All Episodes
Previous Next
June 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:20
276 War and Empathy

Notes from a battle in Afghanistan

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It's 9.30 on the closing hours of my lovely vacation with Christina.
We had a great time. We stayed in town.
It's June the 11th, 2006.
That would be a Sunday. So, hope you're doing well.
I haven't had a military rant for a while, but while trying to tune into 60 Minutes, we accidentally caught Dateline NBC's rescue at Roberts Ridge, I think it was, Operation Anaconda, that went on in 2002 over in Afghanistan. that went on in 2002 over in Afghanistan.
And I am not going to repeat all of the stuff that I've repeated before.
This will be a repeat-free show, except for the ears, arms, you-knows, I-sees, you-thinks, and all that kind of stuff.
But for the most part, it'll be a repeat-free show.
But what I would like to talk about is a couple of the illusions that are put forward about war in the show...
And of course, this is not just in this show.
This is just about any time anybody talks about war.
You always, of course, have to be suspicious when you get a new show talking about war with the cooperation of the army.
That's never something that is...
A good situation because it means that it's been pre-vetted, pre-controlled.
You're not going to get any questions that are going to be morally uncomfortable.
The army is going to be able to use the argument for morality all the way through.
And you're not going to get any kind of honest psychological assessments.
Excuse me, I have a slight sore throat.
I'm such an intellectual.
I tell you, Christine and I, we went to the Science Center Thursday.
Friday. We went to the Science Center on Friday, and Christina has had a cold this week and has been soldiering on with great aplomb.
So we go to the Science Center, and I sometimes bite my nails.
And so we're sitting there, and we're watching a video of how germs get transmitted.
And so I'm watching this, quite fascinated, and then how germs get attacked by your white cells and all these sort of The platelets all.
It was really, really cool stuff.
And I'm watching this going, wow, that's fascinating.
And then, of course, what I'm doing is rolling around the Science Center, pushing all the buttons, then occasionally maybe I'll bite my nail a little bit.
Like, no connection.
Now, of course, come the evening, I'm like, huh, my throat feels a little funny.
And then it all clicks then for me.
Like, it's not going to do it in any kind of useful time frame where I'm actually going to sort of wash my hands or make sure I don't buy my nails or anything.
But it's like, to me, it's just kind of funny that I'm so abstract at times that I can watch this long show about how germs get transmitted and how the body fights them and what the effects are.
And then I'll just merrily go around, pushing all the buttons, engaging with all the exhibits, and transferring just about every plague known to mankind from all the snot-nosed little kids into my, I guess, well-strengthened immune system, strengthened by, of course, that I didn't live in the Mr.
Clean bubble of marriage, but was a bachelor for quite some time, which was a little bit like Jurassic Park, but with some slightly larger bugs.
So, that was kind of funny.
But... So I have a little bit of a sore throat, nothing too major, but I won't be breaking into any falsettos.
I'm sure that for some of you that won't be a great tragedy.
Maybe for some of you it will.
Nah, forget it. It won't be.
So anyway, this Operation Anaconda that went on in 2002, I'll just give you a brief description of it and then a couple of conclusions that I'm going to pillage from Christina and call my own because she's...
Oh no, she's still awake. That Christina came up with.
So this operation there was supposed to be this big attack on Al-Qaeda terrorists, right?
Al-Qaeda fighters. They're never Afghanis, right?
They're never like just Muslims or Afghans.
Al-Qaeda terrorists, because Al-Qaeda is the big boogie word that makes everyone think of 9-11.
So they're going to do this big pincer attack, and they've got hundreds of troops, American troops, going in with close air support and so on.
And Everything that you could imagine that could go wrong in a military operation goes wrong, and of course this is what you find just about any time you look into military operations.
You see just the amount of bungling and incompetence that there is constantly in these kinds of situations.
The government is no better at war than it is at the welfare state or the war on drugs or delivering your mail on a Saturday.
The government is completely incompetent at anything except enriching itself through violence.
And so this particular thing, they had all of these scouts went out.
They had sort of two command centers, right?
So all of these scouts went out.
And came back and said, well, there's actually three to four times the number of Al-Qaeda fighters or whatever you are there.
I'll just call them Afghans, right?
There's three to four times the number of Afghans, but that was just somehow never passed along.
They always say this. Oh, I never got that information, right?
Of course, they probably did, but didn't think it was important or forgot it or whatever, right?
You never know what the truth is inside the military.
It's like trying to figure out the budget of the government.
So they sent too few troops in because they had radically underestimated the number of troops that they were going to go in against.
And then their landing zones, the LZs, I also love the way that reporters use these military acronyms, despite being that they would never get caught more than two miles outside of L.A. without their hair and makeup.
So their landing zones were supposed to be scouted out to make sure that when they put the helicopters down, right?
Helicopters are very vulnerable when they're coming down because you can hit them with a rocket-propelled grenade or automatic arms fire.
They're pretty helpless, right? They're not flashing past at 150 miles an hour.
They're just sort of settling down, so they're very vulnerable.
So you're supposed to scout out these landing zones.
And of course, they sent all these helicopters out with all these guys.
And unfortunately, the plane that was supposed to go and scout out these landing zones had mechanical trouble, and so they never scouted them out.
So of course... The Al-Qaeda, the Afghans who've been fighting in this neck of the woods, I mean, since 1980, off and on, right?
From the Russian invasion.
These guys know this neck of the woods pretty well.
So they're all waiting there.
And anyway, so on one ridge, on the top of a mountain, where this helicopter tries to come down, and it gets peppered.
It gets hit with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic arms fire and so on and so.
It sort of staggers out of there, but one guy has fallen off the chopper and is now stuck on this mountaintop.
So then they send another helicopter out there.
That one gets shot down, and then they send another helicopter out there.
Because, you know, it's important to learn from your mistakes.
All of this is occurring at the same time as calling in the airstrikes to bomb the Afghan positions.
The first airstrike vaporizes a number of...
Sorry, it injures...
A number of American troops because they got their coordinates wrong.
So they're sending the third helicopter out, and they've, of course, now they say, well, we were trying to get in touch with them to tell them not to go because it was too dangerous.
We'd realized that it was too dangerous, but we just couldn't get through to them because, you know, they're all those solar flares that come out of the mountains in Afghanistan, which interferes with communications, of course, so...
They couldn't get around to getting this chopper the word not to go, so the chopper goes, and the same thing happens, gets hit with rocket-propelled grenades, and these guys go down, and there's a long sort of series of stories around this, which you can look up, I'm sure, on the web, but the upshot is that a bunch of them get killed, a bunch more get wounded, they get pinned down, and they can't call in an airstrike because the Afghan position is so close to where they are that it would be 50-50, right?
Who gets toasted?
So, they land another group of rangers about a quarter of a mile, about a thousand yards down, a thousand feet down the mountaintop.
These guys start coming up, and of course, well, I'll get to this in a little bit, but every time there's any kind of problem, all they do is call it an airstrike, right, because they're brave American soldiers, but...
They finally get to the top.
They wipe out the machine gun nest with an airstrike and then kill a couple of stragglers.
And then they find the bodies of two Americans, the one guy who fell out of the helicopter.
They say that he was killed, but we don't know if he was taken hostage and then by calling in this airstrike, which was an overhead reconnaissance plane that happened to have a guided missile in it.
So, the upshot is that they sort of get out, and a bunch of them get killed, and so on.
Now, there's a lot of things about this story, to me, that are interesting.
There is the usual drum-rattling, distant horns, taps kind of music, which is always associated with a genocidal murder, and hitmen in uniform.
That's just natural. You can't talk about the military without people moistening up and imagining that a Marine...
Playing taps in a misty morning in a fog is somehow different from people out there getting killed for...
not exactly in self-defense, right?
It wasn't like this guy woke up and one of these Afghanis was trying to break into his house and steal his children and rape his wife, and therefore he had to shoot that person in self-defense.
No, he had to travel quite a long way to go and act in self-defense, so I wouldn't necessarily call it that.
Of course, their big story...
In the discussion of this, their big story is that, well, these guys did 9-11, and it's payback time, right?
It's payback time. And, I mean, where do you even start with that?
It's a complicated issue.
I'm not going to get into any 9-11 conspiracy theories, because I don't have the expertise to judge them.
But just to take the general story at face value, let's say that Al-Qaeda was somehow behind the 9-11 stuff, or at least that's what these people believed.
Well, The one thing, of course, that can never occur when you're a soldier is that you actually understand that the person that you're fighting is like you, right?
I mean, we like to sort of believe that if we're soldiers, like that the guys we're fighting are stone evil and not a product of their environment and could be anyone they want but just chose to be like guys huddling their ass off on a mountaintop in Afghanistan...
But they've somehow voluntarily chosen to be who they are.
And you've voluntarily chosen to be who you are because you're some fine, square-jawed American soldier.
You just happen to get born into America rather than into some crazy, evil Muslim country.
So you are superior by birth, right?
So it's an aristocratic kind of thing.
But you take it as a personal virtue, right?
So you can't have empathy and understand, of course, that if you feel...
You feel a desire for vengeance because of 9-11, right?
You associate that with Al-Qaeda.
And so you feel that you want to go out there and, you know, kick some ass, right?
We're going to kick an ass and take it names or whatever the hell the phrase goes.
But you're going to go out there and it's payback time because they attacked you, right?
You're an American, right? Some of these guys are from New York.
So they attacked you. So now you're just fighting back.
Now, of course, you didn't wake up one day, as an American, and before you went into the military, or in any country, could be British too, you didn't wake up one day and say, you know, I really don't like the fact that these Muslim dictatorships do very bad things to their women.
I think I'm going to go and leave my friends and family and home, and I'm going to go to far-off training camps, and I'm going to get involved in plots to murder lots of Muslims.
Because they're just bad guys, right?
And so you wouldn't feel that at all, but somehow the Muslims are so different from you that they wake up one day and they just say, I hate the fact that Americans are free.
Of course, they wouldn't believe that you're free because they believe that they're going to paradise and you're not.
And that you're deluded by the false prophet Jesus Christ.
So they feel that their reward is all taken care of by heaven, or by God, or Allah, and so they don't really worry about it.
But somehow the Muslims are so different from you that they wake up one day and they say, you know what, I'm just going to go and join this crazy bunch of fanatics out there in Afghanistan, and I'm going to I started getting involved in plots to kill thousands of Americans, and I'm going to give up my family life, I'm going to give up my education, I'm going to give up all the comforts, because Afghanistan, you know, not exactly the most ecologically friendly place on the planet.
It's not like they're all training there in the Barbados or anything, so I'm going to go do all of these things.
And so they're just like crazy, fanatic, bear-toothed, caricatured, Evil people, and you're sort of, you know, so your desire for payback, right?
See, that's your first clue right there.
I mean, of course, that you'll never get sold just to understand this, I don't think.
But that's your first clue.
Like, they have hurt me.
Now I want to hurt them, right?
I mean, this is a standard human reaction.
I'm not saying it's unhealthy.
I'm not saying it's unnatural.
I'm just saying it is a basic human reaction.
If somebody attacks me, I'm going to want to attack them back.
If somebody punches Christina, I'm going to want to do whatever I can to defend her, even to the point of calling the cops and loudly making a podcast about my bravery later.
It could be any number of ways that I'm going to do it.
But that's your first clue, right?
So they have attacked you, and now you want to go and hurt them, right?
You want to go and kill them and so on.
Well, see, if you have any sort of understanding of the commonality of human nature and that Muslims are not a different species, Arabs are not a different species, then your first, I guess, basic thought would be, well, if I want to hurt them because they've hurt me, I wonder if we hurt them as well, right?
Like, since I want to go for vengeance and go and kill them...
Maybe the reason that they attacked my country was because we went and hurt them.
So the fact that Osama bin Laden talks about the problems in the Middle East as being caused by the post-World War I division of the Muslim countries after the defeat of the Germans and the Ottoman Empire, the fact that the Middle East is now entirely...
the problems in the Middle East, of course, are largely to do with...
The way that the Middle East was carved up by the Western powers and the puppet governments put in place and so on, right?
So the Middle East that we know of now, today, is directly the result of the decisions made during the peace conference in 1919 in Paris about how the Middle East was going to get divided up and ruled, right, by the Westerners.
And so this is great. Considered to be a great negative in the Muslim world, under the heel, as they say, of the Western powers or Western supported powers like the House of Saud.
I mean, this is all considered to be a pretty bad thing.
I can sort of understand that to some degree, right?
And so, maybe they don't like us for the same reason that I want to go and hurt them.
Maybe they wanted to hurt us for the same reason.
That's just a basic... If I feel it, it's not likely that I'm the only person who feels it.
And so that's how you learn about other people, right?
What is my emotional reaction?
Well, maybe that's their emotional reaction too, right?
And this is not relativism, right?
I'm not talking about ethics here.
I'm just talking about motivation for the first point.
But that's something, of course, soldiers can't be allowed to feel.
They can't be allowed to feel empathy for the enemy.
And they can't find common humanity in...
The Muslims themselves, who are raised with all this propaganda about how the enemy is bad and you should go and kill them, and they're just evil causelessly.
They just wake up and they're evil causelessly.
Well, of course, that's how the Americans are brought up, and the British, and a lot of people in the West.
And so we feel that somehow that the Muslims are to blame for what they're doing, even though the Muslim governments are far more repressive and evil than the The Western governments, right?
So we don't have any empathy for them because we're trained not to, and yet somehow they're supposed to be more mature and have empathy for us, even though they're raised in much more repressive regimes, right?
So the fact that America caused the deaths of half a million Iraqi children during the sanctions of the 1990s might, I would say, have something to do with why the Western governments Governments, not the Western people, right?
That's what everyone says. And the Muslims themselves say, well, we like Americans.
We just don't like what the government is doing, right?
Which is a little bit better than we sometimes manage, right?
Because we hate Muslims sometimes as well as Al-Qaeda.
Now, of course, the vast majority, in my opinion, the vast majority of people are moderates, right?
It's just a bell curve, right?
So you've got some people who are naturally atheists, you've got some people who are naturally religious fanatics, and then you've got, you know, a bunch of people in the middle who are just, you know, either way, right?
They're just sort of trying to get by, get along, and get along in life and survive and raise their kids and go to work or whatever.
And... That's a pretty important thing to understand, in the same way that there are moderate Christians, there are atheists, and these are not people who've reasoned their way, but the natural bent is not to be religious.
And there are religious extremists on the Christian side as well.
But that's just not something we're supposed to understand.
We're not supposed to understand that we're all sharing mostly a common humanity, and we're not supposed to understand that they're kind of a lot like us.
Now, the problem then is a corollary problem which is always taught to soldiers, which is that they are told that they are a superior fighting force.
This is an important thing to understand about the life of a soldier.
You are taught that you are the best, that you are the strongest, that you are the most capable, that you are the best trained, that you are the most disciplined, that you are the most loyal...
And that you guys, you know, you all kick ass, and those other guys are just a bunch of ragtag towelheads who don't know which way to point their Kalashnikovs.
Now, this is also quite a fascinating fantasy that comes out of this lack of empathy.
It's sort of like, you know, if you've, I think I've mentioned this before, but if you see those sports films, right, you see some sports film about the underdog team with the, you know, quirky band of misfits and so on, and they, you know, they've been struggling and they want to do well...
And then, on the other side, you have this evil team of really well-put-together and well-funded kinds of cheaters.
Well, the problem, of course, is that that's not how war works, right?
In war, everyone is the same because everybody wants to survive and everybody wants to, as they perceive it, do the right thing and kill as many of the opponent as possible.
There's no innate difference, right?
So you're watching some sports team, and sports team A, which you've been following for two hours, then goes for their big match, and you want them to win.
Like your sports team, right?
Your local sports team, you want them to win.
Of course, if you were watching the other sports team for two hours, you just want the other sports team to win.
Like, this is just something we don't understand.
Fundamentally, we just don't understand this as human beings, and the result of this, of course, is...
A sort of sea of blood the world over.
We don't understand that it's just a matter of where you happen to be born, right?
I mean, this has a lot to do with it.
The average American did nothing to earn his or her freedom.
He's certainly not doing anything to defend that freedom but become...
Becoming paid killers for the government.
It's just an accident.
Where were you? Sorry, where was the great umbilical airplane when it happened to let your fertilized egg go, right?
Was it over Afghanistan?
Well, sucks to be you.
You grew up a Muslim, right?
And were you happy to be born over in the States?
Well, okay, so you grew up to be a...
You know, semi-homicidal Christian maybe.
I don't know. But the issue is that it's mostly accident, right?
People don't invent their own thoughts.
They just absorb what's around them, right?
And so to think that people are evil because they happen to be born in a different country and raised in a different ideology is...
Problematic. And it's not problematic because the Muslims aren't evil.
That's not the issue.
I'm not trying to create any relativistic scenario here where nobody's right and nobody's wrong.
The problem is not that the Muslim ideology is not evil.
It is. It's completely evil.
The problem is that you think that only the Muslim ideology is evil.
That's the issue, right?
I mean, you don't see that if you go by principles, Christianity in its history is no better than any other religion, no worse than any other religion, and the degree to which Christianity has been civilized is the degree to which it has been removed from political power.
And now that it's gaining political power again, it's doing exactly the same thing That it all but does, which is it starts to divide people into the good and the evil, and it starts to kill the evil people, right?
Because there's no negotiation in Christianity.
Yes, there is no negotiation in any religion, because it's all about faith.
So, the idea, the magical thinking, that arises from a profound lack of empathy, that those people on the other side of the ridge are somehow different from you, is quite mad.
And of course, we've probably all heard, I certainly have when I was a very little kid, These stories that in World War I, during Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day of 1915, I think it was, or 1914 as well, everybody put down their weapons and they went out into the no man's land and they had schnapps and brandy together.
And this, of course, had to be stopped by the high command because it was a bit too much of a lie.
There's a Marxist analysis that says that both the soldiers are pawns of the upper classes, I think, is somewhat true.
I'm no Marxist, but I think that there's a good deal of truth in that, in terms of these people are all raised...
To be cannon fodder, right?
I mean, we can certainly see... Or to pay.
They're either in the army or paying for the army, right?
That's the two options when you're an adult in Western society.
So, the fundamental lack of empathy that people have for what is sort of called the enemy also gives them the illusion that they're superior fighters and that their valor and their bravery is going to make a damn bit of difference, right? That, to me, is quite a remarkable thing.
Now, I don't know whether this is true or not.
I've read it in a number of different places, but I don't exactly move in the circles where this could be verified.
But it does seem to be a fairly common belief around the world, and particularly in the Muslim countries, that American soldiers are not tough.
And certainly judging from this particular story and other stories that I've heard of or seen, there does seem to be some truth in this.
So, for instance, if you want to just look at an amoral category of courage, right?
I'm not talking about any kind of ethics here, but just this amoral categorization of courage.
Independent observation of the war between the Afghans and the Americans would not, I think, put the category of overwhelming courage on the shoulders of the American troops, because what happens in this story and in other stories that you've probably heard of is that any time that the Americans get into trouble, they do two things.
Number one, they call in an airstrike.
Number two, They get medevaced, right?
They get evacuated out in medical helicopters.
Now, I'm not saying that it takes no courage to go into any fight, right?
I mean, this is a difference of degree.
But... If I were to pick a side that I was going to be fighting on, say, in any war against America, I would probably go with the Americans myself, because I'm no expert on Al-Qaeda, but I'm pretty sure that Al-Qaeda, when they're pinned down by the Americans and shooting up RPGs at the descending helicopters, don't really have the ability to call in an airstrike, right?
I mean, the Americans in any theater of operations have overwhelming air superiority, and in fact, the Americans don't go in without overwhelming air superiority, right?
This is sort of the false war that's fought these days.
When was the last time you read about a gripping air battle, right?
It doesn't occur.
And so when it comes to courage, the Americans, they get into trouble, they get pinned down, eh, let's call it an airstrike.
And then if they get wounded, it's like, eh, let's call in the medevacs and get evacuated out.
To a hospital, eh, not more than an hour or two away.
Well, the Afghans, Afghanis that are fighting...
Don't get to call in airstrikes.
They don't get to get evacuated out to state-of-the-art hospitals behind the lines.
They're just up there freezing their little tushies off in these mountains.
Of course, I'm sure to some degree, for some of them at least, it's their country, right?
So, I mean, they have that motivation as well.
Plus, they have the crazy additional motivation of believing that they're instantly going to go to heaven, if they believe that or not.
I don't know whether that's just a myth or not, if they believe that.
That they're going to go to heaven if they get killed, right?
So, of the two, right, of the two sort of forces, I would sort of say, in a non-ethical kind of way, just sort of measuring the height of a liquid, so to speak, I would say that it would take a lot more courage to be on the side of the Afghanis than it would be to be on the sides of the Americans.
And the reason that that's important is not because I want to get lots of emails saying that I'm pro-Al Qaeda, which I'm sure I will, But the reason that that's important is that one of the ways that soldiers get killed, and one of the reasons that soldiers go into battle,
is that they think that their own emotional or psychological state of bravery or whatever is going to have some particular relevance on the outcome.
What saved some American lives here at the cost of several hundred Afghani lives was this airstrike, which didn't have anything to do with courage.
It had to do with superior firepower.
So this idea that there's all of this virtue and nobility and courage associated with these soldiers who are just doing a fine job and so on, as I think it was Napoleon who said, God is on the side with the most divisions.
Whoever has the superior firepower will find out.
That they win, and it's got nothing to do with courage.
It's a purely technical exercise to win a war.
It's all about supply lines and so on.
And if you look into more details into the Battle of Britain, for instance, which is often cited as, you know, British courage against overwhelming odds, well, no, it was a lot of complex things, but the fact that the German pilots only had 50 minutes or so of combat time over England, because they didn't have a lot of gas tank equipment, And the fact that the British were able to out-produce at that time in the war with the help of other countries also, I mean, was the major factor, right?
So thinking that there's some big A variable called courage and so on in a war is a huge mistake, right?
Because what it comes down to is, can I call it an airstrike, right?
It comes down to that kind of stuff.
And once you understand that, then you can start to strip away some of the mythology of bravery and sacrifice and so on of a soldier, right?
And it can become, well, if I'm in a shootout...
It's really good if my gun doesn't lock up on me, right?
If it doesn't jam, then that's a good thing.
And if it does jam, then I'm going to get gunned down, right?
No matter how courageous I am.
So, of course, that reminds me, as I'm sure it does of some people as well, of that funny scene in the first Indiana Jones where, you know, Mr.
Scimitar of Death emerges in the marketplace and Harrison Ford's character just shoots him, right?
I mean, this is sort of what is kind of funny, right?
When you get into this kind of stuff.
But courage really doesn't mean anything in war.
What matters is, does your gun jam?
Is there a good supply chain?
Can you call in an airstrike and can you get medevaced out?
That kind of stuff means something.
What's your technology like? I mean, the fact that the U.S. had all of these spy planes orbiting the battlefield, able to track everything and send in guided missiles, that meant something, right?
They didn't win because they were braver than the Afghans.
That's sort of what I'm trying to get at.
Now, the last thing that I'll say about this...
It's this issue of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Well, it is a complex phenomenon, and there are thousands upon thousands of Iraqi veterans who are considered to be at risk, and they say only a quarter of them are getting help and so on.
But if you are a soldier who's out there and you've listened to this, I wouldn't put a lot of money that there's a lot who have, but if you have...
Maybe you're questioning some things about the military and so on and your own role in this kind of stuff.
This guy, his name was Self.
I can't remember his first name.
We'll just call him this guy.
Mr. Self, right? Which is kind of an interesting name for somebody who no longer has one.
But this guy was out there, and he was wounded, and he was the leader.
And he called in the airstrikes, and he went and killed a bunch of Afghans that were left, I'm sure, half-dazed.
And Mostly dismembered or disabled from the airstrike, he went and killed them and found that the airstrike that he'd called in had likely killed some Americans who were there as hostages or as prisoners of war or whatever you want to say.
Well, he comes back from Iraq and he starts to spiral down into suicidality and depression and so on.
He's suffering all these problems and the way that he's got all these nightmares and the way that he frames it in an interview is he says, I just look at everyone and I picture them dead.
I'm sort of sitting right across from you.
And I sort of say to myself, I know what you're going to look like when you're dead.
I know what you look like dead.
So he's a complete basket case, right?
And he's going through a very difficult time, and of course he's getting help from the army chaplain, so I'm sure he'll be fine there.
And what he keeps saying over and over again is, it should have been me, not them.
It should have been me, not them. It should have been me, not them.
And at his conscious level of awareness, this means to him that...
It should have been me that died, not my fellow American soldiers who died.
Well, he's not going to get better if he goes on thinking like that.
And he's not going to get better because nobody's ever going to tell him what I'm going to tell you now.
Which is that the problem that he's facing...
is not that he saw people who were dead.
And it's not that he was shot.
And it's not that his comrades died.
This is not the problem that he's facing.
The problem that he's facing is that he went thousands and thousands of miles on the orders of someone he never even met to go and kill a bunch of people because he was told they were an enemy.
The problem that he's facing, the reason that he is psychologically disintegrating, that nobody is ever going to tell him, is that he is a mass murderer.
The problem that he's facing, which nobody is ever going to tell him, is that he is a hitman who thinks he is a saint.
We won't even get into the complexities of the false self and the true self involved in this kind of delusion, but He has carved off his capacity for empathy.
Who knows what his childhood was like, if he even had any capacity for empathy to begin with, we don't know.
I think yes, to some degree, because he's actually suffering based on his experiences or his actions.
So, the fact that he is experiencing all of this is some sign that there's a possibility of cure, but the cure will never be possible.
Unless he extends his empathy, and this is what we all need to do as human beings, is to extend his empathy to include those termed as enemies.
Because if he understands that the people who he gunned down in Afghanistan for vengeance were acting on their own distorted views of vengeance with regards to the United States military, That the people who mastermind these things very rarely are on the front lines.
The people who are on the front lines are usually ignorant, poor kids who are filled full of hateful propaganda by those who have more power and resources and are sent off to die and to kill and be killed.
And that, really, they're just like him.
The difference is that he happened to be born in America and they happened to be born in In Saudi Arabia or Syria or Iran or Iraq or Lebanon or Turkey or wherever you want, where this sort of thinking goes on.
Now, if he can understand his own susceptibility to propaganda, which we are all susceptible to, if he can understand his own susceptibility to propaganda, then he can begin to understand The Muslims' susceptibility to propaganda,
right? I mean, a newborn baby in a Muslim household did not create Islam, did not create dictatorship, did not create war, did not create standing armies, did not create taxation, did not create madrasas or public schools or Sharia law or any of that stuff.
They're born into a horrible, horrible environment which you and I can't even imagine.
How terrible it is to be raised as a Muslim child in a Muslim country, man or woman.
It's equally horrible in both situations because it is an evil and irrational doctrine.
So he has far more in common with the Muslims that he's killing than he does with his own superiors.
he has far more in common with the Muslims that he's murdering than he does with his own wife.
And this is something that if we don't grasp as people, that we have more in common with somebody who's being taxed than with our own government.
Because in the same way that a sheep has much more in common with a cow than they do for the farmer that owns them both.
I mean, you can call it a class thing or whatever, but it's my strong belief that this is where the empathy needs to lie.
If he can understand that he was lied and tricked into killing people who were just like him and who had exactly the same stories about him than he had about them, but that their stories were much more substantiated in fact In fact.
In fact, the United States has killed far more Muslims than Muslims have killed Americans.
I mean, By orders of thousands.
By a factor of thousands.
And they can point to all the bodies, and it's all admitted to in the U.S. press.
You've got Madeleine Albright after chirping about how she feels that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was worth it.
So, they have absolute proof, which they can point to, well documented in the U.S. press, and praised in the U.S. press, crowed about.
In the US press, right?
So you have the US targeting hospitals in the attack on Fallujah, a war crime by any standard, punishable by death according to the US government's own laws, being praised on the front pages of American newspapers and interviews with American officials saying that this is the best thing since sliced bread.
Well, if this mistress self can look at the people that he murdered and say that the real brothers on the battlefield were the people that he was killing, then he can begin to deal with his post-traumatic then he can begin to deal with his post-traumatic stress disorder, which is actually a moral sickness of the first order.
Because he knows, deep down in his heart, that he was a paid killer, swallowed up in the psychotic fantasies of others, well-paid and well-trained to go and kill people that he had much more in common with than those who were ordering him to do the killing.
Well, Which is why, in World War I, it's the troops in the trenches that came across No Man's Land to have drinks with each other, because they were the ones who actually had more in common with each other than the leaders who did no such thing, of course.
And so, if he can begin to cross that bridge, that gulf, to understand that we must have some sympathy for those who are raised in totalitarian regimes, that we must have some empathy,
because even if there are people like us, and I'm sure that there are, even if there are people like us, like we who love integrity and rationality and freedom, real freedom, If there are people like us over there in those Muslim countries, can you imagine the difficulty that they're having relative to the difficulty that we're having?
We can choose not to go to church.
We can question our teachers.
We are not going to get whipped.
We're not going to get our hands cut off.
We're not going to get killed. There are no honor killings in the West.
And... I mean, other than the ones I'm describing in military terms.
And so... The difficulties that the people who are our brothers over there in the Muslim world who are struggling to bring some kind of sense and rationality to this psychotic doctrine, those people over there in the Muslim world who are doing that, you and I have more in common with those people than they do with their own family.
Because we're struggling to bring truth and rationality to a world that is progressively drowning in psychotic fantasies about the state and God and all of this ugly, ugly filth that human beings attempt to flush their moral crimes into, which doesn't work, right?
You give up your crimes, you give up your soul, right?
Which is what this person is struggling with and what I had to struggle with with my own moral corruption in my 20s.
Well, if we can have empathy for those who are raised with the same amount of propaganda that we were raised with, and who have a much, much tougher time breaking free of the kind of social controls and the kinds of social punishments, then I think we can actually have empathy for even the crazy Muslims.
Empathy doesn't mean sympathy.
I want you to understand this.
I'm not saying that we're all going to have a big group hug and everything's going to be better.
A lot of these people would kill us if they could.
But we've been doing a whole lot of killing from our side of the fence, and so it's hard not to understand why they might feel that way.
But there are people out there in the Muslim world who are like us, who are trying to bring some sanity to this crazy blood-soaked dream of religious fundamentalism.
I don't know how we're going to find them.
I have had some hits from people who are downloading Free Domain Radio and coming to the blog and more power to you.
I mean, if you're listening to this, you have the kind of courage that I can only dream of.
I get nervous talking about this kind of stuff with no repercussions and I'm safe in my living room.
What you're doing over there is something that I can only look at with a kind of staggered awe in terms of courage.
And if there's anything that I can do to help, Then let me know.
But these people who are born into these dictatorships are enslaved.
They are absolutely enslaved.
They are filled with propaganda.
It's hard for us to see the truth and to see rationality.
It's hard for us to see that we are alone in our struggle for the most part and our friends and family are opposed to what it is that we're doing.
So it's hard for people...
It's hard for us even to accept the truth about our own families and about our own friends.
And about our own social situations, boyfriends, girlfriends, and spouses who may be opposed to what we're doing.
So if we have a hard time accepting that, can you imagine what a hard time it would be to accept this when the alternative is not just social ostracism, but imprisonment, torture, and possibly death?
Well, I've got to tell you, I don't think I'd be doing what I was doing if I was being threatened with death for doing it.
Unless I had gone completely underground.
So I do have a great deal of empathy for people who end up in these kinds of situations.
I mean, what is it that it takes to get a human being to end up shivering their ass off in a mountain in Afghanistan, facing down the most incredible military power the world has ever seen, Which can nuke you from orbit, pretty much, and that this is the fight that you've ended up in.
It's not because you had all the choice in the world, and you just reasoned your way into that this is the best possible situation that you can end up in.
And so, I think it's part of the craziness that we all need...
To deal with in ourselves this idea that we can split off human beings into people who are completely opposite from us.
That we can take all of the virtue that to a large degree we have inherited by happening to be born into a post-enlightenment society with a relative degree of economic and intellectual freedom.
That we didn't earn these things.
I would not be who I am if I was born in Syria.
I'm not saying I'd be a priest, but I would not be who I am if I was born in Syria, because I've leaned on the thoughts of other people, just as we all do, which I would not have access to.
And that the sanctions for doing what I'm doing would be more than I would bear.
It would take a crazy person to say, I think, that ideas are worth your life, because if you're dead, what does it mean?
You don't have those ideas anymore.
You can't enjoy them. Violence works very well in controlling and suppressing human freedom and human conversations and human rationality.
We see this the world over. The guns come out and everyone dives to the floor and pretends to pray for Allah while perhaps looking for a contact lens.
So violence works very well.
It would work as well on me as it would on you.
And the kinds of difficulties that we have...
Just in terms of social ostracism and the possibility of rejection by people who have no power over us is nothing compared to the kinds of brutalities that are inflicted upon people who grew up with these Muslim or other kinds of dictatorships.
And as such, I think that it behooves our common humanity not to say that they're not trapped in an evil doctrine.
They are. They're trapped in an evil doctrine.
And the people in the police and the people in the military, to some degree, are trapped in an evil doctrine as well.
They're a little bit more active in enforcing it than most of us are.
But I think that we need to have some level of empathy for those people who are out there, who've been raised with the kinds of lies that make our lives look like how we currently view the tale of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
And it's very hard for people to fight their way out of those lies, just as it is hard for us to fight our way out of those lies.
And so if you know anybody who's a soldier who's suffering from this kind of stuff, instead of asking them how it felt for them to watch their comrades suffer, it might be worth asking them what did it mean to kill another human being because you were told to.
That, to me, would be something that would set them free.
It's a pretty explosive thing to ask.
But if you have the stomach and the intimacy with someone who's suffering in this way, I think it could be well worthwhile.
Thank you so much for listening.
I had a very kind donation today.
I really appreciate that.
And if you'd like to come by the boards, that would be great.
I also appreciate the FeedBurner sign-up so I can track listenerships.
And of course, as always, I thank you for listening and hugely appreciate donations that come my way.
▲
Export Selection