All Episodes
Previous Next
March 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:32
145 Do We Need A Standing Army?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I'm running late, so I'd better get this Volvo started.
Hi, it's Def.
How's it going?
5.13pm, running a little late.
17th of March 2006.
I hope you're doing well.
So I lost a podcast this morning.
There is great woe in the land.
No biggie, actually.
I'm going to reproduce it, actually, word for word.
So, what did you see?
Okay, I started off this morning, and what I was doing was I did a couple of ums, and then I did some errs, and then I did a couple of you knows, and then I did a couple of as ifs, and then I sneezed twice.
So I'm going to be reproducing all of that, and it's going to be just perfect.
So.
Okay, so I did something about the military this morning, which I'm going to I sort of Think that it's not bad really to have a second take at something because it was a complex topic and I think I'd sort of Hammered out the whole conceptual thing right at the end So let's go with our sort of major three points and see if we can't figure out how to make this stuff a little clearer so
We began with a post that was on the board, and I promise not to pick on board posters in particular, but this one was an interesting and instructive enough post that I think it's worth repeating and trying to tease out some of the problems that are in it.
And I fully sympathize with this perspective.
I mean, my heavens, I only got over my addiction to pornography and war fever Yeah, probably about 18 months ago.
So, again, no Hightower, no casting down of aspersions upon the ignorant, since I was still so very recently among their kind, that there's no disrespect whatsoever meant by the repeating of this kind of question.
It's a fully understandable problem.
But one person posted on the board this interesting question, which was, I was, you know, doing my usual army bad, army bad, army bad thing, and this poster said, well, why is it inevitable that A standing army ends up attacking its own citizens.
Is it inevitable?
It doesn't really make any sense.
And he said, I can think of times wherein a standing army has been in existence within a country and it has not turned like a rabid dog upon its own citizens.
And so it's not initiating violence against its own citizens and so on.
And this is an absolutely understandable opinion.
And this is something, the reason that I'm bringing this up is because it's so hard for us to understand the water that we're swimming in, sort of conceptually, right?
One of the people who posts and who's got very smart things to say was IMing me today saying something like, and I apologize if I'm paraphrasing incorrectly, Something like, everybody thinks that their world is good, that they're doing the right thing, and this is the case throughout history, and yet most people throughout history are wrong, and of course I would say that all people throughout history are wrong, and there are certainly things that maybe we can't figure out.
I think we're pretty close, to be honest with you, and I hope that that's not hubris, but I think in this conversation, I think we're getting pretty close to what might be called a truly civilized outlook on the world, like a truly pacifistic, realistic, honest, moral view of the world.
I think we're getting pretty close.
I think we're a lot closer than most people in history have ever gotten, and I think that's why it's worth straining to go that little bit further and see if we can't find, you know, the final, the Holy Grail, right?
The truth.
And I think we're close.
I feel like I'm getting consistently closer, and that's a wonderful and exciting thing.
I can't tell you how happy that is making me, and I hope that it's making you happy as well, because it is a gripping and thrilling journey.
So I think we're pretty close, but it certainly is true that the vast majority of people feel that their world is moral, that the world is good, and as one... I was listening to one... UCTV has a good podcast, Conversations with History, and they were talking with a southern guy who said he was quite shocked when he saw his father was a minister who got involved in the The Civil Rights Movement in the 60s.
And he said, you know, lots of good people, nice people, thought that segregation was the way to go.
You know, people who brought up their children well and blah blah blah.
Now, I don't really believe that that's the case.
I think what he meant by good, nice people was people just like everybody else around them, which is quite a bit different from good, nice people.
I'm sure that there were people who voted for the Nazi Party who, you know, were just like everybody else.
In fact, we know that because they got in power legitimately.
Oh, that reminds me.
Okay, one thread catch-up and then I will continue on.
And this is one of my own threads.
What I forgot to mention, or I started off when I was talking about Hitler in a couple of podcasts back, I was talking about, and I was reminded to fix this up when I next talked about or even came close to the topic, I started talking about how Hitler had no problem with democracy.
And I forgot to tie that off because, of course, I went beating around the thickets of my own tangents until I got lost.
But what I meant to finish that off with was to say that Hitler had no problem with democracy insofar as he, after the failed putsch of 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch, he actually decided after that that he was only going to seek power, that the Nazi party was only going to seek power through legitimate and democratic means.
And that's what they went and did.
That's the only thing I wanted to say about Hitler's relationship with democracy.
He wasn't a fan of it.
But he had no problem with it in terms of a sensible way to gain power, you know, after which he then destroyed the economy with central control and command and all the stuff that the British, after defeating him, thought would be such a great idea for their own economy.
Okay, that's it.
Now I'm back.
And I didn't talk about that this morning, but I'm still going to keep going.
So, it's very hard for us to recognize the water that we're swimming in, because if you ask a fish, I mean, let's take a slightly surreal interview topic, if you could ask a fish and say, what temperature do you think the water is that you're swimming in, they'd sort of look back at you and say, what water?
What temperature?
What are you talking about?
This is just reality.
This is what is.
There's no water, because of course they've got nothing to compare it to, and they've got no other temperature to compare it to.
So they really don't have any sense that there's such a thing as water that they're swimming in, or that there's such a thing as air, or anything like that.
And it's very true with people's intellectual understandings or moral understandings of the world.
We're all brought up on this propaganda, and it takes a long time to fight your way free.
The rewards are enormous, but the battle is hard.
And this is the kind of question That comes out of this kind of thinking, and again, no disrespect to the person who's posting it, it's very instructive, and I was until recently entirely caught up in this kind of mess myself, so I'm certainly not coming from any, you know, wiser zone, or at least not until very recently.
So this person wrote and said, I can't think of an example, you know, I can think of many examples where standing armies have not exercised violence against their own population.
And by that, of course, I'm sure he means that they have not attacked their own population, you know, in the sort of way that it happened in Guatemala in the 80s, where the army sort of went nuts and attacked their own population, or had a coup, or started throwing people in gulags, or whatever.
It's very hard for us to see this stuff very clearly, because we have this category called army, and unless the army is actually shooting people and so on, it's not violent, and so on.
Now, of course, as I posted back a response, which was something like, well, it's hard for me to understand what you mean when you say a standing army is not exercising violence against its own population, because as far as I understand it, standing armies are are funded through taxation, right?
So if you don't pay for the army, they shoot you down, right?
And if you really, I mean, they'll come and get you to drag you off to prison, and if you don't go off to prison voluntarily, they'll just shoot you down.
So it's hard for me to understand how the existence of an army or anything that is coercively funded through the state, or coercively funded in any way, is not exercising violence against its own population.
So that sort of was my response there.
It's very hard of us to not think of the army as some abstract concept.
The army, the defense of the realm, the protection of the homeland, you know, this overused phrase, on American soil, you know, it's just like, blah!
That stuff makes me kind of gag for obvious reasons, but There's no such thing as the army, right?
There's no such thing as the army whatsoever.
The army does not exist.
There are a bunch of guys who, if you don't give them money, they're gonna shoot you down!
And to me, this is a protection racket.
And so when people say, well, we need an army for self-defense, it's a complete contradiction in terms.
I mean, obviously, you can maybe, maybe there's something I'm missing and obviously feel free to let me know.
But it seems kind of obvious to me that to say to me, I have to force you to pay money to me so that I can protect you from people who might force you to do something.
I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
I mean, it's that simple.
I mean, there's no logical defense for it.
Either self-defense is not interesting or not valid, in which case you don't need an army, or self-defense is interesting and is valid and is something that we want, in which case the first thing we do is make sure that there was no such thing as an army!
Because they would be the first people to pray on us.
Because you can't have an army without people praying on it.
Now, you can.
I mean, you can have an army without people praying on you.
And that's basically something like what we would call security guards.
Security guards are some private armies.
I mean, they're exactly the same.
They're paid.
But they're paid for voluntarily.
And generally, of course, they're only required because the police are so inefficient that everybody knows that they're not going to get any property back if it gets stolen.
So they have to protect it with these brain-dead drones.
There's such a thing as a private army, you know, it's the security guards or whatever.
And so I wanted to talk a little bit about this topic today, because I just think it's kind of interesting.
Now, be warned, I am going to talk about self-defense.
So if you have not listened to my earlier podcast, I'd appreciate it if you do it.
Oh, wait, you know what?
I think I can remember it from memory.
Uh, hello!
It's bad sound from early podcasts.
I think that's pretty accurately how it sounds with the occasional explosion as I blow on the mic.
So I'm sorry for those early podcasts.
If I had any time, I would try and re-record them, but I just don't.
So we must plow on.
So in terms of self-defense, I know that it's something that we get all hung up about and it's this caveat and so on.
I'm just going to try and take another swing at it, and I'm not going to repeat anything from the earlier podcast.
I'm just going to talk about this concept of self-defense so that hopefully this idea of an army can be laid to rest, or at least we can open up a new area of debate about it, because it's a bit stalled, I think, in the conversation as a whole.
So I'll take a swing at it and see if I can't loosen up a few bricks.
Now, I'm going to give you a horrible metaphor, so bear with me as we plunge into a horrible, festering world of medieval black death.
So let's picture that you and I are ethical debaters.
We are scholastics and we are ethical debaters in the Middle Ages.
And this horrible, bubonic plague is tearing asunder the life and limbs of everybody across Europe.
And we have this ethical question.
And the ethical question is this.
Let's just say we figured out the whole infection thing.
And the ethical question is, when somebody has passed a certain phase in the progression of bubonic plague, then they are doomed.
They are doomed to days or weeks of a horrible, sputum-ridden, bloody, coughing, retching, Death.
And there's no possibility that they're ever going to survive.
And as they cough up all of their phlegm-laden sputum into the medieval atmosphere, sadly, they're going to cause many other people to die, because an infection is going to spread, and so on.
Now, the ethical debate in this case would be something like, do doctors have the right to just kill those patients and cause their bodies to be burned so that they sort of prevent their suffering and they prevent the spread of the bubonic plague through their hacking and coughing as they die?
Well, that would be an interesting debate to have.
I personally would never participate in it, in the same way that I'm not really participating in the self-defense debate, but rather looking for a third way.
And the third way is usually not something that exists in the present world, but If violence is removed from the situation, it can be created.
So, it's sort of very important, right?
So, I mean, it's sort of like if you look at, you know, we're a bunch of people in the desert, and we have one liter of water, and we've got three-day march, and there are ten of us, and who's going to die, blah, blah, blah.
Well, I just say sort of like, let's dig for water, and I know how to find it, and then we don't have to worry about who has to die.
And so in the medieval world, here, you can have a debate about whether doctors should be allowed to kill patients who are going to die horrible deaths anyway, and whether they should burn their bodies so there's no infection.
So you're going to save lives, prevent suffering, and all that.
You can have that debate.
I don't think it's particularly interesting.
I mean, in the moment, maybe.
Who knows, right?
But what is interesting is, you know, how about we get rid of the aristocracy in the church?
And Then, we have a free market.
And once we have a free market, we get great things like sanitation.
And we get great things like morphine, painkilling drugs.
We get soap.
We get, I mean, all of these things.
We get antibiotics in time.
We get all these great things.
And then we don't have to worry about whether doctors have the right to kill patients that are dying from the Black Death.
And that's sort of what I'm trying to get across, and I'm not doing a very good job, because it's hard.
I haven't figured out the best way to do it, so I'll just keep thwacking away until I manage to bring down this piñata of truth.
Oh my lord, I've been watching too many America's Funniest Home Videos.
It's like they just should all wear cups when they put the piñata up, don't you think?
I mean, wouldn't that just be what you'd learn?
It's hard to get this across that we do not have to look at the existing situation and figure out how it can be optimized because once you get freedom so much is going to change and so much is going to grow that it's enormously unlikely that the situation is ever going to occur.
So, I mean, another one, for instance, is that, you know, regularly half of women would die in childbirth.
And you would have this horrible question.
It's like, when do you save the mother?
When do you save the child?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, of course, what you want to do is have a free market so that improvements in medicine can occur to the point where you don't have to choose between a mother and the child every third birth that you're administering as a doctor.
So, in the realm of self-defense, we don't know exactly what society is going to look like without a government, but I'll tell you this.
It is going to be about one-tenth of one-thousandth of one percent as violent as it is now.
One person posted on the boards A question.
I got a citizen saying violence is really not an issue.
And he was saying, you know, dude, come check out my neighborhood.
I got gang warfare.
There's people getting shot.
There's cops rolling around.
There's people lounging around on street corners who'll shoot you for looking at them funny and blah blah blah.
I'm paraphrasing a little, but I think you get the idea.
And I wrote back and I said, well, that's fascinating.
A. Get out and I sympathize.
And B. Okay, so you've got gang warfare.
I assume this is based on drugs or prostitution or gambling, all of which are made illegal by our friends in the state, which drive the whole proceeds of organized crime and make it all profitable and so on.
So that's sort of one area where a non-governmental situation would eliminate violence.
You're talking about kids who are lounging around on street corners, so shoot if you're looking funny.
And of course, they're all educated by the government.
And there's welfare.
Their families are basically messed up by the welfare state.
And they don't really have any job opportunities, because the minimum wage is really high, and the government education is so terrible.
So there's sort of another example.
And you could sort of go on, I won't go into the whole email, but you can go on and on about this kind of stuff.
He did sort of say, wow, he hadn't really thought of it that way.
But you don't want to look at what is and say, well, how would the free market handle what is?
The whole point of the free market, the whole point of freedom, is that what is will change.
And it's a very hard thing to get across.
This is why the free market tends to lose among a poorly educated and unimaginative population.
Because they look at, oh, the drug war, oh, we can't make them legal because drugs are already so bad, even though they're illegal, if we make them legal!
And, of course, what people don't see, and this is why really important truths are non-intuitive and don't appeal to the senses, as I've said before, right?
I mean, the world looks flat, but it's not.
So sensual evidence is just the beginning.
It is the final arbiter, as I've also argued before, but it is just the beginning of truth.
And so, in a situation Where self-defense seems quite important.
Self-defense might not be at all important once we don't have a government.
So, the same way that the question about whether the doctors can kill the patients during the Middle Ages seems very important, but in a free market situation, you've got Ativan, you've got morphine, you've got whatever drugs you need to get rid of pain, you can isolate the patients, you've got antibiotics so they won't get sick to begin with, there's sanitation.
Yes, yes, and I know before you write to me and tell me that the state put sanitation in and blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, that's fine.
But how well did sanitation work until private market engineers figured out water filtration?
Riddle me that, Batman.
So, that's something that I try to get across.
I don't know how to do it.
If you have suggestions, please help me.
It's a very difficult thing.
To paint a portrait of a world of possibilities, right?
I mean, that's a very difficult thing to do.
I mean, you can read the moon as a harsh mistress and get a sense of it, but it's not going to be anything like... I think DROs are going to be part of it, but I don't know if there's much else.
I mean, everything else is going to be so different, it's hard to predict.
It's like saying to somebody in the Middle Ages, what is medicine going to look like in a couple of hundred years?
Because of course it wasn't until the late 19th century that going to a doctor actually raised your chances of not dying.
Before that, if you were going to a doctor, you were much better off taking your chances with the natural course of things than going to a doctor.
Because a doctor isn't going to kill you bad.
So, that's something to try and grasp, and it's a really tough thing to grasp.
It's very abstract, but it's very real.
The history of it is very clear, if you look at the Industrial Revolution, the before and after snapshot.
It's unbelievable.
If you look at the before and after of the computer revolution, if you'd said to people, oh yeah, there'll be instant free messaging anywhere in the world and phone calls will all be free if you've got the right hardware.
And people would say, you know, in the late 18th and late 19th century, what are phone calls?
Let's start with that.
So the world that is going to come into being is unimaginable compared to what it is now.
So we don't have to solve those problems in the future based on the problems in the present, because those problems probably won't exist in the future.
And I can tell you this, violence is not going to be a big issue at all in a stateless society, aside from the odd brain-damaged schizophrenic crazy guy who thinks God's telling him to kill someone.
She probably won't be God.
It'll be just Bob in this situation.
But you just don't get that kind of issue in the future.
You won't have to worry about it.
And it's not something that I'm just sort of making up at all.
It's something that you can directly trace throughout history.
And you can look at societies where the state does not have as much authority.
There are less violent societies.
So, I mean, this whole myth that people have, and this is a very important myth that people have made up, which I've written about on my blog, but the Wild West was incredibly peaceful.
This idea that there's these one-eyed criminals that go out to the frontier towns to prey upon the... I mean, it's crazy!
Criminals always gravitate towards cities.
They don't gravitate towards frontier towns where it's like, give me your cow!
It never happens, right?
The reason that these films became very popular after the Progressive Movement is that you really needed to paint a portrait of life before a very large government, and the government in the early 20th century was much larger than it was in the 19th century, especially after the Progressive Movement and the income tax in 1913 and so on.
But you really had to portray the world as an incredibly violent and dangerous place until the sheriff rode in and cleaned everything up and made everyone safe, right?
I mean, the Wild West was incredibly peaceful.
I mean, okay, maybe not so much for the native Indians, but definitely for the settlers, it was very peaceful.
People didn't blow each other away and have these hair-trigger tempers and so on, because you've got to be a kind of stalwart and independent and rigorous personality to go and make your living on a bug-infested frontier, and those people don't tend to be criminals, and they don't have enough wealth to attract criminals.
I mean, just look up the statistics, all that stuff about the Wild West, all pure propaganda, and I only say propaganda just because it only came out after state schools, right?
I don't remember any of the literature of the Wild West occurring before the growth of state schools in the 1870s, so maybe I'm wrong, let me know if I am, but this is just the kind of stuff that you naturally get, right?
The state is bigger, why?
Okay, well, let's do the ex post facto justification and say, well, it must have been really bad before the state was big, right?
I mean, that's...
That's what Winston Smith is trying to figure out when he goes and talks to that old guy in the bar in 1984.
What was it like before?
That's what Harry Brown was continually talking about.
What was it like before the war on drugs?
Well, I remember and it wasn't a problem.
And what was it like before the federal government got into health care?
Well, it was pretty cheap and that was great.
The issue that without the government there's all these people preying on each other, it's just not true.
That's just propaganda, right?
You've got to understand that.
Look at the facts.
Don't even accept a word of what I'm saying.
Just go look up the facts around violent crime and of course check your sources and so on, but it really was not an issue at all.
People were not violent in the absence of a state.
Compared to how violent they are and how much violence they're subjected to in the presence of a state, it really is quite worlds apart.
So, let's look at, so this idea of self-defense, sorry, just to finish that off, this idea of self-defense is, forget about it, it's really not important.
What you want to do is, or if you think it is important, focus on defense against the existing state, which means getting rid of it.
But don't worry about self-defense.
It's really not going to be an issue.
I grew up in a tough neighborhood.
I knew lots of guys who got into fights.
I never once got into a fight.
I've never hit anybody.
I've never been hit by anybody.
There's ways out of it.
There's ways to avoid it.
And this is even in the current very corrupt environment.
In a stateless society, it's not going to be an issue.
It's far too profitable to be somebody who's non-violent and far too destructive to be somebody who's violent.
There's going to be no profit in it.
No profit at all.
And there's going to be jobs aplenty.
They're all going to be well paid.
Nobody's going to sit there and say, ah, I'm going to go and steal a VCR when I could get paid 25 bucks an hour to work behind a counter at McDonald's and earn enough in three days to be comfortable for two weeks.
So it's just not going to happen.
Don't worry about it.
It's not a big issue.
And even if you think it is, though, I mean, that's fine.
Maybe you don't believe me.
That's fine.
I mean, I can see it clear as day, but maybe you don't believe me.
That's totally fine.
I'm not a psychic.
But if you do believe that self-defense is an issue, that's fine.
My question is, why on earth do you need an army if all you're worried about is repelling invaders?
Doesn't make any sense to me.
We don't need armies anymore.
We have weapons of mass destruction.
I mean, you get yourself 50 nukes in random spots around your country, nobody's going to invade you.
It's absolutely unthinkable.
If you have, and I'm not talking in control of the state or anything like that, I mean, that's not what I'm talking about, but you really don't need an army if you have a couple of nukes run by a couple of DROs that say, hey, if anybody sets foot on our soil, that is ill-intent or some army comes over and the Navy steams over from Copenhagen to invade New York or something, then you just say, well, we will nuke you.
I mean, it's never going to happen.
It's never, ever, ever, ever going to happen.
And what do you need a standing army for?
What the hell do you need 250,000 people carrying arms around for?
I mean, what conceivable purpose could that have in a free society?
It's madness.
It's madness.
They're not there to protect you.
I can't say that over and over again.
Enough.
The government has no interest in protecting you.
The military is simply used to threaten you with and it's going to continue and it's going to escalate until the government runs out of money and we get some kind of freedom out of it.
Unless we talk openly about this and convince people and get rid of those people who we can't convince.
Stand by our convictions and dump the people who want us dead out of our lives.
But you don't need an army, even if you think that self-defense is so vitally important.
All you do is, if Canada wants to invade the States, you just say to the Canadian government, we'll nuke you.
And it's not going to happen.
And we know it's not going to happen, because it never has happened.
War magically ceased the moment that countries got weapons of mass destruction.
War, the plague of eternity, the eternal plague of mankind, magically up and picked up its black skirts and sashayed out of the realm of human consciousness between political leaders who can actually do each other some goddamn harm.
Right?
Nukes will take out the leaders or the families or take out enough of the economy that the leaders actually have to get a real job on a farm somewhere.
I mean, magically, they're magically able to refrain from war when their own interests get threatened.
So, self-defense, even if you think it's necessary, and I don't think it is, but even if you think it is, it's gonna cost you like half a penny a year to pay some DRO to go and set up a couple of nukes and monitor.
They're gonna make three guys in a bunker.
That's all you're gonna have to pay for.
It's ridiculous to think you need an army.
I'm sorry.
It just gets to me.
Oh, and I'm not laughing at you if you have these opinions.
I really do understand them.
Again, I was subject to the same kind of brain fever for many years until about a year and a half ago, when I finally cracked the code on the argument for morality and began spewing it around me like a flamethrower and seeing what stood at the end of it.
And the answer was, as you can well imagine, not so much.
But it is kind of funny.
It is kind of funny to think that we need protection from other governments, and so we're going to give our own government the power to throw us in jail if we don't fund their mercenary army, which is first and foremost pointed at us.
Right?
I mean, the real targets of the war in Iraq are the American taxpayers.
I've talked about this before, and I've written articles about it before.
That's indubitable.
I mean, there's a rationale, whatever you want to call it, for the Iraq War, and I've yet to do the whole Iraq War thing.
I need some preparation for that.
Because, you know, I'd like to do a podcast in it, just as it's ending.
Because, you know, it's safer.
But the one constant target is always the taxpayer, because that's the one thing that's absolutely required for the military to function.
So, you really don't need an army in any way, shape, or form.
Now, you can say, well, it was only the army that got the WMDs together, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that's fine, that's fine.
I mean, they exist, and of course the free market would never have invented them, but who cares?
They're there now.
You've got weapons of mass destruction.
You've got hackers who can break into just about any computer system and mess up whatever you want.
There's just no capacity.
And let's say that even you don't like that.
No problem.
I mean, the great thing about an argument that's fundamentally sound is you can accept every premise you want and it's still going to work.
So, of course, in a free society there's no restrictions on the weapons you can have.
None.
None whatsoever.
You can have anything you want.
You can have a nuke in your basement.
You can have a tank in your front yard.
I am perfectly comfortable with that.
Absolutely, completely, and totally.
Everyone can have a nuke in their pocket.
I swear to God, it's absolutely and perfectly fine with me.
Because nobody's going to.
Nobody's going to.
And there aren't these lone Lex Luthor nuts who are going to hold cities hostage.
I mean, come on.
Get out of the comic books.
This doesn't happen in real life.
Compared to the danger you face from the government, you're worried about a comic book character holding you hostage with a nuke?
Come on.
Please, people.
It's time to deal with the real dangers before we start making up the imaginary ones, which never make any sense anyway.
So everyone in a free society has all the weapons they want.
You can have a hip-firing scud, if you want.
And, uh, hip-firing scud?
Eh, good name for a band.
Anyway, you can have all of that stuff that you want.
And so, who's going to invade you?
I mean, really, who's going to invade you?
You have no idea who has what weapons.
You have no idea.
Who's got a nuke?
Who's got a scud?
Who's got a pistol?
And who's just got strong language and hand gestures?
Or who's, you know, I don't know, like a legal weapon because they know kung fu or something.
Who's going to invade a country like that?
Maybe nobody's got any nukes, but you don't know, because there's no central registry of who's got what weapons.
As somebody pointed out on the board, Switzerland's never been invaded, because in Switzerland you have to own a gun.
I mean, who's going to invade you?
It's kind of funny, right?
That's certainly not a state-run army, my God.
I mean, government armies are the most ridiculously inefficient things in the world.
I mean, the army's just a post office in fatigues, as Harry Brown used to say.
Perfectly true.
What's the idea then?
Oh, the idea that some country is going to come and invade a free society when the nukes, the weapons of mass destruction, the DROs, and everyone's going to see them coming, right?
If this is any kind of threat, those DROs are going to have radar and figure out satellite photos.
I mean, they're going to absolutely see it coming.
They're going to do whatever they need to get rid of the danger.
And there's going to be... everyone's armed with God knows what when you finally do get... I mean, what are you going to do?
What, is Finland going to invade the international brotherhood of DROs?
To do what?
To steal the television set?
What are they going to do?
It's just funny.
Oh, man.
And there will be no profit in it.
The first thing you do is target the leaders.
It's easy.
You target the leaders.
You put a bounty out on their heads.
I don't care.
I mean, if it's privately done, I don't care.
You kidnap him.
It doesn't matter.
It's never going to happen.
It's never going to happen.
Because you've got one DRO with one nuke, and that's all you need.
You know, it's going to cost the whole country like five grand a year to keep this massive defense system going of one nuke and, I don't know, maybe some anthrax.
But it's never going to come to that.
Nobody's going to invade a free country with all of the weapons, all of the population armed to the teeth.
It's unthinkable.
Never going to happen.
So when it comes to thinking about the army, The army's pointed at you.
I mean, the army is pointed at you.
You know, this is the great danger of the problem of talking about self-defense.
As soon as you talk about self-defense, how important is self-defense?
Well, what do you get?
Well, you get the police and you get the army.
And what do you get from that?
Well, you've got to pay these people with taxes.
So the first thing you do is you have to point these guns at the population to extract the taxes.
And then, of course, as I mentioned in the board, you know, the final thing which we don't have to get into because it's just so self-evident.
I'll just mention it briefly.
What happens then?
Well, the army only exists because of external threats, right?
Oh, it's self-defense, it's self-defense.
Okay, so what is the army going to be most likely to do?
Well, the most likely thing that the army is going to do to maximize its economic resources is to provoke external threats.
That's as clear as daylight, it's as clear as sunrise, and it's as sure as the fact that the moon will rise tonight.
In order to expand its size, scope, power, budget, and all that, all the army's ever going to do... Oh, self-defense?
You want self-defense?
Well, okay.
Well, let's see if we can't whip up some threats so we can expand.
I mean, where do you think 9-11 came from?
It's not... Well, Palm Harbor.
It's not accidental.
That's the course that you're setting yourself on.
The moment you say, we need an army for self-defense, that is the inevitable course that you're setting yourself on.
Happened to every single culture throughout history.
Happening to ours right now.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, as I've also mentioned, oh, Canada's peaceful, they don't have overseas... Well, yeah, we're getting there.
We just stationed all these troops out there to kill and torture people in Afghanistan, and sure as hell it's going to happen over here, and 9-11's going to happen over here at some point.
And nobody's ever going to protect us, and it's never going to be connected.
And, you know, as I talked about in one of my blog articles, the Canadian government will absolutely use troops against the Canadian taxpayers if they get arrested.
I've been confirmed by a military man that that was their training throughout the 90s when they were cutting the budget.
So, I mean, you'd start talking, the moment you talk about self-defense in a military, you've got the absolute destruction of your culture and, you know, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
I mean, it's just an absolutely inevitable straight line.
I mean, you can smoke for 50 years and get away with dying from an aneurysm, but you cannot create an army and not have it destroy your culture.
It's just absolutely inevitable and that's what you're playing with.
And to solve what?
Self-defense?
From who?
It's just never going to happen.
You get a free society where everybody's got all the arms they want, never in a million years is going to have anybody invade you.
Everybody's going to far more profitably trade with you.
You're not going to have drug gangs, and you're not going to have all these idiots coming out, or brain-dead people coming out of stupid public school systems.
I could go on and on.
I'm sure you get the idea.
But honestly, the Army is the worst idea in the world.
I mean, it is the very, very worst idea in the world.
And we really don't need to worry about being tough guys and talking about self-defense, because we're going to create a society where self-defense is just not an issue.
▲
Export Selection