One Person Dead, a Tragedy; A Million Dead, a Statistic
How does the government and media handle small, individual tragedies versus tragedy on a massive scale, for example through wars? What does it say about society?
How does the government and media handle small, individual tragedies versus tragedy on a massive scale, for example through wars? What does it say about society?
How does the government and media handle small, individual tragedies versus tragedy on a massive scale, for example through wars? What does it say about society?
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
Good to see you, Daniel.
I want to talk about a vicious dictator of this 20th century.
Maybe not the worst, but probably very competitive on how many people he might have killed.
But there's a famous statement by Stalin that I think we can work in a way into some current events.
And it looks like it's a reliable quote from Stalin.
He said that one man being killed is a tragedy, which we'd all agree.
Killing millions is nothing but a statistic.
I imagine you've heard that quote.
Absolutely.
So that is it.
So we are now very concerned about tragic deaths.
We've had these recent deaths in the inner city, and it's done by policemen.
It happens to be a militarized police.
You know, we had Michael Brown's death and Eric Garner.
And when you see it isolated, it seems so unnecessary and so vicious.
And a lot of emotions pump into, and a lot of it used by people to make certain points.
But there are a lot of times that they ignore a lot of deaths.
How many other deaths are going on in the inner city?
Some other places, don't you think there are plenty of deaths in those areas as well that we don't talk about?
Yeah, certainly not the states' wars.
No.
This is the one thing is some people make the correlation with what's going on with these debt, where they learn it from the military.
And one of the best examples of this was McVeigh, Timothy McVeigh, you know, because, you know, he didn't kill millions, but he killed hundreds, and it was significant.
But he didn't go out to murder an individual because he hated their guts.
He went to kill for philosophic reasons.
He had been trained to do this, and he saw our government as the enemy.
So therefore, killing a couple hundred people meant nothing, nothing to him.
And this was something he learned in the military.
He says, it's collateral damage.
So it's almost a cultural thing that leaves our military and comes over and concentrates on certain things.
So we concentrate on these individuals, but, you know, our military kill a lot of people, you know.
Cultural Collateral Damage00:07:14
Yeah, you know, we talked earlier when we were preparing for the show.
You mentioned this quote.
You also, we talked before about a quote from Lady Astor, which is sort of the corollary of this.
Yeah, that is interesting because Lady Astor with George Bernard Shaw in 1932 confronted Stalin.
They had a meeting with Stalin and she says, how long to Mr. Stalin, how long are you going to keep killing people?
And he says, as long as it's necessary.
Now, that is the psychological framework from where he's coming.
I thought, good night, could we be drifting into something like this?
So if you ask our leaders today, because we kill a lot of people around the world, and if you add them up, you know, in the last 15 years of how many died as a recipient of our bombs or sanctions or anything else, there's a lot of people that have been killed.
And could it be that we're drifting to that, that it's only a statistic?
Probably one of the best evidence that we have for that was when Madeleine Albright was confronted.
You know, they asked her on national TV, what do you think that there's a report now that there's 500,000 children and others that died because of our sanctions against Iraq.
And she says, well, that's the price you have to pay.
So it wasn't killing people, it was just doing what is necessary.
And right now, in a way, I think we're at the point like what Stalin told Leaster, as long as it's necessary.
But how long is our war on terrorism going to go on?
I said, get ready for a long war.
What is it?
I think Aston Carter said three decades.
Or was it him or was it, someone said, decades, it's a decade.
It just goes on.
And they have a lot of killing to do.
But they're bad people.
They say they're terrorists.
But then when you try to pin it down, even legally, that we legally can consider a terrorist anybody who objects to what we're doing.
Even if we've invaded their country, if they shoot back, they're a terrorist.
As long as we're there, there's going to be shooting.
And I know you recall the argument I had with the committee on a declaration of war going into Iraq, and I said, they haven't committed any aggression against us.
And you know what the answer was there.
Shooting at our planes.
They were shooting at our airplane.
Matter of fact, that just came up, I think, with Lindsey Graham, as he announced to be president, that they're aggressors.
They've been shooting at us, you know, and as long as they are there, they're the aggressor.
But see, that is going to be endless, and they don't count.
And they have to do certain things because it is, I use this word carefully, cautiously, it's sort of a conspiracy to make sure that people don't know.
Because do you view the caskets when they come back?
Do you see the people suffering in the hospitals?
No, what you see is you see one or two individuals who have artificial limbs as a consequence of the war who are able to still ride a bicycle.
So they ride a bike with the former president who sent them off to war.
So that individual sort of compensate.
This is the good stuff.
But all the other ramifications, the families who have lost loved ones, the veterans who lost their sight and their limbs and aren't riding, aren't even riding bicycles.
So I think that those are just statistics and they go on.
And I cannot see how we can solve this without thinking about our involvement overseas and what creates this atmosphere.
You know, it's interesting is how the media portrays these two different types of events that Stalin mentioned.
And I wonder how much of it, I think a lot of it, is about state power.
An individual being killed, the media can use to promote various things that give the state more power.
The power to take away guns, the power to force us to take certain types of drugs, the power to militarize the police.
But if you look at the tragedy of a million dead, that would undermine state power because it shows the absolute failure of state power to have any objective results.
And they participate in changing our attitudes about our enemy because they are the bad guys and therefore we who send our men over and they might even use sharpshooters and they kill these people, they become heroes.
In our society, our military, they're probably praised as the greatest heroes ever.
And I have a little bit of license to say that having been in the U.S. military for five years.
Not that I saw combat or anything, but I still, right now we make heroes out of the individuals who may well, if we're on the right track here, they're participating in killing people, you know, endlessly.
And it sort of suggests that they'll keep killing people as long as it's necessary.
And I think it's going to be necessary for a long, long time because, you know, there was an attitude that was different because I remember World War II.
Even that has an interesting history.
But there were different times.
We were attacked.
Germany declared war against us.
The people got together, even those who tried to keep us out of war.
They got together like in three years.
They beat the Japanese and the German army, and it was over.
And just think of the size of the enemy.
And today, no, it's not the case.
It's going to go on and on forever.
And we have a job to do.
We are the policemen of the world.
And we refuse to acknowledge this silly notion that we might have that some of these people are defending their country.
Matter of fact, when we wanted them to be defenders of the country, we called them freedom fighters.
When they were defending Afghanistan against the Soviets, of course, we were with them only to turn around and end up supporting this.
But you know, guns, guns participate in this, and the big argument is, some people might make the argument, well, even in the church killing, if one individual there had a gun, might have made a difference.
So now, like you say, there's a political effort to take advantage of this, and the gun control people come in, control the guns, the guns did this, if he didn't have a gun, you know, this sort of thing.
But if our thinking is leading us to, you know, a correct answer, and the killing overseas that are statistics and not real, those are government guns.
So yes, maybe it is the gun, the gun that we have to control.
Have control on the guns the government uses.
Because all of a sudden, think of the chaos in our cities today because of the militarization of the police, which has been pushed by the federal government with tanks and things like that.
Is It Time To Sacrifice Liberties?00:01:48
So is it once again that we have to curtail the liberties of the people to solve this problem?
After 9-11, you know, they were coming to get us because we were free and prosperous, and therefore we had to stop them.
And so what did we do?
We took away our liberties.
So, but instead of looking at the problem, and of course, you know, if there is a translation of the way our military operates and sets the stage for psychology that the people in this country accept, you know, the violence, and of course, the best example, of course, would have been Timothy McVeigh.
So, anyway, it's an interesting subject and one I think is very serious.
And it leads us right back to this whole effort of trying to understand our foreign policy and understanding the psychology and just wondering if there's any chance that maybe we're participating in ignoring some deaths because there are too many and it's difficult.
It's not part of our nature to want to concentrate on the many millions that are dying.
And we certainly, I don't want to even think, you know, that we are a participant, but to deny it if it's true is a different story.
So just because it's painful to admit this, I think that we should look at our foreign policy and look and see if we should be the world policemen, see if we should be the individual that polices the world and runs the economy and puts sanctions on other countries and concentrating on one or two tragic deaths,
which we can't ignore, and forget about the millions of people who are suffering both economically and from the wars that we have been involved in in these last 15 years.