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July 12, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:15
326 The Rise of Evil Part 1: Examples

A theory about conditions for the inevitable escalation of evil

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
Yes, we are, in fact, recording for monsoon season here up in Canada, which seems to last pretty much every weekday so far.
But at least I didn't have to...
I don't have to record off my Zen Vision M. Fantastic product.
Recording is fine, just not so great for a car in a rainstorm.
And the reason that I couldn't the other day was because I had a meeting and I didn't want to be noticed as absent from my work, so I had to leave my computer there.
All of the subtle tricks of the trade for people who are looking for work.
So, this morning, I'm going to take a wild stab at trying to work out this idea that I mentioned in another podcast, which, if you're listening out of sequence, you understand that this is the kind of crucial linking information that you're missing, so somehow you'll survive, perhaps.
But... The question that has troubled me or piqued my curiosity for a couple of months now, maybe a couple of weeks now, is why, why, why, why, why is it so automatic for people who are sort of crazy and volatile to continue in their craziness and volatility keenness?
Why is it that all addictions grow?
That's sort of my kind of question.
And to me, it's not an obvious question.
I try and take sort of nothing for granted at all.
And so I would never say, well, it grows just because that's the nature of addiction.
That's not, you know, what is addiction?
Something which you want to do outside of all reason.
And why does it grow? Because that's what addictions do.
So addictions grow because they're addictions.
That's not really something that I would find too, too, too satisfying.
And so the question for me is why?
Why does it grow? Why is there this instability at the basis of addictions?
And you can talk about everything from alcoholism to sexual addiction to something like Hitler, right?
The wars that go on between mankind.
Why is it never enough? Why is it never enough in terms of why is Napoleon always trying to evade more countries?
And why does Stalin want to grab more territory?
And when is it enough?
And I find that to be a fascinating question.
As I mentioned in the podcast yesterday, Tuesday, Monday, Monday, the question of why is it not enough is baffling to me.
I mean, if somebody gave me a million dollars, I'd probably stop working.
Please donate at freedomainradio.com.
Click on the donate button.
I believe PayPal accepts a million dollars.
But I would quit working and do other things.
It's not that I really hate working or anything.
It's just that relative to other things that I could be spending my time on, I would both prefer and I think be more useful, since the world could probably survive without...
Another product manager, a director of product management in the IT world, but I think that every voice for freedom that can be mustered is worthwhile.
So if I got more, I would change my behavior.
But for people like Hitler, when he gets more, he accelerates his behavior.
And there is this sort of massive self-destructive sequence that occurs with the behavior of these kinds of people.
They get more, they destroy more.
I mean, Hitler, you know, he wanted political power and tried to push.
The Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
And then, just, you know, let me go over the...
I don't have any notes here, but I researched some of this stuff for a novel I wrote, so I'll sort of give you the brief chronology.
Born in the late 19th century, his father was very abusive and grew up in what the author of The Gifted Child, Alice...
something, something. She calls it, drama of the gifted child, she calls it poisonous pedagogy, which is the kind of parenting that went on in Germany that was just unbelievably destructive towards children, and I would be absolutely shocked if Hitler had not been, as a child, raped repeatedly and savagely by male relatives or his priest or something like that.
And then he grew up, he wanted to be an artist, and he applied to an art academy, I think, in Berlin, and was rejected, and was basically homeless for quite some time.
Sort of a bum, working odd jobs as a painter and things like that.
You know, just your typical sort of bum, frankly.
And then he saw a film wherein, I can't remember, some orator, Bismarck or something, some orator was...
It was passionately rousing a speech, and Hitler got very excited and felt that he could do that.
I guess he sort of had this innate knowledge about his own abilities as an orator, which were considerable, of course.
And so he joined the Nazi Party very early on.
There was a putsch, and then he was arrested and had this sort of magnificent, defiant speech in the court and refused to take any responsibility but said that he considers the existing government to be illegitimate and the betrayers of Germany because of the reparations and the failure to win World War I and the consequent economic destruction that was occurring at the time.
And so he became a sort of folk hero, I guess you could say, because he was speaking about a lot of people.
Just sort of very briefly, the Germans missed the whole Enlightenment thing, so to speak.
So they basically ended up with a technology that they never could have developed themselves.
It's sort of like giving a...
I mean, to put it in an extreme sort of fashion, it's a little bit like giving a gun to a savage, right?
To... Because technology and productivity and all this kind of stuff, these are all fruits of capitalism, which is the fruits of freedom.
And the disparity of freedom in the countries of the world is one of the major causes for war and oppression.
Because the...
The capitalist countries develop technology for putting people down, holding people down, mostly military technology, but to some degree police technology and so on, prison technology, but mostly it's just weapons, right?
It's the gun in our head that keeps us down.
And... So basically, whenever you get capitalism, why is it that we have to get rid of the state now more than ever?
Because now the state has all the weapons.
The wealth to create the weapons and the technology was all created by capitalism.
It's not like the Defense Department invents new stuff.
It just pillages from the private sector or pays people in the private sector to provide it.
It doesn't do it itself.
The Army Corps of Engineers didn't come up with the sort of stealth bomber or something like that.
But the wealth to create all of this technology is generated by the free market.
And then what happens is the government takes over that wealth and uses it to begin destroying the free market.
I mean, this is sort of the addictive behavior.
When is enough power enough power?
The politicians who live today have access to money and power in the West, have access to money and power absolutely undreamt of by the richest conceivable kings in the past.
Midas would never have imagined the kind of wealth that's available and the kind of power and the kind of resources that are available to Western politicians.
So, of course, it's not enough.
They have to keep going. And so the countries that generate the wealth end up swelling the ranks of the government because they can, quote, afford a larger government and the people can survive with a government as large, right?
I mean, when you're subsisting on 2,000 calories a day or 1,800 calories a day, if the government grows twice the size, then you starve to death, right?
So there's a natural limitation.
In sort of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, and also to some degree to the Roman Empire, there's a limitation on the size of government because people just die when the government grows.
And now, with the magic of the Fed and national debts and printing money and all this, and of course the magic wealth creation machine of capitalism, Governments can get far, far larger.
They have become tumoresque.
Governments can get far, far larger than they were before, and thus far more dangerous, even in terms of whole human life, whole human society.
There was no government in the Middle Ages that could wipe out 80% of humanity, but nuclear weapon governments, particularly the U.S., can do that.
So governments have become much more dangerous and much larger because of capitalism.
Capitalism produces excess wealth, Excess wealth creates cities.
Cities create property rights.
Property rights create trade.
Anyway, excess agriculture.
We can go over that another time.
Excess wealth creates excess government, and excess government then begins to destroy capitalism for the sake of feeding its own insatiable demands.
And what happens is then, because this technology is in the hands of the government, this incredible technology for putting people down and controlling people and surveillance and all this kind of stuff, wiretapping it, all of this technology that's available, mostly military, is then sold overseas to corrupt governments.
This is how the rot goes. In fact, all this technology and military aid and so on, and people, in fact, are then sold to corrupt governments overseas in return for money.
And that way, the loyalty of the government becomes chained to foreign despots and to major corporations and all this kind of stuff we know.
I don't think I'm shocking anyone with this kind of stuff.
But this is how the rot spreads from the corrupt governments to the less corrupt governments, right?
And whatever we say about North America or most Western governments, They may be corrupt, but they're a heck of a lot less corrupt than the House of Saud or the 5,000 princes that prey upon the flesh, blood, and money of the Saudi people.
But the Saudi government has an enormous amount of money, of course, and partly because they're getting an enormous amount of military aid from the United States, so they don't have to spend as much keeping their people down.
And also because, of course, this oil was all discovered by Western technology, and they are using Western technology.
But then they grabbed the technology from the Western companies.
After Europe was weakened, in fact, yea unto death by the Second World War, the Arab countries took advantage of the West in that standpoint and stole all of the technology that was digging up.
Oil in the Middle East, right?
They were all British and French and I think to a smaller degree German.
Companies that went and found the oil and drilled for the oil and showed everyone how to use, how to do it and so on.
And then when the West was beaten down from World War II, the Arab countries took over all of this stuff.
I mean, the Arab countries didn't invent all of this stuff.
I mean, they can't because it's a centrally planned, dictatorial, socialist-style economy.
So, the Arab governments end up with an enormous amount of money because they've stolen all of this technology and the very finding of the resource itself from the West.
And, of course, the West has a far higher demand for oil than the Arab countries do.
Capitalism is sort of creating all of this stuff, and then because there are governments, it really is dangerous, right?
All of the gold that we create is fashioned into swords to keep us down, and the more wealth that is in a society, the larger and more dangerous the government becomes, and it's sort of a natural, inevitable thing.
And so we're way, way, way past, like, no government in history.
It has grown as quickly and as extensively as Western governments since the post-Second World War period.
It's absolutely impossible. You can't do it without the excess wealth that the free market is still striving to create underneath all of these government regulations.
So, sorry, back to Hitler.
He has this, he has this magnificent speeches in the courtrooms, and then he joins, he's in the Nazi party, and they begin to sort of just make speeches everywhere, and he's speaking, and the first time he spoke was like five people in some basement somewhere.
And... Then he begins to grow, and he really taps into a lot of the ex-military people.
Once you spend four years in the trenches in World War I, as you may have read in All Quiet on the Western Front, then your life is destroyed.
You are not really that much good to anyone.
This is sort of a very important thing.
The war destroys the souls of men, without a doubt.
And... So there were lots of disaffected people, I guess you could say, in Germany after the First World War, and there was a brief economic upsurge in the early 20s, and then there was this massive inflation, because Germany, of course, was the first welfare state, right?
They come out of the Middle Ages and all the way to the 18th and 19th centuries without ever having gone through the separation of church and state and the limitation of The limitation of religious and collective thought through rational empiricism and the scientific method.
And so the priestly class is still hugely powerful within Germany.
The women are all fanatically religious.
Church, children, and kitchen.
That's the three-word mantra for the German woman.
and I'm sure not now, but it certainly was for quite some time in the past.
So, let's do this.
And so you have a highly technological, highly socialized, highly centrally commanded economy in Germany, which of course generally destroys which of course generally destroys the free market and destroys the economy as it sort of proceeded to do throughout the 20s.
And so you have a lot of people trained in military combat who miss, and to some degree, at least according to reports at the time, they miss the war.
They miss the songs, the camaraderie, the staying up all night, the drinking, all that kind of stuff.
They miss the war. They can't conceivably adjust to civilian life.
Unemployment is very high.
And, of course, in the Treaty of Versailles, you have an excellent methodology for people to blame the external culture.
And also to believe that there is something in Germany that is great and that is not represented by the current leadership.
Like, if Germany is great, and Hegelian philosophy was pretty powerful in Germany, that there is a world spirit that chooses particular nations to act out the progress of mankind and all this kind of...
Raskolnikovian kind of stuff that goes on in crazy collectivist state-sucking philosophies.
And so they believed, genuinely believed that, at least many, many people did, genuinely believed that Germany was the methodology by which Christianity was going to survive and flourish, and collectivism and tribalism and Aryan perfectionism was all going to triumph and flourish across this godless, increasingly atheist world.
This is a typical mystical response to an increasingly rationalist world, right?
The devil is taking over the world and we've got to rescue people from the error of thinking for themselves and plug them back into the Borg and the Hive and the Collective and how awful it is that people are actually looking at reality and coming to their own conclusions which don't agree with The ones that we want them to, so we'll have to kill them or convert them.
All the standard stuff that goes on when an increase in rationalism or the rational philosophy or scientific method or empiricism occurs within society.
And so the big question, which was really confusing for people, was, well, how on earth could we have lost?
How on earth could we have lost?
We were the...
A nation chosen by God to advance mankind back to the Middle Ages and get rid of all this nasty Enlightenment stuff.
So how on earth could we have lost?
Well, of course, they then identified themselves as a mostly Christian nation with some Jewish elements, so partly what happened was, well, we lost because we're not Christian enough, right?
It's what always happens with crazy people, right?
If a crazy person believes that his destiny is to rule mankind and he fails, then he says, well, it's because I'm not crazy enough, right?
I mean, he never says, gee, I guess that was sort of a crazy...
I mean, always the same thing, right?
And so... When they lost, when this crazy socialist country, mired in the Middle Ages and brutally treating its children, lost the First World War, they didn't say, well, you know, maybe this whole war thing was a bad idea, and maybe we should undo the welfare state, and maybe there's something to learn from America, which, blah, blah, blah, only got 100,000 troops involved rather than the millions that we did, and so on.
They don't say that. They say, oh, you see, the problem is that we're not crazy enough, right?
We need to become completely fascistic and get rid of the last elements of decadent liberal capitalism, and we also need to make sure that we take it out on the Jews and so on.
So we need to become a completely religious theocracy or collectivist theocracy.
Which, of course, Hitler was the new religious leader.
I mean, there was not... It wasn't his philosophy.
It was, you know, this was the Fuhrer.
This was the leader. This was the father of the fatherland.
This was all this kind of stuff, right?
You know, that scary German national anthem that they still have?
Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.
And it's always sung with, like, 6,000 mean-looking, clean-shaven, square-jawed Aryan guys marching away, which is never particularly relaxing to people.
But... And it translates to Deutschland, Germany, Germany, overall.
Overall. And of course, they just mean, oh, we choose Germany overall as our homeland, blah, blah, blah.
Of course, that's not really the case.
It means Germany rules.
Everyone. But, so what happened was, Hitler sort of catches this swell of discontented frustration with liberalism and with the sort of the quote free market, right?
This is the danger that we're going to face and not in the too distant future, in my humble opinion.
That the walls are going to come tumbling down.
All this house of cards that's running the economy is going to sort of come tumbling down, and then we face the choice, right?
If we've correctly identified the malady, then we can correctly apply a cure, which is an excess of violence in government, and so on.
And if we have not correctly identified the malady, or at least if there's not enough word out there to make that clear, then...
Or at least to give people a choice, then by heavens we go the other way and we are not so much with the freedoms anymore because we'll be so busy defending our freedoms that we won't actually have any left, right?
And so Hitler then, of course, gains ascendancy to power.
The Nazi Party begins to gain a lot of votes, and the ironic thing, as I've mentioned before, is that it was the welfare state that fed a lot of this stuff, right?
The welfare state had to pay all of the ex-soldiers who couldn't find work, and had to pay the young, in particular, who were growing up in an economy that was largely toast.
I guess you use a technical economics term.
The economy was a wreck, and...
And there was no military for these people to go into.
And I'm not saying that that's a good or bad thing.
It's just that generally the military had been disbanded.
They were only allowed to have troops of 100,000, no air force, no navy.
This was part of the Treaty of Versailles.
And so the welfare state was paying all of these youths who then turned their money.
They all lived in communes or lived collectively, and they turned their money over to the Nazi party.
This is where the wonderful tax revenues from the middle classes went towards the barbarous thugs who were about to kill them all, get them all killed.
And this is the price of illusion, right?
As I've said a couple of times, this is the price of illusion.
This is what you have to pay when you believe things that aren't true and aren't willing to take the emotional step.
That is difficult, I understand, of accepting the truth, then society dies in flames.
The price of illusion is death.
The wages of sin, as the Bible says, is death.
And the wages of fantasy is death.
And this is a very common theme throughout most literature that you read, that fantasy is death.
This is a very common sort of situation.
So Hitler gets into power in 1933, I think it is, after winning.
He doesn't win a clear majority, but there's such dissent within the Reichstag that the Chancellor of Germany, sorry, the Elder Bismarck, the Chancellor here, I can't remember the name of her, but the leader in Germany appoints Hitler Chancellor, and Hitler then goes about passing all these laws to get rid of the last remnants of any kind of political freedom within Germany.
Germany and private property is to some degree maintained, but it very much is heavily taxed and also government has final say.
In the fascistic say, there's nominal private property with private corporations, but government controls everything through regulations and taxation.
And that's different from communism where there's not even nominal private property, no corporations, the government owns everything directly, but the effects, to a large degree, the effects are still sort of the same.
So then Hitler begins to build up all of his...
So he becomes Chancellor of Germany, destroys...
And the Reichstag fire, which was partly used to help him crack...
Partly used as an excuse to crack down on unsavory elements within German society.
There was a fire that was to burn down their houses of Parliament.
And, of course, he used this to crack down on those who were defiling the sacred German blah, blah, blah.
And, of course, it turned out that this was set by the Nazis themselves and used as an excuse.
And they were brilliant at this kind of stuff, just using excuses to start wars.
So it was always like when they invaded Austria, it was because they figured out...
They said, well, the Germans within Austria are being tyrannized against by the Austrian government and their...
They will welcome us with open arms, like all the standard stuff that you hear about in Iraq.
This is all standard operating procedure for how to invade a foreign country.
You don't even have to think about it, really.
All you do is you say that there are victims over there who are being tyrannized.
And if you can unite them with your own people, this is sort of one of the problems that came out of the First World War.
Which was, Czechoslovakia was, I mean, in particular, other countries too, but Czechoslovakia was created as a sort of mongrel state, which was pieced together, like Iraq was, from a bunch of disparate ethnic groups, jammed together into one country, and then everyone said, good luck with all that, right?
So the western half of Czechoslovakia, which was invaded in 1938, was composed mostly of Germans who were, it's the standard story, they're suffering under the brutal injustices of the Czech government that has refused our repeated cries to intervene and is encouraging and secretly funding those who would abuse Germans and steal their property and Kill their children and rape their livestock.
All the standard stuff. We, who are the reasonable ones, have tried every peaceable method to bring...
When war is the intent all along.
This stuff is as old as politics.
This way to get to war is so carved with the blood and hide of human beings that it's more like the Mariana Trench or the Grand Canyon these days.
And then an incident is provoked and in you go, right?
And then you say, well, and they'll be welcoming us with cheering.
And this is the last, this is the only thing that we're interested in.
We are simply, we wake up every day sweating blood and bleeding from the eyes because of our concern for the people in foreign countries who are being...
We want to bring to them freedom.
And this despot, this guy who is in charge, is an evil guy.
And he scorns us.
All the same words are used as were used in Iraq.
It's all the same nonsense over and over again.
But he has scorned us.
He has... Hurled our repeated requests for intervention back in our face.
He laughs at us. All the stuff that just provoke people's crazy rage, right?
I mean, this is pretty standard, right?
And so, you know, they invade Austria, which of course was Hitler's birthplace.
And then they invade the western half of Czechoslovakia.
And then they invade the eastern half of Czechoslovakia.
And then they invade Poland.
And that was pretty much it, right?
I mean, England had deigned not to intervene in Czechoslovakia.
Because it couldn't get anything useful over there.
That was sort of the story. If you want to read, it's very interesting.
You can find it on the web. The story given by the British military to Chamberlain at the time as to why intervening in Czechoslovakia was impossible.
We can't fly over there. We can't do this.
We can't do that. We're not ready, even though this had been brewing for a couple of years.
And so England, which had some hope of being able to do something to save Czechoslovakia, even if it was just out bombing Germany on the West, did nothing.
And of course, Chamberlain returns with his famous Peace in Our Time memo, which Hitler laughed at the moment he signed and Chamberlain left.
He's like, God, spare me from having to deal with these ridiculous old men.
He said something similar to that.
And so... You get the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and in September of 1939 you get the invasion of Poland, and this is provoked by, of course, the Polish Germans are groaning under the oppressive yoke of the Polish government, blah, blah, blah, all the standard stuff, and they're begging to us, our brothers, for help just to liberate them from their oppression, and atrocity stories are poured out.
Of course, you didn't hear any of that about rape rooms and so on in Saddam Hussein's time, and they lowered people in vats of acid, and what made their families watch, And so on.
Two evil sons.
And so they are groaning under the oppression of their vile masters and crying to us for help.
And, you know, are we noble enough to take up the...
Reluctantly take up our weapons to help our brethren and so on and liberate them.
them and all standard stuff.
And then what happened was the, um, the Gestapo, uh, shot a whole bunch of Polish people, dressed them up in Polish uniforms, which they'd stolen.
And, and then they, uh, shot, shot a bunch of their own citizens at a radio station on the border and said, look, the Poles have, have attacked us and, and, uh, unprovoked.
And we are, we are, we have no idea what they're trying to, uh, they're trying to attack Germany and they're, they're, we're doomed unless we act in a defensive manner and, and so on.
Right.
So then they, believe it or not, sent enormous amounts of cavalry over to Poland But basically killed Poland in three weeks, right?
I mean, they've never had any problem.
And this is the thing that, of course, is interesting when you think about it.
And this was pretty clear, of course, around the Iraqi war as well.
I mean, more in hindsight, I was sort of pro-Iraq war in 2008.
Two, and that's because I was an idiot, but that's alright.
We've all had our idiocies in the past.
At least I wasn't publishing and podcasting back then and don't have to explain it all the way every time.
But... In the Iraq War, the question, of course, the basic question any intelligent person asks is, what is the ratio of the military?
And what could conceivably be achieved by Poland attacking a radio station in Germany, right?
I mean, that's not exactly the heart and soul of the German war machine is some small radio station on the border of Poland.
And of course, the Iraq war budget was one-tenth, I think one-tenth of one percent of the American war budget or war spending, military spending.
And so, yes, Saddam Hussein could light up Baltimore with a nuclear weapon, but why?
He's got it pretty good.
He's making scads of money off the Oil for Food program.
And why would he do something to upset his cushy, palace-ridden, rape-ridden life?
Well, it's never mentioned, right?
I mean, it's never a superior...
Like, we go in and if you beat them in three weeks, the question is, well, why did you ever think they were going to attack you to begin with?
Like, are they deranged? Are they completely insane?
Because that would never make any sense, right?
As I've mentioned before, it's like the 6'4", 250 pounds, a pure muscle wrestler guy...
Going up to a three-year-old, punching him full in the face and saying, well, I had to because he was about to attack me.
I mean, it's just funny, right?
I mean, so the quicker the war goes down, the more that it's ridiculous that these countries were ever going to invade or threaten Germany at that time or America now in any way.
It's just... It's silly, right?
I mean, it's just kind of like, once you get it, and once you're out of the propaganda machine, which takes a little bit of kicking and swimming, then it's really, really clear.
And all praise to Orwell, of course, for getting there long before all of us, right?
So that's what happened in Poland, and then England had a mutual support treaty with Poland, so...
They could have done something about Austria, could have done something about Czechoslovakia, but they decided to declare war on Germany when they couldn't do anything about Poland.
And, of course, they did nothing about Poland.
They couldn't get any troops out there.
The war was over in three weeks.
And what they did was they basically started mobilizing like crazy at home.
And the interesting thing is that Hitler did not want to have a war with England and was more than content to say to England, you have your island and the empire, and I don't even care about America, right?
All these people, oh, we'd be speaking German, blah, blah, blah.
Hitler didn't have any ambitions towards England.
He actually had quite a deal of respect for England because England was militarily very strong and he was a military man.
He was a soldier in World War I and blinded in gas attacks and so on.
By the way, he was in the cot in a military hospital near the front after he'd been blinded in a gas attack when he had his revelation about what he needed to do with his life.
That must have been some seriously nasty and evil gas that was going down there.
So, that's something that's important to understand, that Hitler wanted to expand, and then he did want to go overseas, and he wanted to have an empire, like every other empire builder in history.
Their goal is not, and never is, really to take over the world, because Hitler was a smart fellow, however evil he was.
He was a smart fellow, and he knew that he wanted to take on places like Ethiopia.
So that he can prance and preen around and call himself the ultimate warrior.
He really didn't want to take on places like England, which had a navy, and of course one of the things that contributed enormously to Germany's defeat in World War I, if not decisively, at least according to Churchill, was the...
The blockade of Germany that strangled off foreign goods from coming in was Germany.
Direct access to the sea is always a problem for Germany.
It's why they keep trying to take countries with access to the sea.
And so Hitler didn't want to tangle with England, and he didn't want to tangle with America any more than Stalin wanted to invade Western Europe.
I mean, Stalin grabbed the Eastern Bloc countries because they were easy pickings, but he didn't go any further because there was a military deterrent in the form of a nuclear weapon right beyond the Eastern European, like right beyond the Iron Curtain.
So after he took Eastern Europe, His troops started streaming back towards Russia.
All NATO was in a panic, but it was very clear from the aerial photography that all of Stalin's troops were heading back towards Russia, and there was absolutely zero danger of him invading Western Europe.
He knew that the Americans wouldn't drop a bomb to save Russia.
The Czechoslovaks, because, of course, the whole war.
And the whole war had been fought to save Czechoslovakia and Poland, and so on.
They end up being swallowed entirely by an even more brutal dictatorship than Nazism.
And if you have any doubts about that, again, just have a stroll through the Gulag Apokolago, where there's a chapter wherein Solzhenitsyn talks about The kind of punishments that were meted out in Germany for political dissidents, which was like two years of a labor camp or whatever.
Two years of jail, there wasn't even a labor camp.
Whereas you'd get 20 years in Gulag and you'd die.
I mean, 99% chance you'd die before you were ever released and like a 0.001% chance you'd ever get released anyway.
So Hitler's regime, for the Germans, I'm not talking about for the Jews, but for the Germans and for the other minorities, the gypsies and the mentally retarded and so on, For the Germans, Hitler's regime was far less brutal than Stalin's regime was for the Russians, or Mao's regime was...
For the Chinese, largely because of no famine, right?
I mean, there were the famines in the 1930s after collectivized farming was put in, particularly in the Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of Europe and unable to produce, like, three loaves of bread throughout the entire 30s.
The starvation that occurred through collectivized farming was the great disaster for...
For those who were locked in the communist gulags, starvation was the main issue.
Because of collectivized farming, Germany never pursued the collectivized farming thing.
They just shot a bunch of videos with bucks and women running through the fields claiming to love the motherland and the fatherland, sorry.
And so they didn't pursue collectivized farming, so they had enough food.
That was sort of the fundamental issue.
And in Russia and in China, they all starved to death by the tens of millions because the collectivized farming simply destroyed...
The people's capacity to produce food.
And so that's...
I mean, if I had to live as a sort of native, I would choose Germany.
I would choose none. But I would choose Germany over Russia or China because of that sort of issue of starvation.
Starvation didn't really hit Germany until 1945, just at the very tail end.
And it wasn't because of a lack of collectivized farming.
It was just a lack of any kind of infrastructure for getting anything around because of the civilian-targeted Allied bombing.
And there is, of course, this general fear that Hitler could have taken over the world and if he had developed the atomic bomb and so on.
Well, that wasn't going to happen. The totalitarian dictatorships do not produce things of quality.
You know, you try driving a ladder and then think if Russia could have produced an atomic bomb on its own.
You need privately trained, privately motivated, state-funded, I mean, I understand it's the military, but...
And you need a constant stream of innovations and intellectual property from the private sector in order for the military to be able to achieve anything...
There's simply no possibility of that.
And of course, the anti-Semitism of Hitler's Germany was one of the key factors in driving the Jewish physicists and so on out of Germany and into the arms of the Allies, where, of course, they made significant progress towards developing this hellish weapon that has changed sort of the course and consciousness of human history and made us all feel just a little jumpy from time to time, because instant death from above is something that hasn't really been believed in since the days of the Old Testament.
So this question of addictions, and obviously this was a very dangerous addiction, there's sort of two things that I'll talk about, and I'll just touch on them now.
I'm going to have to talk about them a little bit more on my drive back.
I'm going to a meeting in Hamilton.
But the first thing that I think is important to understand is that Hitler flourished because people had illusions about him.
He was not a very secretive guy.
He said, I want to kill the Jews and rule the world, and I will defy anybody who stands in my way.
And people are like, oh well, yes, but that's just rhetoric designed to win over the German population, blah blah blah.
Well, no, I mean...
It's what Quentin Tarantino says about his films.
Like, they're not jokes. They're very, very serious.
People always say that they're campy, and they're like, no, I'm very serious.
And what he is very serious about, of course, is degrading any kind of moral or elevated sense within the soul of mankind, but that's a time for another topic.
Or a topic for another time?
That's a topic for another time.
So there's this illusion that, and of course the reason that the Western governments couldn't see deeply into the evil of Hitler was because they were, to their own small degree, creating fascistic states themselves through the massive poverty programs and the control over the currency and the increasing regulation of business and the antitrust acts.
And the New Deal was a new deal for government and a new ripoff for the population.
So because they were all pursuing the same path, albeit far more distantly than Hitler, they really couldn't...
What are they going to say? Hey, that's too much power.
Okay, well, let's have to debate about how much is too much power.
Was it too little power for the entire history of the American Republic until the early 20th century?
Was it all too little power?
Was there a deficiency of power?
How would you prove that? The people in power cannot ask, fundamentally cannot ask that question, how much power is too much power?
And so, of course, what they can do is they can do stupid shit, like create a space race and think that it's important which hockey team wins which game.
In 72, I think it was, that was a big to-do because the Russians and the Canadians were playing a hockey game.
That's what political philosophy comes down to, where the frickin' puck ends up.
But they can only create these silly little games about competition, right?
Who gets to the moon first?
It's like, who gives a shit?
Who gives a shit?
Let the Russians go live on the moon for all I care.
Who conceivably could care about who gets to...
Is that the definition of which society is better?
Is that the last thing that we have to offer?
Is who built a better rocket?
That's all it comes down to.
So it's very sort of sad stuff.
But they can't really ask that fundamental question, what is wrong with communism?
What is wrong with communism is that the government owns property.
Well, no, it's not that the government owns property because, of course, in America the government owns pretty much everything and you rent it back from the government based on your property taxes and so on.
And... So it's not that the government owns property.
It's not that that's wrong with the government.
It's that the government owns too much property.
Okay, well, how much is too much?
Given that the Western governments own everything and you rent it back from them, but there's no real rent in the Russian system, it's more a difference of degree and not of kind.
So, the government owns too much property in Russia.
That's the bad thing. And so, then, of course, the better thing is that the less that the government owns property, the better, right?
I mean, if Russia's bad, the Soviet system is bad, because the government owns everything, then surely the government should own less.
And the less the government owns, the better.
Well, which direction are we going into in, you know, talking in the 1950s during the Red Scare?
Which direction are we going to when it comes to our own society while the government is owning more and more and more and more continually?
Well, the Russian government is bad because they keep intervening in the internal affairs of foreign countries.
Well, okay.
So let's look at the 50s and 60s.
What's happening with the CIA? It really was the part calling the kettle black.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I understand completely that there is a strong differentiator It's a strong differentiation between the two systems, but it's really the direction that you're going in, right?
It's really the direction that you're going in.
A chain smoker who's 60 and dying of lung cancer is...
Is healthier than a 30-year-old who's chain-smoking and not dying of lung cancer.
But the question is, what is the direction that the person is going in, right?
And, of course, if the smoker says, well, the older smoker is bad because he just smokes too much, so I'm going to cut down a little bit, but then the habit continues to grow and he's smoking more and more over time, it might be said that he maybe hasn't really grasped the basic point.
So, from that standpoint, I think that it's important to understand that, Germany wasn't going to attack England or America, just wanted an empire like everyone else.
And Russia wasn't going to attack past the Iron Curtain and tweaked around with foreign countries, but who cares, right?
That's not really how empires get built, is through a little bit of military funding to Korea or Vietnam or anything like that.
And the illusions of the differences between the progress of the two systems...
It's sort of important to understand that there was this considerable illusion about what it meant to be a free society and a non-free society.
And of course, communism was created as this shibboleth to frighten everyone, like that's bad and we're good, they're evil and we're good, with no really strict and clear definitions.
And I bet you most of the people who went through this sort of red scare would never have any clue As to what the sort of technical definitions of capitalism and communism were or anything like that.
It's just that the Ruskies, they're bad, and we're good.
And the same sort of thing, of course, was occurring with Iraq.
Why is Saddam Hussein bad?
Because he tortures people to get information about possible insurrections.
And we're good because we...
Torture people to get information about possible insurrections.
But it's very different, because we part our hair on the left, and Saddam Hussein parts his hair on the right.
So that's the difference between good and evil in these kinds of situations.
So I'm sorry for the long ramble through some little highlights of European history, but the reason that I wanted to talk about this is there's two central premises that I'm going to work with when it comes to this afternoon's chat about why this powerlust always grows until it self-destructs.
And the two sort of things that I wanted to establish is that there's lots of historical examples of just how this stuff continues to grow and continues to grow until it self-destructs.
And also that there's an enormous amount of illusion on the part of those who claim to be opposing it.
That's sort of the two major things that I wanted to establish before we talk about the theory behind it.
And just to be forewarned, if you don't like the theory part of what it is that I'm doing, I mean, if you want sort of more...
A syllogistical proof and so on, then this might not be the one for you because it is going to be exploratory.
I have not closed the case by any means in this.
It is an exploration, which is fine.
You know, sometimes you want to fly to Orlando and sometimes you just want to head off into the woods and see what you find.
And this will be an example of the latter, let's say.
And so I just sort of point that out, that it is going to be much more of an exploration than any kind of syllogistical proof, but I think that there's enormous value in that, because we also want to break new ground as much as we can, as well as go over the tried and true cases.
So we'll talk about that, but just remember those two principles, and I'll...
You know what, I'm not going to say them again because I'm going to mention them again in the beginning of this afternoon's podcast.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I hope this is helpful. And we will take a swing at the why rather than the what this afternoon.
And I think that you'll find it very interesting.
I think it's a decent theory. I think it's got some possibilities.
And I certainly look forward to, of course, to everyone's feedback on this kind of stuff because, as I mentioned before, Understanding this kind of stuff is the most important stuff in the world.
Doctors like to save people, and philosophers like to save the race.
Doctors will invent stuff that saves the lives of millions of people.
Philosophers can invent stuff that saves the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
As long as people are clear about the cause and effect of violence and death, then we can do an enormous amount to free the planet and save millions of lives.
Hundreds of millions, if not in the long run, or throughout history, billions of lives.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll...
this afternoon.
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