust is now being used for a social revolution. It’s a sad fact. It runs into hundreds of millions. Another example, in a meeting once a man came up, and I was told later he could’ve financed us, all we wanted to do, without feeling the difference. He said he wanted to set up a think tank and wanted some help from me, which meant go to work for him. I said, “Well, we have a think tank.” “Well, yes. Your ideas are fine and we want to use them, but we want … ” He went on to outline what he wanted. A group of men to write on orders, whatever he felt should be written about so that it could be given mass distribution by him. In other words, I know this type of situation. I’ve encountered it over and over again over the years. A man sets up an institute or a publication or something and he can breeze in and out and say, “Let’s write on this today. Stop everything and go to work on this.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 20:43 “Well, we’re working on something you told us to do three weeks ago.” “Well, drop it. I’m not interested in that now.” That kind of situation. Well, as it developed, he also was interested in political action. Primarily, a think tank towards political action. I said, “Well, there are some excellent political action groups and some are turning out exceptionally good papers.” I mentioned Howard Phillips and conservative caucus, in particular, and then referred to a few other groups. But what developed was that he wanted one that he could control. Now, I’m not trying to say that it was an ego trip for him, because I would be doing that man, I think, an injustice. I believe he too now is dead. But, it was summed up in a statement that if you want a thing done right, you do it yourself. Well, that isn’t entirely true. If you want a thing done that you are an expert at and a specialist in, then you can do it best. But you have to delegate things otherwise.

R.J. Rushdoony: 22:19 Our problem today is that we have a great many people, both in the world of ideas, and the world of the professions, and the world of political action, and a great deal else who will not delegate anything. They want to reinvent the wheel because they think they can do it better. I think this is one of the great handicaps that we face as Christians and conservatives; we are unwilling to work with others. Well, onto other matters, having settled that with regard to the future of Calsedon. It’s wide open, let me add. If we have the money, there’s a great deal we can do, a great deal. We have people all over the world who want to come and do some studying with us to go back and to put into effect their reconstructionist ideas. Now, onto a couple of little items before we deal more extensively with others.

R.J. Rushdoony: 23:41 I was interested in this little item that Zaire’s President, Mobutu Sese Seko was here from Africa recently, and he and his entourage of 80 people spent about $2 million visiting New York and Florida’s Disney World. But meanwhile, his country owes the United States about $200,000 interest on a loan. That interest was due a year ago. Well, when a Michigan democrat protested against that situation and called Zaire perhaps the most corrupt regime on the face of the continent and said, “Are American tax dollars going to subsidize this?” The administration did not say no. The Reagan administration wants to double aid to that country. A state department staffer contends that connecting Mobutu’s lifestyle to the interest default was like comparing apples and oranges, whatever that means. There you have it. That was the kind of story that candidate Reagan loved to quote, but President Reagan has no time for.

R.J. Rushdoony: 25:20 One more item about the wisdom that emanates from Washington D.C. There’s a tremendous controversy underway and if you are in the cattle business, you know about it. The USDA, the Department of Agriculture is planning to change its meat grading standards, so leaner beef could qualify for its prime and choice grades. This has upset restaurant owners and others very much. It has upset the consumers, Federation of America, American Association of Retired Persons, Consumers Union, National Consumers League, Congress Watch, and Community Nutrition Institute. Why? Why in the world are they upset about the grading? Well, if Congress goes along with this, or the USDA goes through with this rather, and changes the grading, it’s going to have an effect on people. Because now, everything is determined by the USDA grading and the consumer who goes into the market, looks at these gradings, and the grocer prices or the meat market prices things in terms of these gradings.

R.J. Rushdoony: 27:01 Now, if you allow leaner beef to have a higher rating, what you’re going to do is to effect feed lots and the amount of grain fed to these cows. You’re also going to raise the price of leaner beef, which is really better for you and is better quality. As it is now, the prime and choice grades have to be so heavily trimmed before they can get to the market that for every 100 pounds, eight to $16 is lost. You pay for that, an extra eight to $16 for every 100 pounds of meat that are rated prime and choice simply because of fat that has to be cut away. The leaner meat is the better one, but this is what happens with regulations. We don’t trust the free markets, so we pay a price. Well, I see time is racing by and I had so much in mind for today. Remember last time we talked about Hitler? I said something to the effect that Hitler was no different from most politicians.

R.J. Rushdoony: 28:44 I submit that if you went through the speeches of Hitler and put them side-by-side with the speeches of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, unless there would be a reference to race, you wouldn’t know the difference. Do you remember Roosevelt’s speeches and the speeches of other prominent democrats when they were attempting to pack the Supreme Court? Well, most of you weren’t born then. But those of you who were, now listen to what Hitler had to say in a letter to Chancellor Brüning at the end of 1931 about democracy. I quote, “You refuse, as a statesman, to admit that if we come to power legally, we could then break through legality. Herr Chancellor, the fundamental thesis of democracy runs: ‘All power issues from the People.’ The Constitution lays down the ways by which a conception, an idea, and therefore an organization, must gain from the people the legitimation for the realization of its aims. But in the last resort it is the People itself which determines its Constitution. Herr Chancellor, if the German nation once empowers the National Socialist Movement to introduce a Constitution other than that which we have today, then you cannot stop it.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 30:19 In other words, The People, Yes, as Carl Sandburg phrased it some time before. You need to do is to supply the people with the methodology of the day, to command them. Democracy, because it says, the people, yes. The people, the voice of the people is the voice of God. Then whatever the people want is law, and because the German people humiliated by the defeat of World War I, wanted to find a scapegoat. Not to say we were overwhelmed by superior forces, or we were overwhelmed because our strategy was wrong on this or that front. Hitler supplied them with that excuse, the scapegoat, the myth of the 20th century. Rosenberg said it is race, it is nationalism. He had good reason to say so. After all, we had at Versailles and thereafter a tremendous resurgence of nationalism. The Peace Treaty was an explosion of nationalism. Every little people in Central Europe wanting its freedom.

R.J. Rushdoony: 31:52 Nationalism was and is a force. We can’t discount it yet. Consider the Welsh nationalism that is arising, the Scottish nationalism, the Britain, the [Bask 00:32:07], and all the peoples of Central Europe straining for an opportunity to be free, to have their own nationality and language and so on. Rosenberg went a step further with it. We’ll make it race. We’ll make it race. That was the myth. But since 1950, the new myth of the 20th century is equality and every kind of revolutionary movement is fueled with the mythology of equality. Equality is a myth. It is a mathematical term in modern politics that is transferred from mathematics into human relations and it cannot work. You cannot say that two Englishmen and two Negros are equal. It depends on the Englishmen and it depends on the Negros. Besides, even then if you had two sets of saints on both sides, or two geniuses on both sides, it would be meaningless.

R.J. Rushdoony: 33:24 Equality is a mathematical term. It applies to so many pounds of things. To lumber, so much lumber equals so much lumber. It applies to things that are abstractions or very material entities, not to life. Well, Howard Phillip sent me a very interesting and long-winded, very long-winded speech by Castro. This was in April of this year, 1982, the 12th of April I believe. The speech, I can see why they say that he speaks for two-three hours, because this certainly to deliver would take a couple of hours and maybe four. One of the things that he begins by affirming is that change is to come by revolution. Of course, we believe that change comes by the grace of God and by the workings of God in the heart of man. Castro is dedicated to the creation of a new man and the new man is going to be created by revolution. He says, “Man will not see his fellow as his superior or his inferior, but an equal.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 35:10 Religion has always called for sacrifices. Castro says that there must be sacrifices to the revolution, to the state. He insists emphatically that there must be a spirit of discipline and a sacrifice. He is against any kind of inequality. “We will be able to prove,” he says, “That certain grades do not mean that some people are more intelligent than others. We’re going to demonstrate that with work and discipline, revolutionary discipline, all will be equal, all will be able to do the same work. University students, in particular,” he says, “Must be revolutionary.” He affirms and he calls it, “The principle of worthiness.” That principle of worthiness is service to the revolution, so that there is a religious sacrifice that is required of man to the new god, the revolution. He admits that there are problems. “Desperate and anguishing housing problems,” he says.

R.J. Rushdoony: 36:48 He admits that there are inequities that arise, that many of the things that are planned do not turn out well, but the revolution is going to take care of everything, like God. He says, “We must work to further the revolution and for the formation of a communist conscious in our youth. “A truly communist conscious,” he says. We have a religious movement here. It is going to create a new man, a perfect equality among all men, a new conscious, a new mind, and a new kind of thinking which he says is true logical thinking. Let me quote, “Logical-linking is a socialist formula.” It’s he who says linking in this case. “Those who are more capable and who are stronger, and many times the one who has more resistance to pain can earn more. But there’s always a component of inequality in men. Some have more facility for one thing, more ability, more physical strength, more resistance than others. We have to resort to material incentives. It is a need that moving from capitalism to communism imposes on us. That is, that is imposed by the socialist stage.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 38:28 Now, he surrenders his total equality of men and says that there is always a component of inequality, but we must work to lower ourselves to equalize all things. I like this line, “If there is no wealth, there will be few things to distribute.” That’s not a problem. He doesn’t have much to distribute. “The goal,” he says, “Is creating a communist man.” How is he going to create this incentive to make people sacrifice for the revolution? “If man works more merely to earn more, this is a positive attitude, in the sense that it helps and produces more, but it is not a communist attitude.” But, then he goes on to say, “Reality imposes on society its rules and formulas.” He has to play with the idea of incentive. He has to condemn it, but he has to leave the door open to good capitalistic incentive. There must be, of course, an internationalist spirit. This means having a concern for the revolution and so on. Somehow, in discussing the internationalist spirit, he gets into the fact that buildings collapse and what’s wrong with them and so on.

R.J. Rushdoony: 40:17 But a new internationalist spirit is going to correct all these things. Interesting too, he said they issued a call for teachers in Nicaragua and 29,500 teachers responded to the call. No doubt, they were sent out to teach with rifles. Well, it’s quite a speech. But, this is the kind of thing that works in the world today. It worked to bring people to Castro. It is continuing to work in one area after another. But, the reason why it works is men out of envy are ready to bring down those who are more successful than they. Because of that, they are ready to believe in the kind of thing Castro preaches. An interesting fact in Castro’s speech is that he speaks of the free peasant market. He says, “It is a concession due to specific needs. We will have to resolve this.” But then again and again he comes back to it, “There must be a distribution. The free market maintained by the peasants does a great deal to distribute food. The peasant earns a little more there.” Yet, it is capitalistic and he doesn’t like it.

R.J. Rushdoony: 42:05 After all, to recognize that it is a capitalistic market that is helping keep the peasants alive and get food to the market, is a very unhappy fact. Well, he goes on and on. He deals with the fact of how much corruption there is. The revolution did not abolish bribery, but somehow when the new communist man is created, this will eliminate that fact. Another interesting fact is, almost 120,000 Cubans have carried out international missions within the revolutionary armed forces alone. People who say that they’re only a few thousand Cubans who’ve been exported abroad to Africa and elsewhere for revolution are talking nonsense. This is available to the press. Why don’t they feature this fact? 120,000 men from the revolutionary armed forces alone is a considerable army, so that Cuba is an international revolutionary force. Well, there’s more I could say about this, but let’s let Castro go for the time being, if not permanently.

R.J. Rushdoony: 43:44 Now to another subject. Recently, on a trip to Washington I read a very interesting book on American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict by Henry Warner Bowden. It was published by the University of Chicago Press. Bowden is a professor of religion at Rutgers University. He’s a true-blue liberal. It’s an interesting book, but I don’t think he knows much about Indians. Moreover, all he sees basically is cultural genocide on the part of the White man. I wonder if he’s ever been at an Indian mission and spent any time there. I was an Indian missionary, or a missionary to the Indians for eight and a half years. I enjoyed the book. There is some interesting data in it, but as far as an appreciation of Christian missions or of the Indians, it’s a liberal approach to Indians, so he sees what liberal mythology tells him Indians are and he feels badly about the destruction of Indian peoples and cultures.

R.J. Rushdoony: 45:11 Well, in terms of that, I’d like to read something from John Greenway’s book published a few years ago and perhaps it’s still in print. The title is Down Among the Wild Men. It was published in 1972 by Little, Brown and Company for $12.50. Now, Greenway is an interesting character. I believe he’s now retired also. But Greenway had a lot to do with the student movements of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Although, later he joined the voluntary police in Boulder, and with relish, took part in beating off some of the student rioters. His part in it in the early stages was as an expert in folklore and folk music. His work and some of his recordings were very instrumental in stimulating the entire movement of primitivism among students in that era. Of course, when they parted company, they dropped Greenway and his records and music totally.

R.J. Rushdoony: 46:46 Greenway says about the American Indians, and I quote. Now, here is an anthropologist who has lived among Natives the world over. “I have lived among the wildest of the desert people. I’ve also been among aborigines who opted for total integration. Aborigines who taking thought had flipped quietly one family per block into cities where their children possibly, or their grandchildren certainly would be White. The very great majority of vanished aborigines we read about as having been exterminated by murderous settlers disappeared on the latter road, so too did the American Indians. No one who has made a close study of the secret history of the American Indian would credit how massive their integration and subsequent miscegenation with Negros and Whites has been. Selling very well at this moment is a new and entertaining book by that most successful popularizer of romantic archeology, C.W. Ceram, who I am told actually believes that White settlers killed 15 million Indians.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 48:09 “I expect he attributes all deaths of Indians since 1492 to Whites, even if their deaths occurred through heart attack while exerting themselves with scalping knives and tomahawks. Or the aborigines two or three generations of intermarriage with Whites and they are generally lost in the White population, emerging only to win beauty contests and tennis tournaments. No one suffers from the silent melting off of aborigines, except the administrators of Native affairs. One of these latter who strictly warned me not to name him if I expected to get into his reserves again told me he was carrying on his book several thousand aborigines who did not exist, people created neither by God nor the spirits, but by local agencies padding welfare and pension payments. The same fiddle caused endless trouble for American Indian agents in America in the last decades of the 19th century.”

R.J. Rushdoony: 49:16 “There was no way this fellow could get rid of the supernumerary Natives. If he simply honestly and naively corrected the census, shrieks of genocide would roll like thunder halfway around the world to the glassy bevel of the United Nations and Australia might very well be put under mandate to the Republic of Congo. I know the agents of provocation in Australia well and I say in cold as seriousness, they are not nice people. There are some things I could tell you that would harrow up thy soul about this, but I will not. You would not believe me.” Then he goes on to say that the same thing is true in the United States. Well, I can confirm that. Most of the settlers who moved westward progressively were single men, single men. They wanted women and the Indian girls were the available ones. In fact, they made it hard for the surviving Indians, because any girl that you could look at among the Indians without your stomach turning. Now, I’m not trying to be unkind, but that was literally true and that was what an old timer told me. Was grabbed by the White man.

R.J. Rushdoony: 50:48 They had more money. They had more goods. They had everything that was desirable and the Indian girls went for them. As a matter of fact, in California a real problem developed. There was so few Indian girls left when the gold rush was underway, they were all married by the White man. All your old families in this country are likely to have Indian blood somewhere along the line. Now, the surviving Indians are a small handful. I worked on such a reservation, and by the way, I believe the Indians have, on the average, a better IQ than the average White man. Their problem is that religiously their ideas make them backward. That’s the key. Religiously, they do not have the morality to stand out. They do not have a discipline within their family structure. What they had was a tribal discipline. Well, to get back to the Indians. When I was among them, they could tell me of all the old line White families in that county, which of them had an Indian grandmother. The Whites never told me that.

R.J. Rushdoony: 52:28 Now, a White family living, say, in Philadelphia will be proud of its Indian blood. To them, it’s romantic. But those who live close to Indian reservations look down on the Indians as low class and dirty. As a result, they soft pedal that fact. They prefer to forget and they’ll never mention it. I know that one of the best White ranchers in the area where I was, was … I forget now. I think he was half-Indian. Never once did he tell me that. Never once and I was in and out of his home, he was in and out of mine. Living close to the Indians, he wanted to separate himself from them. He was a fine man, but he had advanced in the world and he did not want that association of a lot of people who to him were drunken bums. But the Indians do and they could tell me how they were related to him. The extent to which most Indians have disappeared into White society is tremendous. And if we took a healthy attitude towards the Indians, most of them would very quickly disappear.

R.J. Rushdoony: 54:00 We are keeping the Indians backward with a policy of paternalism which is destructive of them. Well, I want to get onto something else now. Time is running out. I’d like to read three poems in a very, very light vein, which I think are delightful. They’re from a book by Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends. Now, the first one is entitled Early Bird. “Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird. And catch the worm for your breakfast plate. If you’re a bird, be an early early bird. But if you’re a worm, sleep late.” This one, My Rules. “If you want to marry me, here’s what you’ll have to do: You must learn how to make a perfect chicken-dumpling stew. And you must sew my holey socks, and soothe my troubled mind, and develop the knack for scratching my back, and keep my shoes spotlessly shined. And while I rest you must rake up the leaves, and when it is hailing and snowing you must shovel the walk, and be still when I talk, and—hey—where are you going?”

R.J. Rushdoony: 55:51 This last one, which I think fits a lot of people today, especially our liberals who don’t want to hatch out and face the real world. It’s an egg poem, a poem about an egg entitled I Won’t Hatch. “Oh I am a chickie who lives in an egg, but I will not hatch, I will not hatch. The hens they all cackle, the roosters all beg, but I will not hatch, I will not hatch. For I hear all the talk of pollution and war as the people all shout and the airplanes roar, so I’m staying in here where it’s safe and it’s warm, and I will not hatch.” Well, those people who will not hatch are taking to the streets with their anti-nuclear protests, they’re demonstrating outside our nuclear power plants, they will not hatch, they say. The world is going to hatch them willy-nilly. Well, I’ve enjoyed our session together. I’m off tomorrow morning all too early to another trial and I do wish you would be in prayer concerning these trials.

R.J. Rushdoony: 57:42 The voracity of the state and of the federal government against Christians increases. The June mailing, by the way, of the Calsedan Report will have a position paper that I wrote a time ago we haven’t been able to get out until now on religious liberty versus religious toleration. The point I make there is that religious freedom in the United States is dead. Very few people are aware of that fact, but it is dead. We have instead religious toleration. The same thing the Soviet Union has. The only difference is, it’s much narrower in the Soviet Union, but it’s getting narrower here every day. The 1st Amendment was written to end religious toleration and establishment and replace it with religious freedom. We are reversing history now. We have taken the road to totalitarianism. Be in prayer about these things. Well, I’ve enjoyed our time together and I shall look forward to visiting with you again in a couple of weeks. Thank you for listening and God bless you.