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Oct. 1, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:33
875 The Myths of the World Wars Part 1

Some initial thoughts on the century of 'genocides for freedom'

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Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Thank you so much for tuning in for another exciting show of Thoughts of a Philosopher.
It's the 1st of October, 2007, and I wanted to go over some of the broader thoughts that I had with regards to what I think is pretty much the most mythologized and misunderstood war in history, which is the Second World War, which unfortunately destroyed a good number of the branches of my family, both on the British and the German side.
So I'm going to start with a letter here.
Not the whole letter, but it's basically the Why Are We in Iraq letter.
This came out of a response to my last video on the Iranian president coming to the United States.
So this gentleman writes,"...60-some years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat." And had sunk more than 400 British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.
The U.S. was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans in Congress wanted nothing to do with the European War or the Asian War.
Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outraged Congress unanimously declared war in Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not attacked us.
It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.
France was not an ally. The Vichy government of France aligned with its German occupiers.
Germany was not an ally. It was an enemy.
And Hitler intended to set up a thousand-year Reich in Europe.
Japan was not an ally. It was intent on owning and controlling all of Asia.
Japan and Germany had long-term ideas of invading Canada and Mexico, and then the United States over the north and south borders after they had settled control of Asia and Europe.
America's allies then were England, Ireland, Canada, Australia and Russia and that was about it.
All of Europe, from Norway to Italy except Russia in the east was already under the Nazi heel.
Well, I mean, this is very common stuff, that the Nazis were the enemies of civilization and that they were intent on grinding the world in a global dictatorship for a thousand years and if it hadn't been for the valiant and heroic soldiers of America and England and the other colonies and Russia to some degree, we would have all been ground under a Nazi dictatorship and all are we speaking German and we have to fight and stand up against aggressors and this and that and the other.
And I understand why people believe that.
I mean, it's something that they're told. Over and over and over again.
And I don't think it is necessary to say, but I'll say it anyway, that of course the Nazi dictatorship was a brutal, sadistic, horrendous, murderous, genocidal, complete and stone evil upon the world.
No question about that. But you have to ask why these things come about.
You have to ask why these things come about.
Because if you don't, then all you have to do is sit there and say, well, the next time some evil dictatorship is about to, quote, threaten us, we have to go and kill people.
That's not... It's not good medicine.
That's not good understanding. You don't sort of sit there and say, well, the moment the gangrene gets really bad, I guess we have to cut off the guy's leg.
You know, how about preventing gangrene?
How about understanding where it comes from?
How about nipping it in the butt early?
So you don't end up with massive amputations.
So I'm going to just sort of put some ideas out there.
I studied this to some degree.
I have a master's in history from U of T, University of Toronto.
Which is an Ivy League university up here in Canada, and I also wrote a novel, actually a three-book novel called Almost, Available for Donations, which traces two young men in England and Germany in the 20 years leading up to the Second World War.
So I've done some research in this area, and this is the thoughts that I've come up with, and you can let me know what you think.
First of all, you cannot understand the Second World War if you don't understand the First World War, and If you understand the First World War and understand that the Second World War was really just the First World War with a 20-year détente, as Koch said, a French general, at the end of the First World War about the Treaty of Versailles, he said, this is not peace, this is a détente for 20 years, and of course he was correct, almost down to the day, in fact.
So, if you understand that, if you understand the First World War, it's a lot easier to put the Second World War in context, and if you understand the stated goals of the Second World War, then it's easier to understand, at least why I have some skepticism about whether they were achieved, and whether they were necessary.
So, the First World War killed tens of millions of people, decimated France, destroyed the Western democracies, destroyed the hundred-year peace that had been engendered by the rise of the free market from the fall of the Napoleonic Wars, the fall of Napoleon in 1815, to 1914, which was when the war broke out.
And there were some skirmishes, definitely on the eastern side of Europe, but they weren't particularly major.
It was the first time ever, really, in history that Europe had not suffered a war in Western Europe for about 100 years.
And then this war erupts.
And we won't get into all the causes, and we won't get into the...
I think public education had something to do with making people much more willing to fight for a state and a nation.
Public schools always breed rank patriotism, so I don't think it's an accident that a generation after public schools came into being, you have a bunch of people suddenly ready to die and kill for the state.
That's another issue. But what happened was, on the Eastern Front, from the French side, The Allies and the Germans had fought themselves into mutual exhaustion.
There was a strategy that the British were taking in the First World War, which was to blockade the Germans, so to not allow any resources to come through by sea.
So, what this meant was that the German population was slowly being strangled for food and war materials, and this was very effective.
This is one of the reasons why Hitler made the charge to the sea in the opening parts of the Second World War, because he knew that if you didn't have sea power, you couldn't last in a war.
In 1917, before the United States entered the First World War, the Eastern and Western powers were fighting themselves into a state of mutual exhaustion.
And what happens throughout European history, when you fight yourself into a state of mutual exhaustion, when neither side can decisively gain the upper hand, you end up with basically everybody just goes home.
You basically end up with the maps being drawn very similar, To the way that they were drawn before the war.
Or if there are alterations, it's not with any particular advantage.
Because no one can enforce their will on the other party.
And therefore you basically just go home.
You can't inflict massive punishments on either side.
No side can inflict massive punishments on the other.
Because there is no overwhelming superiority on one side.
So... In 1917, President Wilson in the United States, after promising not to get Americans, I will not send your sons to go and die in foreign wars, he entered into the First World War on the side of England and France,
and this was after trumped up charges of German torpedoing, I think it was the Lusitania or something, it was completely nonsensical, but the same kind of propaganda that gets everybody involved in wars, America sent over 100,000 troops who were fresh, energetic, had enormous backings of the American industrial machinery, of the ability for America to produce war materials.
What happened was, instead of the European powers fighting to mutual exhaustion and going home, What happened was because of the influx of the American war resources and soldiers, and 100,000 soldiers with fresh resources was quite a significant bit of strength on the British and French side.
What happened was the Germans had to accept an unconditional surrender.
So because America entered the war in Europe at the time that it did, very near the end, the Germans ended up having to accept an unconditional surrender.
And then, as is always the case, in the spirit of when you have this kind of overwhelming upper hand, in the spirit of, you know, crush your enemies and vindicate your own participation in a bloodthirsty war, the British and the French imposed these most staggering terms upon Germany.
Under the Versailles Treaty, Germany gave up enormous tracts of land, was forced to pay reparations.
That was such a staggering sum, such a staggering sum, that if the Treaty of Versailles had actually been followed through to its conclusion, Germany would have finished paying off its war debt in the 1980s, in the 1980s, more than 60 years after the end of the war.
So this Treaty of Versailles Which was profoundly humiliating to Germans and they felt was completely unjust.
It wasn't like Germany just happened to start the war.
I mean, it was a complicated interweb of alliances and, of course, the cannon fodder of willing, state-educated, indoctrinated children or teenagers who were willing to fight.
That made this war possible.
Also, the war would not have been possible without the nationalization of central banking and the ability of government to monopolize the printing of money, which allowed them to fund the war beyond all rational conjecture.
I mean, finances and war are very closely related, which we can get into another time.
So, because the Americans came in, the allies on the Western side were able to impose these ridiculous terms on Germany, and what this did, of course, was it...
It caused Germany to start to print lots of money.
So after the war, Germany began to print a lot of money to pay off these war debts because it didn't have much money.
Germany also under Bismarck, if we go back a generation and a half, in the 1870s was the first country in the West to institute a welfare state, which included old age pensions, health care benefits, unemployment insurance, and so on.
So in order to pay for all of that, the governments take over the money supply.
They take over control of the currency, which allows them to print money and pay for all this stuff by creating inflation and putting national debts on the future generations.
So again, it's a whole lot of things that lead up to the Second World War.
You've got the nationalization of currency.
You have the state education and indoctrination of children.
You have a whole system of entangling alliances.
You also have pressures which are arising.
Germany was becoming quite an industrial power before the First World War, which the British didn't like very much.
The British Empire was a mercantilist empire.
It wasn't free trade. It's like you...
You go and get permission to buy and sell from the government, and then you get a monopoly, which allows you to charge exorbitant profits.
Nothing to do with the free market, right?
Germany was beginning to carve into that.
There was lots of financial pressures, which the ruling class, which feeds off this kind of stuff, kind of really needs to protect.
And they get the sons of the middle class and the poor to go and die for their own wealth.
And this was occurring all over the world.
When the Germans had to pay all of this ridiculous stuff, all of these ridiculous reparations, they simply couldn't.
They didn't have the money. They also had this welfare state, which continued and was made much worse because, of course, so many people were injured in the First World War.
This crippled the economies of the participating countries for many, many years afterwards.
And, of course, another thing that happened was, as Churchill pointed out at the time, he said, well, what's the point of confiscating, like they say, we're going to take a million shoes from Germany, we're going to ship them to England because you guys destroyed so much of our wealth, we're going to take your stuff and we're going to ship it to England.
And, of course, all that did was it put the British shoemakers out of business, right?
So it wasn't just money.
There were goods and materials that were being stripped out of the German country and shipped to England and France and the other allies.
And all that meant was that the domestic producers were simply harmed, which produced more unemployment.
There was a sharp recession that was actually worse in the short run than the 1929 crash that came later.
In 1919, 1920, 1921, but it recovered because the governments didn't do anything to quote help or alleviate the problems of the depression.
So what happens is Germany has to pay off all these war debts, which it can't do because it has no money, and of course it lost a lot of its tax base.
This is another sort of fundamental issue that occurred in World War I, is that a lot of the tax base simply got destroyed.
All the young men got killed who would have been productive tax fodder for the ruling classes, so there was no money.
So what did they do? They started to print money.
Under the Weimar Republic.
And this is, you may have heard, the sort of famous hyperinflation that occurred in Germany where you'd have to have a wheelbarrow of cash to go and buy a loaf of bread.
And a guy went into a bank with a $100 US bill and wanted to change it into German currency, the Marx.
And the bank didn't have enough currency to change a $100 bill in any of its vaults because the inflation was just ridiculous.
So this wiped out the middle class, wiped out middle class savings, made people not really care about their careers.
It just didn't make any sense, right?
You'd sort of work hard, study hard, and go to school, and then what would happen is all of your savings would be wiped out.
So a guy wrote about his...
I think it was his grandfather or his father who had an annuity that he had bought and sort of paid into like an old age pension annuity for years, but it was a fixed payout in terms of currency.
It was not indexed to inflation.
So when this annuity came to pay out, which he was supposed to live on for his entire retirement, he took it across the street, he bought one cup of coffee and it was all gone.
So the capital was wiped out in the desire for industry and And the conformity to rules was wiped out, the middle class was wiped out, and they became radicalized, because people didn't really understand at that time the degree to which printing money caused inflation.
So they all got radicalized, and they all hated what the West had done to them, right?
So everybody in Germany was aware that the Versailles Treaty led to economic destruction.
And they really hated it.
And so they became radicalized.
And there's lots of other reasons that Germany didn't go through the Enlightenment and barely went through the Renaissance and remained an entirely collectivist and religious culture.
So their solutions always involve a hegemonic dictatorship, right?
The Germans can't think of individual liberty, at least at that time, as a solution to the problems that are caused by collectivism.
For them, it's always more collectivism that is the answer.
So, what happened then was the Germans began to rearm, and they were specifically barred from rearming under the Versailles Treaty, only supposed to have an army of 100,000 people, no air force, and very little navy.
And so they began to rearm, and partly the way that they rearmed was through loans from America, and to a smaller degree from England.
Hitler came to power, and we sort of don't have to get into all of the reasons as to why this all occurred, but it had a lot to do with the hyperinflation, destruction of the middle class, and radicalization of the youth, right?
If you can't give goodies to the young, they don't care to obey your rules, right?
So if the young look at their parents who worked and were industrious their whole lives and were completely wiped out and ended up penniless and dependent upon the state, particularly in terms of welfare, then the young don't want to obey.
They get that there's a rot in society and they get radicalized.
And, of course, for the young, when you could get welfare and unemployment insurance under the Weimar Republic and also under the Nazis, it was a lot more fun to go to rallies and get radical and not buy into the existing system.
And so, in a weird way, the more stable elements within society were taxed to pay for the growing radical elements among the communists and the national socialists, the fascists, the Nazis.
And it was really a fight between these two.
There was an old saying that said about the Germans that a communist, sorry, that the brown shirts who were the fascists, who were the Nazis, they're actually beefsteaks because they're brown on the outside and red or communist on the inside.
And there was a great battle between the fascists and the communists throughout most of the world in Italy and in Germany in particular.
And in Italy the fascist one and in Germany the fascist or the national socialist one as well.
So the National Socialists get in power, and everybody's thirsting for vengeance because they felt so slighted by the Versailles Treaty, and Hitler, of course, was rousing them, and their philosophers had never taught them reason and individualism, so they just flocked to the herd.
And, of course, you had to wait 20 years because you needed a new generation of soldiers.
You couldn't go to war right after the First World War because your soldiers had all been wiped out, so you had to wait to breed a new generation of killers to be able to go to war again.
So the British public had looked to, and the French public, they looked to their governments to protect them.
They looked to their governments to protect them from a war that may occur again.
And that, of course, didn't happen, right?
The governments didn't protect them in the First World War, the governments didn't protect them in the Second World War.
So when Hitler went back into the Rhineland, which was a piece of land that had been taken away in the First World War, still populated largely by German-speaking people, the British and French governments did nothing.
And Hitler himself said in his memoirs, he said, if they had done one thing, if they'd sent one soldier across the line, it would have all been over.
Because Germany didn't want to particularly go into another war, and certainly didn't want to go into a war when it was unprepared.
So Hitler began making these moves into the Rhineland, into Alsace-Lorraine, and then later into Czechoslovakia and Austria before then.
And so the Allies not only helped to fund the Nazis, but they also did nothing when Hitler clearly said he wanted to dominate Europe and wanted to dominate Russia.
And he said, here are the steps I'm going to take.
He began taking those steps, and the government did nothing to stop him.
Nothing to stop him.
And the people had put their faith in their governments to protect them from threats that may be arising from anywhere in the world, but of course particularly in Germany.
So if you can imagine...
That you rely on the police to protect you.
And you get death threat after death threat after death threat.
And the guy says, I'm coming over on Thursday.
I'm going to pick your locks. It's going to take me six minutes.
And then I'm going to undo my shoes in the anteroom.
And then I'm going to do this. And I'm going to find you.
And I'm going to kill you. And you call the police.
And you say, look, I've got a schedule of when this guy's going to do it.
And he says, I'm going to send a letter on this day.
And I'm going to send a letter on this day.
And then I'm going to drive by your house on this day.
And the guy does all of that.
And you send it to the police.
And they don't do anything. How protected would you feel?
So the governments kept reassuring the citizens that nothing was wrong, that there was no problem, and there was, of course, a great deal of admiration, particularly for Mussolini and his fascist wards in the West.
I mean, the aristocracy have a lot more in common.
People at the top levels of government have a lot more in common with each other than they do with you and I. Bush has more in common with Putin than he does with you or I. So those interests tend to align quite a bit.
So, to cut a long story short, the West did nothing to protect its citizens from the pillages of Hitler's Germany.
Hitler then invaded France.
France had spent the last 20 years building this Maginot Line, which was supposed to protect it.
There was one area that was not covered that was in the forest.
I think it was the Ardennes. The Panzers came through there.
But, remember, the First World War had been fought on French soil.
The French had seen millions of their men killed for nothing, for no reason, for no purpose.
So, in France, there was a significant anti-war feeling.
A significant anti-war feeling.
What's the point? We're going to go and fight, it's going to go on for years, millions of people are going to get killed, and at the end, we kind of go back to where we were.
So, what's the point? So, everybody says, ooh, the French are such cowards, and this and that, but...
It's not that hard to understand why the French felt the way that they did about the Second World War and kind of folded.
They said, you know, we get invaded and then they go away and we get to live and so on, right?
So, of course, then Hitler wanted to drive towards England, and this Operation Sea Line, he was going to invade England, there was the Battle of Britain, and so on, which England won for a variety of technical and logistical reasons, like the fact that the German planes had to fly quite a ways to engage in air combat over England, these Messerschmitts 109s, and they didn't have the fuel reserves to have much fight in them when they got to England, so they had to turn tail.
The British could land and refuel very quickly, and the British production was highly optimized.
So the British won, not because they were so valiant or valorous, but just because they had the home team advantage, so to speak, and good production facilities.
And of course, Hitler gave up after the summer of 1940 on invading England.
So this is an important thing to remember.
Hitler couldn't even cross the 15 miles of the English Channel to invade England.
Hitler could not cross the 15 miles of the English Channel to invade England.
This is going to be important when we consider whether or not Hitler could ever have invaded America down the road.
So then Hitler turns east, and basically after 1941, particularly after the winter after he invades Russia and loses eight-tenths of his army, it was over.
It was just a matter of time.
Hitler was never in any conceivable way ever going to conquer the whole world.
It's completely and totally impossible to imagine that this could ever be the case.
So, if we look at...
So, sorry, let's sort of...
The war ends and we'll sort of get in just real quick here.
But what was the goal?
What was the goal of the Second World War?
Well, the goal of the Second World War was to fight against socialism.
A national form of socialism where the government doesn't necessarily specifically take over the means of production in the communist model.
It doesn't take over the factories directly, but it hyper-regulates and taxes.
So it leaves the ownership of the means of production in, quote, nominally private hands, but it taxes and pillages them continually.
That's the fascist model.
Nominal private ownership, public taxation.
In the communist model, it's public ownership and no taxation, so to speak, because the profits are all just sort of, quote, profits are siphoned off by the government, which, quote, owns the means of production.
So it was fighting against the regulation and taxation of industry.
That's the definition of socialism rather than communism, right?
Nominal private ownership, public taxation, and regulation of those industries.
That was the goal.
That's what was being fought against.
So, what happened?
Well, all of the socialistic intellectuals, all the way back from the Fabian movement at the turn of the century, The socialist intellectuals all fled the results of their teachings, which was National Socialism and the fascism that occurred alongside it in Italy and other countries.
So the socialistic professors all fled to England and to America.
And then after the Second World War, what happened was they all got teaching posts at universities, and then after the Second World War, through the GI Bill, You had a whole generation of people who went to university for free and basically got taught all the same bullshit in North America and in England that had been taught in Germany and in Italy a generation or two before.
So this infection that had caused the virulence of Nazism and other forms of fascism fled to North America and to England and began to teach all the same stuff, right?
And so, did we really end up fighting National Socialism and winning the battle?
And winning the battle? Well, no.
Of course not. The first thing that happens after the Second World War is that the British population kicks out Hitler, votes in Clement Antley, who was a socialist.
I mean, when you think about it, we have gone to war against National Socialism, against state ownership of the means of production, or state control of the means of production.
So what happens? Well, the moment that we win, we vote in a socialist who begins nationalizing in England the means of production.
Just mow that one over for a little while.
We have conquered national socialism.
What are we going to put in in England?
Socialism. And so they nationalized the coal industry, the oil industry, the gas industry, the power, a number of the banking institutions were nationalized in England, which causes exactly the same economic chaos and mess and so on.
Then they nationalized the healthcare industry in England and in Canada, although in Canada the dental industry escaped.
So there's this massive nationalization, massive growth.
In the size and power of governments in the West.
See? We are fighting against totalitarianism.
And we're going to vastly expand our government.
We are going to vastly expand the powers of our government in order to fight dictatorships.
We are going to vastly expand the power of our governments in order to fight governments that have too much power.
Do you see how crazy that all is?
Do you see how it did not achieve what it is that was wanted to be achieved, what was aimed to be achieved, which was the elimination of socialism and of fascism?
So, I mean, countries have all gone off the gold standard.
The Western countries can now print money at will.
We have expanding powers of torture, detainment, and arrest in all the Western powers.
We have massive national debts.
We have staggering levels of taxation compared to the pre-war period.
Before the First World War, there was no such thing as a passport.
You could go anywhere, travel anywhere, work anywhere.
There was no such thing as work permits or work visas.
You could just go and live and travel anywhere.
And after the 20th century, after hundreds of millions of people have been murdered for the cause of freedom, what has happened?
Governments are 10 to 20 times larger than they used to be.
Governments are 10 to 20 times larger than they used to be.
Before the First World War, before hundreds of millions of people died for the cause of freedom, there were no passports.
There was no income tax.
There was no sales tax.
There was no draft.
Governments did not control the money supply, or if they did, they were on the gold standard and were limited to the amount of money they could print because they had to back it up with gold.
There was no nationalization of key industries.
There were no farm subsidies.
There was no welfare state. There was no military-industrial complex.
There was no old-age pensions.
And I know some people think those things are good, but they're terrible.
In terms of government power over the individual.
I'm just looking at the big picture here.
I'm just looking at the big picture.
Because if an agency says that it wants to protect my freedoms, that it is fighting and that people, tens of millions of people have died to make me free, Then all we really need to do, my friends, all we really need to do is to look at the world and the state of freedom within the world before this massive, genocidal, murderous series of wars for the liberty of the human race.
We need to look at how free the world was before these wars began and how free the world is after these wars were ended.
That's all I'm asking.
We don't have to have opinions.
We don't have to make things up.
We don't have to find hidden or key or mysterious ways of looking at these conflicts.
All we have to do is say, what was the purpose?
What was the purpose? Well, the purpose was, you see, to make the world free.
The purpose was to make the world free for a democracy and so on.
Well, what happened? Are we more free after all of these bloody genocidal murderings of hundreds of millions of people wars?
Are we more free or are we less free after these wars of freedom?
It's a relatively simple question, isn't it?
And there's no need to be subjective in our answers.
There's no need to be subjective in our answers.
One of the things that propelled the growth of militarism throughout the world was the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was created after governments got control of the money supply, began printing way too much money, which caused the hyper bubble of the 1920s.
And then when that began to be too unstable, there was too much inflation, they cut back on the money supply printing, which caused the bubble to collapse.
And then they began to hyper-regulate the economy, and this is as true in the United States as it was anywhere else in the world.
They raised tariffs 40 or 50 percent.
The entire system of international trade collapsed in the 1930s.
They cut the money supply by 40 percent in America in the early 1930s, thus creating a prolonging depression that was staggering in its effects on the world.
This is after the First World War that was supposed to make the world safe, a democracy that was supposed to bring freedom.
It was supposed to bring freedom, and what it brought was governments out of control with counterfeiting, which destabilized, caused problems, destroyed the middle class, put millions of young people out of work, threatened the ruling classes with a possible revolution.
If you look at the 20th century, what you can get from that, and this is not my lesson, this is objective, this is a fact, That we are about 5% or maybe 10% as free now as we were at the turn of the 20th century,
between 1899 to 1907, you could say, where no passports, private currencies in many areas, no government supply of national industries, no income tax, no draft, no military industrial complex, no very small national debts.
You could move anywhere, go anywhere, live anywhere, Where are we now?
After this whole century, hundreds of millions of people died for our freedoms.
What is the state of our freedoms relative to before all of this began?
Go a little bit further back to the 1860s, excluding the War of Northern Aggression or whatever you want to call it in the US, and excluding slavery, which I don't mean to brush over, but we could even choose our own schools for our children.
We could choose our own schools for our children.
What has happened since?
What has been the effect of all of these wars against government power, against dictatorship, against the expansion of the state class, against a military industrial complex?
What has been the result? Let's just look at the before and after.
It's only a hundred years. We're not talking about going back to ancient Athens here.
What has been the result of all of these wars for freedom?
Of all of these tens and hundreds of millions of people who cried and bled and died for freedom, we are much less free.
We are much, much, much, much less free.
We can't even conceive of the freedoms that people in the 19th century had, the late 19th century.
We can't even imagine what it's like to live without an income tax, to live without massive tariffs on everything we buy, to live without farm subsidies and union backups and National debts, government control of currency, massive inflation.
There was deflation in the 19th century, as you would expect in a rationally productive economy.
There was deflation. Money was worth more at the end of the 19th century than it was at the beginning.
In the 20th century, now it's worth less than 5%.
A dollar is worth less than 5% of what it was in 1900 for parity.
Money's been destroyed. Our freedoms have been completely undermined.
If you count in things like the national debt, we're already 90% the way to fascism anyway.
It's like something like 8 out of 10 of the platforms of the Communist Party have been enacted in America.
State control of education, state control of banking, state control of the currency, all of these things, which are considered essential to communism, have been enacted in the United States.
After a Cold War, where communism was the great evil, It's madness.
It's madness. Not only did the governments fail to protect the people that they were supposed to protect and instead ended up having to send tens of millions of them to their deaths, but they didn't even die to retain the freedoms that they had before the war.
After the war, there were fewer freedoms.
The war is the health of the state.
War is the health of the state. In any war, governments grow bigger, they shrink a little bit afterwards, but not.
Never back to where they were before.
So the idea that we went to the Second World War to preserve liberty is simply empirically not true.
Not only did we not go to war to preserve liberty, but the result of the war was far diminished liberty as it always is.
As it always is.
So I don't understand when people say, well, we went to fight the Nazis to keep freedom for mankind.
Because what would have happened if we didn't go and fight the Nazis?
Well, let's see, shall we? What, oh what, would have happened if we had not gone, talking about the US, if the US had not gone to fight the Nazis?
Well, we know.
We know. Nobody fought the Roman Empire and it collapsed.
Nobody fought the Soviet Empire and it collapsed.
Nobody's fighting the Chinese Empire and it's becoming steadily more free.
Socialistic or fascistic or totalitarian methods of economic control are so fundamentally anti-productive and anti-efficiency that these systems always and totally and completely collapse of their own accord.
There's no conceivable possible way that Hitler could have established a thousand-year right.
No conceivable possible way.
Because the fascistic model of centralized command and control economic production is so unbelievably inefficient that it would have collapsed within a generation or two.
It always does. It always does.
You say, well, yes, but those people would have been enslaved for a generation or two.
You know, this is like the argument that people say, well, you know, see, the people in Iraq are better off Now that Saddam Hussein is gone.
Well, of course, they're fleeing the country to the tunes of millions.
But the one thing that I would sort of ask about those who say, or ask of those who say that we can go and invade and kill people in other countries because they're better off if we do that, is really, do you think it's the case that the people who are dead are better off?
Do you think that the people who are killed are better off?
If we had gone and invaded Russia after the Second World War and we had killed 10 million or 20 million Russians, would they have been better off?
Of course not. They would be dead.
And the one thing we know, empirically, this is not my opinion, the one thing we know is that most people choose to live under tyrannies than to die fighting them.
And we know that because there was no market revolution, other than the Hungarian one in the 1960s, there was no market revolution.
Under the Soviet bloc through its entire 70-year history.
People preferred to live under that dictatorship than fight it.
We know this is true because in America, in Canada, in England, people don't choose to fight against the state and die and get killed.
No, they just suffer under the tyranny, the increased tyranny of these governments we live under.
Nobody can make that decision for you.
What are you going to live and die for?
I mean, they can, but it's not just.
If you're not going to be willing to go up against your own government and get killed, as you inevitably will, which is why I don't suggest it.
It won't work. If you're not willing to go and do it, how the hell can you make that decision for somebody else and say, well, yes, it was worth killing all of those people because that ended the tyranny more quickly.
It's not your choice to make what other people can live under and not live under and what they can survive and what they cannot survive.
Yes, we could have nuked Eastern Berlin and ended that tyranny pretty quickly and the lives of millions of people, but that's not our decision to make.
If other people choose to live under a tyranny rather than fight against it, that's their decision to make.
You cannot make that decision for them.
So if people had said, you know what?
I know this Hitler stuff is totally evil and I've got some chance of ending up in a concentration camp, which it is, and they had.
But they said, you know, there I have a chance.
There I have a chance.
If I sort of keep my head down and I obey and I do what I'm told, I could live.
I can have my family. I can go home at night.
I can talk with my wife.
I can, as some Soviet dissident said, the only private conversations in the Soviet Union between a husband and his wife under the covers of their bed.
I can go and do those things and I can survive and I can raise my children with some truth and some knowledge and then one day, maybe, we'll be free in the future.
That's how people choose to live.
You can't make that decision that they should die so that they might be free at some point.
You can't make the choice to kill people and then justify it by saying, well, but I ended their tyranny more quickly.
That's not your choice to make.
If they choose to live under that tyranny, that is their prerogative.
It's just murder to kill people and say, well, I'm freeing you.
Can you imagine? I've written a story...
It's called Space Aliens from Luxembourg, a Horror Story, which you might want to have a look at.
It's on my blog, freedomain.blogspot.com.
But there's no conceivable way that this national socialism could have lasted more than a generation or a generation and a half.
There's just no possible way.
There's no possible way.
The idea that this incredibly destructive and corrupt German economy would have ever been able to invade North America when it couldn't, even at the height of its power, it could not cross over.
To England is laughable.
I mean, it's completely ridiculous.
It's like imagining a four-year-old can take on Mike Tyson, when a four-year-old can't even pick on a five-year-old, right?
So there's just scare stories that are made up.
So I just sort of wanted to point out, because there's a lot of mythology about the Second World War, but we're far less free after the end of the Second World War than we were before, far less free after the end of the First World War than we were before.
The degradations of our freedoms have continued and are accelerating.
After a century, the 20th century, where it was considered that millions of people fought and died to make us free, they didn't make us free.
Just empirically. I mean, I'm not making stuff up.
Just empirically. Look at the size of governments before and afterwards.
Look at the degree of civil liberties before and afterwards.
Think back to this dream world of the 19th century, and I'm just talking in terms of, you know, white guys.
I understand all this other stuff.
But instead of expanding those freedoms to women and to minorities, what happened was they all vanished for us.
So people did not fight and die to make us free, because empirically we're just less free afterwards.
We can't go killing other people saying, well, we're freeing them, because dead people can't be free.
All they can do is rot. Thank you so much for watching.
I appreciate your patience as we walk through this.
I look forward to your feedback.
I look forward to your donations, which you can donate at freedomainradio.com.
My book on Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, which is a personal walkthrough how to apply philosophy to your own personal life, is available at freedomainradio.com.
And oh my friends, oh my brothers and sisters.
I have a book coming for you that you must read.
I'm not a pushy guy, and I don't even feel comfortable doing this, but I'm absolutely telling you, you must read the book that I am finishing up now.
It is called Universally Preferable Behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, and I am going to do whatever it takes to get this book into your hot little hands.
If you can't afford it, I will send you a free copy.
If you buy it and don't think it's as important as I say it is, I will give you your money back.
If you can only afford to pay half the price, I will give it to you for half the price.
You can pay me back whenever you want.
I am going to get this book into your hands because it is how to have a valid and universal and rational system of ethics without gods, without governments, without collectivism.
It is the holy grail of philosophy.
How can we prove ethics?
Without reference to religion or statism.
I am going to do whatever it takes to get this book into your hands.
And if I have to personally come over and read it to you at your job, I will do that too.
So that book is coming out in a week or two, universally preferable behavior.
A rational proof of secular ethics.
It's relatively short, highly, highly compact, and comes with a logic tree, too.
So I hope that you will, I don't know, I demand that you buy this book, or get this book somehow, or get me to get this book to you somehow, because I think this is the way that the world can be saved.
Thank you so much for watching.
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