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Nov. 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:13
493 Murdering Saddam

Thoughts on the ethics of hanging Hussein

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Well, it's Steph. I'm going to do a wee, tiny little podcast.
I'm just heading to the gym today before I have to spend some time this afternoon fulfilling the lovely requirements of our police state and filling out yet another piece of paperwork to prove my citizenship.
So funny to think, eh, that before the First World War, a man could travel the length and breadth of the civilized world, certainly in Europe, with no passport and settle and work wherever he wanted.
Truly, the prison planet is...
I had a British passport which worked fine for a while and then I had to get a landed immigrant status card for a while and then I had to get my Canadian citizenship which was fine for a while and now I have to get a Canadian passport In order to easily traverse to the U.S., which I do a fair amount on business.
Just more unpaid labor to satisfy our political masters in their quest to create freedom, to sustain freedom by enslaving the free.
They're here to save me.
And so they are going to make me buy a passport.
And I think it was recently that It was found that about, I think, 30,000 blank Canadian passports had gone missing.
And so there's nothing like a passport to solve the problem.
It actually, of course, makes it far easier for criminals to pass, right?
The higher you raise the restrictions on passage for people, the more that it makes it more valuable for bad people who want to cross borders.
It makes it more valuable for them to get a hold of The counterfeiting passport industry and the more...
I mean, it's like currency, right? No matter what they add to currency, counterfeiters, other than the government itself, will always find a way to counterfeit.
And similarly with passports, the more restrictive you make travel, the more people feel that there's security because of those restrictions and the cottage industry that you create in artificial forged or stolen papers...
It just makes people feel more secure.
It creates a cottage industry and false paperwork and allows their people to traverse the borders with greater ease.
So, I just think it's kind of funny.
It's not a huge hassle.
It's just that, for me, this is like the third or fourth time I've had to get my paperwork.
Of course, yeah, before that I had to get my British passport updated.
So it's just the third or fourth time in the last two years that I've had to get my paperwork updated, and it really is becoming this sort of cartoony kind of Casablanca scenario, you know?
We want to see your papers.
You must show us your papers.
So, I wanted just to have a brief podcast, the briefest of brief podcasts, on this question of the murderer of Saddam Hussein that is currently scheduled.
I guess the news came down today.
This is the 5th of November, 06th.
The news came down today that Saddam Hussein has been found guilty of killing 143 Iraqis in 1982 and it is duly reported with all the solemnity of great justice that this mass murderer has now been brought to justice and will be executed and Iraqis are cheering in the streets.
All of this, you know, from the propaganda ministries known as the free press.
And I just sort of wanted to point out a couple of things, because somebody posted on the board this morning and said, you know, is this just, you know, because the guy killed, you know, he's a political leader who, you know, I guess signed orders.
I don't think he personally went round and strangled all of the Iraqis in question.
I think that it's far more likely that he actually ended up...
Just ordering people who then said, hey, that guy's got a nice mustache and likes to dress in traditional Western garb from time to time.
Let's take his word as gospel and go shoot ourselves some Iraqis, right?
Now, of course, the obvious question is that that would be any sort of sane human being with any sort of remotely basic intellectual integrity would ask is he would say, well, The reason that Saddam Hussein was considered to be such a brutal and horrible dictator was that his crimes against humanity were of such an extreme degree that a murder nearly 25 years ago of 143 Iraqis that he himself merely assigned papers for and did not execute or commit himself would surely rank down in the bottom one-tenth of one-tenth of one percentile of the crimes That he was supposed to have committed,
gassing his own people, torture, rape rooms.
I remember reading some story about how, I don't know, 10,000 or...
I think it was even 30,000, but that seems a little high.
My memory might be playing tricks on me.
Large numbers of tens of thousands of Iraqis were murdered by Saddam Hussein's regime every single month.
So doesn't it seem sort of odd, in a way, To pick on one minor incident relative to all of the other crimes he's supposed to have committed that went down nearly 25 years ago and where the body count is like 12 minutes of what he was supposed to have done over the past 30 years.
And I don't have the answer for this, but I can certainly put forward a somewhat educated guess.
And the somewhat educated guess would be that These crimes were chosen because they were one of the few crimes wherein U.S. complicity or Western complicity in the crimes would not be dug up, right? You'll notice that we really have...
I mean, it's a total kangaroo court, right?
We have really received no particular indications of the evidence that was brought forward.
We've heard nothing from the witnesses that were cross-examined.
And I've heard nothing from the defense side.
Now, of course, you know, it's considered to be almost heretical to say that maybe we should hear from Saddam Hussein's defense, not because he's not an evil man.
I mean, I'm sure he is, but I only have the word of the people who are telling me that the WMDs were there as well, so who am I to tell?
But, you know, let's just assume that he is an evil man.
Then what you want to do is you want to, in cross-examining an evil man, and the Department of Justice, so to speak, and the DEA do this on a pretty regular basis, when you are cross-examining A fine gentleman who has committed a crime, what you really want to do is to find his accomplices, right?
I mean, that's sort of a rational approach to dealing with the problem of crime in this context, right?
because obviously Saddam Hussein could not personally run and administer all of these supposed rape rooms and all of these various horrors that occur in this realm.
So, all right, I can hear that everybody is saying, let me find some new way for Steph to be able to continue doing his podcast, even though let me find some new way for Steph to be able to continue doing his podcast, even though he's had ways to do it at
I can hear the desperate voice of potential listeners saying, Steph, is there any way that you can produce more podcasts?
And this voice is strangely accented.
And has some pretty desperate tones in it, which I can certainly understand.
But I'm going to decide to continue to do a little bit of it just while I start my workout because I have some stuff that doesn't require any hand stuff.
So let me continue with this idea that accomplices would be an important thing to sort of gauge and understand.
When you were looking at a crime, especially a crime that is countrywide, that involves a government, right?
No leader can act alone.
George Bush obviously didn't go to invade Iraq.
In fact, he only goes to Iraq under extraordinarily heavy security, because it would be kind of ironic if some mortar were to injure the poor fellow.
And so, this issue of trying Saddam Hussein, it would obviously be very important to get all of the accomplices That were to have helped him in his goal or his achievement of subjugating, humiliating, destroying, murdering, raping and so on masses of Iraqi people.
So given that there's this vast amount of corpses and there's these genocidal burial grounds and so on, it does of course seem a little bit odd that They're picking on this one little thing.
My guess is that if they were to, say, pick on the big thing that was one of the ideas or historical circumstances that drove people to war, I think that what they would find, if they began to dig into this sort of chemical gassing of the Kurds,
the chemical Ali's gassing of the Kurds, 5,000 people killed with, I think it was some sort of gas, Nerve gas sprayed from helicopters, right, they would say, okay, well, this criminal intent to kill the Kurds would have been, you know, somewhat impossible without the helicopters.
And it would have been somewhat impossible without access to these weapons, right?
So motive is obviously important, but means are equally important, right?
This is why when there's a bank heist going on, you also try and catch and prosecute the guy who drives the getaway car, right?
Because without the getaway car, not the car itself, but without someone willing to drive the getaway car, no crime would actually ever occur.
So this would be another aspect that you would need to look into when prosecuting a crime.
And this, of course, was very much what occurred in the Nuremberg Trials after the Second World War.
The people actually began to look at the means by which the Nazi policies were made possible and expanded.
So if they were to look into the chemical attack on the Kurds that roused such ire prior to the invasion, they would very quickly find That it was the United States that was at least one source of the chemical weapons that were used against the Kurds.
Now, is it illegal to sell weapons in a sort of objective moral sense?
Well, there are weapons that are used for self-defense and then there are weapons that are specifically designed to be used in a crime, right?
Something like a sawn-off shotgun or a gun that has its serial number filed off and has, I don't know, a fingerprint resistant handle or something like that is obviously a weapon that is only designed to be used in a criminal environment.
If somebody sold such a weapon that was then used in a crime, in a sort of free society, and again, I'm not saying whether they would be serial numbers or anything like that, but let's just take that for granted.
In a free society, you would say that the person who held up the bank was liable, that the person who drove the getaway car was liable, if the getaway car We're so constructed as to be almost undetectable.
It had no license plates and I don't know like it was invisible to cameras through some cloaking Klingon or Romulan cloaking methodology or something.
Then you would say that the person who built such a car specifically for the purpose of criminal activity and sold it might also be liable if the gun had a fingerprint resistant A handle and no means of identification and fired bullets which could never be traced through ballistics.
Obviously that would be a weapon that would be created and sold for the simple and obvious reason and purpose of being used in a crime.
So, the people who made such weapons may, I'm not saying would, but you might make an argument that the people who made and sold such weapons would be engaged in direct activities to support and further the commitment of crimes.
So, when we look at the gassing of the Kurds and we find out that The American government sold vast amounts of weapons to Saddam Hussein after putting him in power to begin with, right? And also sold weapons that would only be conceivably used in a crime.
I don't know if the nerve gas or chemical weapons that were used against the Kurds were left over from the American sort of cross-pollination of evil that occurred When they funded both sides of the Iran-Iraq war, but it would certainly seem that it came from something similar to that.
So what that would mean is that there would be a strong argument to be made, I think, that the U.S. would not come off well should their enablement and complicity within the crimes that were committed by Saddam Hussein come to light.
If the gassing of the Kurds was considered such a vile evil, which of course it was, then it would seem rather specious for the US to make such a genocidal attack possible and then to completely distance itself from its enablement,
from its providing of the money and the weapons and the machinery that allowed such predations to occur, And then to say, well, this guy is pure evil, so we have to invade.
Now, if the United States, which of course would never happen, and it's not the U.S., any government would do the same thing.
If the U.S. were to have said at some point, well, we put this lunatic in power, we funded him, just as we funded the other side during the Iran-Iraq War, and we gave him weapons, and we gave him helicopters, and we gave him money, and... Or advisors and so on.
And we later found, he was just genocidal lunatics who were going back in to clean up a mess we made.
Well, that would be a little bit harder, I think, for the American people to swallow as a rationale for going to war.
And so, basically what happens is the evil that men create and commit from the high echelons of abstract government, they suddenly stare down in a completely removed manner And say that this evil which has appeared out of the black moor of history, out of the corrupt philosophies of foreign despots, that we who have never been tainted with this evil must now fight it with all the might that we possess.
That's inevitable. And you can't own up to the fact that your own history has created these issues for people and that you bear a very heavy blame In the prosecution of these crimes,
in the creation of these crimes, you bear a very heavy blame because then what you get is the moral reality of corruption at high levels rather than the simple fairy tale of good and evil that people educated in the state system seem to prefer.
So I would say that I've not read a single sort of mainstream account of this sort of issue and what might have gone into it.
It just doesn't seem to occur to anyone to sort of ask these questions, which I think is a real shame.
You know, it's to an extrapolated and hyperbolic degree.
It's sort of like the Nuremberg Trials been focusing on the Beer Hall Putsch, sort of minor and thwarted attempt by Hitler to take over power in the 1920s.
It would be as if after the slaughter of the Second World War that the Nuremberg Trials focused on A parking violation that Hitler had accumulated in the 1920s.
There would be some question that if the gravity of the evil was so great that hundreds of thousands of lives in the Iraqi war, if the gravity of the evil that Saddam Hussein represented was so great, then surely it would be something that It would be a little bit easier to prove someone's crimes without having to go back to a relatively minor set of murders that occurred nearly a quarter century ago.
Of course, that question can't be asked, right?
Just as it can't be asked, why are we not receiving transcripts of this trial?
Because, I mean, the man's evil by definition, and to ask for proof is sort of like revisiting the Political and ethnic theories of Hitler and saying, well, gee, what if he wasn't wrong?
Right? I mean, so you simply can't have that conversation.
It can't be allowed.
It's, you know, becomes one of these things where we're supposed to have all this free speech.
But there's so much that can never be discussed and never asked and never talked about.
To even ask the questions is to admit to a kind of moral evil of the first order.
So... Despite all of our supposed free speech, there's just so much that we can't ask.
And we just sort of have to take this nonsense as a given, right?
Saddam Hussein was stone evil, and we're going to focus on this tiny little career of his decade-long span of terrorism and murderousness and genocide.
Why? I don't know.
We're not allowed to hear any evidence to the opposite.
Not because... I mean, the...
The intelligent thing to do when you've deposed a dictator, not that deposing a dictator through force isn't always the most intelligent thing to do, but let's just say you've done it, is to find as many accomplices as possible, right?
So that you can find the cause of the dictatorship, so that you can prevent its recurrence, right?
And of course, it would be sort of ironic if the cause of the dictatorship, of the specific dictatorship, not of dictatorship as a whole, which the Middle East is sort of prone to, but...
If the cause of this specific dictatorship that was decried as the worst evil was the United States foreign policy and military spending and loans and the sale of military hardware to this sociopath, then it would be sort of ironic, right? Because we'd say, well, the cause...
The enabler of this murderous madman was the United States.
So in other words, it was the intervention of the United States that was the enabler for the multitudes of murders that occurred and state murders that occurred under his reign, under Hussein's reign.
And so if the proximate cause of Saddam Hussein's murderous reign was the U.S. or, you know, a combination of the U.S. and Western foreign policy, Then, if the cause of the problem was U.S. intervention, it would scarcely seem likely that the solution for the problem would be, yes, U.S. intervention.
That wouldn't be the next thing that you would really guess, right?
Now, I guess the last thing, I guess two more things that I'll say about this, if you don't mind.
I'm working on my legs, so I can use my hands at the gym, too.
Hopefully this will be a listen-able tool-able.
The next thing that I would say would be that the timing of this, of course, is specifically designed to appeal to the passive, violent, arrogant dupes of the U.S. population.
And the reason that it occurs this way, of course, is because the midterm elections are coming up.
And so because the midterm elections are coming up, There has to be a signal of, you know, toughness on the war on terror.
And of course, the majority of state-educated simpletons believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11.
They're going to feel that this is the kind of justice that has now been visited upon the perpetrator.
Of the attacks on New York.
So that's the major reason why the timing would occur in this manner.
It would be fascinating.
It would be absolutely fascinating to hear Saddam Hussein's side of the story.
Right? Just as, of course, it was instructive to hear Hitler's side of the story.
It taught a lot about the dangers of communism.
And so on.
And of course, the other side is always perfectly aware of our hypocrisies and moral failings, just as we are always aware of the hypocrisies and moral failings of their side.
For instance, Hitler was perfectly aware that Wilsonian's 14 points, the sort of national self-determination in his 14 points, to which Clemenceau rolled his eyes to heaven and said, my God, I'm so sick of Wilson's 14 points.
Even God himself had only 10 commandments.
But the rank hypocrisy of going into the First World War to make the world safe for democracy while backing England and France, two of the greatest colonial and imperialistic powers the world has ever known prior to, well, I guess since the Romans and prior to the Americans, is patently ridiculous, right, to go into. To make the world safe for democracy while supporting the two empires that denied national self-determination, which I'm not saying is a good thing, but this is the story.
It's just one of the many hypocrisies that occurred.
The fact that Ho Chi Minh wanted the U.S. aid and support in his revolution and that the domino theory never had any empirical evidence behind it, just as the supply-side theory, which does not include significant government spending cuts in accordance with the tax cuts, was never proven.
Well, it's proven to be false.
All of these hypocrisies are perfectly evident to the other side.
The warts and blackness and shadow and dark side of our cultural society, which is mostly around the state, is perfectly, perfectly evident to other people, to a greater degree, as their failings and evils are evident to us.
And the reason that you need to listen to your enemies...
It's so that you can improve yourself, right?
Because we can't see very clearly our own blind spots.
That's why they're blind spots, right?
We all want to disavow our own capacity for evil and hypocrisy.
And that's why we need to listen to those who have suffered from our own inability to see our own hypocrisy and evil.
And that's why it would be massively instructive, liberating, helpful, positive, and healing.
To hear Saddam Hussein's side of his relationship going back 30 years or so with the United States government.
Absolutely fascinating and it would be wonderful to hear his side of things.
It would be incredibly instructive.
So, we won't hear that, of course.
That's never to be translated, that's never to be known, that's never to be disseminated, except there'll be some Iraqi, some Muslims or Arabic-speaking people who might translate, even if it was made public.
I don't even know if the transcripts of the trial are available to anyone.
But there'll be a number of people who will translate them, put them on websites, and be decried as sympathizers and traitors and so on, right?
Because our allegiance must be to those in power, not to morality or goodness itself.
And the last thing that I'll say, of course, is that just on a sort of basic moral and logical principle, if it is considered to be an evil worthy of hanging to cause the death, and you know where I'm going with this, I'm sure.
I'll keep it brief. But if it is a crime worthy of hanging to be a political leader who orders the deaths or orders actions which result in the deaths of a hundred-odd Couple score Iraqis, right? I mean, again, the argument for morality.
If you want to make that argument, that political leadership decisions that result in the deaths of Iraqis should be punishable by hanging, one must, of course, logically wonder what the status is going to be of Tony Blair and George Bush and the leaders of Micronesia And the leaders of Swaziland and all the other nonsense countries that have joined in or been bribed into complicity in the coalition of the willing.
Even the Spanish and Italian leaders and the Japanese who had troops there would then be complicit in the murder, not of 143 Iraqis, but of tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the forcible displacement of three-quarters of a million and the wounding of God knows how many hundreds of thousands.
If you're going to start swinging this sort of justice, or I guess if you're going to say you're going to take aim with the rifle of truth, It would be a little less morally revolting if it didn't actually just logically go off in your own hands while you were taking aim at something far less dangerous than yourself.
So I just sort of wanted to have those couple of things to sort of mention about this issue.
You always have to look at the causes of things, not just sort of their immediately talked about points.
The question of justice in this realm is almost impossible to decipher.
It's like asking what is good medicine on a battlefield versus what is good medicine in a modern equipped hospital.
You know, if you're on a battlefield and you don't have any morphine, then, you know, I guess putting people out of their misery when you can't save them or letting people who are bleeding to death and you really can't save die would be good medicine.
Good medicine in a modern hospital would not really equate to that kind of stuff.
So looking for justice and morality in a situation where governments have colluded with each other to produce the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and I guess if you include the blockade of Iraq in the 1990s, millions, certainly millions of people, if you've colluded in that, if governments have colluded to produce that level of death and misery, looking for justice to me is...
It's a fool's game. You want to create a situation where there is no battlefield if you want to improve medicine.
Trying to find a way to improve the medicine on a battlefield where you have a rusty saw and no anesthetic and no antibiotics is a bit of a fool's game relative to spending your time attempting to find ways to prevent a battlefield situation from arising.
So I don't think that's the right place to look for justice and I think that you're just going to look at it like one mafia gang A bigger mafia gang has taken over a smaller mafia gang.
And, you know, they've kidnapped the leader and now they're bumping him off.
And of course, the mafia at least does it without this big show of trial and moral pomposity, which is why the government is much more revolting than organized crime.
Because organized crime at least doesn't tell you that it's virtuous to make a big show of virtue.
And organized crime, of course, kills far fewer people.
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