18. Amalek and Violence (Remastered)

Amalek and Violence

R.J. Rushdoony

Our Scripture is Proverbs 4:14-19. We began last week with the study of Amalek and God’s Law concerning Amalek. We shall return to the law as it deals with Amalek next week, but for the present, our subject is, Amalek and Violence, as Solomon in his Proverbs comments on the violence. 

Enter not into the path of the wicked,

And go not in the way of evil men.

Avoid it, pass not by it,

Turn from it, and pass away.

For they sleep not, except they have done mischief;

And their sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall.

For they eat the bread of wickedness,

And drink the wine of violence.

But the path of the just is as the shining light,

That shineth more and more unto the perfect day.

The way of the wicked is as darkness:

They know not at what they stumble.

Proverbs 4:14-19.

We saw last week that the essence of Amalek is its violence, its war against God and therefore its war against man, its desire for violence for the sake of violence, its belief that it can play the role of God in the pseudo-omnipotence of destruction. Our Scripture today gives the comment of a law giver, Solomon, who spoke of the feverish desire for violence on the part of wicked men. He declared that they cannot sleep unless they do violence, it is their life, their joy, to do harm. Unless they do evil, Solomon declared, their sleep is taken away. 

For they eat the bread of wickedness,

And drink the wine of violence.

A very graphic and forceful sentence. Their food is violence; it sustains them, they hunger and thirst after it and work to create it. 

Now, there are some people who would radically disagree with Solomon. In fact, the majority of men today in our universities and in jurisprudence as well, see evil, simply, as displaced righteousness. The attitude is that instead of having evil men, we have basically good men whose very sound impulses are misdirected. Thus, all that’s needed with a basically sound humanity is to redirect their impulses, and the worst thing that you can do to them, of course, is to treat them harshly, because you only misdirect their basically sound impulses further. 

Thus, whether they are criminals or perverts or robbers and looters, their impulses are basically sound and basically healthy, they are merely misdirected. Now, the Biblical point of view, Solomon’s premise, is man’s depravity. The wicked, Solomon declares, enjoy their evil, it is their life and their way of life. A prominent current doctor and psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, with whom I do not agree, has been accurate in stating:

“If we do not start from sound premises we leave the door open to false ones.” ⁱ

A very true conclusion. In fact, if we do not start with sound premises, we leave the door open to very dangerous conclusions. 

Today, as we face the fact of growing violence, it is important for us to have some sound premises concerning it. Biblical premises. For if we do not, we wind up in some very dangerous conclusions. Let me cite now a couple of examples of contemporary violence. These are the more plentiful, repeatable ones. 

The first to quote, this is from a doctor’s report.

“Recently two middle-aged women in Brooklyn on a summer evening were walking on a side street toward one of the larger avenues, after visiting a friend nearby. They intended to take a taxi home. About 250 feet from the avenue, a group of boys came up, crowding the sidewalk. The women drew back to let them pass. The last boy grabbed the right arm of one woman, to take her purse, then knocked her down on the sidewalk and jumped on her again and again. When she was taken to the hospital, it was found that she had a broken shoulder, broken elbow, broken arm, and a compound fracture of her right thighbone, for which an elaborate operation was necessary. She needed three nurses around the clock. And when she recovers, she will have to wear a brace from her hip to her heel and will be permanently crippled, with one leg shorter than the other. In my professional contact with this case, I learned what terrible pain and shock were caused—and that the expenses involved wiped out a family’s savings. There was no sexual connotation to this attack. Since the boy had the pocketbook, there was no reason for pure gain to explain his stomping the woman so mercilessly.

Twenty-five years ago this would have been an exceptional case and would have caused a sensation. Now it did not raise a ripple and was not even reported as news. It happens too often. The boys were never caught; if they had been caught, the authorities would not have known what to do with them. This is today’s violence in pure culture. I have known a number of similar cases. They are as a rule not fully reported, far less solved or resolved. Those who use the fashionable explanation for violence, that it is due to domineering mothers or inadequate ones, to pent-up aggressive instincts or a revolt against early toilet training, do not know the current facts of life in big American cities. They try to reduce ugly social facts to the level of intriguing individual psychological events. In this way they become part of the very decadence in which present-day violence flourishes.” ⁱⁱ

And to cite one more example from the same doctors report: 

“A boy of thirteen was walking home from school in a suburban area. A short distance from the house a car rolled up and several boys jumped out; they attacked and beat him unmercifully, then they jumped back into the car and rolled away. Their victim was taken to the hospital with severe facial lacerations and concussion of the brain. He did NOT know his attackers and had never seen them before.” ⁱⁱⁱ

These are not extreme cases, in fact, they are the more repeatable and printable ones. There is increasingly a greater perversity and a more startling imagination exercised of this kind of violence and depravity. Moreover, increasingly, the young hoodlums who are involved in these cases come from supposedly good homes, permissive homes, which from the modern psychological point of view are ideal homes! On top of that, you must add the fact that, apart from this unorganized, spontaneous, violence there is the planned violence, the rioting, the looting, the demonstrating, the warring against the police. The roots of this, as we saw last week as we studied Amalek, was the desire to be as God, and since man cannot be God in any true senses, in any creative sense, to create goodness, life, righteousness, truth, holiness; he plays at being God with the pseudo-omnipotence of violence and destruction. 

Milton caught this in his Paradise Lost when he has his Satan say:

To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.

(Paradise Lost, I, 262–263).

This means, of course, war against the God of Scripture, and this is the essence of revolutionary violence. We do not realize it today, but the Soviet Union, after gaining its power after the revolution, did repeatedly state that it was at war with God, and it turned its attack on the churches and on Christianity, ‘the war against God.’ They proclaimed, for example, from a proclamation of 1923:

“We have declared war on the denizens of heaven.’”

In 1924, this proclamation: 

“The party cannot tolerate interference by God at critical moments.” 

As a matter of fact, to make sure that God was denied and the Bible disproved - this you will not find in any books on the Soviet Union by our liberal professors. In the mid-twenties, about a year after this declaration of this war on God, they sent an expedition to Africa, a scientific expedition, to capture apes and artificially inseminate the female apes to produce a new race and prove that evolution was true and that the Scripture was a lie. Of course, you can see why that whole expedition has been hushed up by people everywhere, because not only do the scientists of the Soviet Union have no desire to confess that they were completely wrong, but the various scientists around the world who welcomed the experiment have no desire to call attention to it because it was such a failure.

But this war against God was also proclaimed in the area of law in the Soviet Union so that right and wrong as objective values, as objective standards, were abolished. For example, Krylenko the state prosecutor of the Soviet Union said:

“…urged the judges to remember that in the Soviet State their decisions must not be based on whether the prisoner be innocent or guilty, but on the prevailing policy of the Government and the safety of the State.” ^iv

And he wrote a book, Court and Justice, to develop this point of view which is at the heart of Soviet law. In other words, whether a man committed a crime or did not commit a crime, or whether he is actually guilty or not guilty of what he is accused is irrelevant. There is no objective standard of right and wrong, of truth and the lie. Therefore, the prevailing policy of the government and the safety of the state is the criteria. Thus, perversity and violence replace God’s Law and justice.

When men begin to free themselves from God’s Law-order and to manifest their violence, certain elements appear. First of all, violent men, because their violence is a religious act, an expression of their claim to be as God with omnipotence, try to provoke religious awe by means of shock. This means, fresh new acts of violence to provoke fresh shock. The violent feed on this fresh awe or shock. Degenerate hoodlums want a shocked response and they work to get it. Repeatedly I have found over the years that these degenerates like to confess. They will seek out a minister or a priest to confess, not because there is any repentance, but because they enjoy the shock. They delight in the response they get, it feeds a religious aspect of their being. And I have found by investigating that these people are not only telling the truth but they are actually thinking at the same time, “What can I do to step up this which I did?”Acts of incredible perversity of the sort that never get into the press. But they feed on this shock, it makes them feel all the more omnipotent, all the more god like, to have created this shock. And very often if a person whom they are torturing does not respond, they intensify their actions to get that shock, they feed on it.

Second, a very obvious need for fresh shock means a continual stepping up in the intensity of perversity and of violence! Violence, thus, leads to greater violence. This, of course, is contrary to what many are teaching today, “Let them work it out of their system, it leads to a catharsis, they purge themselves. So that if you let them indulge in their violence then they will stop being violent because they will have worked it out of their system.” But violence does not cure itself; it either destroys or is destroyed. It wants continually greater violence to create greater shock and to enjoy what it is doing. 

Third, those liberals and socialists who believe that the answer is a change of environment by legislation or social planning or by means of love are taking, of course, the wrong approach. Rather than the basic character of the person, the responsibility of the individual, they make it the responsibility of society. On the other hand, those pietistic Christians who say that the answer is conversion are simplifying the matter. This is to reduce the problem to a simplistic level. Certainly conversion is necessary, but love, conversion, and a law-order can never be substitutes for one another; each has its place and function. You need a law-order in society at large, you do need love in a family situation and in community relations, you do need conversion and the work of proclaiming the Gospel by the church. Nothing in and of itself is sufficient; the totality is needed. Not one of these things can be considered, therefore, a substitute one for another.

Fourth we must say that it is not surprising today that we have a violent generation. Everything has been done to flout God’s Law-order. We have statist non-Christian education, discipline has given way to permissiveness, the church has replaced the doctrine of regeneration with social revolution. Instead of executing incorrigible criminals, society subsidizes them. A violent generation has been fostered. As a result today, the younger the child, the greater the evil. 

A state educator commented recently to me that the problem with narcotics on the college level is not as great as on the high school level! The younger the child, the greater the problem. And now the expectation is that, before long, the problem will be greater on the junior high school level then on the high school level because each new ‘baby crop’ is reared more and more in terms of this total violence as their basic nature, this self-indulgence. There is an increase in the prevalence of violence as well as its intensity and perversity with each on coming year.

Fifth, we can observe, moreover, that the 1960’s has seen more talk of love and more hatred than perhaps any decade for centuries. Popular music is a very interesting indicator of this. Recently an anthropologist wrote a volume analyzing a great deal of our popular music and its significance. He spoke of the fact that we have:

“The virtual disappearance of idealized romantic love as a guiding principle.”

In other words, he says, twenty years ago, and thirty years ago, talked a great deal, sang a great deal about romantic love. Now, whether one agreed or not with the concept of romantic love, nonetheless, love was genuinely the theme in some fashion of popular music. Today it has disappeared. And when the word ‘love’ appears, it doesn’t normally have reference to love. For example, he cited among the popular tunes of the last decade, the song Careless Love which has no reference, as he points out, to love; it simply has reference to an unexpected pregnancy.

Moreover, he comments concerning the two most popular songs of the past ten years, from Charles Winick:

“One of the most successful phonograph records ever released was Hound Dog, a paean of hostility and a representative early rock and roll number with traditional chord progressions. The Marquis de Sade would have been thrilled by Boots, a more recent favorite. Nancy Sinatra is sure of a wild surge of applause when she grinds her heels into the stage as she triumphantly exults that her boots will ‘walk over you.’” ^v

As he points out, the sure-fire formula for a popular tune today is the expression of concealed and very powerful hatred. All such music, clearly, points to the Marquis de Sade. Thus, it is not surprising that his works, after having been, almost from their conception, banned, are now printed and popular and regarded as very profound. The number and work being written about de Sade as a great philosopher and psychologist are numerous. Violence, thus, is now seen, after the Marquis, as man’s fulfillment. The humanistic remedies, therefore, for violence, are about as effective as putting out fire with gasoline. 

Sixth, we must further point out that as we look around the world we find that societies that breed violence have a phenomenon that’s known as ‘running amok.’ The word is spelled either ‘amok’ or ‘amuck.’ What is ‘running amok?’ Well, until now, ‘running amok’ has been a characteristic of the Malays, the Fuegians, the Melanesians, the Siberians, and some peoples of India. What happens? It is a manic and homicidal condition, we are told, following a state of depression. When these people from a culture with a background of violence face a new environment and problems beyond themselves, and people superior to themselves, their reaction is one of total violence. They go into a trance-like condition and run amok, killing everything in sight with frightening violence, and only with difficulty are they brought down. 

Now a generation brought up permissively and given to tantrums, to violence, and dedicated, because of its humanism, to a belief in its own righteousness, is a generation which has been bred to run amok. It will do so because it is its fulfillment to do so. Amalek is thus very much with us and must be dealt with. Education which breeds Amalek must be replaced with Christian education. Churches which have congregations of Amalekites must be replaced with Christian churches which believe, teach, and apply the whole Word of God. 

The state must become Christian and apply Biblical Law. The permissive family must give way to a Biblical family, and only so can Amalek be destroyed. In 1948, George Orwell, as he wrote his book 1984 saw the future as, “…a boot stamping on a human face, forever.” And the sight of it was one of horror to him and led to his death. But what to Orwell was a horror, became a hope within twenty years, with Nancy Sinatra grinding her boot heels onto the stage as she sang that her boots will walk over you. And all over the United States and all over the world, this tune swept and was welcomed as a vision of delight. Orwell’s horror has now become a popular hope. Amalek is reborn, we shall, therefore, have violence and more and more violence. And the only answer is Christian reconstruction.

Let us pray.

* * *

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee that the government is not in the hands of the government, but in thy hands, that they Word is truth, that even as Solomon declared of old, inspired by thy Spirit, that they who drink this wine of violence and the bread of wickedness shall stumble and fall. That the path of thy people is as the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. So, our Father, we come to thee in this confidence, beseeching thee to strengthen us so that in thy life we may see light. And by thy Law-Word we may establish thy rule, thy Law-order and might progress unto they perfect day. Bless us to this purpose and protect us in thy service, In Jesus' name. Amen. 

* * *

Are there any questions now first of all with respect to our lesson?

What you’re having is, of course, an intensification with each generation of this dedication to violence. So that the academic community finds the college student at war with it. But the high school community is even more violent and is at war with the present college generation. So, they are at war with one another and ultimately against us. So we must, of course, be all the more dedicated to reconstruction.

The generation gap exists today, among those who are in the other camp. In other words, in the Christian community, there is no generation gap because the community as a whole and the Christian family is a unity, and they see things in terms of God’s Word. But, outside the Christian community, where self-interest prevails in terms of an accelerated violence, each generation is at war with the previous generation and with those just above it. 

There was an interesting article on this in Life Magazine some few months ago, and it is now out in paperback form, lately enlarged, about this man who wanted to understand the generational gap, and so he had his nephew staying with him for the summer. His nephew was a high school age, I believe, about seventeen or eighteen, or perhaps a freshman in college. And of course, everything about his uncle, this nephew resented, but the climax of it was when the thirteen year old boy treated the eighteen year old with the same contempt, and regarded him as representing an older generation. In other words, there is no communion possible with those who are citizens of the city of man. So that there is not only a generational gap, but there is a family gap. That is… drifting apart on the part of husbands and wives, no ability to communicate, communication becomes, progressively in the city of man, an impossibility. The ultimate in non-communication is hell where every man lives in total isolation with himself, unable to communicate with anyone else because his existentialism now becomes complete. 

Remember I pointed out when we dealt with existentialism that Sartre says that God has no problem with him; his neighbor is. Because in terms of a systematic existentialism, how can you have any relationship with any other man? You are concerned only with your own being, your own existence. Now, how can we build a bridge from this total self-isolation to another man? This is the problem for Sartre. Well, of course, it’s the problem for our modern existential society. Communication is a problem in an existentialist world. There’s a total breakdown, and the world becomes a hell. So the generation gap? Of course! There is a ‘person gap,’ there’s total alienation, total isolation, every man is an island unto himself.

Yes?

[Audience member] Must we either have an ‘Amalek’ rampant on the earth, or Biblical Law? Can’t we just wind the clock back? ^vi

[Rushdoony] Nobody stands still, and there is no neutral ground. This is, of course, what the majority of the world wants; some kind of neutral ground so they can say, “I’ll step out here and let the issue be fought out by other people, I don’t want to be anti-God or pro-God.” But there is no neutral ground and people are either moving in one direction or the other. So the vast majority that doesn’t want to get involved is actually involved, but not more than just barely. Their attitude is, “We won’t take sides,” but they have already. They’ve taken sides by refusing to make a stand, so they will drift progressively in the other direction. 

The amount of drift that some of these people whom I see occasionally, about once a year, is really appalling. They feel they’re just standing on the sidelines, but each year they tolerate more and more. They have moved without realizing it.

Yes?

[Audience member] Is there really, actually a measurable increase in violence? Is it related to violent playthings like swords or guns? ^vii

[Rushdoony] First of all, there is a per-capita increase in violence to a startling degree. The number of crimes committed per thousand in the population is skyrocketing. So much so that many things that twenty or thirty years ago would have been on the police record are not reported today. For example, the kind of thing I read to you, the case of violence to the middle-aged woman or to the boy. Very often in many cities it’s not reported because it’s useless, they’re just referred to a doctor. And the attitude is, and this is on the part of the police, one of helplessness. “There’s nothing we can do about it, we’ve gotten so many pressing things that it would just involve a lot of book work. If you can give us a lead as to who the person was, alright, then we’ll do something, but we are so overwhelmed with the major crimes which are getting out of hand that we cannot deal with cases like this.”

So, the incidence of violence is very, very great, and the petty things are not the problem. Because you have that kind of plaything for a long time. In fact, right now I could take you into the rural areas of the country where the boys are given a .22 rifle when they enter kindergarten, this is in ranching country, and taught how to shoot and told, “Now you’re a man, you’re starting school so it’s high time you learned how to use a gun.” And in these areas you have the lowest rate of violence because there’s the basic training and discipline and character which is instilled. So, it’s not a question of toys, it’s something much more basic. 

Now, I’m not saying that necessarily I approve of the kind of toys and the like that prevail today, but I’m saying this is trifling to try to ascribe it to simple things like that. It has deeper roots in the basic family patterns, the educational patterns, the cultural pattern of the day which is radical humanism.

Yes?

[Audience member] Aren’t we all subject to fits of anger? ^viii

[Rushdoony] Most people do have moments, there are very few of us who are so mild that we go through life without feeling angry very often, and some of us feel angry once or twice a day. Now, the difference between a mature and a responsible person and an irresponsible person, is the ability to control our feelings, our emotions. A child who has tantrums and is indulged in these tantrums, grows up into an adult who expresses every tantrum in the form of dangerous violence. But most of us learn how to control those things and make them socially useful. So we get angry about something, and instead of having a tantrum, we then, if something can be done, do something concrete about it. In other words, we channel our anger into constructive channels.

Some of the most constructive things in American history have come out of the channeled action of angry men.

Yes?

[Audience member] Can you comment on the violence of these rioters who seem to be violent for no end or purpose.? ^ix

[Rushdoony] The violence of these persons is violence for the sake of violence, it is violence as a religious act. And this is what we are seeing progressively, they want to be violent because it’s their way of proving that they are a kind of superman or God that they claim to be. But the kind of thing that is done progressively is to do something without cause for the sheer pleasure of doing it. This is why so often there are groups that prowl in big cities, seeking an opportunity to perform acts of violence on completely innocent people whom they do not know. Or if they do provoke it, they’ll do it on people they do know, the purpose is to create this kind of shock so that this horror will feed their ego, their desire to play God. 

I could be very specific here, but it’s the kind of thing that is hardly repeatable. In one case I knew, which really turned my stomach, a man who had a very charming, a very godly wife, was performing all kind of perverted acts of torture until she broke away and escaped from him. The whole purpose was each time to do something that would be all the more shocking and unimaginable to her. And it was not only her terror but her shock with these unimaginable tortures that delighted him, he really enjoyed it. And the interesting thing was that when he was finally nailed with this, his greatest pleasure was in confessing these things. Well, the court was very indulgent of him, and told him they would turn him loose. He came from a very fine family, I knew the relatives, I met them all and they were upstanding citizens, and his reaction was, “Alright, I have psychiatric treatment required of me.” So, periodically, he would go to a different psychiatrist. The reason was that when he had reported everything and literally frightened some of these psychiatrists because they wondered if he might not try something on them. And occasionally he would get very angry if they’d say something that irritated him. Well, when he’d worn out the shock with one, he’d go to another and scare him half to death and this gave a great deal of pleasure. So that the confession, whether it was to me or to anyone else, was a part of the thing that fed his ego. It angered him if you silenced him because he did want to talk about it, it fed his ego; he was a kind of a god who could create this horror in people, this awe, as it were.

Yes?

[Audience member] Was the crucifixion of Christ an example of the acts of ‘Amalekites?’ ^x

[Rushdoony] It was a war against God. The crucifixion was a Roman penalty, the prosecution was Sanhedrin-instigated. But the Romans, of course, did use this kind of shock. Public crucifixions in order to terrorize people, and on occasion would crucify thousands at one time. 

The Assyrians were Amalekites to the core, of course. They would skin people alive or behead them by the thousands and pile their bodies to make a mountain to terrorize people. They delighted in the shock they created, they boasted of it. They were not savages, they were a highly civilized people, a very brilliant people. But, this was their principle; to create an empire by means of this total terror, this shock, this violence. And of course, people would capitulate in fear.

i. Fredric Wertham, M.D., A Sign for Cain, An Exploration of Human Violence (New York: Paperback Library, 1969 [1966]), p. 23.

ii. Fredric Wertham, M.D., A Sign for Cain, An Exploration of Human Violence (New York: Paperback Library, 1969 [1966]), p. 10f.

iii. Fredric Wertham, M.D., A Sign for Cain, An Exploration of Human Violence (New York: Paperback Library, 1969 [1966]), p. 258.

iv. R. O. J. Urch, The Rabbit King of Russia (London: The Right Book Club, 1939), p. 208.

v. Charles Winick, The New People, Desexualization in American Life (New York: Pegasus, 1968), pp. 28, 29, 33.

vi.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

vii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

viii.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

ix.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.

x.  Question added/modified for clarity and brevity.