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Oct. 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:34
465 Stef The War Hero
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. Oh, it's, I guess, just before 6 p.m.
I guess we're fairly close to talking about the evening now.
So I hope you're having a relaxing and wonderful day slash evening slash morning slash wee hours, if you should be up.
And I had a sort of interesting question posed to me today on the board, though, of course, it came through psychically to me while I was hard at work.
And... It was a question which was related to what I had talked about the other day, which was that I was a pro-Iraq war as a, I guess up until, certainly, gosh, you know what, I'm not even going to try and figure it out.
But I was at some point pro-Iraq war, before the war, and I think it was really just as it was drawing up, as it was becoming imminent, that I switched my viewpoint to something a little bit more sane and a little bit more humane.
And that was all to do with our good, dear departed friend, Mr.
Harry Brown. Who had some excellent things to say with regards to war and who was a great friend,
though I barely had any contact with him, maybe once or twice we emailed, but a great friend as far as helping me to really understand What violence was all about, and he's the one who sort of finally broke me of what I don't exactly know what the right term even is.
It was a kind of minarchism, I'm sure, but my basic philosophy sort of from my teenage years onwards was that there should be a government but it should be funded voluntarily and of course I didn't go into the bowels of this contradiction neither did I experience it as a contradiction except really as it showed up in my personal life in the contradiction in the kind of ethics that I believed in versus the ethics that I lived which were really not at all the same thing and So I wanted to talk a little bit today about my sort of history of bloodlust,
about my history of warlust, in the hopes that I can turn some people away from what I consider to be a very spiritually destructive set of beliefs, a very psychologically damaging set of beliefs.
At least it certainly was for me.
It caused me to retain a kind of coldness and a falseness.
In my philosophy and thus subsequently and inevitably within my personal relationships.
And it gave me a...
Well, might as well talk about it rather than talking about it.
So let me at least start from the beginning.
Of course, I was raised with all of the bloodlust that British children are supposed to have.
With regards to the glorious history of England in the Second World War.
It's my personal belief, as I have mentioned once or twice before, that the reason that British people are so obsessed with the Second World War is because it was such an enormous and catastrophic waste of resources.
Because Everybody fought for this war and died for this war.
And all too sadly, it resulted in the mass putting together or the mass generation.
Good Lord. Remember when I could use words?
That was kind of fun, wasn't it?
We liked that. That made podcasting quite a bit easier.
They fought against socialism and ended up by having socialism imposed upon them by the state.
So there is a, you know, a gruesome kind of tragedy in the history of the Second World War, of course, just absolutely abysmal in the way that it shook out for the average and general population.
And so, like all traumas that aren't understood, emotionally they have to be replayed over and over and over again, but with the same kind of brittle, with the sort of brittle sameness about the whole process, a deadness, a kind of, you know, like if you have a kind of shallow manipulative mom and she bursts into tears every time this or that happens,
it's kind of a shallow, it's like a groove worn in the soul, or the lack of a soul, and that really is what It goes on in England with regards to, maybe it's in the other countries as well, but mostly in England, there's one I know of.
This view of the Second World War as England's finest hour, and the scarring that was inflicted upon the world, particularly in Europe, with regards to the Second World War, was something that It was impossible for people to process,
particularly the idea that it was all in vain, that it was all a waste of time, that basically what happened was one generation in the average age of soldiers in World War II, I think, was about 27, so one generation, They grabbed some freedom for themselves, but of course they were less free at the end of the Second World War with some minor changes in economic freedom.
Less free at the end of the Second World War than they were at the end of the First World War, and certainly their children grew up, those born in the late 40s, Early 50s grew up to get LBJ's Great Society, price controls, stagflation, the EPA, OSHA in the US, and of course lots of other government agencies and regulations throughout the rest of the world.
And so, of course, it was absolutely terribly and totally tragic.
And it's something that people really can't comprehend.
Certainly, it would be very hard for my family, who was heavily involved in war, to really be able to comprehend the wiping out of...
Half a dozen family members, half a dozen men, and probably an equal number of children in the bombings.
And for my mother to see most of her family wiped out, because of course she came from, her mother was Jewish.
And for my mother's own childhood to be the carnage and brutal series of orphanage rapes that I'm absolutely positive that it was.
It's hard for people to look at that and to imagine that it was worse than in vain.
See, in vain would be, well, that didn't make us any more free.
But that, of course, is not the case.
What happens is that when wars get declared, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people get slaughtered, and what ends up is that society is a lot less free than it was prior to the declaration of war.
So it's worse than in vain.
The U.S. recently has passed a resolution or a bill, I think, signed by the President that legalizes torture pretty much, allows vague definitions of torture to be defined by the executive branch, and also excuses those who participate in torture.
It immunizes them from subsequent prosecution.
And this, of course, is the result.
This is the precious freedoms that That hundreds of thousands of soldiers are over in Iraq defending.
I mean, this is the hilarious thing in a grimly cosmic kind of way.
And it will probably take a few thousand years for the joke to be really fully appreciated by the majority of human beings.
But it is, of course, a grim and terrible but fundamentally hilarious joke that the war on terror is producing...
I mean, this is absolutely inevitable.
It's called projection, psychologically.
Those people over there are bad.
We are good.
And the sort of grim horror of this kind of irony is something that happens when people don't process the horror of war.
What is the price of Americans failing to process an unjust invasion of a foreign country?
Well, there's a price to be paid for that.
I mean, morality is omnipresent.
Morality is universal.
Morality is inescapable.
And you either sort of get with the program as far as ethics go, or basically your life turns into a nightmare.
So what is the price for Americans and possibly those around the world as well, but certainly Americans?
What is the price for the American population for failing to genuinely process that the government declared war and invaded and killed hundreds of thousands of people on completely flimsy excuses?
I mean, what happened?
It's gone into the memory hole, right?
It's gone into the memory hole like New Orleans and all the other things that happened which proved that the government can't tie its own shoelaces without decapitating someone.
And what happens?
Well, there's no mass revolt in the citizenry, right?
There's no moral horror that George Bush declared war and has committed the international crime of aggression and is morally indistinguishable from just about every other aggressive dictator throughout history has declared war on false pretenses and has invaded a foreign country under false pretenses I mean,
all of the stuff that they came up with, aluminum tubes and going for yellow cake from Niger, it was all the most patent nonsense, right?
And this kind of, you know, what is the price for failing to recognize the moral horror of what has occurred over the past few years?
And that, of course, is the moral horror that people are blind to because they didn't process what happened Previous to all of this in US foreign policy and the foreign policy of other imperialist countries and so on, so failing to recognize the moral horror of sanctions against Iraq and failing to recognize the moral horror of using uranium-tipped warheads In the first Gulf War and before that,
failing to recognize the horrors that occurred in Nicaragua and San Salvador and Granada and the Falklands and all of these things, right?
And, of course, it all goes back to failing to recognize the moral horror of World War II, of the...
The chicken-in-every-pot New Deal of the hyperinflation in Germany, of the First World War, of the Crimean War, of the Napoleonic Wars, of the Wars of the Roses, because people sort of just can't really fundamentally process or refuse to.
I don't know. I mean, I'm never going to guess what goes on for other people.
But because they don't process these kinds of things, so the government's always going to expand, right?
The Patriot Act II or whatever the hell they're calling this new Bill of Horror It's simply the price.
It's the price you pay for failing to take action in a verbal sense against your own government, right?
People just kind of go, oh, okay, I guess we invaded Iraq, and I guess it really wasn't that justified, but, you know, maybe they thought the best of it at the time, and the fact that people aren't vociferously arguing, I guess, as I try to do from time to time, That the state should be abolished, or at least that we should get the hell out of Iraq.
This is the price you pay, right?
By refusing to recognize the horror that your governments are committing overseas, you will end up With your government importing that horror to you.
Look at what goes on in foreign policy as a lab for domestic policy, because that's really what it is.
You just look at any history of any dictatorship, the aggression that occurs overseas, usually, almost always, at least that I can think of, occurs overseas before it occurs at home.
And so if you don't have empathy for Iraqis, then don't expect anybody to have empathy for you.
And I put myself in that category, of course, as a couple of years ago, although I did have a false and misplaced sense of empathy.
But that's the price.
You know, there's simply no way around it.
If you don't have empathy for others, you can't have empathy for yourself, fundamentally.
You also, people are very sensitive to hypocrisy, and so if you feel that your government declaring war and invading another country on false pretenses is not a moral horror of the first order, Then the result is that you can't then oppose the expansion of brutal state power within your own country.
You've already said that the state can do all this wonderful good by using violence.
So how are you going to then suddenly say, oh no, the violence is only for Iraq.
The brutality and violence of the government and its positive effects on the moral health of the nation, that's for Iraq.
That's not for us. I mean, that would be so blatantly hypocritical that this is sort of the step-by-step approach that states take to whittle down your personal liberties, right?
So, I was for the war, and I was for the war for very ignomious reasons, for very false, hypocritical, shallow, false self reasons, to be perfectly frank.
I guess I always try to be.
I'm probably aware of that by now.
But why was I for the war?
Well, I was for the war because I thought, or I felt, that it made me look tough and manly.
That was a very strong element of why I was for the war, and I wouldn't really underestimate the degree to which that is the case for other people as well.
That lots of people are pro-war because they like the idea of siding in their spirits with the square-jawed marines and the tough-but-fair soldiers who are out there battling the devils of this world to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, right? I mean, there's frankly a sort of pathetic machismo that I felt, at least.
Maybe other people have different reasons.
There was a kind of pathetic machismo That I felt with regards to war that caused me to feel that it was all good and tough talking and made me a real hero and a staunch, serious, pragmatic, tough-minded moralist to talk about my approval of a war that cost me nothing.
There's no real way to look at it in a way that shines even the remotest positive light on me during this phase of my moral development.
I certainly don't hate myself for doing it, I certainly do wish that it was a little bit less common in society that we hold beliefs because of the aesthetic effect that we believe that those beliefs have on others.
Boy, what a sentence.
I tried running, just for funsies, I tried running a little bit of one of my podcasts, one of the WAV files, through a speech-to-text program, and it just really didn't have any luck at all.
I think it would be much faster simply to listen to it and type it out, but I was just curious how well it would do.
So it was a form of aesthetic shallowness.
I'm not even sure of the right phrase to use my sort of beliefs about the war.
But I very strongly remember that some of the people that I used to work with, we'd sit down at dinner and we'd talk about the war.
And I would use the sort of cliches that I had come across that bolstered my oh-so-manly and virile position.
And I would say things like, well, you know, sure, some Iraqis are going to die, but, you know, 10,000 Iraqis are dying now in Saddam's prisons a month anyway, and so blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
They're still going to be better off.
They're going to be better off afterwards.
And I used the examples of Japan and of...
Germany, of course, after the Second World War.
And I believed that there were weapons of mass destruction.
And I believed that the intelligence was fair and justly done.
And I believed that it was a moral crusade to go and liberate the Middle East.
And I believed... I mean, I knew enough, of course, by that point to know that it had nothing to do with 9-11.
But I believed all of the nonsense that the government told me.
And yet I was completely skeptical...
Of all of the stuff the government told me about the educational system and welfare and the medical systems and so on, all the other stuff that the government runs.
I was very skeptical about all of that, you see, because I was such an independent-minded thinker.
But I swallowed wholesale all of the stuff and all of the tough-minded stuff that the government told me about the reasons that it was going over with a bunch of thugs to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Murder. And I did that, you know, partly because there is a kind of aesthetic that I should have been perfectly aware of based on the fact that it's something that we capitalists have to fight constantly, right? The sort of Mr. Burns character of the capitalists, right?
The greedy, fat, capitalist, Daddy Warbucks kind of pig.
That is an aesthetic cheat in an argument that is something that we capitalists have to oppose quite often.
And of course, what I did was I swallowed the kind of aesthetic cheats that are always involved in conversations about war, which is that people who aren't pro-war are, you know, Sandalistas, right?
The sort of granola hippie peaceniks that would have let Hitler march all over Europe and who would have ended up bleating like lost little lambs in the concentration camps because nobody ever came forward and stood up against evil.
And so evil step by step rules the world and people who don't put up a fight, they claim some sort of virtue, but really they're just cowards and they're not willing to be tough and to stand up against evil and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They're all talk, and it's not virtue at all.
It's just cowardice. And so, you know, you saw all of the anti-war protesters, and they were all sort of freaky-looking, hippy-looking kind of hippy-dippy kind of people.
And so I accepted, swallowed hook, line, and sinker all of the aesthetic cheats involved in the war arguments, right?
So you had, you know, tough-minded people who were really interested in protecting your liberty, right?
And regretfully, we must use violence.
We're forced into this corner, and Saddam Hussein has to be taught a lesson, and he can't thumb his nose at the world, and he can't flaunt this, that, and the other, and he's whatever, whatever, right?
And I swallowed it completely.
Completely. And to me, it would have been embarrassing to be anti-war, right?
I was a complete conformist in this area.
So, I went around trumpeting the virtues of the war, and even after the war, I remember after I had changed my mind, of course, the conversations got very explosive very quickly.
And I guess I knew all of that, right?
It was all wrapped up, right?
I mean, if you're around kind of people who get offended by you being anti-war, then you kind of shouldn't be having a whole lot to do with them as a whole, right?
I mean, people who think that the use of violence is A-OK shouldn't really be in your life at all, right?
I mean, if you're interested in thinking and reasoning with people, those very keen on AK-47s as a good way of resolving disputes, you know, shouldn't really be around.
Because either they're violent or they're hypocritical, right?
Either way... It doesn't really look so good, right?
So either they're violent, in which case they will pull out a gun and shoot you for disagreeing with them, or they're hypocritical in that they wouldn't, but they want other people to do it out of sight, so that they don't really see it.
They won't steal money, but they would like to get a government grant.
So they don't want to dirty their hands with actually committing the crimes themselves.
They just like other people over the horizon to do it and get themselves mailed a nice tidy little check because they don't want to do any sort of messy stuff.
That's no good. So it was a kind of...
Desperate projection of courage and why?
You know, the fundamental question for me is always why.
Why do I need to? Not the what.
What I was doing was pretending to be courageous.
And the question is why?
Why was I pretending to be courageous?
Why does a human being need to exaggerate a particular trait in a false and positive kind of way?
Well, I'm sure it's not going to be too hard to figure this one out.
The reason that a human being projects...
An exaggerated trait is because in reality he is deficient in that trait.
So the reason that I had to talk tough about the war and to put myself forward as a verbal armchair warrior of noble heroic abstinence from fighting was because I was extraordinarily deficient in a little virtue we like to call courage.
I had to talk tough because I was a coward, and so my own cowardice, what did I do with it, right?
Because you can't just erase it.
It's there. It's real. And so what did I do with my own cowardice?
Well, like most people who get into these kinds of false and hypocritical situations, what I did was I projected my cowardice onto these peaceniks.
Right? So I would say, oh, those people, they're just talking, you know, they think it's virtue, but it's really just cowardice and so on, right?
And they're the cowards.
I'm the tough guy, and they're the cowards.
When, of course, the reality is that I was the coward, and they were, in fact, most of them, not all of them, a lot of them anti-war people are conformists and socialists and so on.
But those who were legitimately doing it, people like Harry Brown, who were doing it from a sort of real standpoint, They were the heroes, they were the courageous ones, and I was the coward, right?
The cowardice can't go away.
It can't vanish because it's real and it's there.
And so the only thing that can happen with that cowardice is that it ends up being projected into some other group.
So a lot of Americans who are pro-war are very angry at the terrorists because they say, well, they're mad, horrible, violent, unjust aggression.
And of course, that's themselves.
It's their own government, and they have to project it onto the other side.
Again, this is not to say, as I'm sure I don't need to say, that there's anything moral that's going on on the other side either, but it's just important if you're going to use principles to apply them consistently, as I didn't for quite a few years.
So... I was a coward, and let me tell you how I was a coward, and let me tell you how that translated into war fever.
Well, if I believe that liberty is a tree that must be watered with the blood of tyrants, if I'm so strong and so tough and so staunch with the oak-like belief that liberty is a treasure if I'm so strong and so tough and so staunch with the oak-like belief that liberty is a treasure to be won through You could sort of go back in time if you wanted, and I would appreciate it.
It's taken me a little bit of time.
Go back and say, Steph, so you say you are pro-war not because you're pro-violence and you think that shooting people is a good idea.
Well, I know.
I am not pro-violence, and I do not think that shooting people is a good idea in general.
Okay.
Now, you believe that liberty requires courage and resolution of action.
That's one of the reasons that you are pro-war.
Yes, liberty requires courage and resolution of action.
And that freedom is a state of virtue That must be defended with assertive action.
Yes. And then you would be quite right, I think, in asking me and saying, well, do you believe or do you feel that all of the people in your life are virtuous and moral and good and noble people?
And I would say, well, no, not everyone, right?
It's okay. Well, then you say, well, how many of those people who are in your life, dear Steph, are noble and virtuous and good people?
And I would say, well, this guy and maybe that guy sometimes.
Well, what about your girlfriend?
No. No, not really.
Okay, what about your brother?
Good lord, no. Mother? No.
Father? No. Friends that you're sitting with at the table who are pro-war, are they people of high virtue and integrity?
No. What about your business partners?
Are they people of high virtue and integrity?
No. Okay, have you made any moral compromises that have resulted in harm to other people in a way that was morally compromised, right? And I would say, yeah, kind of, yeah.
Yeah, I absolutely did.
And then, you know, it might be then worthwhile asking me, and again, I would certainly appreciate it if you don't mind popping back in time and save me a little bit of energy here.
Then saying, well, if you believe that virtue is a state and freedom is a state that requires resolute action to maintain, might I inquire of you, dear younger Steph, why, just why, it is that you are not actually taking that action in your own life?
That's a perfectly reasonable question, right?
I mean, really, I hate to laugh because it's war, but it is kind of funny.
You know, thinking back on it, just how ridiculous my thinking was.
And how glad I am that I wasn't podcasting back then.
But it's funny.
In a deeply horrible kind of way, it's funny.
Because, you see, I'm very concerned with the freedom of Iraqis.
With them being free from exploitation.
And with them being free from the inevitable compromises that come from negative authority.
And I don't even have that authority in my life.
I have no Saddam Hussein telling me, you have to see your family, and you have to be in business with these people, and you have to be friends with these people, and you have to date these women, and blah, blah, blah.
So I was very concerned with the freedom of Iraqis, while I was not even using my own freedom.
I mean, it's grimly, grimly funny.
It's a comedy of absolute self-blindness.
Because I'm all about the freedom.
I'm all about the freedom and I'm all about the staunch, you know, take no prisoners approach to liberty.
Because, you know, you've got to be free.
Freedom is, you know, water, blood of tyrants, free.
And yet, I was not free at all in my own life.
And I was taking no resolute and courageous steps towards achieving freedom and integrity within my own life.
I was completely cowardly.
So I am such a brave armchair warrior that I have absolutely no doubt that we should send people thousands of miles to kill thousands of people, because I'm all about the freedom and the staunch action that maintains it.
But was I willing to pick up the phone and break with the corrupt people in my life?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
You see, freedom is for the Marines in Iraq, thousands of miles away.
It's a gift that you grant to people that you don't know, that is enforced by people that you don't know, and is paid for by mechanisms that you don't understand, and in ways that you don't have to fund.
See, that's what freedom is.
Freedom is a dancing invisible elf on the far side of the moon, and it's so important that we should make it the number one focus of our life at all times.
But as far as actually going to achieve freedom in my life...
No, no, no, no, no.
That's for Iraq. That's for the Marines.
That's for the government, you see, to enforce.
Because I'm a tough guy, right?
And I'm all about... I'm all about being assertive.
For the cause of freedom, you see.
I'm all about that. Oh, my God.
It's too sad for words to think about the kind of nonsense that I believed back then.
Freedom. It is a state that the government can achieve thousands of miles away by killing thousands of people, but it's not something that I would be willing to pick up the phone and achieve with no bloodshed in my own life right now.
Because that's how much I value freedom.
People should die for it, you see.
People should be killed and people should die for it.
Because it's that valuable.
That souls should fly from erupting gun wounds and blood should spill like a river.
Babies should be killed.
Mothers and pregnant mothers should be blown up.
I am willing to countenance all of that for the cause of freedom.
All the bloodshed and genocide the world over for the cause of freedom.
Pick up the phone and tell my mother I don't want to see her.
No, no, no, no. I don't want to do that.
Because I'm supporting freedom in...
I'm supporting freedom in Iraq, you see.
Not... Not here.
I'm about freedom in Iraq.
Not here, you see.
So, that's...
That's my brave warrior stance, right?
That's just, I guess, a fairly important thing to understand, that that's what I'm all about with regards to freedom, or at least what I was all about with regards to freedom, and that's why I'm so glad I didn't podcast back then.
Thank you so much for listening.
I hugely appreciate it.
I look forward to your donations.
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