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March 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:24
142 The Matriarchy at War

The tricky task of raising a soldier (or, the umbilical cord-ite)

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There's a lot of discussion going on about whether Canada should have troops in Afghanistan.
I feel the need to speak up.
Who am I?
I'm just an ordinary mom.
A damn good mom whose son lost his life over there on a highway north of Kandahar.
Private Braun Scott Woodfield died on November the 24th when his light armored vehicle rolled over.
He was just an ordinary kid.
A damn good kid who wanted to help people.
He had his heart in the right place, and he found another family in the Royal Canadian Regiment.
He was very proud of being a soldier.
This is where he felt he could help people.
I was proud that he was proud.
Canada, warts and all, is the best damn country in the world.
What better country to show the world what a good country can be?
The best way is to lead by example, for sure.
But there are bullies out there, and one has to be prepared to deal with them.
I ask that we, as Canadians, hold our heads high, and in doing so, show the men and women over there that we care.
Show them that we honour their valour, respect the call of duty that has summoned them, show empathy with the sacrifices they and their families endure, and demonstrate that we are a proud nation of proud, ordinary people.
Beverly Woodfield, Cow Bay, Nova Scotia Good morning, everybody.
It's Stefan.
It is the 16th of March, 2006.
It is 8.40 in the morning.
And I just wanted to read that to point out to our American friends, or my American friends, that, or my friends in liberty who happen to be live on a differently colored map square, that it's not just in America that you get these crazy fundamentalist brutes.
It's not just in America that you have this hellacious, violent, death-dealing nationalism.
And it's not just in America that you get or find these death cults of military families who speak in these angry, violent clichés and who have become so corrupted
Either through their own experiences with their own family, which is what I would pretty much suspect to be the case, or because they have imbibed so much pig's will of modern philosophy.
You know, not directly, I doubt that this woman actually went to university and studied postmodern relativism, but They have imbibed so much of the ideas floating around in the modern world that this is exactly the same kind of stuff that you would hear or read in Nazi propaganda.
This angry, vicious woman who praised her son's occupation as professional murderer as being kind and his heart was in the right place and he found his new family in this regiment and I just find this kind of... This is the reason I don't read the media.
It's the reason I don't... There's nothing to learn here except that there are really vicious and brutal people in the world.
There's nothing to learn from the media but a confirmation of a diagnosis that I already know to be the case.
And there is always the risk of infection in the media.
And this is sort of one thing that it may be.
It may be interesting if you are somebody who reads the newspaper or who watches the news or who gets caught up or who reads this kind of stuff.
It may be interesting to take a break for a while.
To take a media vacation.
Or a krabatical, because it's all crap and you're taking a sabbatical from it.
A krabatical.
It may be worth doing that because you already know that the culture is very unwell.
You already know that the majority of the people around you have been corrupted into moral monstrosities.
anti-moral, immoral monstrosities and that they are bitterly defending error and murder and corruption and violence and they are bitterly defending it against your life.
They're bitterly defending other people's rights to hurt you and to imprison you and to kill you if you resist.
And this woman reminds me a little bit of a woman who was in Fahrenheit 9-11 And this woman lost her son in Iraq and she read a letter very tearfully and her sort of vaguely brain-dead husband was right next to her on the couch saying nothing and seemingly feeling very little.
And this tubby woman who sort of reminded me vaguely of Herb Tarlac's wife on the old WKRP in Cincinnati And she was reading this letter and she became very emotional and she said that before he left to go to Iraq he sat on his bed and said he was terrified and he didn't want to go.
And she said, she said, I sat down with him, something like this, she said, I sat down with him and I talked him through his fears and I helped him to understand his obligations and I reconciled, helped to reconcile him to the fact that he had to go and blah de blah de blah.
Now, of course, this is not to pick on women, because we've already had that go, but it's worth looking at the cycle of violence is not only male-based.
The cycle of violence in the case of soldiers has a lot to do with brutal, sentimental, vulture-like mothers.
I mean, we all know from the military dad who's, you know, stand to attention, do this, do that.
Here's a list of your chores.
And you get them done or you're grounded.
Or you're confined to barracks.
You're put in the brig.
We all know the metaphor of the marine dad and how brutal that is.
What we don't see is the woman who lacks any kind of maternal feeling.
Who lacks any sense of morality, in fact, who has a morality which involves enslavement to strangers she will never meet to the point of sacrificing her own child.
That is so anti-biological that it is just absurd.
These women who raise these soldiers and who speak in these kinds of terms are one of the very steady, certain, beating hearts of genocide and war and destruction.
These nice women who go to church, who were very careful mothers, who made sure that their children got their inoculations, who probably lectured their children in stern and loving ways about hitting other children.
These mothers who worried over their children's homework and who broke their hearts when they got a skinned knee.
These mothers who, with all the tender dreams of motherhood, were overjoyed when they were found out to be pregnant, when they found out themselves to be pregnant, went through a pregnancy and basked in the glow of pregnancy and in the kindness of others towards those who are pregnant, who went through obviously challenging, all labor is challenging, went through challenging labor,
and breastfed and worried over should I feed my baby formula or should I continue to breastfeed who juggled work family issues who rushed home from important things at work when their child was sick all of the tender cares that mothers provide to their children and I think by and large at the physical side this is generally true even my mother was quite a good mother when I was sick
All of these tender cares that mothers place into the security and protection of their children, the staunch biological imperative that mothers want to pass on their own genes and fathers want to pass on their own genes, all of this becomes completely reversed.
When faced with propaganda.
This is the power.
This is the power of propaganda.
Because morally there is no difference between a hitman and a soldier.
The only possible difference between a hitman and a soldier would be a mercenary who was hired voluntarily by a community to repel invaders.
Those soldiers would be more akin to security guards, people who are hired to protect property.
It's a voluntary situation.
It is not a situation which is coerced by the government on the general population to strip them of their taxes and pay for the military.
That is a possible situation under which a soldier can be a moral man or woman.
A voluntary contract to defend property that is specific and time-limited and completely voluntary.
None of this everybody's got to pay nonsense.
Completely voluntary.
The only option being that if a DRO had a very large area to cover that it was in sort of nominally in charge of, and never sort of monopolistically, but nominally in the way that Microsoft has like 90% of the operating systems, then that DRO might make it part of the condition of being accepted by that DRO that you kick in 50 bucks a year for defending the property as a whole, and that's perfectly voluntary.
As long as the DRO owns the house that it's selling to you, it can make that part of the contract.
We don't have to get into the technicalities of that now.
It is possible.
But just want to give you a sense of the power of propaganda.
Of the power of this tiny little snowflake bowl.
You know, those little snowflake glass things are filled with snow.
This is where people live relative to the wide world.
They live in this tiny little glass enclosed artificial area relative to the actual truth.
So you have mothers who are praising The state that murdered their son.
And on the other hand, in this 9-11 woman, whose name escapes me, the Fahrenheit 9-11 woman, she, on the other hand, is angry at the government that has the military that killed her son.
But her son reached out to her the day before he left to go to Iraq.
He reached out to her and he said, Mommy, I'm terrified.
I don't want to go.
I feel like there's a good chance I'm not going to come back.
I don't really know that I believe in the war.
I just don't want to go.
The day before he left, he reached out to his mother to help him fight his way free of this fog.
And his mother told him, using the argument for morality, to go.
You signed up.
It's your duty.
It's your responsibility.
It's an honorable profession.
You're doing the right thing.
You know, we've had generations of men in the military.
None of them have cut and run, cut and run.
I love this cut and run, like he's over there.
Cut and run, well, cut and run.
We're not going to cut and run while Bush is sipping tea in the Rose Garden.
It's just a sick joke.
But this is the power of propaganda.
This is what ideas do to the human mind.
This is why the argument for morality is something we should always be eager to use because there is no greater power.
It has the power to overcome and obliterate and completely reverse all of the dictates of biology which has taken millions of years to imprint themselves in human nature.
Then these women are proud to sacrifice their children.
They are proud to serve up their children to kill or be killed.
You have Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
This group of mothers who hold news conferences and have ads on the print and television and other media and they're trying to raise awareness because their sons or daughters have been killed by drunk drivers.
And you really don't see mothers against genocide, mothers against the military.
You really don't.
Because we are not a civilized culture.
Sort of the fundamental thing to understand about the West, and you have to not be fooled by the momentum of history, that we are not a civilized culture.
We are not a kind culture.
We are a brute, fascistic, tribal culture.
We are not civilized in any way, shape, or form.
And the only reason that any civility exists within our society, such as the vestiges of the free market, the vestiges of democracy, It's because in the past, people were civilized.
In the Enlightenment, people were more civilized.
And we have that momentum that is fading fast.
But we, in terms of our present culture, we are not civilized.
And that's why I don't read newspapers.
And that's why I don't watch the news.
That's why I'll watch a little bit of 60 Minutes when I feel that I can take the horror that's out there because at least they're critical.
But it's pretty much like reading the Nazi press or the Soviet press.
And it's not because the government runs everything.
I'll get to the media in another podcast.
But basically the media is dependent upon government approval for its survival.
Everyone has to have a license from the government.
It's amazing how mysteriously licenses can become problematic when you criticize the government.
But everybody goes through these 14 years of public school indoctrination about the state.
We're constantly bombarded with ads about the virtues of the state.
The media is composed of people completely beholden to the state.
And so what are you going to get out of these people whose entire livelihoods, incomes, and everything, their careers, all of their skill sets, all depend upon praising the state.
This woman is getting survivor's benefits.
Can you imagine what problems might occur to her survivor's benefits if she were to found Mothers Against the Genocidal Military?
Or Mothers Against Military?
Can you imagine what would happen in her community if she were to speak out against the war?
Can you imagine what would happen in her own conscience?
Imagine what would happen in her own conscience if she looked in the mirror and said, I encouraged him to go.
If she began to research the history of Afghanistan and try and figure out why the hell her son was there, She would realize that he was a pathetic little broken pawn in the military-industrial complex.
What would her life amount to if she had propagandistically participated in the murder and the corruption and murder of her own son?
What would that mean to her as a human being who obviously, like all of us, values the argument for morality?
But this is what I mean when I say that the state is an effect of the family.
So you grow up as the son of this brutal, cliche-ridden, angry, bitter, vengeful, proselytizing, moralizing woman.
The military might not be such a bad place to go.
You're certainly primed for it.
And the other woman, the woman from Fahrenheit 9-11, she gets angry at the White House.
Can you imagine?
She gets angry at the White House.
And she's railing against this, and she's railing against that.
Like this other woman, Gail something or other, whose son died in Iraq.
She is angry at the White House.
But you don't raise a soldier accidentally.
You don't raise someone who's quite comfortable going into a nightmarishly regimented and emotionally brutal environment where you are taught how to murder efficiently, and where people joke about the Geneva Convention, wink, and say, do whatever you need to do, just get me the goddamn information.
You don't accidentally raise somebody who is comfortable and happy and feels perfectly at home in a situation where you have no voice, you cannot speak up, and if you don't obey blindly, you get physically beaten up or killed if you resist the arrest by the military police.
You don't accidentally just come up with a soldier out of nowhere.
A soldier is like a bonsai or an orchid.
It takes incredibly careful preparation to turn a wonderful baby into a willing killer.
This is not something that George Bush is responsible for, people.
This is not something that the state is responsible for.
This is something that parents are responsible for.
This is something that communities are responsible for.
And Given that this all has to happen before the age of three or four, and ideally before the age of two, and that women are the primary caregivers, it can be said in a very real sense that the cause of war is mothers.
You and I were exposed to all the same nonsensical propaganda.
I've had a few emails from people who were in the military, but none who speak of it positively.
So this kind of distorted and warped and murderous human soul, this black death of a personality, is not something that somebody just goes, hey, wow, I'm a real happy well-loved guy with a secure future and I love my life, but there's this really great Marine brochure.
So I think I'm in.
Inconceivable.
I can't tell you what I would do to avoid being in the military.
I would very likely kill myself rather than go and fight and die, because it is far better to suffer evil than to do evil.
And I count myself enormously, enormously fortunate to be one of the one or two generations in history That has been able to grow up without the fear of the draft and of genocide, murder, and death, and torture, and every hellish thing on earth that war is.
But I find it astounding.
I find it astounding that this one brain-dead, chattering, empty, dead, violent, vicious woman praises the state that killed her son, But of course she's a participant and she's the primary participant.
You see, the army just picks up the broken detritus left behind by bad parenting.
And given that you have to kill the empathy primarily to create a soldier, you have to kill the capacity for empathy because to point a trigger at another human being and to pull that trigger is not something that you come about accidentally.
It's something that takes years of careful preparation on the part of the parents.
And generally, since it's very early, empathy develops within the first year or two of life.
Sorry, first year or three of life.
And of course, if it's the father who's the primary caregiver, then it is the father.
In that case, who is the crucible of the soldier, the source of the soldier?
But in our society, for the most part, it's women or female caregivers who are the primary caregivers for children, and it is in that phase that the soldier is born.
So this is something you also don't hear a lot of feminists talking about, that the root of violence is motherhood, that the root of war is motherhood.
And they'll say, well, it's because they're brutalized by their fathers and so on, or their own fathers, but that's fine.
And that's a perfectly valid thing to say.
But then the only problem with that is that you then remove any possibility of criticizing anybody.
If all you talk about is a cycle of violence, and my mother was bad to me, therefore I'm bad to my daughter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's fine.
But then there's no point talking about it, because it's like getting mad at aging.
I mean, it's just sort of stupid, right?
It's like getting mad at gravity.
Or a sunburn if you don't put SPF on.
Because if women aren't responsible for the cycle of violence, then neither is men, for sure.
In which case, there's no such thing as a cycle of violence, there's simply what is.
And then people have to explain why it is so possible for people like myself to get out of the cycle of violence and to have wonderfully productive, nurturing and loving relationships as an adult.
By the simple virtue of placing the blame where the blame belongs, which is on the parent and not on the child, where it does not belong, and accepting responsibility for the after-effects as an adult, since I now do have responsibility for accepting responsibility for the after-effects of being exposed to high degrees of violence when I was younger.
It's called putting responsibility on people, and it does not get women off the hook at all, especially when you're talking about a paid killer who has no empathy, who is cold, who is angry, who's acting out some kind of brutal rage on the world, and who then is praised for being a damn fine person, whose heart is in the right place, and who is trying to help people.
Well, I'll tell you this, one thing she did get right, one thing she absolutely did get right in this letter, is the fact that she says he found a second home in this regiment.
A second family.
And I will absolutely tell you that is the case.
Because his primary family was vicious and murderous as well.
So people always tell the truth.
People always tell the truth.
His heart was in the right place, which for the mother is the wrong place.
He was trying to help people, absolutely.
He was trying to help his mother avoid her own evil by acting it out himself.
That's truth in everything this woman says.
Because you can't escape the facts of the unconscious and the honesty of the unconscious.
But the idea that it's true in the surface is ridiculous.
And there are bullies out there and you need to know what to do about them.
Absolutely!
She's totally right.
She's the bully!
And he didn't know what to do about it.
He just went out and started shooting at people and torturing people and brutalizing people and he brutalized himself in the process because he didn't know what to do with the bullies who were not out there but in the home.
So when you see the next time you see a movie or a documentary about war and you see these men marching up and down in that ridiculous high-stepping thing
If you see the films about the Nazis, these goose-stepping things, if you see the Muslim men all bowing down in a kind of horror and moral shame, at least from the outside, bowing down and praying at the same time, when you see this unbelievable level of fear, conformity and rage in the world, every time you see that, see a ring of mothers around the scene.
See a ring of cold, and brutal, and vicious, and angry, and withdrawn, and withdrawing, and shunning, and manipulative mothers.
Of course, you can see the fathers as well, but we already see the fathers.
We already see the brutality of the fatherhood, because this is what the feminists have hammered on, and I think rightly so.
Why not?
They haven't hammered on it morally, because they're not talking about mothers, but they have hammered on it insofar as anybody who gets to point out an evil, it's good.
It's not like learning about the Holocaust is bad.
Of course, it's good.
You just don't want to only learn about the Holocaust, and you want to make sure that you extract the moral knowledge, the moral understanding of what caused the Holocaust, which doesn't cost Judaism in a great light.
But what we don't see is the mothers.
That's what remains invisible to us because of the enormous amount of propaganda around motherhood that we get.
Consistently.
In the media.
And of course within our own families.
And because mothers are not at all familiar with or responsible for their own aggression.
Women are just like men in terms of their moral natures.
Women are not better or worse than men.
We're all human beings.
But men have had, and thanks to feminists, and I appreciate that, men have had the need to control the male temper, the need to Be more humane, all of that stuff, great!
Who's gonna feel bad about somebody who says it's always important to be more humane?
Now, of course, I don't believe that the feminists themselves are particularly humane, unless they're talking about the female violence which produces things like moral monstrosities, evil robots like soldiers.
If the feminists are talking about that, then they're actually just humanists and they're civilized.
But if they're just talking because of their own problems with men, if they're talking about the innate virtue of women and the innate degradation of men, then they're just contributing to the evil.
Now I can pick some good out of that insofar as it helps me further see male violence, but they're just contributing to the evil of the world and they're not civilized.
They're just partisan.
They're just tribal.
And also they're just after government money, which is brutally stolen from everyone else in society, so they're also corrupt.
But I wanted to sort of point out This fact that we really need to see this ring of mothers around all of these violent men.
This ring of matriarchal, evil, corrupt, destructive power.
Because civility starts very early in life.
Empathy and tenderness and warmth and concern and care.
All of these traits start very early in life.
And if they don't start, it's the responsibility of the mothers.
Or the primary caregivers.
I think I've said this enough.
But let's just say the mothers, 99 times out of 100, it is the mothers.
If a society is not civilized, and there is no society in the world that is civilized now, societies that are not civilized are turned uncivilized by mothers.
Wherever you see pictures of brutality, see the ghosts of brutal matriarchy in the background.
Wherever you see men screaming and punching and waving guns, see brutal matriarchy in the background.
Because women have so much power in the world.
Women choose the men.
Unless the woman was raped, in which case she is not going to marry the rapist, she chose the brutal man.
Because we do have within culture, in all cultures, the idea that rape is bad, and the idea that you cannot force a woman to marry you, is pretty common.
It's not universal, but it's fairly common.
Certainly in the West, it's de facto, it's just a statement, it's a fact.
And so, a woman who is not violent herself, but who chooses a violent man, has voluntarily chosen that violent man, chosen to have children with that violent man, and obviously not done much to protect them, because they will have been exposed to his violence pretty consistently.
So even in the choice of the man, the woman is the agent.
The woman is the deciding agent.
And the degree of civility that a culture possesses, in my humble opinion, is to a large part the degree of responsibility that women take for the brutality that is in the world.
The degree of responsibility that women take for the men that they choose in their lives.
The degree of responsibility that women take for how they treat their children and the after-effects of that.
That womanhood is the heart of civilization.
Because a child who is well-raised can be subject to very little evil, very little corruption.
They pay their taxes and all that, but a man who has been badly raised is subject to just about any kind of corruption you can think of.
So that's something that I do want to talk about.
I think it's just so important to talk about this in general.
To share our experiences of our exposures to female violence.
Because to solve the world is not just philosophical.
As I think I've made sort of clear, at least in my opinion, so far, the world is not philosophical.
The mother, who does not, when her child says, My God, Mom, I don't want to go to Iraq.
I'm terrified.
I think I'm going to die.
The mother who does not say, as if she is awakening from a bad dream, Oh my God, you're absolutely right.
Let us get you out of this country as quickly as possible.
We'll find some way to make it work.
Let us flee this horrible country and go to some place where they can't extradite us and just get out of town.
Mothers who don't do that are the ones who are breeding the violence in Iraq.
And they are the ones who are generating these murderers.
They are the ones who are raising and pruning and training and developing these murderers.
And if we don't see that, then all of the philosophical arguments in the world aren't going to mean smack.
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