Our Threatened Freedom

Have We Forgotten The Fundamentals? (04:07)

R.J. Rushdoony

Transcript:

R.J. Rushdoony: 00:00 Have we forgotten the fundamentals? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom. In a recent issues of Chronicle of Culture, Professor Thomas Lamar recounted the following recent events, and I quote, “Indira Gandhi, while exercising [inaudible 00:00:21] powers, let her son deal with the problem of India’s overpopulation by having police surround movie houses, collect the males, and transport them to sterilization centers. Some 10 million Indians lost their capacity to reproduce. In Indonesia, West Sahara, Iran, and Nicaragua, women gauged out prisoners’ eyes, emasculated them, then gagged them with their genitals,” unquote. Grim and ugly facts, but increasingly commonplace all over the world. When I was a schoolboy, I greatly enjoyed pirate tales like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I knew that such stories dealt with times long gone, and had nothing to do with the present. Times have changed since then.

R.J. Rushdoony: 01:20 Now piracy is commonplace in the Caribbean Sea and in the East Indies. Small ships are regular seized, and all who are aboard are murdered. Recently, a friend gave me a copy of his friend’s logbook, An Around-the-World Voyage on a Small Yacht. It was a strange feeling to read of the precautions to avoid pirates. The world is certainly slipping back into barbarism, not only on the high seas but on our city streets. One writer recently called attention to the chilling taste for violence. This love of violence is apparently among criminals, and also among television and film viewers. So far reaching is this taste for violence, that simple matters of political protest have increasingly courted violent confrontations with fervor and delight.

R.J. Rushdoony: 02:20 Once, not too many years ago, we regarded violence and terrorism as a thing in the past. Hitler was dead, and Stalin too, and supposedly the world was going to evolve to a higher moral level. Quite obviously, we have lost our way, or perhaps we should say the way. Centuries ago, the psalmist said, “Accept the Lord, build the house. They labor in vain that build it. Accept the Lord, keep the city. The watchmen waiteth but in vain.” About 50 years ago, in The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset spoke of the new barbarians as scientists, specialists, and others who believed, quote, “that civilization is there in just the same way as the earth’s crust and the forest primeval,” unquote.

R.J. Rushdoony: 03:19 In other words, the new barbarism assumes that 20 centuries of Christianity, and its accomplishments, are a natural fact, like the air we breathe, rather than a moral and religious fact. We are a part of the new barbarism. If we forget that the fundamentals of our faith are also the fundamentals of our civilization. Freedom is perishing because are neglecting the foundations of freedom. The worldwide retreat into barbarism will not be solved by the politicians. It is a moral and a religious fact, and it calls for a moral and religious answer. This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.