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Nov. 13, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:23
507 Patriotism Part 1: Reciprocity

Pearl Harbor - Unprovoked?

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. I wasn't going to podcast this morning.
I'm listening to a good new book.
But a conversation that's been cooking along on the boards has changed my mind, rightly or wrongly, about the value of that.
And it is going to, if you're from the United States...
This one is fairly guaranteed to offend your sensibilities and sense of virtue, for which I truly apologize.
The last thing as a philosopher that I would want to do is to offend people's virtues and a desire for the good.
But nonetheless, as Aristotle says with regards to Plato, the truth is more important than our friends.
And of course, I would supplement that to say, That the truth should never be in conflict with our friendships, because friendships can only be based on honest and true values.
So, the question that has sort of come up is that I am often accused of I am often described, let me not use any inflammatory language, I am often described as a pacifist and occasionally will be termed,
actually not so occasionally be termed, An extreme pacifist and what that generally means is that people believe that I oppose the use of violence in every single situation and that I would not support the retaliation against anybody who invaded my country or my locality or anything like that, no matter how nefarious their motives were and so on.
It's very hard for people to stop thinking in terms of a government, right?
I mean, as I am a market anarchist, it's very hard for people to say to themselves what would life be like without a government.
For some reason, people have no problem wholeheartedly imagining things as absurd as people walking on water and virgin births and all of this kind of nonsense.
They have no problem with all of that.
But they seem to have extreme difficulties when it comes to trying to figure out whether or not we can survive without a government.
Although they themselves do not ever have any direct contact with this government, all that happens is that their money gets taken from them or they get thrown in the rape rooms of prison cells.
But we don't institute governments within our own lives.
We don't have trials of our children and throw them in cages in the basement should they displease us.
We don't run our lives like that.
We don't use force in our personal lives.
But we imagine that sanctioning it in a general worldwide uber-state kind of way is a positive moral development.
But I would sort of just preface this before I get to the main topic by saying that if you think that it's important what my opinion is of whether or not there should be an army, Then you don't really get anarchism yet.
You don't really get market anarchy yet at all.
So if you write to me, as a fair number of people do, and say, Oh, Steph, you know, this pacifism of yours is terrible.
You know, you would just sit there and stand idly by and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, before we get to sort of my...
Rejection of that and some of my opinions on that.
Let me just point out that if I decide not to buy cocoa puffs, I doubt a whole load of Cocoa Puffs lovers are going to phone and email me and post on my board in high dudgeon and outrage because they will say, well, you just don't get how great Cocoa Puffs are.
My God, man, don't you know about that powdery, sugary, brain-exploding sweetness?
It's like an angel crying on your tongue.
And they would just say, yeah, you don't like it, you don't like it.
I still get my Cocoa Puffs, even though the fact that you, Steph, don't like Cocoa Puffs has diminished the market by one.
I still get my Cocoa Puffs, I get mine, so people aren't going to get that mad at me.
People, on the other hand, do get extraordinarily angry.
In the realm of government, right?
Government engenders an enormous amount of conflict because there's just one solution.
It's like when there's only one religion, there's a huge amount of conflict because everybody wants to grab control of that and use that to enforce their will upon others, not because that's innate to human nature, but because it's a kill-or-be-killed situation with the government.
You either enforce your will on others or other people enforce their will on you, but there's not a whole lot of in-between.
Government is not about compromise.
Oh, it's bipartisan.
It's like, well, it's bipartisan for you guys, but we still get our asses kicked if we don't obey the rules.
So there is no cooperation in government.
There is no compromise in government.
Government is about imposing the will of the minority, and usually the opulent minority, on the majority.
And getting them to love it through public schools and other kinds of propagandistic institutions.
But... It doesn't matter.
In a free society, like in a truly free society, whether I'm a pacifist or not, doesn't matter at all.
This is the basic beauty of the anarchistic model, of the stateless society.
If you want a massive army, go for it.
Go for it. Have fun.
I have no problem.
If you want to spend 90% of your income and...
Live on mayo and hot dog, white bread sandwiches, living in a trailer park in order to fund the massive military that so gets your crank going.
By all means. It's a free society.
You can get your own militia together.
You can do whatever the hell you want.
And if you think that this is some radical departure from where we are now, think again.
People have their militia. They're just called the mafia.
And the Bloods and the Crips and other types of gangs, and of course the police.
The most powerful gang inside until Posse Comitatus is broken and the army comes home.
So people getting upset with me that I am not interested in funding a large military would have no problem with me at all.
In fact, they might even prefer They might even be happy.
This is the beauty of the free market system.
They might even massively prefer that I not be interested in building a large army.
Why? Well, because if I'm interested in building a large army too, then what happens, of course, is that I'm bidding up the same materials that they want.
So, I would not say that there's any problem in a free society whether or not I want a military or you want a military, that's all totally fine.
I think that a lot of people talk tough about the military.
I think that a lot of people are pro-Iraq war the same way they're pro the war on drugs.
And it's very easy when you don't have any skin in the game to trumpet and sound off and be a real noble hero.
But I would be very, very curious, of course, to see how many people would still be pro the war in Iraq if they actually got a bill for a thousand bucks a month per family, or, you know, whatever it's running now.
That to me would be great. See, then we'd find out, without price, everything is bullshit.
Without price, it's just words, right?
It's like actions speak louder than words.
What you're actually willing to pay for is a much better indication of your values than the courage you display around the dinner table when you're talking about our heroic soldiers and so on.
And... I know that there are people who do go to war and so on, but those people are paid to go to war, right?
If they themselves paid to become soldiers, then we would find out exactly how valuable soldiering was.
Or, if their pay were only determined and the need for them were only determined, By people who voluntarily paid for their salaries.
Then we would find out how pro-military people really are.
Lots of people study military history and they'll get real down on it.
I did all of this for a novel that I wrote about the lead-up to the Second World War, so I understand all of this.
Available for donations, just let me know which one you want.
People will talk a lot about The virtues of war and all this kind of stuff.
But until they're actually willing to put their money where their mouth is, which would be the case in a free society, it's all just a load of nonsense.
It's all just people talking tough and posturing and being sanctimonious and oh so brave.
But I sure would love to see what happened to the military.
If it became a voluntarily funded institution, then I'm sure there would be some degree of military power that would still exist because the world can be a dangerous place, but I doubt it would be 5% of the GDP or 4.5% or whatever it is that is occurring within the United States, and 2.5% or 2.8% for the British government.
This, of course, isn't counting the national debts and so on.
So it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter one little bit whether or not you are offended or not by my approach to the military.
To think that it matters one little bit whether or not I am pro-military in the way that you want it to be or anti-military in the way that is exactly as ludicrous as getting as offended by My preference of long-distance carrier versus yours, or my choice of cell phone plans, or whether I buy a cell phone or not.
And, of course, people might then respond and say, yes, but national defense, or let's just say national for want of a better word, national defense is a collective responsibility and If you don't pay for it, then I must be forced to pay more for it.
And if nobody wants to defend their country, then my property is also at risk.
And blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And I certainly understand all of that.
You know, you're not the only person who's interested in protecting his life and property in the world.
And if you think that you are, you might want to relax, you know, just a little bit.
You actually have quite a bit more in common with your fellow man than you may imagine, right?
You actually have things in common like you don't want your house to get exploded, to get blown up.
You don't want your children to be sold into slavery in the markets of the East.
You don't want...
Your wife to get carted off by a Mongol horseman.
Pretty much everyone has these sort of basic feelings.
And those who don't have any value for property, who don't value property really, Aren't going to be able to pay for the army in a free society anyway.
So I wouldn't worry about it too much.
Everybody wants to protect their property.
And of course, you know, just very, very sort of briefly, The amazing thing about trying to invade a free society, and we can go into this more detail another time if you like, is that it's going to be really freaking hard,
right? I mean, look at the most amazing and powerful military machine that the world has ever known, the most evil, sky-reigning, death squad killer group of hitmen that the world has ever seen assembled, this side of Hades.
The United States military can't even...
Deal with about 10,000 insurgents in Iraq.
And why? Because there is no state that is established which can be taken over.
These people destroyed the state and they've tried to set up a pseudo-state, but the insurgents do not recognize the state.
And the people in general recognize the state to a small enough degree that they're not willing to turn in the insurgents.
It's like certain minority groups in America and I'm sure in Paris and so on where the cops go in and ask what went on and they just get the blank faces because in those minority groups the moral legitimacy, God bless them, the moral legitimacy of the state is not respected or valued and so there's a code of silence that is included.
Which, of course, the police get mighty upset about, and it's, of course, kind of funny because there's nobody with a greater code of silence about crimes than the police, that the crimes that the police themselves commit.
So... I would say that it's important to understand that if you're going to invade a free society, an anarcho-capitalist society, then the normal thing that you do when you invade a country is you go and occupy the parliament and you go and occupy the seats of government and so on,
and you grab a hold of the public treasury, whoever gets to sign the checks, writes the rules, and That's how you take over a government in a free society.
That's all fairly clear, I'm sure.
Sorry, that's how you take over a status society.
Go and occupy the seat of government, get a hold of the treasury, and you're good to go.
And if you can't get a hold of the treasury, at least get a hold of the printing presses for the money.
And of course, once you can pay the soldiers with any kind of legal tender, for want of a better, not so oxymoronic phrase, Then you will get people to...
The soldiers will then take your money, do your bidding, and they will kill anybody or arrest them who comes up with competing currency or trades in gold or does anything to undermine the value of the money you're paying the soldiers in.
And this is all fairly standard, right?
That's how a coup works. You go and kill the leader, and you take over the government, and you get a hold of the money supply, and lo and behold, you have, with relatively precision kind of strikes, You have been able to take over another government.
Good for you. However, of course, in a free society, there is no center of government.
In a free society, there is no legal tender that is a monopoly.
There is no national treasury.
There is no department or ministry of the exchequer or ministry of revenue or there's no big government vaults full of gold bullion and jewelry and so on, right?
So, where are you going to...
Where are you going to invade?
Who are you going to kill?
It's a tough question, right?
I mean, you are going to have a very tough time invading and taking over a country because the insurgency system is going to be very strong.
And we can talk about that another time if you like, but there's really going to be no profit.
Now, that doesn't mean that there's no profit on the home side, right?
Because wars are not about taking booty from the enemy, but about taking booty from your own taxpayers, right?
I mean, there's precious little value coming out of Iraq.
In fact, there's an enormous destruction of hundreds of billions of dollars coming out of Iraq, which is far less important.
Of course, money is just money, but far less important than the hundreds of thousands of lives, both Iraqi and U.S., though the U.S. to a tiny proportion of lives that have been snuffed out in brutal and violent and horrible ways.
Through the invasion.
But the war continues because there's vast profits for the money elite and the international bankers and those at the top of the economic food chain.
I mean, more on the fascistic food chain.
It's not like Microsoft's making a whole lot of money out of Iraq, but the people who are the sort of government-slash-corporation combos, which is the fascistic stage of late socialism, Socialism being the government expansion of power over the economy, which draws, like flies to honey, corrupt companies to make money from that state power.
The fascistic late, you could say late capitalism, but it never, you know, hasn't been capitalism for a hell of a long time.
It never was pure capitalism, hasn't been capitalism for a hell of a long time.
But these people are making money hand over fist.
A war is fundamentally the destruction of money and small amounts of vast profits made by those who are focusing on or those who manage the destruction of that money.
You're really going to have a tough time invading a free society because there's nothing to seize.
And there's no treasury to seize.
There's no central... And there's no...
You can't get control of the army, right?
Because the army is not seizeable.
Because there's no public money supply.
And there's no public treasury that you can grab a hold of and get control of.
And so it's going to be, you know...
This is a fairly well thought out position.
It doesn't mean you have to agree with it, but at least understand that it's a fairly well thought out position.
And the fact that I have ended up saying that a standing army always gets put to some kind of use, right?
And a standing army that is paid for through coercive measures against the taxpayer is a criminal institution.
I mean, it's the greatest criminal institution that is out there, regardless of the propaganda, right?
You don't look at words. You look at deeds.
You don't look at... You don't look at propaganda, you look at facts, right?
And the army and the police, primarily, their primary and perpetual activity is to extract money from domestic citizenry, not to protect the citizenry against, right?
I mean, it's kind of funny anyway, right, to say, I need a government to protect my property, so I'm going to have them force me to give over half of it.
Or more. Coffee break.
So... So let's get to the conversation that was...
Ooh, not too bad a tangent. Only 15 minutes.
That was... Let's get to the conversation that was occurring on the boards, which was something around the following.
And I get these with monotonous regularity, which doesn't mean that the people aren't well-meaning, and it doesn't mean...
It's just that they've never heard this kind of stuff, and they associate, perhaps, pacifism with, you know, long-haired, dewy-eyed granola-eating hippies or whatever the sandalistas.
But... The message that I sort of get is, oh, so you're anti-military.
You're an extreme pacifist, so you would not have retaliated to the evil attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.
You would not have retaliated to the firing on the U.S. vessels on the Gulf of Tonkin.
This was one of the sparks for the Korean War.
You would have let the Nazis overrun You would have let the Nazis overrun Europe and let freedom be snuffed out there and millions of people die.
And then you would have let Hitler develop the atom bomb and then he would have come over and nuked a couple of US cities and thus taken control of the United States.
Rather than pay a small amount of your property in taxes or rather than support a military, you would have let all of these evils come to be.
And the way that you know that it's not a real argument is that any sane human being, when presented with that proposition, would never, ever, Say that,
sure, I'd rather keep on to a small amount extra of my property rather than pay, you know, 10% of my income or 5% of my income, I guess it would be to maintain the military, that I would rather hang on to 5% of my income and for sure and for certain have a genocidal and murderous and, you know burning up all the minorities kind of dictatorship take over my country
I mean that would really be cutting off your nose to spite your face so to speak that would be to keep five percent of your property and then lose every single liberty and you know most of your property and have your children dragged off to war you know all for the sake of for a couple of years saving five percent I mean this is not a real argument right and
And whenever you get an overwhelming aggression, and I don't mean sort of the hostile tone or anything like that, but what I mean is whenever you get an argument that no sane human would ever say no to, then you know you're dealing with propaganda, right?
You know that you're dealing with propaganda.
This is the primary stench that propaganda gives off, is that it seems completely insane and irrational to oppose it.
I mean, that's the point of propaganda, is to get you not to think, but to exceed, to concur.
So you get this sort of with the anarchistic philosophy as well, right?
With the idea that human beings should not institutionalize violence as a methodology for dealing with each other in the form of the state for both moral and practical reasons.
I would say that you would want to understand what happens with the anarchistic philosophy as well.
And you may have heard this before if you're an anarchist, or you may have said this if you're not.
But the argument against anarchy is sort of twofold.
One is that you're just selfish and don't want to pay your fair share.
You're greedy. You don't want to help the poor or care for...
The sick to die and the poor to starve and the indigent to loaf around and never have a chance at a decent life.
And you want all of that just because you don't want to pay your fair share.
And that's sort of the one side that you're just sort of a bad, selfish person.
And who wants to say, oh, yeah, me.
I'd rather have a new iPod than have the sick have any medicine or have the starving have any food.
I mean, yes, because I'm a selfish, evil, fat cat capitalist.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But that, of course, is not true.
And the other thing that's also said, right?
So there's the A, you're evil.
And this, of course, occurs as well, right?
So rather than protect your family and rather than protect your life and your freedoms, you would rather hang on to a couple of percent of your income and not fund the military, blah, blah, blah, right?
So there's one side of things. You're a selfish, evil, you know, stupid guy.
And the second is that the consequences are just insane, right?
And so, in the anarchistic view, right, so not funding the military results in, you know, Hitler marching down Fifth Avenue and so on, all this sort of nightmare horror.
And, you know, the death of all things virtuous, noble and good in the world and so on.
And the same thing is true when you talk about getting rid of the state.
It's like, oh, well, don't you realize that if we didn't have any state, there would be perpetual civil war and, you know, millions of people would die and there would never be any stability and you'd never have any right to hold on to your property.
And so, you know, we have to pay off the government the money that they force us to give them because, you know, it's still better than the alternative and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Which is, you know, again, the funny, the sort of cheat in this, the lie in this, is that if these arguments were true, and if not funny, the military ended up with Hitler or Stalin or Mao walking down Fifth Avenue and the death of all things virtuous, noble, and free, and it only cost you a couple of percent of your income, and you would be completely immoral and insane not to do it, then what's happening is somebody is saying, I'm going to...
Bring logic to bear on you, my friend, who doesn't agree with the military or wants a stateless society.
I'm going to bring logic to bear on you, although for some mysterious reason you have been unable to process the logic that I'm presenting to you.
Even though, doubtless, you've lived in the world and you've heard all of this kind of stuff a million zillion times.
So you've been unable to process the basic logic of protect your freedoms and don't get killed for only a couple of percent of your income, which of course would be perfectly logical.
And also that without a state, you know, you want to get rid of the state based on principle and the result of that principle would be millions of deaths and anarchy and in the worst sense of the word and constant murders and gangs roving the streets and so on, right?
So if I'm unable to process the variables and to understand that those are in fact the conclusions and the cost is relatively small relative to the horror of the conclusions, then clearly I have no brain where my cost-benefit analysis should be.
I have no capacity to reason.
I'm woefully addicted to principle and have no capacity to process consequences and will stick to principle despite universal genocide, murder, death, destruction, concentration camps, and so on.
I will stick to my principles Regardless if they result in the flaming death of all that is holy and virtuous, good and decent in the world, well, then why would you argue with me?
I mean, if I've already stated implicitly, and I would say explicitly in this case, if I've already stated that if these consequences are so obvious and true and that I've lived in society and have heard them as often as you have, then if I'm still sticking to my principles, I'm then if I'm still sticking to my principles, I'm obviously like egotistically and dogmatically insane.
It's like I'm still a communist, because somehow communism could be made to work despite the fact that it results in universal murder everywhere it is put in place.
So clearly, there's a cheat in here, and this is what propaganda always does.
Propaganda puts forward an argument that anybody with an IQ of 70 or more would concur with, and that is irrefutable, right?
Why would you even consider not having an army if the results were the dictatorship and this kind of stuff, right?
And so, no sane human being would ever disagree with those arguments, and so that's how you know it's propaganda.
Because they're still willing to argue with you, even though they're calling you completely and totally insane.
Right? Completely and totally insane.
Because you want, you know, rather, just to stick to principle, you'd rather give up all your freedoms, even though you say your primary principle is freedom.
Right? So, I know that's been a bit of a long-winded explanation.
Actually, probably not for me.
But I sort of really wanted you to get that when you get these kinds of completely off-balance arguments where there's simply no rational way, if you accept the principles, to deny the conclusions, that's how you know that you're dealing with propaganda.
And the falsehood that is involved is that they're saying, you're insane, but I really want to debate with you.
They're saying that you can't process 2 plus 2 is 4, and here I am trying to convince you now of a higher mathematics and calculus and relations and functions and so on.
There's sort of a cheat. If I'm smart enough to be interested in these ideas, then I'm obviously not insane and irrational.
And if you're willing to debate with me, you can't say that I'm insane and irrational.
But if you put an argument that lopsided forward, then you're saying that if I don't already believe this, I'm insane and irrational.
So I sort of wanted to point that out.
Now, the thing that occurs, or at least I think the thing that is useful to occur in this kind of context, is the following.
It's okay, traffic's moving slowly.
Time for a coffee break. The response is to extract the principle and to reverse it, right?
That is pretty much, right?
Because what happens is, you know, people feel, with 9-11 and with the Pearl Harbor and so on, that the thousands of people who died horrible, agonizing, flaming, murderous, evil deaths, which I would certainly concur with, agree with, the...
The people who went through that, that's very vivid, right?
There's a certain kind of my brother, my brother, right, that occurs with this kind of stuff, right?
So there's a certain kind of, you know, these people are my fellow countrymen, and their deaths were horrible, and of course we've all seen it replayed, and we've seen the outrage of our leaders, and there's been movies about it, and so of course these people are, you know, our brothers in spirit who have been cruelly murdered, and it's all very vivid, and so on.
And, of course, we don't see movies about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we don't see movies about the rampant, predatory, vile child abuse that leads someone to end up as a drone in the Emperor's Army, Emperor Hirohito's Army.
Being a suicide pilot, a kamikaze pilot.
We don't see all of this.
We don't see that journey. We don't see the enormous amount of brutal abuse that occurs within a dictatorship to get people to be the sort of willing tools of murder and death for the emperor.
And we also don't see the consequences that occur or that accrue to people who don't obey in a dictatorship.
We don't see them as helpless pawns.
We see them as, you know, voluntarily and willful, malevolent evil guys, right?
That Japan, and of course we have to use this collectively, that Japan's treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war.
Right, right.
Like, the U.S. has declared war, like, two or three times in its history, despite being involved in over 120 violent conflicts.
It's only declared war, I think, twice, World War I and World War II. The rest of the time, it deigns not to.
But then, of course, the moment the Japanese attack without a declaration of war, well, okay, they're evil.
I mean, that's bad, right?
But, um... And this, of course, is not to say that the murders of the U.S. sailors and civilians in Pearl Harbor was not an evil act.
Of course it was absolutely evil, no question.
But why was it evil?
Why was it evil?
Why was it evil?
This is how you get out of propaganda, is you extract principles and reverse them to test the case, right?
So we say, well, it was evil because it was an assault upon another country's persons and property.
Well, that's fine, right?
I mean, that's a perfectly reasonable and valid thing to say.
And so the individual crimes are, you know, the individual people who dropped the bombs and pulled the triggers and so on.
That's perfectly reasonable, I think.
And then we say, okay, so the principle is that if one country, and we'll just use these collective concepts for the moment, if one country then attacks or undermines or steals from or aggresses against another country, then self-defense is perfectly valid, right? Well, we say yes.
Well... Of course, for those who think, you know, everybody likes to think that history begins with the incident, but history never begins with the incident.
There's a reason that when I wrote Revolutions, also available for donations, actually you can buy it from the publisher at publishamerica.com, the novel title is Revolutions.
There's a reason that I wrote Revolutions about 40 years before the Russian Revolution, because that's when the history is really occurring, right?
And, you know, it's like somebody's dying for 10 years, and then the moment that they die, you say, wow, I guess they weren't well, right?
But, of course, the death is the final culmination of a series of dysfunctions within the body, and something like Pearl Harbor on 9-11 is...
A final manifestation of many, many years of abuse, right?
If you're a chain smoker, you don't wake up one day with lung cancer and say, holy crap, where the hell did this come from?
That's bizarre, right? You say, well, a natural risk of smoking for many, many years is the risk of lung cancer or emphysema or whatever it is.
It doesn't just come out of nowhere.
You say, well, this is bizarre, right?
I'm sure you get the idea.
And, of course, American meddling in the Pacific and the Far East has gone on for almost as long as America has.
The fact that Japan got 80% of its oil from America and that America placed an embargo, right, aggressed against its own citizens to prevent them from selling to Japan, and there was a blockade, there was a seizure of Japanese assets, there were ships moving around Japan, there was, I mean, Japan had every right in this philosophy.
I'm not talking about the, you know, objective right.
I'm just saying that you obviously don't wait for the bombs to light up your cities, right?
And, of course, the U.S. claimed this right with no evidence relative to what was happening in Japan.
Claimed this as a moral right to invade the United States, to invade Iraq.
But American aggression against Japan was enormous.
You know, asset seizure, the crippling of the economy through the embargo on oil.
And, of course, Japan has no oil, no natural resources to speak of.
And so Japan is incredibly vulnerable to embargoes and to blockades, and to sort of sea blockades.
And without oil, of course, the Japanese military has like two weeks before it simply ceases to work.
Oil is that fundamental commodity that without it you can't wage a war.
So, when the United States began aggressing against Japan and strangling its oil supply and seizing its assets, then the Japanese were perfectly aware that if If they did not do something, then within weeks to a month or two, they would be unable to wage war because they simply would not be able to get the oil.
Now, I'm not sure. To be perfectly honest, I don't know why it was 80% that came from the United States, and I don't know why Japan couldn't go and get oil elsewhere.
You don't have to excuse my lack of knowledge on that, but there are governments involved for sure in one way or another.
So Japan knew that it had to act very, very quickly.
Otherwise, it would simply be defunct as a military power, and it feared invasion, rightly or wrongly.
Certainly the ruling class feared that if the U.S. sanctions and blockades were to take effect and to work, which there was every indication that they would, Then the Japanese ruling class was afraid, as are all ruling classes, that if they can't keep giving bread and circuses to their people, that there's going to be a revolution and so on, right?
So basically, the Japanese could be reasonably argued, I mean, were being enormously aggressed against, that their capacity to have a military and to wage war was being crippled, and therefore they had to act.
The U.S. ships were already in the Pacific, of course, further east than Pearl Harbor.
And so the only way, given that the primary concern that Japan had was the U.S. Navy, it wasn't like the Air Force was that dangerous, or the Marines, but the Navy was the methodology or the mechanism by which the U.S. was going to maintain its sort of grip on, or maintain its control over Japan.
And so they, and again, it's not to justify it, it's just, you know, it's important to understand the reasoning behind it.
So what their perspective was, was they said, well, okay, so it's now or never.
Like, we either do something now or we're done.
They've stolen all our money.
They've cut off our oil.
They've cut off, you know, we're going to really diminish capacity to feed our own citizens.
And the only way that they're able to maintain this and enforce this is with their fleet.
It's their fleet that's dangerous.
And it could well be argued, right?
I mean, you've got to get the view from the other side, right?
I mean, you don't have to, but if you want to be a rational human being, then you've got to get a view from the other side.
Because when you think about national defense, right, having massive amounts of aircraft carriers and destroyers and so on all masked in Hawaii, what on earth did that have to do with defending the American homeland?
It had nothing to do with defending the American homeland, and people overseas are perfectly aware of that.
Why does America have hundreds and hundreds of military bases around the world?
Does it have anything to do with defending American interests at home?
Of course not! So, the first thing to understand is that everybody who's around the world is perfectly aware that the United States military is in no way, shape or form dedicated to or has anything to do with defending America.
It exists for a completely different reason.
Which is to aggress against the world outside.
It has nothing to do with defending America, right?
You would not need, in order to defend America, you know, a massive fleet in Hawaii, right?
Because that really wouldn't make any sense, right?
So everyone's aware, and Japan is perfectly aware, that that fleet is there to terrorize people in the Pacific, right?
And, of course, it's happening, right?
And Japan is an evil dictatorship, don't get me wrong, I'm just talking about the reasoning, right?
So Japan, you know, dwindling oil reserves, no capacity to wage war in weeks or months, and no possibility of defeating the U.S., right?
Because, of course, the U.S. has the natural resources, or at least it was a high domestic oil producer at the time.
The U.S. has the economy, the natural resources, the labor, the manpower, and, of course, doesn't have to worry.
Japan was growing a ghastly empire in China and other sort of Asiatic countries at the time.
And so... Which, of course, is horrible and evil, but, you know, if Americans want to go over and sort that out themselves, more power to them, but there's no reason why, and there's every reason why not, that Americans should not be forced to go and fight against the Japanese because everybody's interested in freeing the Chinese to become communist.
Oh, wait, sorry, that is what happened.
Anyway. So the Japanese were backed into a corner.
And so what are they going to do?
Well, if they declare war in the United States, the United States will just bomb the crap out of them and shell them because they've already got the military in the Pacific.
And so what are they going to do?
Well, they're going to have to try and cripple the United States Navy, which is the obvious aggressor, right?
I mean, they're not stupid, right?
I mean, our enemies, the enemies of our country and so on throughout history and so on are not stupid.
There's a very specific reason they didn't declare war.
There's a very specific reason it was a sneak attack.
And there's a very specific reason that they went directly for the military, for the Navy.
Right? And there's a very specific reason why it was that day Rather than any other day.
The question is why? Why that day?
I mean, Japan has been around for thousands of years.
America's been around for hundreds of years.
Why that day? What happened?
Why? Why would they do something like that?
Especially since they knew they couldn't win in the long run.
Well, anyway, so that sort of basic issue is just something to understand.
So if the principle that you are being aggressed against and fear invasion, legitimately so, and companies have taken hostile moves towards you, is a legitimate reason for self-defense, which is, of course, what is used to justify American aggression abroad, then American aggression, which is almost always far more clear than foreign aggression against America, I mean, which is more valid, right?
The American embargo upon Japan and the seizure of Japanese assets, is that clear provocation relative to, say, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was completely made up and manufactured?
Or is it clear relative to, say, the abstract and totally bizarre domino theory, which caused the Americans to murder about 3 million Vietnamese?
Is it, say, more clear than completely made-up stories about weapons of mass destruction?
Is it more clear than the Japanese desperate plea to surrender, which the US, as I've talked about before, did not heed?
And demanded unconditional surrender and then surrendered with exactly, when the Japanese surrendered, they gave them exactly the same terms that they wanted before.
So even though the Japanese are begging for surrender and have given up the ghost, the United States still lights up hundreds of thousands of Japanese souls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Is that just or fair?
And the reason that I'm sort of pounding on this so much is not because I think that Americans are evil.
To me, systems are evil.
Individuals within those systems, and this is a complicated topic.
I'm not going to expect to convince you on it right away.
I'm not even sure that I could.
This is sort of more of a gut feel than any kind of syllogistical or historical proof, but systems, bad philosophies turn people bad, right?
The same way that in the Middle Ages, bad medicine got people killed, right?
It wasn't until the late 19th century that going to a doctor actually increased rather than decreased your chances of survival.
So, given that it's systems that we should be focusing on, philosophical ideas that we should be focusing on, I would make the case that we don't actually want to try and say, well, you know, America good, Japan bad, right?
People are generally as good as their systems allow them to be.
Because people want to survive and have kids and not get killed, and the system is so full of people who are willing to do whatever the leaders say that it's hard to blame individuals.
In my view, it's hard to blame individuals.
Because it's just so widespread, right?
You can only create blame where there's a wide divergency of possibilities.
And given that everybody ended up going to fight in the wars, they obviously felt that they didn't have any real choice.
And, of course, the other thing to do is to say, well, if I claim that membership in my country is a great virtue, then what would be the case or how would it logically be if I were born Japanese, right?
If I'm virtuous because I'm American and I was born here and this and that, Would it also be the case that you would have the same amount of virtue if you just happened to sadly be born in Japan?
Would that be a logical and reasonable result?
Would you still maintain the same amount of virtue?
Well, of course not. It would just be pure vanity to say that your virtue has nothing to do with where you're born, in which case it's no longer virtue, right?
I mean, if you're just good for being American because you just happened to be born in America rather than in Japan, say, in 1920, Then it's not a virtue.
You didn't earn it, right? It's just something that occurred to you through luck, like being tall or whatever.
Not having a congenital heart defect or something.
It's not like, wow, I'm really athletic.
I'm really good at taking care of my health because I didn't get a congenital heart defect or whatever.
We're just pausing while I wanted to finish this point off.
We're just pausing for those on the audio while I do my parking.
I'm very glad that I have it. I hate getting...
I have these nightmares about getting here because I'm British and lining up and not having my card and all this kind of stuff, but...
Anyway, so I just sort of wanted to point that out, that whatever standards you bring to bear for armed conflict that you say, well, we were justified in retaliating for Pearl Harbor because we were aggressed against, well, you know, as I said sort of yesterday, whenever you come up with a theory, I think it's very, very important.
to spend time coming up with the opposing view first.
This is what propaganda wants you to do is to make such a case that no sane human or whatever disagree.
But that's the first thing you need to do is to begin to find counter examples.
So if you say, well, Pearl Harbor was evil and we had to attack back because we were aggressed against and we were good and they were bad.
Well, that's great. There's nothing wrong with that as a theory, but it's just a theory, just like everything else, right?
The first thing that a scientist does when he comes up or thinks he's come up with a theory is he says, okay, well, what would be the counterexamples?
What data doesn't support it, right?
So I don't waste my time on these theories.
The same thing is absolutely true and required and I think would be a hallmark of intellectual integrity to achieve.
Would be the same thing in the realm of, look at that, the lighting system is up, in the realm of history and so on.
So I just wanted to sort of talk about that so that you get the idea.
I'm not talking against virtue.
I'm not talking against honor.
I'm not talking against speaking against decency.
But the actions of governments usually have almost nothing to do with that.
In fact, I would say it's an almost universal rule that they're the complete opposite of that.
So, I'm not trying to say that now America is evil and Japan is good.
I'm simply giving you the counterexample that the actions of all the governments are evil, and the citizens are the ones who pay, and you don't want to confuse the American government with American ideals, right?
You don't want to confuse the American government with American ideals.
It's not that if you criticize the American government, you're not criticizing truth, virtue, and nobility.
In fact, I would say you're actively defending them.
So thank you so much for listening.
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