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Aug. 31, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

31:24

394 A Public Intellectual

An examination of one ivy leaguer

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	Good morning everybody. Hope you're doing well.
	It's time for a MurmurCast.
	I am upstairs, Christina seeing a patient downstairs, so I'm going to have to be relatively quiet.
	Always a challenge for me, particularly with this topic.
	We're going to have a little chat today, if you don't mind, with your kind indulgence, about a fine gentleman by the name of Michael Ignatieff, who is a Canadian intellectual who is now running for leadership of the Liberal Party, which would give him a fair shot at being our uber-president and or prime minister.
	And I think it's worthwhile having a little look at his sort of history and his philosophy, just because he's a prime example of exactly what it is that I'm talking about.
	And I think this will be useful in helping us elucidate or delineate some of the ideas that we're talking about with regards to the moral culpability of intellectuals in the realm of sowing the seeds of violence.
	Now, this guy has a pretty impressive statist pedigree.
	He was the son of Canadian diplomat George Ignatieff, the grandson of Count Paul Ignatieff, who was the Tsarist last minister of education, and one of the few Tsarist ministers who escaped execution by the Bolsheviks.
	His maternal great-grandfather was a 19th century principal of Queen's University, one of the biggest universities in Canada.
	His mother's younger brother was a political philosopher, George Grant, and his great-grandfather was Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatieff, the Russian minister of the interior under Tsar Alexander III.
	And he was pretty much groomed for where he ended up.
	He spent the majority of his formative years in Toronto.
	His father got different diplomatic jobs, so of course he moved around a lot.
	In 1959, he was sent back to Toronto to attend Upper Canada College, which, I mean, for those who did have no reason to know, is the pretty hoity-toity place where you go to make contacts and get groomed for success.
	And he was a boarder, and so I guess he was 12, yeah.
	In 59, he was 12, so he was sent to boarding school.
	He was elected as a school prefect, was the captain of the varsity soccer team, and served as editor-in-chief of the school's yearbook.
	And he volunteered for Lester Pearson during the 65 federal election.
	He worked for the Liberal Party as a national youth organizer and party delegate for the Pierre Elliott Trudeau campaign.
	Now, he studied history at the University of Toronto, which is where I studied history, and he became a friend of the socialist Bob Ray, who was later premier of Ontario, the place where I live, it's a state or province.
	After he completed his undergrad degree, he went to Oxford University, where he studied under Isaiah Berlin, and then from 64 to 65, he worked as a journalist at the Globe and Mail newspaper.
	In 76, he completed his PhD in history at Harvard University.
	He was an assistant professor of history At the University of British Columbia, and then he moved to the UK. He held a senior research fellowship at King's College, Cambridge.
	He then left Cambridge for London, began to focus on his career as a writer and journalist, and he lectured at Oxford, the University of London, the London School of Economics, the University of California, and in France.
	While living in the UK, Ignatiev became well-known as a broadcaster on radio and television.
	I haven't seen any of this sort of stuff, but...
	In 2000, he accepted a position as the Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
	And then he became the Visiting Professor in Human Rights Policy at the University of Toronto.
	He's received seven honorary doctorates, and he's been married twice.
	So anyway, he's written a lot.
	He's written fiction and non-fiction.
	And he now has left his position to work for, to try and become the Premier, or to try and become the Leader of the Liberal Party.
	He's an MP at the moment, and then at some point to become the Leader of the Liberal Party, which means he's got a pretty good shot of being the President or the Prime Minister of Canada, which is fairly, fairly, so this guy's, you know, groomed, And he's got all of the right credentials, seven honorary doctorates, a doctorate from Harvard, and so on.
	So he's got a lot of education under his belt, and he's been a very prolific author and a very, I guess, prolific communicator in terms of both written and spoken word he's influenced you know tens of thousands of people around the world he's probably had directly thousands of students and so he is a premier public intellectual and let's have a look at sort of the stuff that he believes and the stuff that he proposes and we can't really say to him because he's got a PhD in history he is somebody who's had vast access to academic resources He has had a vast amount of exposure to,
	obviously, if he taught at the London School of Economics, he must know something about economics.
	And so he's not somebody that we could ever fault for not having the leisure, the time, or the money, or the motive to examine history in any kind of clear or valid light.
	So this is a gentleman who has had no shortage of trying to figure out the world, and no shortage of any capacity to do so.
	Now, he actually was a supporter of the UN and NATO intervention in conflicts like Kosovo, and he was critical that it was only limited-risk deployments and the Rwandan genocide, and he argues for more active involvement, larger-scale deployment of land forces by Western nations in future conflicts with the developing world.
	And he was also a prominent supporter of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, He argued that America had inadvertently established an Empire Light, a global hegemony whose great notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known.
	The burden of that empire-obliged America he believed to expend itself unseating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the interests of international security and human rights.
	Ignatief initially accepted the position of the Bush administration that containment through sanctions and threats could not prevent Hussein from selling weapons of mass destruction to international terrorists.
	Like many others, he had been persuaded that those weapons were still being developed in Iraq.
	Moreover, according to Ignatieff, what Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds and Shia in Iraq was sufficient justification for the invasion.
	So here we have an intellectual who is publicly sort of going on record to say that...
	Selling weapons of mass destruction to international terrorists is worthwhile going and blowing up, I guess, over 100,000, 150,000 Iraqis.
	And it seems to me quite interesting that this guy would say that...
	Because everything, as I've talked about in the podcasts on...
	on the introduction to philosophy, everything that you put forward as a belief must have a principle behind it in order for it not to just be an opinion.
	So he says that you can go and kill the population of anyone whose leader sells weapons of mass destruction to international terrorists.
	And this guy is not ignorant of history, of course.
	So he would not at all be ignorant of the belief, or ignorant of the knowledge, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction sold to him by the American government.
	So, of course, in this example, where he says that it's worthwhile, or it's morally good, or it's required to It required, not even good, but required.
	To invade a country because the leader might sell weapons of mass destruction to international terrorists, and because he's an evil guy, he must be aware that America sold weapons of mass destruction, excuse me, to Saddam Hussein, and therefore,
	since they sort of deemed Saddam Hussein to be an international terrorist, that he should actually logically support the invasion of America and the murder of proportionately, you of American citizens and, of course, the sanctions, which would be, I think, half a million or, sorry, it would be about two million American children that would die.
	He also does take the sort of lesser of two evils approach.
	So he's written several newspaper articles about the threat of terrorism, where he argues that governments might need to take a lesser evil approach that finds a middle ground between adhering to the rule of law and sanctioning coercion.
	The central question of this approach, really, is how far the state can justify using violent undemocratic measures to secure a free and democratic society?
	And conversely, at what point these measures themselves become as offensive to freedom and democracy as the threats they seek to prevent?
	So this is one of Ignatieff's op-eds from the New York Times Magazine, May 2nd, 2004, where, of course, he comes up with the scare story of some terrible attack And he says, when democracies fight terrorism, they are defending the proposition that their political life should be free of violence.
	Which contains so many errors you could spend a half dozen podcasts just examining that one sentence.
	But that is quite fascinating, right?
	He says, when democracies fight terrorism, they are defending the proposition that their political life should be free of violence.
	But defeating terror requires violence.
	It may also require coercion, Secrecy, deception, even violation of rights.
	How can democracies resort to these means without destroying the values for which they stand?
	How can they resort to the lesser evil without succumbing to the greater?
	So, of course, when democracies fight terrorism, what he means is that they are using violence to attack those who are threatening to attack back.
	Right? The democracies generally started...
	The fights with the Middle East, the democracies started the fights with the Muslim world.
	Which, again, is not to say that the Muslim world isn't crazy and evil, but we definitely poked into that wasp's nest pretty considerably.
	But defeating terror, he says, requires violence and coercion, deception, blah, blah, blah.
	And that is sort of his approach.
	And he says that political life should be free of violence, which is hilarious, of course, because I'm not sure what he would imagine the political life is, other than the initiation of violence against the innocent.
	And he also says that, even so, after 9-11, a little later, he says, after 9-11 we were frightened, and Congress and the government aren't always thinking straight.
	After the attack, it may have made sense to detain more than 700 aliens on one immigration pretext or another until we could figure out whether there were other sleeper cells at work.
	But it made a lot less sense to hold them for months, 80 days on average, and to deny them lawyers and public due process before we tossed most of them out of the country.
	And to me that's quite fascinating because he doesn't mention, of course, that the government at the time, the Bush government, He flew, of course, all of the Bin Ladens out of the country.
	He's talking about people who were just sort of grabbed because they looked funny and so on.
	And that is just the kind of stuff that he comes up with that just is kind of funny, not thought through at all, simply designed for effect.
	And, of course, like most people, he laments the fact that the CIA was tamed He puts it here, he says, Now, the amazing thing about here is the word excesses.
	Excesses. Now, I don't know if you know about the history of the CIA and the Vietnam War, but the CIA tried to assassinate foreign leaders, as well as it had a black ops kill program, which killed tens of thousands.
	It actually murdered tens of thousands of innocent people throughout Vietnam.
	And this, of course, is called an excess.
	An excess. This gentleman has children.
	I wonder if the CIA murdered one of his children, whether he would simply call it an excess.
	But, of course, these are just words that people use, where we say, well, yeah, if we'd only killed a couple of thousand, it would be okay, but it was like tens of thousands.
	That were murdered, and so that's excessive, really.
	It's excessive. It's, you know, like the same way that your doctor says that your tumor is simply a sort of mildly excessive multiplication of cells.
	Now, of course, this is the same gentleman who, a few paragraphs earlier, is asking or demanding or making the request, I guess you could say, that, or saying that we have the right that our political process be free of violence, and then, of course, when the political process results in the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of Vietnamese, That's simply called excessive, right?
	I mean, this is not a man who has a coherent thought in his head, and yet is a leading public intellectual who has seven honorary degrees and a PhD from Harvard.
	And then, of course, he pulls the usual stunt of bemoaning that everything's too slow.
	Checks and balances work slowly, Congress must deliberate, the courts must review, and meanwhile, a crisis calls out for decisive action.
	This is why terrorism's chief impact on democracy, not just in the United States, but also in every other free society, and especially in Spain and Britain, has been...
	To strengthen the power of presidents and prime ministers at the expense of legislatures and the courts, and to increase the exercise of secret government.
	Much of the war against terror has to be fought in secret, and the killing, interrogating, and bribing are done in the shadows.
	This is democracy's dark secret, the men and women who defend us with a bodyguard of lies and an armory of deadly weapons, And because it is our dark secret, it can also be democracy's nemesis.
	Of course, the dark secret is his own family's history of statist policies, and particularly in the Russian era, right?
	I mean, he's not really talking about America.
	He's talking about his own history.
	He's actually written a book on his own family history as well.
	And so this sort of bribery and interrogation and secret murders and so on, he talks about as part of the political process, while of course demanding that the political process be allowed to operate free of violence.
	Now his position becomes truly fascinating once we get closer to the end of his...
	Article, so the last paragraph he says here is, The chief ethical challenge of a war on terror is relatively simple, to discharge duties to those who have violated their duties to us.
	Even terrorists, unfortunately, have human rights.
	We have to respect these because we are fighting a war whose essential prize is preserving the identity of a democratic society.
	and preventing it from becoming what terrorists believe it to be.
	Terrorists seek to provoke us into ripping off the mask of law and order to reveal the black heart of coercion that they believe lurks behind our promises of freedom.
	We have to show ourselves and the populations whose loyalties we seek that the rule of law is not a mask or an illusion.
	It is our true nature.
	Fantastic! Boy, there's so much truth in what people say and what people write if we only really understand the language that they use in a very real and valid sense.
	To discharge duties to those who have violated their duties to us, right?
	So this is the argument to say we should be better than the other people.
	Even terrorists, unfortunately, have human rights.
	We have to respect these fighting a war whose essential prize is preserving the identity of democratic society and preventing it from becoming what terrorists believe it to be.
	Terrorists seek to provoke us into stripping off the mask of law in order to reveal the black heart of coercion that they believe lurks behind our promises of freedom.
	Boy, there really is a fantastic amount of truth.
	And knowledge in there. You can't avoid this kind of knowledge, right?
	Everybody tells the truth about government.
	They just tell it about other people's governments, right?
	Everybody tells the truth about coercion.
	They simply project it onto others.
	The mask of law, he says, stripping off the mask of law in order to reveal the black heart of coercion.
	But this is the complete and total description of what libertarians are trying to do with the state.
	The mask of lords and the black heart of coercion is the core of the state.
	And we have to show ourselves and the populations whose loyalties we seek that the rule of law is not a mask or an illusion.
	It is our true nature. And see, this is very interesting.
	He doesn't say the rule of law is true and valid and moral.
	He says it is our true nature.
	And of course, for him, it is.
	The rule of law is this illusion that violence is not at the heart of the political process.
	This is absolutely his true nature, and of course this is his family history and so on.
	So let's have a quick look at this gentleman who has also written a piece that's published.
	It's a total puff piece published in Maclean's magazine.
	I'm not going to read you the whole thing because it's really repulsive.
	And here are his policy proposals.
	We need to create more wealth by making our economy more competitive.
	Now, we need to create more wealth by making our economy more competitive.
	One of the things that he is talking about here is reducing trade barriers between the provinces.
	Enough the end of the world as far as the strategy goes.
	We need a national prosperity strategy that addresses the long-term productivity challenge.
	This is government programs and bureaucracy and so on.
	We need a concerted regional economic development strategy that leaves no Canadian region behind.
	Now, this is code in all politics when you're talking about not leaving people behind.
	What we're talking about is handouts, right?
	Handouts from the rich or the relatively better off areas to the relatively less better off areas.
	A concerted regional economic development strategy is a massive system of bribery.
	We need a national food policy.
	That's wonderful. Uh, the...
	The Federal Government's Environmental Plan must work with the provinces to substantially reduce greenhouse emissions, take proactive steps to preserve and enhance the quality of our air and water, and create real incentives for good environmental behaviour and innovation.
	The Federal Working Income Tax Benefit for low-income families, the refundable tax benefit would provide a basic tax credit and an income supplement for families struggling to survive on low wages.
	The Federal Government should play a more vigorous role in consultation with the provinces, municipalities, the private sector and settlement agencies in ensuring that immigration policy is reflective of our labour market needs and that immigrants are more successfully integrated into their new lives here in Canada.
	We need to review the Constitution.
	We need an enterprising diplomatic service and a well-funded commitment to sustainable development.
	We should substantially increase our foreign assistance budget to meet the 0.7% of GDP target.
	We need to focus our development priorities on areas where Canadians have special expertise.
	Now, this, of course, is just wonderful stuff all around.
	This is the kind of stuff that only a PhD from Harvard can buy you.
	Now, of course, this is basically just tooth fairy politics, which is to say that it is all politics, because this is basically saying that we should be richer, we should be happier, we should be healthier, our erections should last longer, and we should be able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, and It would be great if nobody were poor and it would be great if nobody were hungry and it would be great If all the children had toys, and I mean, this is Santa Claus philosophy, right?
	I mean, this is just pure nonsense that he comes up with.
	Of course, he's not dealing with any of the significant issues.
	This is all about increasing the budget of the government, and he's not dealing with any of the basic issues, which he's perfectly aware of as somebody who has taught at the London School of Economics.
	He's perfectly aware of the fact that we have a huge national debt, and of course he's not addressing any kind of solutions in this kind of area.
	He's not saying, well, here's what I'm going to cut in order to cover off the national debt.
	This is all about, and this is all code, right?
	This is important to understand. This is all code for bribery.
	And when he's talking about creating programs and talking, he's just basically saying, I'm going to create a bunch of new agencies and staff them with my friends, and I'm going to create a bunch of new I'm going to use the violent power of the state to redistribute income to those that I like.
	And that's all code for if you support me.
	This is sort of somewhat directed at the voters, of course, to sort of tooth fairy, Santa Claus politics.
	But really it's code for his supporters, right?
	So what he's saying is that if you give me money...
	For my campaign, then I'm going to create all of these new agencies, and I'm going to give you a big, cushy, high-profile job in return for your campaign contributions.
	This is something that is very important to understand.
	He doesn't sort of... I mean, he may be a socialist.
	He probably is. I don't know.
	He does talk about the virtues of the free market, just as every politician since the Keynesian collapse has.
	But he doesn't really talk about anything in particular other than getting rid of some trade barriers between the provinces.
	But the reason that these people have to create all these new agencies is so that they can staff them with people who've given them contributions.
	And the reason they need to be new agencies is, of course, because if they put somebody into an existing agency, they'll be accused of favoritism because that person doesn't have experience in that agency and so on.
	Now, here is the kind of tough questions that Maclean's, the sort of Canadian, it's like the Time Magazine for Canada.
	This is wonderful. This country needs a touch of political sorcery, or at least alchemy.
	How can you operate in that realm without becoming the victim of raised expectations?
	This is the kind of kneel-down and lube-up kind of blowjobs that you get from the media when you're a politician who's popular.
	They don't say, you know, why are you looking at all this increased spending, and what are you going to actually do To cut the deficit.
	What spending are you going to cut, right?
	No, no, no. Political sorcery.
	How do you avoid becoming the victim of raised expectations?
	Slurp, slurp, slurp. And he said, he replies, being elected a democratic politician is very humbling.
	In fact, because you trade in hope, you trade in dreams, people come to you because they think that you can change their lives.
	From getting their families reunited from India to Toronto, to much bigger things like revision of the whole country.
	You come into democratic politics, and you immediately take on a great burden of expectation.
	It's the thing that worries me most about political life, in fact, because the expectations can't be met, and they produce that violent dissolution that I quite understand.
	You played with our dreams, you played with our hopes, and you let us down.
	I mean, it's really, really quite remarkable that this complete, mad, narcissistic, godlike vanity, that he doesn't want to disappoint people who are coming to him to reunite their families and change their lives and perform his magic to...
	Turn their lives around.
	I mean, this is just hilarious what a vain and narcissistic and pathetically fragile ego structure this guy has.
	And this is the one that I love, right?
	After talking about the CIA's murders, after talking about the genocides of American foreign policy, and after talking about the innate violence within the system, this is wonderful.
	He says, this is about some...
	Somebody from the Parti Québécois who was at Harvard as a student at the same time.
	I don't think he was the actual teacher.
	Basically, he says, I don't like diabolization in personal life or in politics.
	This is wonderful. The reality about politics is that it is the arena where human disagreement is worked out.
	Disagreement does not have to be personal.
	It does not have to be winner takes all.
	This is absolutely wonderful.
	The reality about politics is that it's the arena where human disagreement is worked out.
	Which is wonderful.
	It's like saying that the Colosseum is the arena where disagreements between human beings and lions get worked out.
	I mean, it's fantastic. Because, of course, if I was interviewing the guy, of course, I would say, well, that's a wonderful sentiment.
	So what you're saying is that it's very important to be able to disagree in a civil manner with particular policies.
	And he will say, yes.
	And I would say, great. So people who disagree, say, with peacekeeping in Afghanistan...
	Should be allowed to not pay the taxes to support it.
	And he was like, no, no, no, no, no.
	We have to have a centralized national vision.
	It's like, oh, okay. So you say, this is where human disagreement is worked out.
	But if the taxpayer disagrees with a particular policy, the taxpayer has no capacity to disagree because they're going to get shot and thrown in jail if they don't pay for what the politician wants.
	So tell me how that human disagreement is sort of worked out.
	Isn't it just sort of imposed on the taxpayer by force?
	You know, because nobody's ever going to get those questions, right?
	I mean, you would never allow somebody into the media who would ever ask those questions because you would then never have access to the politicians, right?
	These guys claim to be also rational and this, that, and the other, but of course they never have any, any, any I just sort of wanted to mention that this is an example of the kind of public intellectual that is so common in the modern world.
	And this is a gentleman who has quite consciously pursued a life of public influence and teaching citizens about morality and politics.
	And most people are going to have a tough time Pitting their own independent judgment against a guy with seven honorary degrees and a PhD from Harvard, with all these publications and everybody in the world kneeling up to give him a hummer in terms of approving his politics.
	And he's never pitched any tough questions.
	He's never forced to defend his positions on any philosophical or fundamental grounds.
	I mean, this is all just a manipulation of symbols.
	It's not the arguments from first principles or anything like that.
	This man has had access to all of the great books in history for probably a dozen years as a student.
	He is aware of the realities of economics, and he decides to obscure and obfuscate all of the basic facts of politics of which he is fully aware.
	If you say to him, is government an agency of force, he's going to say, well, yes, of course it is.
	Because he knows that if he doesn't pay his own taxes, then he is going to go to jail.
	And he knows that if other people don't pay their taxes, they're going to go to jail.
	My question is, to what degree is this man responsible for all of the resulting theft and violence that is going to occur once he gets into power?
	How much is he responsible for obscuring the debate about the reality of government power?
	How much is he responsible for the increases in debts to future generations by not even talking about ways in which he can constructively We should be more competitive and we should be more prosperous and we should have better regional development.
	All this kind of nonsense, right?
	I mean, these are not political arguments.
	This man is capable, obviously, of at least a simulacrum of rigorous and rational thought.
	I would assume that a Harvard PhD still is not something that you pray for and receive in a sort of religious LSD-induced vision, that there's some rigor In the approach to it.
	But when he comes in terms of public debate, and of course one of the things he says, as all voters do when they kneel down to reciprocate the Hummer with the taxpayers, they say, oh, one thing that politicians generally do is they underestimate the intelligence of the Canadian voter or the American voter or whatever.
	I have a huge respect for voters, blah, blah, blah.
	But all he's doing is he's using his education and his self-proclaimed and publicly proclaimed and well-sought-after qualifications In order to obscure the debates about the reality of power and the political process completely.
	And to what degree is he responsible for the resulting violence?
	Are you really going to expect that the average policeman or soldier is going to engage this guy from Harvard in a debate and feel that he can win?
	I don't think so.
	I really don't. If you remember the Nuremberg trials, they went for the civil leaders rather than for the rank-and-file people, right?
	The civil leaders have more options, they have more They have more, generally, of much higher intelligence, greater language skills, much greater education.
	Who has more capacity to see and communicate about the truth?
	Your average cop on the street with a grade 12 education and maybe a bit of college courses, or this guy who comes from a highly educated family, has no financial concerns, has the wherewithal to do a Harvard PhD, which costs a couple of, you know, 100 grand, 200 grand, easy peasy.
	Who has more options in terms of being able to talk about the truth?
	Your average soldier over there in Afghanistan who's got a grade 12 education and all the propaganda in the world raised by state schools?
	Or this guy who's traveled the world, has had access to great books, has had the leisure to read and study and learn for a dozen years, who comes from a highly educated and erudite family, Albeit state-serving sluts, but nonetheless, who has the greater opportunity for understanding a communication rational thought?
	Your average soldier in Afghanistan, or this clown?
	I would say that this guy has been given all the opportunities in the world, and is using them to further abuse and destroy the freedom and property rights of the average citizen.
	And I would say that he has a huge degree of responsibility.
	I'm actually swinging over to some degree...
	To the belief that the soldiers are as much a victim of these idiots as the rest of us are.
	And I would certainly put that forward again.
	I'm not sort of thinking about the punishment side.
	I'm just trying to think for myself, who am I going to focus?
	Who am I going to target in a sort of conceptual sense?
	Who am I going to focus my intellectual energies on?
	And I've got to tell you, I'm sort of swinging over to the idea that the responsibility...
	For the kinds of deaths and debts and so on that is going to result from this guy's policies is this guy himself.
	He's had all of the opportunity in the world to study things.
	He knows the truth, and he's deliberately lying to the population and obscuring the truth in order to gain power and money and control and resources, in order to punish his enemies and reward his friends and to satisfy his vanity because he is the bringer of all dreams to everyone.
	But I think that this guy is responsible for...
	I think it's these guys who are responsible for the mess that the world is currently in right now.
	I'm having a little bit of trouble blaming the guy who was brought up in a state school and went to all the propaganda in the world And ended up over in Afghanistan in a kill-or-be-killed situation.
	I think that guy probably had far fewer choices than this Michael, the native fellow, and everybody else who's like him.
	So I hope that this makes some kind of sense.
	I'm not advocating any kind of plan at the moment.
	I'm just still working out the issues, and I will talk about them more a little later.

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