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Jan. 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:30
52 War Part 1

A transactional analysis of war

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Good morning, everybody.
It is Tuesday, December the 10th, 2005, one day before my very third winning anniversary, which I am looking forward to enormously, even with all the stress of trying to buy presents, which, as a dude, I have no biological or constitutional ability to do, but I flail around, I do my best, and I make sure everything is returnable.
I get... my wedding anniversary comes right after Christmas, so I've already had the excitement of trying to buy presents before, and I get to do it again, and this is not, you know, from a gift-giving standpoint, it's a little not my favorite time of year, but I love Christmas, and of course I love my wife, and I'm looking forward to our Anniversary.
We're actually going to go back to the place where we first had dinner.
We met on a volleyball league.
About... I guess close to four years ago.
We dated for ten months before we got married.
And, you know, pretty much after our second date, we've never spent... Other than business trips where she can join, she'll join me if she can.
We've almost never spent any time apart.
And I gotta tell you, it's the easiest and most wonderful thing in the world.
So, go forth and reproduce.
Now, I got an email this morning.
I had a number of topics I wanted to talk about this morning, mostly in the sphere of economics.
But what I have decided to do instead is to begin talking about a topic that is going to be explosive and offensive.
I warn you about that up front, and it's not because I'm trying to be explosive or offensive.
It's just that when you look at things from a transactional or rational or analytic standpoint, you tend to blow past quite a few or quite a lot of propaganda.
And in this realm that I'm going to talk about at the moment, the level of propaganda is very high.
So, I apologize in advance for any offense that I may cause you, but I don't believe that I am doing anything that is irrational.
And if I am, of course, please let me know.
The last thing I want to do is both be offensive and irrational.
I don't mind being offensive and irrational, but I certainly don't want to be offensive and irrational, or irrational and not offensive.
So the reason that I wanted to talk about this this morning, and this is going to take probably more than just this morning's podcast, is that I got an email from a fine gentleman who told me that he was offended by my podcast about religion.
And this isn't going to be about religion, but I think it's instructive if you have a look at the journey.
And I will also reveal sort of my own prejudices around this particular aspect of the man's Email.
But, you know, he told me, look, I was an Air Force pilot, or I worked in the Air Force for a number of years, and then I started a financial services company.
And I can't remember what form of Buddhism he was practicing, but he was practicing a form of Buddhism.
And, you know, he was generally quite polite, but, you know, I could tell by the sort of stiff language and, you know, very formal address, A, that he was a military man, and, B, that, you know, he was sort of trying to be polite when he wasn't feeling in his heart too polite.
So, I guess I'm going to take that cue that's coming in over the ether and talk about a topic that is somewhat new to me.
You know, as of two years ago, actually three years ago, I felt that there was a place for the government.
I felt there was a place for the military.
The police and so on.
And I felt that there was a case for war.
I was raised on an enormous amount of British propaganda about the Second World War.
A culture receives a body blow that is almost fatal.
You know, which in Western civilization, the first and second world wars were two successive body blows that were almost fatal to the culture.
And by fatal to the culture, I don't mean that everybody evaporates, I just mean that you simply don't recover in regaining sort of optimism and energy and focus.
And, you know, this happens a lot to cultures.
if you look at the Chinese culture, laid fallow for, you know, a thousand years.
And, you know, if you look at after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Western culture laid fallow for almost a hundred years.
And so, you know, so the way that cultures react to these kinds of body blows where, of course, they blame others and they fantasize about their own motives or their own execution of events fundamentally. they blame others and they fantasize about their own motives Fantasy is a kind of scar tissue that grows over a grievous wound that is not addressed, is not dealt with.
So, you know, once governments got the power to inflict Such enormous brutality on the populations.
I mean, we generally forget that wars in the past were really localized affairs.
You know, with a couple of thousand people at the most taking part of them, and usually in pretty remote locations.
And they really, other than some sieges, which were not very common and mostly took place in the Middle East during the Crusades, apart from some sieges, which were again specifically military in focus, The civilian population did not generally suffer overtly during the prosecution of a war.
And so, in the... I mean, I was reading a guy's account of the Crimean War, and I mean, it was horrible and so on, but it was pretty localized.
I mean, there were towns not, you know, 15 miles or 20 miles from the battlefield that had very little idea what was going on, and towns not further out that just didn't have any clue that there even was a war.
Because, you know, when you're raising your little patch of cabbage, it doesn't really matter that there's a war 50 miles away when you don't even know you've never gone more than 20 miles from your home.
So, once capitalism produced industrial machinery and tooling and all the stuff that you need for the mass production of modern machine guns and bombs and artillery and so on, Then it would seem to me to be somewhat sensible to say, you know, we sort of have a new beast in our midst, right?
I mean, we have a new predator in our midst, that governments now have the power to wage war on a scale that is so unprecedented that we are at a turning point in human history, in human culture.
You know, we are simply going to have to re-examine the power of the state, because the power of the state has increased so enormously.
Now that it is threatening our culture, if not our lives completely.
And so that would have been a sensible reassessment of what happened.
And what did happen thereafter, though, of course, was to prevent this reassessment, you know, sort of for two reasons.
One, the government wanted to retain any sort of... wanted to withstand or hold back any sorts of questions about What it meant that a small group of people in society now had the power to annihilate an entire planet.
You know, that's a pretty significant chunk of power, right?
You probably would want to ask some pretty important questions about the role of the state or the nature of the state, given that it had now achieved an absolutely unprecedented level of destructive power in the sort of first part to the middle half of the 20th century.
That would, I mean, the Department of Justice and, you know, the media get all up in arms, you know, with the robber barons.
Because they, you know, they were very good at selling, you know, oil and aluminum and steel and so on.
They get mad at Microsoft because Microsoft is very good at selling operating systems.
So they really don't like a concentration of power to the point or to the degree that somebody owns 80 or 90% of a marketplace, which is purely voluntary.
So that concentration of power is alarming to people.
But the concentration of, you know, genocidal, instantaneous, destructive nuclear power in the hands of a small group of people who aren't accountable to anyone, people are just like, yeah, okay, but at least they're not selling us really great operating systems.
You know, that's the evil we want to focus on.
So, that was sort of one of the aspects that the state really didn't want people examining that stuff.
So, you know, of course, it's no accident.
And again, I'm not talking a conscious white-boarded plan, but people's instincts for domination are very sort of well-tuned based on our tribal history.
There's no accident that the Second World War ended up with this massive enemy facing The West, right?
So you've sort of went out and created both the Soviet Empire and also by sort of arming the... arming Chiang Kai-shek and his folks in China, you sort of put all of these massive arms in China, which were then used to give Mao, the communist, takeover in China.
You know, one of the worst disasters in Western diplomacy for sure.
In 1948.
So you end up with this massive edifice of state power that's facing the West, right?
Because otherwise people would sort of question and say, well look, you know, we just had this war, 40 million people got killed, there are these nuclear weapons around, we really need to evaluate what the hell's going on with the state because this is just absolutely unprecedented in human history that this much power is concentrated in the hands of this few a number of people.
So, you know, the government didn't want that, so it didn't do a whole... I mean, FDR and Churchill just gave away Eastern Europe.
I mean, they absolutely did.
If you talk to people in Eastern Europe who are a little bit older, I mean, they look at Yalta and the Tehran conference as just absolutely genocidal.
I mean, there are posters in Eastern Europe with Stalin, Churchill and FDR as sort of the great evils of the world, because, you know, these were the guys who handed over millions of people.
To communist misery and slavery, you know wiping out the value hope and potential of millions of people You know with without a fight without a fuss and Yeah, this is partly because there was a lot of Soviet spies in the foreign office.
Sorry in the State Department in the US and you know partly because the simple reality was that England had no capacity to wage war anymore.
I mean, the English economy had been destroyed.
But of course, the US had absolutely no reason to give over all of these countries to communism.
I mean, the US had the atomic bomb.
And it didn't really matter that Stalin had been an accidental ally.
They simply could have threatened Stalin with the atomic bomb, and Stalin would have backed off lickety-split, and, you know, not only could they have liberated Russia, but they could definitely, even if they didn't feel like doing that, which, you know, I can understand after, you know, four years of fighting.
You know, they at least could have forced Russia to go back from Eastern Europe, which was the whole reason, right?
The freedom of Poland was the whole reason that England got into war to begin with.
And everybody had been horrified about what happened to Czechoslovakia in 1938 when Hitler sort of swallowed it up.
So, to hand over Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union without any kind of fight, I mean, when you have a weapon of unsurpassed and unquestioned power, and the ability to threaten Stalin with, and I'm not saying you should have done it, right, because I, you know, I'm not sure that I would be able to pass that kind of order, but it certainly, it was an option that was never explored.
And, you know, in fact they, you know, I've read that they were still talking about Stalin's, you know, imminent invasion of Western Europe when Stalin was recalling all of his troops back to Moscow, and when they knew this.
So, I mean, there was a lot of falsehood that was going on.
So they created this Soviet slash Chinese edifice of communist expansionist dictatorships.
You know, partly, you know, for the same reason that, you know, it's not an accident that if you station hundreds of thousands of troops in the Middle East and fund Islamic, you know, fascistic dictatorships, that you're going to create enemies as well.
You know, the state meddles because it likes to meddle and it makes money from meddling, but also because it makes enemies and, you know, the power of the state needs external enemies for sure.
I mean, that's absolutely unquestioned.
You know, probably one of the least original things that I've said.
I mean, this is all the way back to George Orwell and earlier.
So that was sort of the first reason that the state... that people did not begin to question the state and its virtue.
The second, of course, is that when family members get obliterated, it is so, so difficult to even entertain the notion That they died in vain.
Or, even worse, that they were conned or brutalized or bribed or threatened into becoming murderers themselves.
And that is, of course, such a raw topic in Especially in the U.S.
these days, right?
I mean, even though the U.S.
casualty rate is, you know, what would occur in, you know, about four minutes on the Western Front on the Somme or in Passchendaele in the First World War, but it's an incredibly sensitive topic emotionally to ask the question or to raise the issue, what does it mean to be a soldier?
What is the nature of being a soldier?
And That's another reason why people didn't question the role or the nature of the state, or didn't absorb what happened.
Because the state had been revealed in such unholy, brutal magnificence and terror that it was very hard for people to say, You know, oh my God, what devil is loose in the world that 40 million people slide into death?
And when civilians are openly targeted, when women and children are openly targeted, you know, this happened in the First World War.
I mean, everybody knows about the Allied bombing in the Second World War and, of course, the The German bombing was in response to the Allied bombing, and don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Germans.
My mother's a German.
And I'm certainly no fan of any of the sort of nationalistic, socialistic nightmare that was National Socialism, but it's important to understand that it was the Allies It was the British that began bombing first, right?
There's this sort of portrait of England through Churchill as sort of the noble island fighting against the sea of darkness.
But, you know, don't be fooled.
I mean, ask people who were part of the colonies.
Ask... I mean, the British were no slouches when it came to expansionist and domineering practices.
So, you know, don't be misled by the propaganda.
The British are as brutal a race as any other race in Europe.
In fact, more brutal in some ways.
Because they believe this noble island propaganda.
Everybody knows about the civilian bombing in the Second World War, but you may not have known, for instance, that One of the things that brought Germany to its knees in the First World War was that England pursued this absolutely genocidal policy of blockading Germany.
It's one of the reasons that Germany made a sort of stampede to the sea in the Second World War, was that in the First World War, you know, hundreds of thousands of German citizens, mostly of course children, Starved to death because the British were blockading Germany, weren't letting any goods through, and Germany has no access, you know, has to get to stuff by the sea.
So, you know, they bombed the farms, bombed the factories, and then blockaded any imports.
And so, you know, the Germans just sort of died, died in the streets, you know, by, you know, by the hundreds of thousands because of this sort of British blockade.
And that was, I mean, there's no morality in war.
There's absolutely no morality in war, but there are still different degrees.
You know, taking a gun out and pointing it at someone who also has a gun and can point it at you is not moral, but at least there's some rough equality of circumstances, some rough equality of opportunities for defense.
However, as they did in Iraq, to sky bomb the crap out of the country for a dozen years from 20,000 feet where you can never be hit by anything and they don't have anything to fire back at you and half a million Iraqi children die as a result is not feet where you can never be hit by anything and they don't have anything to fire back Neither is going in and carpet bombing these cowering farm children handed these Kalashnikov rifles that don't even work.
You know, carpet bombing them from 20,000, 25,000 feet and calling it a great military victory like George Bush on that USS, I think it was the USS Lincoln.
It's like, we have prevailed.
It's like, prevailed!
What frickin' chance did Iraq ever had to fight back?
And when has the US ever, ever tangled with an enemy that has a chance to fight back?
Look how horrified they are when it does happen on 9-11.
Oh my lord, we've been attacked!
It's like, what do you think you've been doing?
overseas for the last 60 years.
Anyway, so the second reason that people don't have a great deal of trouble examining the nature of war is that they probably have had people within their own family or in their extended family or somebody they know in their social circle or at their church.
Somebody, you know, has died, has been murdered for this cause and So it's very hard to look at that cause objectively.
You know, one of the best things that a government can do to secure a war is to get someone killed.
I mean, this is very well known in military circles and in civilian circles at the top levels of power.
I mean, in the Second World War, FDR was constantly putting American shipping in the paths of American subs.
Even though there'd been a direct warning that, you know, these routes are going to be, we torpedo at sight.
FDR was constantly putting people in harm's way, hoping to provoke an incident that would be able to put the U.S.
into the war.
And then, of course, he finally got his wish with Pearl Harbor, right?
And, you know, I remember as a kid sort of two questions that came up.
I guess three.
One, I remember being very, very young and asking my mother about the Second World War.
She said, it lasted for four years and it was started by Germany.
And then I asked her, well, what about the First World War?
And she said, it lasted for four years and it was started by Germany.
And now that second part is not quite as clear.
But I just remember thinking, huh, I mean, there's got to be some kind of pattern.
Like, that can't just be a coincidence.
And the other thing I remember as a kid was, you know, I read these comic books about, you know, the heroic British troops and so on, and it just sort of... I think it's a question that strikes every kid, pretty much, who is exposed to a lot of what I call warnography or, you know, war propaganda.
But, you know, the question for me was, okay, so if you kill a guy In private life, you go to jail, you kill a guy in war, you get a medal.
And it just never made sense to me at a sort of basic level that you would have these completely opposing rules of moral conduct.
Not even like great evil to great neutrality, but great evil to great good.
That the same murder could be great evil to great good.
And this is before I knew about the targeting of civilians, because that's not exactly the first thing you talked about, right?
The movies on war don't exactly focus on what happens to civilians who can't get food or medicine for a dysentery child.
A child with dysentery?
Maybe that's a word.
Anyway.
So that was sort of another question that I had about war that sort of never made a lot of sense to me.
And so the question of what it is to be a soldier is a disturbing But, very powerful question.
Of course, war is one of the greatest evils in human life.
In fact, you could say it's simply the greatest evil.
It is, you know, when the devils are truly loosed upon, you know, the soft hides of the helpless.
And, you know, infants are rent limb from limb.
And, you know, pregnant mothers are blown up.
And, you know, limbless human monstrosities are created by shrapnel and shells and IEDs.
And, you know, where the resources of society are all bent to, you know, the mass genocidal murder and destruction of other human beings.
Societies collapse, civilizations collapse.
You know, it plunges the world and countries into, you know, a thousand years of darkness where, you know, generations of, 30 generations of human life can just be sort of lived through in a blind, agonizing struggle of futile subsistence existence.
So it is, you know, the greatest evil in human society.
I mean, taxation is completely benevolent relative to war, right?
The fact that the government takes half my income and threatens me with violence is nothing.
compared to what happens in war.
I mean, some of my mother's tales... She was born in 1937 in Germany.
Not the best place to be, especially when you come from a Jewish heritage.
Not the best place to be at all.
And, you know, all sympathies to my mother as a child.
It still doesn't excuse the evil woman that she became, but I can certainly understand that life was just hellish for her when she was a child.
You know, she was put in orphanages and, you know, she spent days searching for water because, of course, you know, all of the plumbing gets destroyed.
You know, she bid farewell to her mother when her mother was staying in town in Dresden, which was a city that had not been bombed because it was purely civilian, had all these art treasures and so on.
And Dresden had not been bombed, and then one night, I think it was 1944, there was a thousand-plane raid that created a firestorm in Dresden.
The RAF sent over a thousand planes, and one of my uncles was flying one of them on my father's side.
And my grandmother was just vaporized.
I mean, this created such a... A firestorm is where the fire is raging so hard that it sucks oxygen in from the surrounding area.
Which causes it to burn even hotter, sucking more oxygen in.
I mean, it just creates this absolutely hellish environment.
I think, like, two or three hundred thousand people got killed, you know, in one or two nights of bombing.
So, the amount of human horror that war exacts, modern war in particular, It's indescribable, and unless you have experienced it or known somebody who's experienced it and got a good deal of information firsthand, trust me, you really can't conceive what it's like.
Just the amount of evil, helplessness, and horror that goes on, and life literally becomes a living hell.
And, you know, in some ways, the living envy the dead.
So, that is the job of a soldier, right?
That is the job of a soldier if you look at it in purely analytic terms, you know.
And I, again, I apologize in advance for any offense this may cause you, but trust me, it's not been easy for me to look at this stuff either.
I mean, you know, three of my sort of close, my father's close male relatives were killed in the First World War.
Entire sections of my family were wiped out in the Second World War on both sides of the Channel.
So, it has not been easy for me to have a look at this topic objectively, but I've done my best, and what I've come up with is that soldiers, as a profession, right?
Soldiers are human beings who are paid to murder.
Soldiers are human beings that are paid to murder.
And those who pay them take the money from others through the threat of murder.
So there are three people in a transaction that results in a military.
In an economic transaction, let's just talk about first.
The first group is the productive citizen.
The second group are those who take from the productive citizen.
It's usually not the soldiers directly.
The second group is those who take from the productive citizen through threat of murder.
I mean all threats are threats of murder, right?
From the state, I mean.
From the state it's always a threat of murder, right?
And all threats really are threats of murder, right?
I mean, if you fight back from some mafia guy who wants to break your leg because you haven't paid a bill, then he's going to kill you, right?
So that's why you don't fight back.
If you attempt to fight back against the state when it comes to collect its taxes and you resist, they will kill you.
If you resist effectively, of course, they will just kill you.
So all threats really revolve around the threat of murder.
The only way compliance is exacted from lesser threats because you have complied with the So, you know, people can torture you because they're gonna kill you if you resist torture or, you know, if you don't show up or if you try and get away.
You stay in prison because they'll kill you if you try to escape.
If you try to escape and you fight back, they'll shoot you.
I mean, all threats are threats of murder, so let's sort of be clear about that.
And so, in this situation, you have a... in the situation of a military, the creation of a military, you have these three groups, right?
The productive citizen, the parasitical threatener, which is the politician and the police, and, you know, the paid murderer, the professional murderer, who is the soldier.
And, you know, that is, to me, incontrovertible.
I mean, if there's something I've missed, please let me know.
I mean, this is obviously a very sensitive area, and I want to make sure that if I'm putting something bold out there, that it's true.
But, you know, without a doubt, you simply... you really aren't a soldier unless you're willing to kill someone.
I mean, that's really what you're paid for.
And yeah, I know there are people who work in the back offices, and there are people who work in the R&D labs, and so on.
But that's just sort of one aspect of the murder that the military is based on.
That aspect is based on the murder that the police are willing to commit.
The police are absolutely willing to shoot you if you resist your taxes and resist their coming to collect them.
So the guys in the back room of the military They're all paid for by the murderous threat against the productive citizens.
They don't directly themselves murder people, although they are definitely a means to an end.
It's not like the weapons that they come up with are put in the Smithsonian as examples of engineering geniuses.
So, you know, their pay, their careers, their economic survival is entirely predicated on the threat of the policeman's willingness to threaten citizens with murder for failing to pay taxes.
So, you know, murder is the basis of the military at every level.
And, of course, it is the basis of the state as well.
and so that particular economic transaction where somebody is threatened with murder to hand over their money and that money is then handed over to uh... the military uh... for their willingness to murder other people that is the basic economic transaction and
I know that there's lots of stuff that has been coming into my inbox about self-defense and, you know, the state and self-defense and so on.
And, of course, I put the challenge out there to anyone.
You tell me an example where a state has successfully defended its citizens and that that state defense has resulted in at least an equal level of freedom that those citizens had before, if not a greater level of freedom.
And, of course, nobody's replied to me yet because it's never going to happen, right?
Every time the state defends, sort of, quote, defends its citizens, it grows in power and enslaves them more afterwards.
So, please understand that that's where I'm coming from, and if you disagree, I'm more than open to hearing counter-arguments, but I think you're going to have a tough time finding them.
So, that transaction, money from peaceful citizens through the bureaucrats and the police to the military, is, to me, I can't find the moral distinction.
I can find the hypocritical distinction, I could find the propagandistic distinction, but I cannot find the moral distinction between that transaction and somebody who threatens a store owner with murder in return for a portion of his income, and then takes that money and uses it to pay someone else to threaten other people with murder.
You know, for that other reason is, you know, you're on my turf, you're selling drugs where I want to sell drugs, you know, you didn't pay back a debt I owed you, you owe me, or whatever, right?
I can't really drill down to that and find the moral difference between, you know, the state, the police, the politicians, and the military, and productive citizens And organized crime and, you know, the wise guys, the capos, the organized murderers.
I know that, of course, there's uniforms.
I understand that.
They operate in public, the military, but that's just because they have more weapons, right?
But I can't... Other than, you know, sort of what is told and all the propaganda, you know, it was kind of shocking to me in my You know, I guess my education about people in the military started about three and a half years ago when I took a job at a company where there was a sort of military wing, right?
There was a group of people who, and I was reporting to one of them, who had come out of the military model.
And, you know, it was quite an education.
And this is the Canadian military, right?
I mean, I don't even know if these people saw action.
This is the Canadian military, which is not exactly the most brutal military in the world.
So, you know, these are probably the nicest examples of the military personalities.
But, you know, these people were absolutely sociopathic.
I mean, they were just...
You don't get into the military if you're interested in negotiation.
There's no negotiation with your enemies in the military.
You just shoot them.
And of course there's no negotiation in the hierarchy in the military because you obey or you get shot.
So you don't get into the military unless you have a certain kind of personality that you simply have no ability to recognize other people's needs and abilities and negotiate with them for mutually productive outcomes.
So, you know, that's pretty destructive.
That sort of comes from a pretty destructive personality streak, and I would absolutely guarantee you that anybody who was raised in that way, and who is that way as a human being, you know, had an abusive childhood.
Probably not an inconsequentially abusive childhood, but probably a really terrible childhood.
And, you know, they were just bullied and yelled at and hit and beaten and, you know, possibly violated in other ways.
And, you know, that's why they've grown up with a complete inability to navigate, you know, my needs, your needs, win-win situations.
Because they're just, you know, they're nothing but a mass of scar tissue, rage and compliance.
You know, it's what Churchill said about the Germans.
They're either at your feet or they're at your throat.
That's sort of how it is with the military mindset.
So, I don't want to judge all the military based on, you know, the half-dozen people that I knew in one company, but they had consistently disturbed personalities.
And, you know, this is sort of the most gentle military in the world.
And, you know, theoretically it seems to work well with what they're paid to do, right?
I mean, to be a paid murderer.
is not really something I think that is going to make you a happy and productive citizen of the world, and, you know, a gentle and kind negotiator.
And so I sort of reached work at the moment, so I'm just going to begin.
I'm just sort of beginning this outline of aspects of the military and the police, which I will then continue this afternoon.
And I hope you're doing well, and I hope that this isn't too shocking or unpleasant for you.
I think it's worth examining this because, you know, as libertarians or objectivists, we really do Have a rare understanding of the nature of evil, and we should not, you know, hold back our rational analysis just because there is the potential for offending others.
Because, you know, when the world is corrupt, as we know it is, it is the greatest truth that is going to give the greatest defense.
But we still have a right to speak it, and a need to speak it, and almost a responsibility, I would say, to speak it.
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