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June 20, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:01
803 Hitler and Self Defense
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Alright. Well, I think we have time for one more quick one.
In the realm of compassion, which I think is a very, very interesting topic or area of sort of human thought and inquiry to get involved in.
In the area of compassion, I think that there are some very fundamental things to understand and to look at.
And I'd like to sort of tie pacifism, compassion, and Hitler together in ways that are not often done, but which I think can be helpful.
So, a comment was made on the board, which was that you can't be a pacifist because Hitler invades and Hitler comes across the channel and bombs you and this and that and the other.
And therefore, you can't be a pacifist.
Pacifism is invalid because there are people like Hitler.
And you can't...
Logic. Fundamentally, you can't do something called begging the question, which is you can't assume that your own premise is true in order to prove it, right?
So if you say to me, well, how are we going to get across the English Channel?
And I say, okay, well, let's assume that we're already from England to France, from Dover to Calais or whatever.
And I say, okay, so I say, you're asking me how it is that we're going to get from Dover to Calais.
Well, let's assume that we're already in Calais.
The question is, how do we get back?
Well, then I'm begging the question, right?
I'm sort of assuming that something is true that I, in fact, have to establish.
So, when people talk about Hitler, I think it's important to understand not only the personal, of course, but the socio-economic history that was going on that produced Hitler.
And when I say produced, you know, free will, who knows?
I don't know enough about Hitler's personal history, but let's just say, for the moment, produced certainly had an influence on him.
What I posted on the board was that, well, it's pretty clear that Hitler's parents were not pacifists, right?
I know that much about this, and you can get this from Alice Miller's Essays on Poisonous Pedagogy, where she goes into Hitler's childhood and the incredible violence of the abuse that he suffered at the hands of his parents and of others, and of course school and military and so on.
But what I said in the thread was, well...
You say that pacifism is invalid because of Hitler, but the problem is that Hitler's parents were themselves scarcely pacifists, right?
They used violence against their children as a means of discipline, as a means of personal venting, as whatever, right?
And so I don't know that you can say that pacifism is invalid because of Hitler when Hitler is a result of a lack of pacifism.
That's the sort of general argument.
You can never prove this stuff with any kind of permanence or any kind of absolutism, but I think it's sort of important.
Like when someone's dying of cancer, lung cancer, quitting smoking isn't going to help them very much.
So you can't say, well, there's no point quitting smoking when you're dying of lung cancer, therefore there's no point in quitting smoking, ever.
So when an enormous amount of violation of pacifistic principles has produced Hitler, I don't think it's fair to say that pacifism is then invalid.
So, to look at it from that standpoint, let's just, again, it's just off the top of my head, right?
You could go into this in a near infinite amount of detail, but I'll sort of put it this way, which is, Germany, you've got, you know, religious warfare throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, excessive slaughter, immense slaughter, genocide across the entire country, missed out on the whole Renaissance Enlightenment thing, and it was a complete and total disaster.
I mentioned this before, a guy walking through Germany said he scarcely saw a tree without someone hanging from it.
It's a religious warfare, because of the Protestant thing and all that.
And then there's this Prussian militarism.
Bismarck, 1871, sets up the first welfare state.
Again, a total violation of pacifism because he's using violence to achieve his political ends of buying off the poor and the old, and so on, creating a huge amount of people dependent upon the power of the state who will then never vote to diminish that power in the classic Roman or Spartan model.
Again, complete violation of pacifism.
Because there is the spare the rod, spoil the child stuff, that in the Bible, beating kids is the way to go, in terms of educating them.
So, because Germany was a highly religious society, all highly religious societies practice child abuse as a matter of virtue, as a matter of principle.
And... So, the German parenting was influenced by the Bible, was influenced by the militarism that most religious communities, most religious societies, theologies for sure, end up espousing.
And then, of course, to sort of leap forward, we have World War I, which is, of course...
Funded by international banks that are not exactly free market institutions, by countries that have taken over fiat currency.
It also has strong mercantilist elements to it, insofar as Germany was beginning to take over a lot of the trade that Britain was used to, and Britain needed that trade to fund the empire, so there was a natural collision of mercantilist interests.
I think in the 10 or 15 years leading up to World War I, German trade relative to British had increased by about 40%, right?
So, there were lots of things going on behind the scenes that resulted in World War I, which had nothing to do with a complete violation of all principles of pacifism.
And then, what happens next?
Well, Hitler gets drafted into the army to fight on the, I guess, the Western Front for the French and the Eastern Front for the Germans.
And, of course, he was raised in public school.
Public schools are a complete violation of pacifistic principles because they are forcing children to be educated, forcing their parents to pay for them.
So, of course, he's indoctrinated with anti-Semitism, with German nationalism, with socialism, and all these sorts of things in his public school education.
And then he is dragged into The army at the point of a gun and told to kill or be killed.
Thrown in the front where he is shot at for many years.
He's gassed. He's almost blinded.
He's lying in a cot when the news of the German surrender is announced.
And, you know, goes kind of nuts and writes, so...
Hitler's life, the man was a complete plaything of intensely violent special interest groups, all the way from the government, to the church, to his parents, to his teachers, to...
I mean, and this, of course, was true across Germany as a whole.
So, it's hard for me to understand when you say, well, we can't be pacifistic because of someone like Hitler.
That's like saying, well, no one should ever quit smoking because this guy's about to die of lung cancer, so quitting smoking won't help him.
Well, sure! You know, when the disease is advanced, you could make that case, but we here, as philosophers, we're looking for the cause, right?
I mean, if you want to look for the cure, then you don't talk to a nutritionist, you talk to somebody who's going to amputate, right?
I mean, if you find that, I don't know, speaking with a fake French accent causes breast cancer, then you don't let everyone do it and then just say, well, we have to have mastectomies because they're a breast cancer.
You say, hey, don't speak in a fake French accent and you won't get breast cancer.
Because the whole point of philosophers is to put the military out of business, the same way that the whole point of people who want to cure cancer is to put the cancer specialists out of business.
I mean, that's not their goal, but that's the effect, right?
So, it's kind of hard to understand how people say, well, because of Hitler, pacifism is invalid, when Hitler, of course, is the result of egregious, unbelievable, and bottomless violations of the principles of pacifism.
So, sort of to continue onwards, well, you have the Treaty of Versailles, which is a non-pacifist document imposing massive amounts of reparations on the German economy, which, of course, they would not have paid off if they'd stuck to it until the 1980s.
And, of course, the Germans were indoctrinated into patriotism.
They were dragged into the army.
And now, who's to blame?
They're to blame! Right?
Which is complete nonsense.
And so you have that issue where there's massive theft going on in the form of taxation and the confiscation of goods and services from Germany, which is against pacifistic principles in the extreme.
And then you have, of course, the hyperinflation, which results of the government's coercive monopoly over the money supplier.
You have America calling in its World War I loans.
You have the British economy becoming depressed because, as Churchill pointed out, when you ship two billion shoes over from Germany, England doesn't become wealthier.
All that happens is a whole bunch of British shoemakers go out of business.
So, you have all of this, and then you have the Great Depression, which vaulted Hitler into power, entirely engineered through coercive methods, complete violations of pacifism.
You have the...
The American government then starts printing one-third less money, causing a massive deflation, drying up a business investment.
They pass all of these laws, and you've got these massive tariff attacks on any imported goods, further crippling the economy.
So again, these are all intensely anti-pacifistic.
There's a complete opposite of pacifism, all of these violent state interventions in people's lives.
And... Then, of course, you have Hitler who can only establish his power because of the existence of a government which is an anti-pacifistic institution.
And so then saying, well, you see, pacifism doesn't work because of Hitler is, to me at least, a complete non-sequitur.
It's a complete non-sequitur.
We're supposed to be dealing with ideas, right?
We're not people out there shooting people.
We're not security guards. We're people dealing with ideas, which is around prevention in the long term.
People always say, well, if there's a ticking bomb and you torture this guy, well, fuck that.
I mean, how the hell did you get there?
That's what we're concerned with.
We can't take as our primary focus whether or not you should...
We're nutritionists. We don't say, should you...
If somebody says, should you amputate somebody's leg when it's gone black with gangrene because of their...
Diabetes. You say, well, that's up to a doctor.
We are nutritionists. Ideas are always long-term, not short-term.
Ideas are long-term and preventative.
So we say, eat this exercise, and your chances of getting diabetes go down considerably.
We don't say whether or not...
It's too late.
By the time Hitler is sending bombs over, pacifism has obviously been violated for generations by this point, and so...
I mean, this would sort of be my primary answer to that, but there's another answer too, which I'll delve into briefly and which might be of interest to you, which is, you know, were I Winston Churchill in 1940, I would not have declared war on Germany.
I would not have declared war on Germany.
Again, this is assuming that I have some, you know, some real power and influence over things.
And let's for the moment just exaggerate the power and influence that I have over things.
Well, what I would do is, when Germany had rushed its...
when Hitler and his Weimar...
I'm sorry, and his tanks, his panzers had rushed their way across France, what I would do is, facing them across the channel, I wouldn't have gotten involved in France to begin with, I lost half my damn air force in France for no good reason...
But it's simple, right?
When you're facing an invasion, the solution is easy.
So Hitler's staring at you across the channel.
What do you do? You say, well, geez, pacifism can't ever work now, can it?
Well, sure it can. Sure it can.
When you're facing Hitler across the English Channel, the solution is simple, powerful, effective.
You disband the government.
You disband the British government.
I can absolutely guarantee you that that would work perfectly.
If you disband the government and Hitler is staring at you across the channel, what's he going to do?
Well, the planes, the bombs, everything's already there, but private companies are going to rush to take it over, and they're going to be as effective as humanly possible.
Right? Because remember, It was governments that got everyone into World War I and World War II. Governments are not very good at preventing war.
So, I just banned the government, which would immediately place the defense of the country in private hands.
It would decentralize things. There'd be no central area to strike.
There'd be no government to take over.
There'd be no government to take over.
So, that's what I would do, the solution to an imminent threat.
To somebody who's about to invade your country, the solution to that is to disband the government.
There's no central place to attack, there's no police or military to take over.
See, the reason that people want to take over the police and the military is so that they can tax people.
That's why people want to invade another country, so they can take over the...
That's why one farmer would want to take over another farmer's herd of cattle, so he can get the milk.
I mean, if someone's about to come and grab all your sheep, you don't keep them all in the enclosure.
The way to prevent someone from coming to grab all your sheep is to just let them all go free.
Then it's way more work to go and round up all those sheep than it is as a benefit.
If you keep all your sheep in a shed, then yeah, someone's going to come and take all your damn sheep.
So the way that you deal with a potential invasion, the way you deal with it is to disband the government, move the defense into private hands, and then there's no one to attack.
Right? Defense is privatized.
And people say, well, jeez, how could that conceivably work?
Well, the British and the Germans, in many ways, were evenly matched in the Battle of Britain.
In fact, the British had an edge over the Germans in the Battle of Britain, primarily because the Germans, the Messerschmitts 109s, were not equipped with a whole lot of fuel tanks.
They did put extra fuel tanks in them, but that just made them more prone to blowing up.
And so one of the big advantages was that the British planes could fly and engage pretty quickly.
They didn't have to go all the way across the channel and run out of juice and so on.
Primarily, it was a war of production.
It was a war of who can produce the most war machines.
But England and Germany were pretty evenly matched in that battle.
How would you feel if...
Germany were, I don't know, 5,000 times stronger than England, right?
Let's say Germany had 50 times or maybe more than 100 times, maybe 200 times the budget of England in this situation.
Would you think that disbanding the government would be an effective way of defending the country?
But that's what's going on in Iraq, right?
There has never been an invasion, or very rarely, maybe Grenada.
But certainly, if you look in World War II, there were no combatants who had the kind of disparity of military and economic power as between Saddam Hussein, whose military budget was, I think, less than half a percent of America's.
He had no nuclear weapons, as it turns out, no WMDs, and so on.
So, if we look at that situation, here we have a quote Hitler, George Bush.
I'm not morally equating, I'm just sort of looking at the logistics, right?
We have a sort of a quote Hitler who's about to invade Iraq, right?
So, what Saddam-Sidane should have done is just disbanded the government.
Because that's really what happened, right?
Because the government was overthrown, and then people just began fighting on the ground, right?
In a sense, or in effect, it became privatized, which is what resistance movements are, right?
They're private defense agencies.
And it's working very, very well, right?
I mean, all of America's immense military power and strength and expense and all of this and that, the hardware and so on, Well, it doesn't matter, right?
You just melt into the crowds, you just keep picking and, you know, keep costing the money, and you do what they did to the Russians in Afghanistan, which is you just end up with, um...
You're picking away at them until economically they run out of juice, right?
So, you say, well, we can't be pacifists because...
Of Hitler, and I sort of understand what you mean.
If someone's coming rushing at you, bleating around saying violence is wrong, isn't going to help that much.
But what I find surprising, or perhaps not that surprising, when you think about the solution that's always put forward, it always says, well, we need governments because of Hitler.
But that's not true. Hitler only exists because of governments.
As I sort of talked about, the state violations of pacifism and religious violations of pacifism, but always endorsed and controlled and protected by the state, that occurred to produce Hitler.
We need governments because of Hitler.
Nonsense. Hitler only exists because of governments.
Hitler and war are only possible because of governments.
And so, the solution, right?
The solution to every question is always from statists, right?
From people who are this way inclined, minarchists and so on, even libertarians.
The solution is always, and so we need a government.
Right? Insert variable here, the result is, and so we need a government.
But I don't think that's true.
I really don't think that's true.
If I were Churchill, facing Hitler, 1940, and again, assuming I had the power, join me in imaginary world where this is possible, I would just completely disband the government.
Just completely disband the government.
And I would sell off, or maybe not even sell off, just whatever, give away the Spitfires to whoever wanted them, and those people would then immediately create a market for them.
And people would buy those Spitfires up and find other ways to protect themselves from the military.
And, of course, it could well be that by far, and I really believe it would have been the case, that by far the better approach...
To dealing with the problem of Hitler would have been to disband the military because...
I mean, A. Hitler didn't really want to invade England to begin with.
But the better way to deal with somebody who's going to invade you is to let them roll with the punch.
Let them come in. And then just start picking them off.
Let them come to you. Let them spend money.
And that's, of course, to some degree what the French government did, right?
The French government just basically, everyone in France in a sense, just kind of gave up, right?
And they didn't end up losing three or four million men in the Second World War.
They just waited for the dictator to do the stupid thing that dictators always do.
In Hitler's case it was invade Russia, but it didn't really matter because those economies don't work anyway, right?
So you just wait for the invader to...
To destroy themselves economically, right?
Because this kind of stuff never lasts, so you can never keep it going, right?
Would it have made more sense to, if you wanted to be free of Roman rule, to go and kill yourselves against the legions and centurions and so on?
Go up against a phalanx of perfectly placed shields and die?
No! You just wait for the empire to collapse economically, right?
Those guys in Hungary...
In the 1960s, they didn't do a whole lot to get Hungary free of Russia, but the war in Afghanistan did that pretty well.
So, when it came to France, would you rather have been one of the people who died, or would you rather have just hunkered down and waited out the couple of years the Nazis were around, and then just move on with your life when the system collapsed, right?
Because these systems always do collapse.
And so you know that in a state-based defense, you know for a fact, you know for an absolute and perfect fact that this is not the defense that people want.
If the defense was what people wanted, then you wouldn't need a government to force them to defend their country in X, Y, or Z manner.
So if massive civilian bombing attacks, which were initiated by the British to begin with, by the way, if the massive bombing attacks against Germany...
And the retaliatory ones against the British, if those were the way that people wanted to defend it, right?
If the way that the British government defended the British Isles was exactly the way that the people wanted it to, then they wouldn't need a government, right?
The government is only instituted to do things that people don't want done, or to do things in a way that people don't want them done in.
So, was there another conceivable way to deal with the problem of Hitler staring at you across the channel in 1939?
Yeah, absolutely! The other thing, of course, is that why was Germany so economically strong?
Why was Germany able to get its army up and running so incredibly quickly?
I mean, they were not allowed to have more than 100,000 troops, no navy, no air force.
Within a couple of years, they were able to get all this stuff up and running.
Why? Well, because the British government sold them weapons and lent them money.
I mean, this tradition of governments arming their enemies and then being appalled at the strength of those enemies is totally common in history.
We see this with the United States as it stands.
It keeps aiding all these people, keeps sending them weapons, and then it's shot when they end up coming to America and attacking with weapons.
So, what I would suggest is that there are many ways to look at how to deal with impending violence rather than just saying that, gee, what we need to do is to continue to have a state, to have a state military, to have national self-defense in the form of a state, and so on, right?
Private militias almost always beat state armies, right?
Because the State Army is using force, and force doesn't really work so well in terms of getting things that you want.
So, I'm not saying this is proven historically, but I think that it's well worth having a look at as an interesting example of how it would be possible to deal with something like a national invasion in the form of Hitler or whatever.
And I can guarantee you that if you disbanded the government with Hitler staring you down across the channel...
You would end up with a situation where in England would have been far better defended, there would have been far less incentive for Hitler to invade.
Hitler would have self-destroyed his economy, right?
That's the socialist part of the National Socialist agenda, that we know that Hitler would have self-destroyed his economy through central planning and control.
And those people who died by the millions because the government forced them to fight when no fight was necessary, were simply murdered by the government that was supposed to be protecting them.
And it's easy for us to say what should have happened back then and that the government did the right thing, but it's not us.
We're being asked to get a limb blown off, to get our eyes blown out, to go insane from combat fatigue.
It's not us who's being asked to lose our lives for the sake of this defense.
So, I think that it's a mistake to say that Hitler is an argument against pacifism.
I think Hitler is caused by pacifism, and the moral and practical response to Hitler would have been to enact the pacifist technique of disbanding the The state.
So I hope that that helps. Thank you so much for listening.
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