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Feb. 13, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:09
98 Decadence and Empathy

False confessions: War and the soul of a soldier

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
It is 8.30 in the morning on February the 13th, 2006, and I'd like to talk this morning about a 60 Minutes episode that I saw last night.
I do find 60 Minutes to be an interesting program.
Sometimes, I mean, it's always wretched in terms of its conclusions, i.e.
not enough oversight?
We need more government!
But It can be critical of the war on Iraq, and it does show some of the actual soldiers, actual wounds, and so on, and so I would say that they are somewhat negative to the war on Iraq, and so I find them to be an interesting touchstone of where the morals in society are.
And even more interestingly, I find them to be a touchstone of why the morals are the way they are.
And there was a show last night which I guess started with a conclusion that I've already mentioned a couple of times on this.
Show, which is that they said, well, gosh, almost nine billion dollars of cash is missing from Iraq.
And of course, when people say nine billion, you know for sure it's far more than that.
It's just that they know they can't say zero because that would be ludicrous.
But they also know that they can't say the real sum because that would be shocking.
Well, more shocking.
But $9 billion is quite a lot of money.
People will do quite a lot for $9 billion.
And that is sort of one of the reasons why the chaos of war is created.
Of course, there were no banks or anything after the US had bombed the infrastructure into atoms.
And so they had to pay everybody over there in cash, and so what you do, of course, is you get a large number of, you know, I guess you could charitably call them adventurers, or you could negatively call them war profiteers, but you create this mad stampede for cash, which is sort of the basis of war in general, and we're only talking about the tens of billions of dollars of, well, they called them bricks.
They were a hundred thousand dollar bricks of hundred dollar bills, fresh, newly printed, And you know that that's going to cause inflation down the road and you know all that kind of stuff.
So, the issue around sort of why the war in Iraq is going on is sort of mentioned in microcosm there.
They, of course, mention Halliburton just on the side, and that is interesting, but, you know, they never talk about it in any great detail.
The fact that Halliburton is making, you know, $100 for every $1 that other people make in the war.
So they talked about that for a while, then they had some other story in the middle that I can't quite recall, but then they had a story which to me was just... it was eye-opening.
It was shocking and horrifying to me, and that means that I'm probably somebody who knows a little bit more about or understands a little bit more about government predation than the average viewer, and I was fairly appalled, which means that it's probably fairly bad on the evil-o-meter.
But let me tell you about it and let me see what what you think.
Do let me know what you think of my reaction to this this issue.
So the last story that they had on the 60 Minutes show was they were saying, well look there's all these people who've come back from Iraq and they've had these terrible wounds and and so on but boy oh boy aren't they just the pluckiest go-get-em kind of people that you've ever seen.
So they interviewed a couple of these people, and I'll sort of collate some of their responses together into one sort of... well, not exactly one person, but I'm not going to sort of divide it into every single person.
But one woman, of course, had her leg blown off when she was over there, and she was in Humvee, of course, which had no protection, right?
There's no money in protecting the soldiers.
In fact, the government gets quite a lot of money for when the soldiers are So the government has no problem with injuries.
It has problems with deaths, which is one of the reasons why America has spent so much money recently improving battlefield medicine.
If they want the soldiers to stay alive, they'll be crippled.
I'm not saying it wants them to be crippled, I'm just saying that it's economically advantageous for the state.
For soldiers to be crippled rather than to be killed.
This is sort of well known in revolutionary circles that if you're fighting a state, what you want to do is not to kill the representatives of the state, the soldiers, the policemen, and so on.
You want to wound them so that you overwhelm the medical system and so on.
The French resistance knew this very well in World War II and so on.
So there were all of these wounded people who, you know, years ago or in previous wars would never have survived, but now they do survive.
And they interviewed a woman who'd lost a leg in a Humvee.
And, you know, oh, what was it like?
Oh, how did it feel?
Oh, heavens!
You know, and she told this story.
Fairly chirply, of course, because these people have completely lost the ability to empathize with their own horror.
I mean, you can't become a killer if you have any capacity for empathy with your own conscience or with the existence of other people.
So you can be blandly chirpy in a sociopathic manner and positive and bright.
And she was talking about how she's come back from the war, she's been discharged, she'll always be a soldier, she misses it so much she can't even say, and that she's now become somebody who's a prosthetologist or somebody who helps fit other people with this kind of artificial leg and so on.
Now, what I found unbelievable was the degree to which... I think it was Mike Wallace who was the journalist.
And, you know, he's a fairly creaky guy.
He's, I think, in his seventies, you know, and he can be kind of forthright with people.
But the degree to which he was just falling all over with empathy and sympathy and admiration, I mean, oh, I thought he was going to start humping one of their remaining legs.
It was just unbelievable how wretched a display of panting submission this experienced, cynical, supposedly hard-hitting journalist had towards these veterans.
As if they had been attacked while they were sitting in their hammock, sipping some iced tea, playing with their children.
As if it was the victims of one of the snipers in Washington from a couple of years ago.
As if they'd been involved in some boating accident where the engine exploded through no fault of their own and they were merely Victims?
Oh, how terrible.
Oh, you were in a coma.
Oh, they only gave you a 2%, 2% chance of survival.
Oh, my heavens, how scary, how terrifying, how difficult it must have been for you.
Oh, to not know, to lose your leg, to lose your arm.
You're so brave.
You're so wonderful.
You're so plucky.
You're so courageous.
Oh, I can't imagine.
Oh, how terrible.
Now, we've all sort of heard this kind of stuff before, but coming from one of the few centers in the media where there is some questions, let's say, towards the Iraq War, I think that this is fascinating, and I think what it shows is the death throes of a kind of culture, and also it shows how far along we are in corruption or decadence.
It also, I think, shows, and I think it's important to know, Just how far we are from any kind of moral or decent society.
And I don't say that in order to engender any kind of frustration.
I really don't.
Or any kind of hopelessness in you.
I say this because it helps understand the barriers that we're up against if you think that something is going to be relatively easy.
And it turns out to be unbelievably difficult.
Then you are going to get frustrated and bitter.
Your life is going to lose its joy and spark and quality.
And you may in fact take it on as a personal problem, a personal failing.
Well, if I'd done this or I'd done that.
And I remember Harry Brown talking to people in the California election.
The sort of single-platform guy.
So there was the guy from the, you know, smoke-up party or whatever it was, saying that he was going to get all the smokers to vote for him by removing, I think, the restriction on outdoor smoking in California.
And Harry Brown was saying, look, there's no magic solution.
There's no magic bullet.
There's no single key.
So the reason that I'm sort of mentioning this, how far we are from a moral society, is not to make you despair, but to make you look at the difficulties we face square in the eye, and so to be joyful in your approach to spreading the truth.
To know ahead that you're not going to turn people around very easily, to know ahead that it is a huge and monumental battle that has never been won before in human history, which is why it's so exciting to take a real swing at it in a way that I think we're trying to do here and in other areas and other forums.
to take a real swing to find the heart of this evil, because it has never been defeated in all of human history.
And it doesn't mean that it can't be defeated.
I mean, the same thing was true, as I've mentioned before, of slavery a couple centuries ago.
But don't think that it's going to be easy, otherwise you're going to get frustrated and bitter when you don't succeed in a time frame that makes sense to you.
I believe that in the long run it's measured in generations,
But the reason that I'm spending so much time podcasting is because I want to get the ideas out there, as many of them as possible, and as passionately argued as possible, and with as many you-knows and ums and I-means as possible, so that there's at least some element that is transportable and, I hope, interesting in the public realm, so that when the state does collapse, people will know, and maybe the people who've had some predictive ability to
See that coming, we'll have some more, maybe get slightly wider venues and so on.
So that's sort of my particular approach and plan.
But to return to the 60 Minutes program, this is what I wanted to communicate this morning about how far we are from a moral society.
So they are bursting with empathy for these soldiers.
I'm not going to use the term murderers and things like that because everybody knows, who's listened to this podcast, what my opinion is of soldiers, so I'm just going to use the more conventional term so that it doesn't appall on top of being appalling.
These soldiers who have returned were guilty of the international crime of aggression.
And they were voluntarily in the army.
They voluntarily entered the army.
There's no draft.
And yes, they were poor kids.
And yes, they have had little choice.
And yes, the government over the past generation or two has systematically stripped away choices for the poor.
However, if you're going to say that these poor kids never had any choice to become soldiers, then what you're doing is you're saying that when somebody has less choice, then they are less morally culpable.
In which case, you still have the problem of explaining why the US soldiers, who come from the richest country in the world with lots of opportunities, are not more morally culpable, far more morally culpable than the poor men, women and children in a village in Iraq or Afghanistan who've never had any opportunity or choices whatsoever.
Then, they are obviously, the people in these countries are far, far more restricted in their capacities and options than American, the poorest American ever is.
And therefore they still have far less responsibility.
And therefore to attack them, which is, you know, this is what always happens, right?
I mean, you attack the people, you never attack the leaders.
I mean, I'm sure that they want to kill the leaders, but it doesn't really matter.
What you do is you end up attacking the people because you can't find the leaders.
I mean, the fog of war obscures individuals from view, and therefore you end up just blasting the hell out of anything and causing I mean, leaders are incredibly incidental collateral damage.
I mean, there's no such thing as collateral damage.
Like, we're aiming at Saddam Hussein, and we blow up a marketplace.
Those people are not collateral damage.
If, by some miracle, Hussein was actually hit, he would be the collateral damage.
The main damage is always done to the civilians.
This is also true in World War II, of course.
The only major war where it wasn't as true is World War I, and that was never repeated.
After the invention of the airplane, of course, the long-range bomber, that was never repeated.
So, it's not fair to say that the soldiers are not as morally responsible.
You could make that argument, but you would then have to make it even more strongly for those that they are killing, right?
The people out in Iraq who they are killing.
So, what does it mean when I say we are so far from any kind of moral society?
Well, when you have Mike Wallace, you know, panting and breathing all over these people with his heroic, his perception of their heroism, bravery, courage, nobility, and so on, they're so brave!
They're so upbeat!
Well, and displaying sympathy over their wounding.
Then you have, I mean, obviously Mike Wallace has more options than just about anybody in the world, right?
He's rich, he's famous, he's, you know, got the public ear, he could do just about anything he wants.
And it is possible to become more libertarian and survive, as John Stossel has shown.
So, the fact that he has so many more options, and this is the option that he chooses, which is to pant all over these veterans as if they are the second coming.
And the amazing thing, too, for those who are sort of versed in media tactics, the amazing thing, too, is that these people would be telling their stories.
Now, when somebody tells a story as strange and horrific as, I had my leg blown off, or one guy was saying I was carrying my left arm in my right hand, it had been blown off because I was hit by an RPG.
When people are telling stories like that, we're so morally lost as a culture that most people don't really know how to react to that.
And that's sort of important.
One of the things that I found distracting and then fascinating and then revealing was that they kept cutting away, the cameramen or the editors or the producers of 60 Minutes, kept cutting away from the soldiers telling their stories to Mike Wallace's slavishly sycophantically earnest and sympathetic face.
Oh, how terrible!
Oh no!
Oh, how terrible!
Oh my heavens!
And the reason that they kept cutting away was to make sure, and I'm not saying this is sort of a conscious plan, I mean it could be, but I doubt it, is to make sure that the people who are Seeing or hearing these stories react in the proper manner.
So when somebody is telling a story like I was out there I got blown up and also one of the guys was saying I really miss fighting.
I'm a fighter.
I want to go back there and fight.
My guys are still out there fighting.
I really miss fighting.
Well, I mean, the word fighting is ridiculous, as I'll get to later, but the idea that dropping bombs on people from 20,000 feet is fighting is ridiculous.
If you just look at the ratio of casualties, which is sort of 50 to 75 to 1, and of course if you count the sanctions that were in the 90s, it's hundreds and hundreds to 1, and of course none of the Americans are killed in any kind of combat, They're killed with snipers, they're killed with IEDs, they're just killed through terrorism or through freedom resistance fighting, however you want to put it.
But they're killed through those methods, there's no fighting involved.
So the idea that they're fighting is just nonsense.
But so when somebody's saying, you know, I miss the fighting, I miss being over there, my buddies are still over there, they're still fighting, a part of... I mean, certainly the way that I'm looking at it is just like, oh my god, what a horrifying human being!
What a completely horrifying human being who is so out of empathy with himself and with the Iraqis and even with his fellow soldiers that he still talks about it like a boxing match even though he's lost a leg.
Oh, this guy had lost an arm.
And there was another guy who'd been injured so bad they took him six months to learn how to walk again.
And he still said that they asked him, Mike Wallace asked him, well what, you know, are you still in favor of the war?
And he had great difficulty speaking.
And I think there was a long and pretty pregnant pause when you sort of look at this guy looking at the ruin of his entire life, all of his remaining days.
He's not going to get another life.
He's not going to get a do-over.
He's not going to get another chance.
His life now is to be this slow-moving, half-brain-dead, hard-to-move kind of guy.
I mean, this is a complete ruin of somebody's life.
And So his response to should we be in Iraq was, well, yeah, of course we should, because the president has told us that's a decision the president has made.
Now, you and I would probably look at that person like, what a horrifying and murderous thug, at least I would, who, you know, counts it a virtue to go and kill people just because some guy, some privileged guy who's never really served in any kind of combat tells him to.
And, of course, you know, there's sympathy for this viewpoint, there's sympathy for this perspective, there's sympathy for these veterans.
Now, I do view the veterans to some degree as victims as well, so please don't get me wrong that I think that they are pure evil incarnate who could have done anything they want, being tree surgeons or chiropodists, but instead have decided to become murderers in the desert.
I do view these people as victims to some degree, insofar as they were brought up in government schools, subject to government propaganda their whole lives.
They have probably come out of families where the military was fairly strong, which means incessant and brutal degrees of child abuse and violence in the home.
And so there's lots of problems with the idea that they're perfectly autonomous individuals.
And, of course, there are fewer opportunities because taxes are so high, and the economy is destroyed, and union power has gotten rid of the manufacturing jobs, and they just don't have much of a leg up to the truth or honesty or opportunity in any real way.
However, they still do have choice.
I mean, if we're going to say that these people are pure victims, then there's no such thing as morality.
There's no point for these podcasts, and there's no point trying to do anything right.
Because we've just simply eliminated the capacity for people to make choices, even if those choices are in difficult situations.
So, I absolutely, thoroughly, and completely reject the autonomy of the individual in this situation, or in any situation other than, you know, dictatorship or imprisonment.
So, I do view these victims, these people, as immoral agents.
However, I do recognize that their capacity to choose has been somewhat diminished by the degree of propaganda that they have been subject to.
So, what do I mean when I say we're so incredibly far from morality?
Well, this is sort of my fantasy about what it might look like to have a moral interview with a soldier.
It might be something like this.
So let's talk about a bomber pilot first.
Well, a bomber pilot whose plane gets shot down and who loses an arm or something like that, this is sort of what I would imagine a moral speech, if such a thing were possible, from a soldier.
A moral speech from a soldier might look something like this.
He might say, Well, yeah, I lost an arm, but, you know, this is sort of what I've been thinking about.
This is what tortures me, and please don't give me any sympathy for my arm, because let me tell you what tortures me, what I find to be the most horrifying aspect of myself, of my history, of my past.
Not of the fact that I lost an arm, which is bad, but this is what horrifies me.
I can't stop thinking.
Of the men, the women, the children, the old men, the babies, the pregnant women who were blown into smithereens every time I pushed that bomb release button while I was floating high overhead.
I can't help think that I lost an arm, but I've been responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of people, and I don't even know where they're buried, and I don't know anything about them, and I don't know what they experienced, and I don't know their names.
But I do know that the action that I took caused the death of thousands of people who had never done me any harm, and who never had any capacity to do me harm.
They weren't going to come over to America and do a home invasion on my marine butt.
They were just people trapped in a horrible dictatorship with no capacity for getting out, no capacity for fighting back, no capacity for any kind of future.
They were just huddled in these little huts in the middle of nowhere or in these shanty towns in cities and I flew over them and I pressed the button and I blew them All up.
And that is what I can't stop thinking about.
That is what unbelievably destroys my peace of mind.
And this is something that I can't go back and make it good.
I can't go back and put these people back together.
I can't go back and restore the children's lives.
I can't go back and make people whole again.
I can't make it right and that's what tortures me.
And I don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of my life because I just can't make anything right that I've done.
There's no way of going back and undoing who I was.
So that's what tortures me.
That's what I can't live with.
So the only thing that I can think of that I'm going to do is that I'm going to adopt as many Iraqi children whose parents have been killed by this war.
I'm going to adopt as many of them as I can.
And I'm going to bring them over here, and I'm going to bring them up as Iraqis.
I'm not going to try and make them into little American kids, but I'm going to bring them up as Iraqis, and that's... it will never undo what it is that I have done, but it will give me the chance to put A tiny thing right in the face of what I have done.
And I'm not going to take benefits and I'm going to find a way to make it work.
Because I don't see why the American people should pay for what it is that I've done or pay for the injuries that I've sustained.
They already paid me to go over and kill those people.
I'm going to do what I can with the ruin that is left of my life.
I'm going to do anything that I can to make it right.
To make right what I've done.
Because I didn't know... I don't want to say this like I didn't know what I was doing, but I... I knew what I was doing.
I knew I was dropping bombs, but I didn't... I didn't... I wasn't... I wasn't... I wasn't alive.
I wasn't alive to other people.
I wasn't alive to myself.
I didn't know the consequences of what I was doing.
In the long run, like in what happens to people's families and what happens to people's lives when you push that button and thinking, I mean, they were just the enemy.
They were just categorized in my head.
I didn't know what it meant in my heart.
And this is the other thing that I just can't stop thinking about.
This is the last thing that I want to talk about.
It's the last thing I can't stop thinking about.
I mean, I got shot down and I landed not too far from an army base and I was wounded and I was put in a hospital.
I had morphine, I had antibiotics, I had stitches, I had surgeons, I had people who flew me back to America, I had rehab, I've got a prosthetic arm, I've got all of the resources of the richest country in the world at my back and call to help me Still get on with my life to get back to a kind of life.
What I can't stop thinking about is all those people who I bombed.
They're lying in the desert.
They've got no access to health care.
They've got no access to doctors.
They can't get stitched up.
They can't get bandaged up.
No one's going to give them a prosthetic.
No one's going to pay them veterans benefits.
You know, I think that some kid who was scratched by shrapnel that I dropped from my 20,000 foot perch might have died from that scratch because they have no antibiotics.
So please don't give me any sympathy for my injury.
If you want to have sympathy, have sympathy for everyone over there that I killed.
Now that would be something that I could respect as a moral awakening in a soldier.
That is something that I could look at and say, you are somebody who has done enormous evil, but you are beginning to wake up to what it means.
Are you ever going to see that interview?
No, what you're going to see is, you're going to see, well, the one guy they brought out, they trotted out one guy in a wheelchair who was anti-war.
And, of course, you know, they said, well, why, in a sense, why are you anti-war?
And he said, well, my buddies are still over there.
I've got a brother who's still over there.
I'm against war because I don't want him to get hit.
Now, that's not moral.
That's really not.
What would be moral would be to say the reason that I'm against the war is my brother's over there murdering people and I want him to stop.
Because I know what it means to kill people and I know what it means to recognize that you've actually killed people.
You die inside, your life becomes a ruin.
The physical aspect is the least of it.
Losing an arm is the least of it.
And that's the kind of empathy that we don't see.
He wants to go and drag his brother to safety, but he doesn't think about all of the people that his brother has killed.
All of these poor Iraqis, and they don't think of, although I'm sure they know at this point, they don't think of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who were killed through the sanctions.
They don't view this country called Iraq as a kind of slaughterhouse and concentration camp.
And that basically they're about as brave as people coming into Auschwitz in 1945 and beating up on the concentration camp victims.
I mean, these poor Iraqis who have known nothing but deprivation and Bloody dictatorship and propaganda and all of the horror that goes along with a sociopathically controlled and destroyed human existence.
And that the only tiny pleasures that they can have are the pleasures of children and the pleasures of family.
And there have now been hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them Either murdered through the withdrawal of critical medical supplies or food through the sanctions that went on all the way through the 90s and of course they kept bombing all the way through the 90s and you know thousands and thousands of people were murdered through these bombing campaigns long before the war ever got going.
And these people who live in Iraq are about as powerful and strong an enemy as somebody in the terminal stages of multiple sclerosis in a wheelchair.
They are about as dangerous as an anorexic in a boxing ring.
They are about as dangerous as a concentration camp victim in a wrestling contest.
And these are the people who are sky-bombed into atoms, and who are shot at as they approach checkpoints.
And this is who the brave American soldiers feel that they're fighting.
They're fighting.
There's no fight.
There's no fight.
The occasional U.S.
soldier who is killed or injured, assuming not through the regular accidents and problems of war, is never killed in a fair fight, is never injured in a fair fight.
These people are wounded through explosive devices and sniper attacks.
And it's almost never close urban combat.
And it's never the case that... I mean, the Iraqis can't call in airstrikes.
The Iraqis don't have laser-guided bombs.
The Iraqis have boxes of nails and explosives.
So the idea that the Americans are out there fighting anybody is also ridiculous.
But the amount of empathy that is lacking is staggering, absolutely staggering.
Of course, a culture which has this kind of empathy would never go to war in the first place, so I'm not saying it's terribly surprising.
But it is hard to really comprehend just how empty the category we call enemy really is in war or in any kind of conflict.
This is the case of conflict within families as well.
The emptiness and inhumanity of this category called the enemy or the Iraqis or the terrorists or The insurgents.
This is again back to what I was talking about last week about the problem of concepts.
That you create these concepts which you then jam people in.
And as you jam those people in, they go through a blender and come out like this undistinguished paste which you cannot recognize as anything human.
When you put people into these concepts, into these categories, you empty out their souls.
You destroy their identities.
You destroy the similarities.
You know, everybody's saying, oh, I lost an arm, but hey, I'm okay with it.
What I want to do, and everybody who was in this show was saying, well, I want to be a social worker, and I want to work with veterans, and I want to become somebody who helps those who have disabled limbs.
But they want to do it in America.
They want to do it in America.
Isn't that astounding?
Now that they have themselves been injured, wouldn't you think that it might click with them, the amount of destruction that they have rained down on others?
The 2,500 Americans who've been killed relative to the conservative estimate put out by the Lancet of a hundred thousand Iraqis killed and God knows how many wounded And wounded in a way that they're not getting bused to VA hospitals, wounded where they get to die in hospital beds with nothing, or die on the street with nothing.
They live in a medieval world of medicine in Iraq, and they're not getting any access to anything.
They're not getting flown home.
So, the idea that they have now been injured and that the people that they want to help, the people that they're interested in helping, is other Americans who've been injured.
And that they have absolutely zero concept of the people that they've killed and the degree of horror that they visited on those who they have killed.
who have no responsibility in the matter.
They're over there.
They joined the army voluntarily.
They went over there.
They did what they were told.
They didn't desert.
They didn't go to Canada.
They didn't go to Borneo.
They didn't get out when they could.
They went over there.
They did all the steps that lead up to them pulling the trigger or driving the truck.
The gasoline truck, which fills up the tank, which ends up pulling the trigger.
Doesn't really matter.
They did all of this stuff voluntarily, and they feel that, you know, they've been injured, and that's a bad thing, but they have choices, and that's great.
And no concept, no conception whatsoever of the people that they've killed, and the enormous, enormous hell that these people have put through.
And those people they killed had no choice.
The people who were the soldiers Had many many many choices which could have led to any number of places other than them being in a foreign country pulling a trigger and blowing a guy's head into a cloud of blood.
Which is probably a better death in Iraq than the alternative of blowing his toe or his foot into a cloud of blood wherein he's going to have a long, horrible, hellish, painful death which is going to destroy his family's meager resources and not result in him getting any kind of survival chance at all.
So, there's many, many steps which lead to that event of shooting somebody, of killing somebody, of blowing somebody up, of dropping bombs on them.
And the people who are in Iraq don't have any of those choices.
Their illiteracy rate is very low.
Sorry, their illiteracy rate is very high.
They just don't have access to the kind of information that Americans do.
There's no internet in Iraq that the average villager can get a hold of and learn the truth about the situation.
The truth is available.
Places like antiwar.com, the truth is available to Americans at a click of a button.
They just sit their asses down in a chair and click a couple of buttons and read a little.
And that's all available.
All of that is available to Americans.
And so to say that we should have sympathy for these people who have an enormous amount of choice.
It is one thing, and we can have a certain amount of sympathy for the brutality that they probably experienced as children, but to go from an abusee to an abuser is by no means a foregone conclusion.
That journey from somebody who is abused to somebody who becomes an abuser is by no means a foregone conclusion, and statistically there's not a lot of evidence to say that it is any kind of inevitable journey.
So these people are acting out the rage that they experienced against them, directed against them as children, they're acting it out against helpless Iraqis in a way that is far worse than what they experience as children, right?
I mean, murder is worse than child abuse.
So that's sort of how sick the culture is, that we don't have any, even those who are against the war in the public media, such as these guys from 60 Minutes, They really don't have any idea what it means to have empathy from one human being to another.
They really don't have any idea what is missing from the people that they're interacting with.
And they don't get any points for showing those who are wounded if they show them perky and happy and ready to change and ready to be better people and ready to change their occupation, not change their moral natures.
They don't have, they don't get any points for that at all.
In fact, I think it's more destructive because when they mirror the audience's supposed reaction to these kinds of atrocities, I mean the atrocities that these soldiers have probably committed against others, not just the atrocities that have been committed against the soldiers, when they mirror the audience's emotional reactions to that of Wonder and sympathy and admiration.
They are releasing another pathogen into the social bloodstream.
They are releasing another virus of horror, rage, destruction and war into the social bloodstream.
And they're doing an enormous amount to corrupt what little moral sense is remaining.
And I would have kissed the hem of their garment.
I would have kissed the hem of his garment if Mike Wallace had had a shocked and horrified emotional reaction which had been shown on screen because that would have to some degree given people permission to feel the same way and to begin to develop the first shreds of empathy for other human beings who are fundamentally exactly like us.
I mean we can't look at these people over in the Middle East as fundamentally different than us because it's simply not the case.
You take one of those kids as a baby and you raise him in an American household and he's going to be an American.
So there's no genetic difference that results in them storming Danish embassies and so on.
There is simply the abuse of a culture that lacks empathy on children, which then reaps its grim whirlwind of violence and destruction as those children grow up.
And you can't fight it by giving sympathy to those who are going over and killing them.
You simply can't fight Muslim extremism by giving sympathy towards those who are killing them.
or towards those who continue to abuse them.
So the only way to deal with this problem of a corrupt culture overseas or at home is to re-establish the rule of the moral law, to re-establish empathy for other human beings.
And we do this not because we want to change society.
We do this because we want to be able to love and to be loved.
And if you have any kind of empathy for murderers or sadists or masochists, then you simply are going to lose the capacity to have any kind of love relationship in your life.
Love is the most beautiful wellspring of joy in the world, and you want to fight off this kind of infection of sociopathy, because it's going to make you happy and your life joyful, and only as an effect might it do something to reduce the incidence of the universal horror called war.
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