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April 17, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:57
714 The Shootings at Virginia Tech Part 2 - Causes

Why is America so violent?

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. It is April the 17th, 2007.
I hope that you're doing well.
And I wanted to continue some thoughts that I'd had about the shootings at Virginia Tech.
For those who are far in the future, this is the incident where 32 people were shot by a lone gunman who then turned the bullets on himself, or a bullet, bringing the death toll to 33, the brief recap.
is that at around 7.15 in the morning at Virginia Tech, there was a 9-11 call regarding a shooting which was considered to be a domestic dispute, and there aren't really any details at the moment, except insofar as the rest of the campus was not alerted.
The rest of the campus was not alerted, but what happened was two people were shot.
In a dormitory by a dorm resident, an Asian gentleman, and then he vanished.
They had no idea where he was.
This guy who just shot two people vanished, and they had no idea where he was, and they did not inform anyone that a murderous gunman was on the loose.
And then... He changed the doors of a building from the inside, and then he did the methodical psycho walk through the building, shooting everyone that he could come in contact with.
Students had to play dead and so on.
A couple of professors were killed and so on.
And details remain fairly sketchy.
They say that he was dressed in what appeared to be a Boy Scout uniform.
I'm not sure if that is going to turn out to be a military uniform, but let me tell you, it would not be at all surprising.
In fact, it would be entirely predictable if it turned out to be a military uniform rather than a Boy Scout uniform.
And, of course, a Boy Scout uniform.
Anyway, we don't have to get into the history of the Boy Scouts, but it was paramilitary to begin with, of course.
So I'll start with the minor stuff, which I think we're thinking about.
Can you imagine what would have happened if a private capitalist had known of a deadly gas leak that had killed two people, but then somehow vaguely thought that the gas was okay, did nothing for two hours, which resulted in the deaths of 30 more people?
Can you imagine the howls of protest with regards to the administration, this Rudy Crier?
And of course, it's not just the university administration, the campus police, it's the police as a whole.
The police received the 911 call about the shooting and then had no idea where the shooter was.
They did not warn anyone that the shooter was on the loose.
And, of course, the reason they do that, the reason that these decisions are always made, is because people wish to avoid publicity.
People wish to avoid, oh, causing a panic, as they call it, or whatever.
But basically, people wish to avoid negative publicity.
They hope that they can keep it quiet.
They hope they don't panic the student body as a whole, or get lots of negative PR. And so, they kept it quiet.
And they said, oh, we thought that the We thought that the shooter had left the campus.
And of course, as it's going to show, there's going to be no evidence whatsoever that the shooter had left the campus.
They just didn't know where he was.
If you don't know where someone is, then clearly you don't know that he's left the campus.
If you know where someone is, you go and apprehend him.
And if you don't know where someone is, then you don't know where he is.
It's just a story that they made up.
But imagine if this was a private company, a chemical company, who kept the news of a gas leak quiet for two hours, resulting in the deaths of 33 people.
Imagine the howls for regulation.
Imagine the rage that would be unleashed against corporate managers.
Imagine the movies with Erin Brockovich that would be made regarding the perfidious, evil, graspy, greedy capitalists who knowingly suppressed information a la the tobacco companies which resulted in the deaths of dozens of people and blah blah blah.
And this just shows you how hopeless, how much We have given up on the state, even those who are pro-state these days.
There's no howls of outrage about the police.
There's no howls. I mean, there will be for sure, but it doesn't really matter.
There's nobody who says, well, that's it.
We've just had it. You guys are just a complete waste of skin, and we are going to privatize the police because you guys couldn't find your asses with both hands and a flashlight.
But we've just given up. What happens is when this kind of monumental...
Genocidal is too strong.
Monumental, multi-murder screw-up occurs, people just sigh.
Oh, well, let's focus on the evils of America as a whole.
Let's focus on gun control.
And it's just fascinating to look at how people...
Get angry at the capitalists for two reasons.
One is that the capitalists will listen because it's a voluntary transaction and they're afraid of negative PR and there's competition so if you don't go to them they'll go to someone else.
And the other of course is because the capitalists aren't armed and people get very brave in their moral outrage when they face people who aren't armed and can throw them in jail.
But it just goes to show, for me at least, just how people have totally given up on government.
There's not going to be any calls for privatizing police or anything like that.
There's just going to be calls for expansion of state power.
I mean, that's always the constant.
Oh, let's get gun control. Let's get more police in there.
Let's start frisking the students.
Let's have metal detectors. Oh, just more power, more power, more power.
But just if you want to get a sense of how corrupt the general intelligentsia is, just roll over your mind if this had been a private large chemical, if this had been Dow Chemical or something that had kept...
A ghastly quiet resulting in the deaths of dozens of people.
People would just go insane.
They would go insane with the state, with the police.
Oh, nobody cares. I mean, they just sort of, oh, that's bad.
You know, they should have done something different.
But, you know, one little cover story and it all just sort of goes away and people focus on the horror.
Like, this wasn't an entirely preventable tragedy.
So, anyway. Well, not entirely preventable.
The two in the dorm room probably could have weren't savable, but the rest were on the campus.
Tell people to get the hell home.
There's a shooter.
We don't know where he is.
He's a university student.
He just murdered two people, and we have no idea where he is.
And take his guns with him.
Well, that's not the biggest brain surgery attempt.
Oh, and you've got to listen to the university president, I think it was him, who said, well, you know, you only have seconds to make these decisions, not hours, and you make the decisions with the best information that you have at the time, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, yeah, no kidding. No kidding.
But he had two hours to make the decision, because the shootings occurred at 7.15 a.m., and the second series of shootings started around 9 o'clock in the morning, so it was almost two hours.
Enough seconds to make it.
Is it two hours to review things, to ask the police, hey, there's no way you can account for all the guns, right?
Nope. Can you account for the whereabouts of the student?
Nope. Well, shut the damn campus down.
If he took his guns and vanished and informed the population as a whole, he'd say, oh, we thought he'd left the campus.
Is that any better? What if he'd gone to a kindergarten?
Is it better that he left the campus?
Oh man, these people with their...
But I mean, we've given up.
We don't get angry. I mean, most people don't anyway.
They just go like, well, that seems weird or that was a stupid decision or whatever.
But when you compare that to the howls of outrage that would greet a private company that kept the news of a deadly toxin from its workers, oh man, oh man, there would be 500 movies of the week and Julia Roberts' career would be revived.
So that's sort of the one aspect.
The other aspect is, somebody posted on the board this morning, I remember who it is, I just don't like to use names on air without permission, but somebody posted on the board this morning and said, hey, I'm getting interviewed about this this morning, on camera.
And one of the questions that he put forward, and I'm sure it's far too late for him to use this now, but at some point in the future perhaps, Why, oh why, is America so violent?
People just look at this like, wow, this is just a weird mystery.
Oh, is it because there's like 200 million guns or however many more guns than people in the United States?
No, not really. There's lots of guns up here in Canada too.
People just have this, oh, is it frontier mentality?
No, Canada has a frontier mentality as well.
The real question, of course, is why is there so much gun violence in America?
And people say this as if it was a direct continuity from the beginning of America, at least modern America, in 1776.
And, of course, not true.
I mean, there was a good deal of nonviolence throughout the 19th century in America.
If we take all the status stuff out, and if we take the wars and slavery out, gun violence was pretty low.
Gun violence was pretty low.
There's a reason why people like Jesse James were notorious, because they were rare.
It was very rare for there to be crime gangs and so much.
No organized crime in the United States at that point in history.
And it was all just entirely blown out of proportion, as I talked about many moons ago in a podcast on the Wild West, to say that people like the idea of There's no way that you can prevent the evil from rampaging through your house.
Community, and that's what happens when there's not a strong state, when there's only one lone, brave, noble sheriff, and blah, blah, blah.
Of course, it was pure nonsense.
I mean, most of these frontier towns were very peaceful, because criminals tend to flock to cities.
You don't go to a town of, like, 20 people to become a pickpocket, because there's not that many pockets to pick, and everybody knows who you are.
You don't go to rampage through a bunch of well-armed farmers to steal what?
Some eggs? A pig? I mean, please, they don't have enough money out there, or very little and well hidden.
You go to cities if you want to be a criminal, and you go to Congress if you want to be an arch-criminal.
So the real question is not, why is America so violent?
The question is, why is America so violent now?
Why has America become so violent now, throughout the 20th century escalating?
And the answer is really not that complicated.
It's really not that complicated.
And the answer is quite simply that imperial powers are violent.
Countries that invade, sell arms, topple regimes, have covert operations, black ops all over the place, fund thugs, have foreign policy money, pour arms and diamonds and whores into the arms and beds of dictators, and have troops stationed in hundreds of countries overseas, So that those countries are brutalized, terrorized, and bribed into obeying the emperor's will.
Those countries, my friends, could be defined as somewhat violent.
So, anybody who asks, well, why is America so violent, is missing, I think, the basic issue.
Or at least the basic correlation, which is that America is a very violent country.
And it's slightly less violent towards its own domestic citizens, but it's much more violent than most other countries.
In fact, it is the most violent country in the world at the moment.
It's the country with the most troops stationed overseas.
It's the country with the biggest arms sales.
It's the country funding the most dictatorships and the most counter-dictatorships if those dictators no longer please her president.
But it is an extraordinary, it's the most violent country in the world.
It's got the very largest military, the very largest reach, a global reach.
It is unchallenged in the realm of martial supremacy.
And that is, by any definition of the world, the most violent country in the world, in terms of its foreign policy, in terms of its overseas foreign policy.
I guess China has, what, Tibet?
And I'm no geopolitical expert, and there's a couple of other countries that are subjugating other countries around the world, but America is the only one with this kind of reach and this kind of power and this kind of unchallenged supremacy, both in land, sea, and air.
Now, imperialism...
Requires a fair amount, actually, requires a deluge of propaganda.
A deluge of propaganda.
And if you just look at the history of propaganda, you can see very clearly that when a country is an empire, when a country turns imperial, then it must ratchet up the glorification of violence.
It must ratchet up and up the glory of violence.
This is an iron law.
This is nothing I've invented.
This is just 2 plus 2 is 4 as far as how do you get people to support obvious and clear violence that profits them not at all?
How? How do you do it?
How do you get people to sign up for the military, to send their sons, or if there's a draft, To still show up and feel that it's an obligation and they're being selfish for saying no.
How do you get people to support a murderous regime which gets them killed and wounded, which wrecks their economy, which provokes violence from those overseas, and of course it's only more recently that it was possible to effectively strike back at the Imperial Masters.
How is it that you get this done?
How could you possibly, possibly get people to agree to such lunacy?
Well, it's quite simple. You just tell them over and over again that violence is virtuous.
Violence is virtuous.
Violence, violence, violence.
Virtue, virtue, virtue. We're bringing civilization to the world.
We are defending ourselves against external aggression.
We have a manifest destiny.
To make the world a better place.
We are a moral and noble nation.
We are the world's policemen!
Then why do you pay the criminals, my friends?
Why the foreign aid?
The glorification of violence is very much at the core of American culture because America's imperial and there's nothing bad about America in particular.
France did it, and Germany did it, and England did it, and all these kinds of things.
Horatio Nelson, the Battle of Trafalgar.
I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.
And this was, well, worse too.
The battle was won on the fields of Eton.
The higher education was all aimed at producing officers.
You want to be a priest or you want to be a soldier?
You want to kill people's spirits or their bodies?
What's your pleasure? Your choice.
You know, it's a free country. The imperialistic poems, the white man burdened poems of Rudyard Kipling.
The glorification, the charge of the Light Brigade.
I mean, Churchill got in the Boer War by slaughtering people, getting captured, escaping, writing gripping tales about it for a newspaper and starting his political career that way with help from his mother, of course, who was very well placed in society.
But Churchill got his start as a murderer and as a glorifier of violence.
And then he wondered, gee, it seems strange that I have this depression I call the black dog that follows me to the rest of my days.
But this glorification of violence is absolutely essential.
And you can't have an imperialistic country.
You can't have... A murderous, genocidal, aggressive country without the glorification of violence.
Because tales drip back to the home front.
Amritsar, the slaughtered Amritsar, all these other sorts of things that occur in imperialistic countries.
Why do we get to rule?
Well, because we're more moral. How do we rule?
We rule through violence.
Therefore, violence is moral.
Our violence is moral. Violence is moral.
Violence is a great way to achieve virtue.
And of course, if it is considered to be self-defense, then violence in unspecified self-defense is moral.
The logic for Iraq and the logic for Virginia Tech are identical.
with the exception that the gunman at Virginia Tech may have been bullied and provoked in a way that George Bush was not.
I mean, Saddam Hussein never gave George Bush a wedgie or stuffed his head in a toilet or gave him a pantsing at the cafeteria or anything like that.
But the logic is the same.
Aggression in the face of unspecified self-defense, violence for the sake of unspecified self-defense, is a moral imperative.
It's a virtue.
And this is where, and it's nothing to do with the Americans because every single culture is the same goddamn way.
But I'm going to lay into the Americans anyway because they just happen to be doing it at the moment.
Mistakes were made and people died.
Mistakes were made and people died.
They are going to demand that the government do something about mistakes that cost American lives.
They're going to demand a law.
They're going to demand some damn thing.
Something is going to change.
There ought to be a law. There ought to be more violence because violence is bad.
And the shock and horror and deep mourning and grieving and this and that, my God, my God, do you know how much this inflames Crazy people overseas who want to do Americans harm.
Who want to do Americans harm.
If a mafia gang has controlled an entire community for a couple of generations, and slaughter with impunity, and slaughter without conscience, And then one of their hitmen gets killed.
And they break out the mourning and the wailing.
We are shocked and saddened at this appalling murder.
At this appalling, immoral, unjust murder.
And they begin playing all the moral trumpets on the planet.
Because murder, you see, is just so wrong.
But the bodies they've left in their wake, they cheered over and gave medals for.
Do you know that this kind of hypocrisy invites the basest kind of violence in retaliation?
When you see Americans in national mourning because 32 students are killed, when there has been barely a murmur in the national consciousness over the 100,000 plus Iraqis who've been slaughtered,
Which would translate to a million Americans killed and if tens of millions of Americans had had to flee the country because the violence was just so bad after being invaded by the space aliens from Luxembourg.
Can you imagine how people overseas feel that Americans are shocked and appalled that some Americans have been shot?
Their taxes support the slaughter of people overseas.
They have ribbons all over their cars, and the magic phrase, well, you don't not support the troops, do you?
You wouldn't refuse support to the troops, would you?
You wouldn't want to not hand ammunition to the shooters, would you?
Imagine a friend of his who gave him clips of bullets.
And the police questioned him and said, well, you knew he was going to shoot people.
What the hell did you give him bullets for?
It's like, well, I support the troop.
I support him. I'm not going to put him in a dangerous situation and then refuse to give him the tools that he needs, the bullets that he needs.
It's like, but he was only in a dangerous situation because he was going around shooting people.
Yes, but I support the troop.
So that aspect of things is not...
Terrifically complicated.
That the glorification of violence and the worship of killers, that is innately part of an imperialistic country.
And it really could be said, outside of the physical harm and emotional trauma that is inflicted by the imperial country outside its borders, and to some degree inside its borders, you also have to terrorize the population, right?
That's what the war on drugs is about.
It is the greatest cultural harm that occurs as a result of imperialism.
It's the glorification of violence, the worship of Americans.
And, I mean, it's ridiculous.
This guy called in the radio show this last weekend.
Oh, it's great to talk to a fellow Canadian, eh?
And he was from Newfoundland.
And I was born in Ireland and I just happened to live in Canada, but they live like 2,000 miles from the guy.
He's got like way more in common with somebody, I don't know, from the northeastern seaboard, I don't know, Maine or something.
He's got way more in common with someone like that than he does someone thousands of miles away who just happens to be on the same side of an imaginary line, which marks the end of the taxation monopoly.
But this patriotism, this worship of violence, this glorification of killers, and this veneration, of course, of the leader, this is part and parcel of the culture that says violence is good.
Violence is either good because you want to make the world a better place, in which case a man beats his wife for not obeying him, Or children are beaten by their parents for not being good children.
You use violence to make the world a better place, to make people be good.
Or you use violence because of vague and unspecified requirements for self-defense requiring a preemptive strike, in which case you get shootings that are unspecified random attacks of violence against people who haven't threatened just because there's an imaginary attack.
Errors were made and people died.
Errors were made and people died.
And, of course, the police and the administration made catastrophic errors that resulted in the deaths of dozens of people.
Still and all, compared to the cluster of fuck that is Iraq, it's nothing.
It's nothing. And will this wake anybody up, except for we few?
We prophetic few? Will this wake anyone up to the evil of state violence?
No. No, I doubt it.
I doubt it. There's two other things that I think are relevant to talk about with this shooting.
The first is that Virginia Tech is one of the very, very few campuses in the United States that has an active military college on it.
And that's kind of horribly funny, in a way.
So this campus, which is the military campus on the campus of Virginia Tech, This campus trains sociopaths to go and murder foreigners.
Kill them, kill them, kill them, kill them, kill them, kill them by the thousands.
Slaughter, slaughter, slaughter, drown in blood.
And nobody says that there's anything wrong with that.
Nobody says that there's anything wrong with that.
I mean, of course, I'm sure some pacifists and socialists do, but we'll say it too.
I have no problem with common cause with people who are in error.
Someone can accidentally...
A crazy person can say 2 plus 2 is 4.
It doesn't make it wrong. But...
For, I don't know how many, Virginia's an old, an old Marshall colony, right?
It's an old Marshall state, and the majority of soldiers come from the South.
It's had a long history of brutal violence based on the sort of cracker culture it inherited from England.
But no one, of course, no news stories that say another graduating class of killers is on their way to murder people in Iraq.
Or some other damn place.
That is never said. That's never mentioned.
Because when we train people to go and kill other people, based on the orders of some arbitrary asshole, there's nothing wrong.
I mean, that's good. We have ribbons.
We support them. But when somebody uses the same principle, or just...
Well, I guess I don't know if he was told to kill someone.
Maybe there was a voice in his head.
That told him to kill someone.
Well, so what? I mean, what group, what grunt has ever had face-to-face with George Bush?
Other than when their legs get blown off.
I mean, someone told someone, told someone, told someone over the phone is a voice in their head to go kill Iraqis.
The same sort of principle.
Somebody told me to.
Whether the voice is inside your head or outside of your head in the form of your commander, who's never met George Bush but gets it trickled down through the ranks, then...
Doesn't really matter, does it?
I mean, certainly not to the dead people.
With the exception that people who hear voices telling them to kill people are in the minority, whereas troops are well organized and there's quite a lot of them.
Much more dangerous. But nobody has any problem with the murderer manufacturer.
The... The military college that's on the campus.
Nobody has any problem with that. That's not wrong.
Nothing wrong about that. Nothing at all.
So, we can train killers.
They can go overseas and shoot people.
That's fine. But one guy shoots people here.
Oh my god. Murder!
Horror! Genocide!
Slaughter! Butchery! Oh, the horror!
I glass my chest. I turn white with horror.
Well, you don't have the right. You don't have the right.
If you don't mourn for the Iraqis, fuck off with your mourning for the Americans.
Now, if this guy does turn out to be somebody who's had military training and military experience, then, of course, he will be considered a loose cannon.
Somebody who just couldn't hack into the military.
As opposed to, no, he kind of does what the military does, right?
Shoots on people. That's the point of the military.
That's what the military does. That's the deal.
That's the deal. That's what they do.
Certainly that's what they want to do.
Nobody wants to shoot armed people who can shoot back.
That's no fun. But, as was reported on 60 Minutes a little while back, if you can roll grenades into family dwellings and blow up children, there's no real harm in you there.
No harm to you.
So... If it turns out that this guy's had military training, military experience, then it'll just be another blank out.
Like this black guy who rolled some grenades into the tents during the beginning of this Operation Iraqi Slaughter.
It's just a blank out.
Oh, it's just weird.
He just rolled grenades into the tents of his fellow soldiers, and gee, what a shame.
He must have been a Muslim.
Crazy. It went crazy. It went crazy, right?
Because he killed people when people didn't tell him to.
Which is much safer.
Much safer. So, it will be very interesting to see whether or not this martial propaganda that has permeated, certainly it will have been part of the culture of this campus because there's a butcher factory right on the campus which manufactures murderers.
And so it would be very interesting to see if this, he was in uniform, in Boy Scout uniform or something, so it would be very interesting to see the fallout of this, and maybe somebody, I mean, somebody other than us, and I'm sure there are other people out there, I'm sure Noam Chomsky will have his part to say, but people will start to make this connection, that if you glorify violence, you will get more violence.
That which you approve of and praise, you tend to get a whole lot more of in life.
Thank you so much for listening. I had two donations, one lovely one last night, one nice one this morning.
Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
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