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Oct. 1, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:48
876 The Myths of the World Wars Part 2
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Moly from Free Domain Radio.
Hope that you're doing well.
Please drop by www.freedomainradio.com.
Pick up a copy of my book, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, which is how to bring philosophy to bear on your personal life and really set you free individually in things that you can control now.
And also, please look for next week my book, which is A Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, Which is how I tackle the great beast of subjectivist ethics in an attempt to prove rational and objective morality with no gods and no governments.
So I hope that you will have a look at that.
I think it will be a very important book.
So let's continue our little tour down the 20th century to see what lessons we can gather from this absolutely blood-soaked wreckage of a century wherein hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people were slaughtered like cattle, like pigs, like flies for the sake of protecting people.
There is a fundamental paradox, of course, which is why I argue for the absolute immorality of the state, which is it's quite mad to say that I wish to protect my property and the way that I'm going to do it is to create a massive monopoly.
It's completely insane.
It's like saying, I want to protect myself from being raped, so what I'm going to do is hire a bunch of bodyguards who can rape me night and day whenever they see fit.
It's completely insane.
No rational human being would ever create a state in order to protect his property.
No rational human being would ever create a state To protect his wife, his children, his own life.
It's completely mad.
It's like inventing the mafia to protect your store in an Italian neighborhood.
It just is never going to work.
It never has worked. In the 20th century, way up to our current time, is ample evidence of all of that.
The one thing that I'd sort of like to point out is that you can never predict The consequences of getting involved in violence on a massive scale.
Even on a personal scale, you can never figure out what the total consequences, long-term consequences of violence is going to be.
But if we go back to where we started on the last show, which was the First World War...
We talked about how the First World War, the balance of power was vastly unbalanced or imbalanced by the United States coming in with war materials, 100,000 soldiers, and the energy of a young and vigorous nation, thus tipping the balance to the Allied side, allowing for the Treaty of Versailles, and so on.
Now, what a lot of people don't remember, in particular, about the First World War was, of course, the There was an Eastern Front and there was a Western Front, just as there was in the Second World War, although Russia was spending millions of men on the Eastern Front in the same way as she did in the Second World War.
Germany was fighting a two-front war, which is one of the reasons why.
There was a central reason why, once Hitler went to the coast to Dunkirk in May of 1940, he immediately began turning and preparing for Operation Barbarossa, which was the invasion of Russia, because he knew Germany can't fight a two-front war.
That was the big lesson from World War I. So, America comes charging in to the First World War, vastly unbalancing the war efforts of the Allies relative to the Germans.
So what happens? Well, the Germans send a little gentleman named Iljevich Lenin to Russia through Finland.
And the reason that they do that, they fund him and they arm him and they get him all set up to have a coup in Russia.
And why do the Germans do this?
Well, the reason that the Germans do this is that Lenin, as a communist and as an internationalist, was very much against the participation of Russia In the War of the Great Powers, in the War of 1914 to 1918.
So they needed to get Russia out of the war, and as America came charging into the war, the Germans were desperate for any strategy to get themselves out of the war, so they shipped Lenin off with arms and with weapons to Russia, where he is successful in the Bolshevik coup of November 1917 and sets up the totalitarianist state of Russia.
And overturns the Mensheviks, who were more peaceful, more democratic, more moderate, and sets Russia onto a 70-year course, which costs the lives of approximately 170 million, 80 million people.
Concentration camps. You have the Stalin-generated famine, which is based on the collectivized farming of the Ukraine, where everything was taken from the individual farmers in the 1930s.
You have the purges. You have staggering amounts of losses of life in the Second World War.
So you can't tell what is going to happen when you begin mucking about in the military affairs overseas.
So here we have a country under President Wilson, the United States, that comes into the First World War.
Why? To make the world safe for democracy.
And there were 14 points that Wilson had out about self-determination and democracy and markets and all this kind of good stuff, which everyone lapped up as a bunch of nonsensical propaganda.
So they went into the First World War.
And they wish to make the world safe for democracy.
And what happened? Well, they created a totalitarian regime, or they contributed to the motives which propelled the creation of that totalitarian regime in Russia, which they then fought off and on for the next 70 years.
This is what happens when you go around shooting people to solve problems.
You create an ever-escalating, back and forth, sloshing and rising tidal wave of blood and death.
And this is why, when you look at this kind of stuff in history, it's fairly easy to see why it's so hard to believe any of the nonsense that comes out about this kind of stuff.
How military might and violence and death and genocide and slaughter is going to create peace.
It doesn't. It never has.
And it never will.
But we've just got to pry our hands off this gun so that we can live in a world of peace and plenty and beauty and I will say love, though you may laugh at me for saying so.
But I think that in the absence of having our fist on this glove, human beings are wonderful creatures.
But when we have this fist and we believe that this gun is virtuous from here to eternity, we are monsters.
We are monsters of patriotism.
We are monsters of soldiering.
We are monsters of murder. We are monsters of torture.
We are monsters of self-justification.
And we are monstrous in the corruption of the young to whom we tell all the lies that we need to live with ourselves and what we have done.
So, America goes charging into Europe to help the Allies, which propels the Germans to send Lenin over for a coup, which creates a bloody totalitarian regime which lasts for two and a half generations in Russia.
What happens then?
Well, there is, in Germany, of course, a very strong Jewish community, and very successful.
They ran two of the major newspapers.
A Jew was foundational in writing the Constitution for the Weimar Republic.
And like most intellectuals, and the Jews are overrepresented in the intellectual sphere, of course, they were left-wing, they were socialist, and of course a lot of them were communists.
Marx was a communist, Lenin, Trotsky, a lot of the founders of the Russian communist dictatorship were Jewish.
There's some estimates that say 2% of the Russian population were Jews, but over 50%.
Of the communist elite in Russia were Jews, right?
And so, at least in Germany, I'm not going to say about the rest of the world, and I'm certainly not going to talk about reality, because I'm just going to talk about perception.
In Germany, the communist dictatorship was seen as a largely Jewish phenomenon.
It doesn't mean exclusively, but it means a largely Jewish phenomenon.
And this is the same way that we call Nazism a German phenomenon, even though Hitler and a lot of other senior Nazis were Austrian or non-German.
It's just that's where it happened, and this was the major cultural influence.
So for the Germans, they looked at...
The Russian experiment as a Jewish experiment.
And what they did was they said, okay, well, what happened when the Jews, quote, got into power in Russia?
Well, of course, what happened when the Jews got into power in Russia through this communist revolution was they began slaughtering all the, quote, Christians, right?
I mean, don't get me wrong, nothing about Jews in particular.
I apparently am Jewish myself, though I don't care, because I have no interest in collective identities, because they're not identities, they're just cults.
But this was the perception in Germany, that a central issue that was occurring was that The Jews had gained power through communism in Russia and set about slaughtering the Kulaks, the Russians, and they started persecuting the Christians.
And there was, of course, a genocide in Russia that occurred after the assumption of the communists to power that was huge, staggering, by millions, millions.
One of the largest genocides in history, and it was perceived to be of Jewish leadership towards Christians.
So then, when you have an enormous fight brewing in Germany between the Nazis and the Communists, there is a perception based upon the view, again I'm not going to say whether it's correct or not, it's just saying there's a perception,
based on the view that it was the Russian Jews who were killing The non-Jewish Christians, the Russians who were Christians, that if communism came to power in Germany, that the same thing would occur.
If communism came to power in Germany, that the same thing would occur.
That there would be a Jewish leadership that would start killing all of the German Christians, because that's what they saw happening over in Russia.
So, Nazism can be seen to some degree, no justification for either system, they're all monstrous, communism and fascism.
But Nazism can be seen as a reaction to this fear of a Jewish genocide in Germany or in Europe because of what was perceived to be happening, and not entirely inaccurately, but what was perceived to be happening.
In Russia. So if the Jews get into power through Communism, they'll start killing all the Christians.
So they're starting to try and do the same thing here, and the Communists were making great gains in the 1920s and early 30s in Germany.
So we need a white, racist, nationalistic, German-only, anti...
They didn't just wake up one morning and say, we hate all the Jews.
It's not how human beings work.
If you don't know the history, all you end up with is caricature and projection and nonsense and fairy tales and mythology.
People don't just wake up one day and say, ooh, let's hate all the Jews, let's kill all the Jews.
Right? Of course, it's completely immoral.
When I say get rid of government, I also mean get rid of genocide as well as war.
But... This was the perception in Germany.
That's why they were afraid and hated and feared the Jews, because they saw this genocide, which they perceived as Jewish, going on in Russia, and they saw the same activity going on here.
They looked at many of the leading intellectuals who were left-leaning or communist and Jewish, and they said, well, they're going to do the same thing here.
A Jewish elite is going to take over through communist methods in Germany, and they're going to start killing us all, so let's get them first!
And again, this is sort of what I'm trying to say.
You can't predict what happened.
America said in 1917, we're going to go to war in Europe on the side of the Allies.
And what happens? Well, we talked about some of the effects of the last podcast.
In this podcast, we're talking about this fact that it caused Germany to support a revolution in Russia, which caused the deaths of millions of people, propelled a whole bunch of people into power that the Germans saw as Jewish, and then the Germans were terrified it was going to happen to them, so then you get Nazism as a reaction.
Do you see how this pendulum just keeps swinging back and forth?
And you can't tell. You can't tell what happens when you start wading into foreign countries and blowing things up and shooting people.
But you can always tell that it's going to be really, really bad.
Really bad. So, this is the way in which America had a number of powerful stimulants, or had a powerful influence in stimulating the problems of the Second World War.
See, and that's why, when people say to me, well, we had to go to war, you see, because that was the just war, and the Nazis were evil, and we had to go and save the world from the Nazis, of course the Nazis were evil, and the communists were evil.
But it was the intervention that created the imbalance, that started swinging the pendulum wildly in Europe, that ended up with millions of lives being smashed and blown into smithereens, with genocides and holocausts and firebombings of civilian cities and nuclear weapons being dropped on civilians.
You reap tenfold, a thousandfold, a millionfold what you sow.
To take another small example, you could go on and on with this stuff, but I won't bore you with it.
You could go from the ancient Greeks through to the modern Roman Empire of the Americans, and this is example after example after example of exactly the same thing happening, of governments failing to protect citizens, of governments ending up spending the lives of citizens by the millions And then in an ex post facto rationalization, everyone says, well, that was absolutely necessary, you see, because so many of us got killed.
It's absolutely necessary.
It's the same way that people say, well, yes, 600,000 people got killed in the Civil War in the United States, but it was to free the slaves, which is pure nonsense.
Which is pure nonsense.
It had nothing to do with freeing the slaves.
That was an afterthought. It was the expansion of federal power over the southern states.
Slavery was a great evil, but it's not that...
I mean, why was it that only America had to have a civil war that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people to get rid of slavery?
Every other single damn country in the world got rid of slavery without that.
Because it wasn't about...
Anyway, you get the idea.
So let's have a look at a more modern case.
And I've talked about this before, but I'll be relatively brief on it.
So, of course, after the Second World War, there is an exhausted Western powers.
No capacity to wage war for at least a generation.
They had just burnt themselves out completely.
So many people had gotten killed.
The pound was completely crapped out.
Everybody was off the gold standard.
It was a complete mess. So, of course, the communists take this advantage in China to take over and you end up with another communist dictatorship.
See, this is what it's all so awful and so...
We will not be able to laugh about this for 10,000 years, but there will be comedies in time when people say, oh yeah, they went to save the world from totalitarianism.
And what happened? Well, you know, half a billion people went into the maw of Chinese communism.
And, oh yeah, they went to, originally, you see, France and England went to war to save Poland, you see, because Germany had invaded Poland in September of 1939, and so they had a treaty, and they went to go and protect Poland.
Oops! Damn! What happened to Poland at the end of the war?
Oh, so sorry, you got sucked into the Soviet moor, where an entire generation of you will be fed into the concentration camps, the gulags.
So sorry, but the intention just didn't quite make it.
But this is always the way.
This is always the case. We went to save the world from totalitarianism, you see, because Germany was very dangerous and bad, which it was, and so we surrendered a massive hundreds of tens of millions of people to the Soviets at the end of the war.
We didn't save people from totalitarianism.
We simply expanded totalitarianism.
Russia took all of Eastern Europe.
At the end of the Second World War.
How is that saving people?
We just moved it! We just moved it!
It doesn't get rid of these things.
The only thing that gets rid of these things is philosophy, is rationality, is personal integrity and courage.
Not shooting people.
Shooting people does not solve problems, does not change the world, does not change people's minds.
It just exposes them to sunlight, not the light of thought.
So, of course, they accidentally find oil in the Middle East and One of the reasons that England promised Palestine to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration was because in order to get loans to continue the First World War from Jewish bankers, they made a promise to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Jewish state of Israel.
So this gets set up and, of course, everyone gets attacked.
The Jews get attacked right away because they've set up, for their own lunatic reasons, they've set up their country right in the middle of everyone who hates them.
It's a state of perpetual danger, just like 1984.
We are always at war with the Arabs, and they get a good deal of goodies from the Jews around the world and so on.
But the Anglo-American companies who had found the oil and were sort of gathering the oil were viewed as very great prizes by the Arab governments of the time.
And so, of course, what happened was when the Allies had finished fighting the Nazis, They said, okay, well, screw those Eastern Europeans.
We're going to surrender them into slavery under Stalin.
To hell with them. What we're going to do is we're going to just sort of retreat and we're going to lick our wounds.
Oh, and now that we're out of the Middle East and we can't possibly go to war at the moment, the Arabs are taking and nationalizing, because of their socialist propaganda, which we largely fed to them through our intellectuals, they're now nationalizing the oil companies.
So they stole all the oil companies, and because the West had just been in a big war, they couldn't do anything about it.
And not that they should have, because that would have worked out even worse.
And so the Cold War goes on and on.
We'll just sort of talk about this last thing that culminated in 9-11, so that you can understand that this stuff just never works, right?
So in order to...
In order to fight against Russia through the proxy wars, the Vietnams, the Koreas, and so on, through the proxy wars, which nuclear powers, at their very worst, are able to do, the CIA trains a fine young gentleman from Saudi Arabia named Osama bin Laden, who's a religious and nutty and pretty nasty guy, to go and fight with his mujahideen in Afghanistan.
And he's working on this theory, and the theory is that you can never militarily beat a superpower.
They've got nuclear weapons, they've got all the guns and planes and bombs in the world, and you can't invade the country.
They'll just nuke you at the border or drop a billion conventional bombs on you on the border, and you'll never get anywhere.
So what you need to do is you need to lure them into your neck of the woods, and then you need to stage a war of attrition.
Because in the Second World War, it cost about the same to attack as it did to defend, right?
So you had a bomber that cost, I don't know, half a million dollars, and then you had a couple of anti-aircraft guns that cost half a million dollars, and, you know, they blow each other up.
So that's why in the First World War and the Second World War, it's largely a war of attrition.
But now the balance of power has changed quite a bit in that you can take down a $20 million fighter with a $15,000 Stinger missile.
So whoever's defending or harrying or nitpicking or whoever's the insurgent, whoever's the guerrilla, is spending hundreds or thousands of times less than the person who has the more expensive military hardware.
And so bin Laden went in to Afghanistan and harried the Russians and this was one of the things that was pretty key about Russia.
Going bankrupt, because they spent so much money on the war on Afghanistan, they blew up so much military hardware that they had to replace.
That's one of the key reasons they were going to go bankrupt anyway, because just as the Nazi Empire would have, just as the Communist Empire would have if they hadn't reformed.
But this, of course, made it go that much faster.
So Bin Laden goes into Afghanistan and is instrumental in bringing down a superpower by harrowing it in a one-sided non-war of attrition where the Soviets have to spend $100,000 for every dollar that Bin Laden has to spend.
So he learns a great lesson, which is that you bring down a superpower by luring them into war in a land that you're familiar with, in a culture that you're familiar with, and then attacking them from every angle and harassing them until they go bankrupt.
Huh. I wonder if that has any parallels.
I understand. Wait, you know what?
That actually seems to be very similar to 9-11.
Yes, I in fact think that it is, right?
Because, of course, in the first Gulf War, they lied to the House of Saud, the Saudi leadership in Saudi Arabia, and said, oh, there are lots of Hussein's troops and tanks massed along your border.
He's going to invade. They faked all the photographs.
And so the House of Saud said, oh, God, give us some American troops.
So the American troops all went to Saudi Arabia, and they're there propping up the House of Saud, which is hated by fundamentalist Muslims because it's considered to be westernized and corrupt and decadent and evil and leading people off the path to evil and the great Satan and so on.
So they hate the fact that America has troops stationed in Saudi Arabia.
You know, just as if you live in America, you'd probably be kind of pissed if China had hundreds of thousands of troops stationed all over the United States, propping up a local dictatorship.
Well, you would not be that happy with that either, right?
So, of course they want the U.S. troops.
There's 700 U.S. bases around the world.
It's a ridiculously far-flung military empire.
So he knows that he can't fight the troops in Saudi Arabia because they're propping up the ruling class, the House of Saud, and because America is far superior militarily.
So what does he do? Well, he cooks up a scheme where he says, how am I going to lure America into attacking Muslims?
How am I going to lure America into a war in the Middle East?
Well, 9-11 happens.
Everybody goes completely insane and never asks a single question about history or where it came from or what happened or what's going on.
But it's like, kill, kill, kill, kill!
Get them back! Punishment!
Vengeance! Murder! War!
It's always worked out so well in the past, hasn't it?
Always so fucking great in the past.
Let's try it again. It's a goddamn lesson we have to keep learning over and over and over again.
It's embarrassing how ridiculously slow we are on the uptake about the practicality of violence.
So America goes charging into the wrong country, as one comedian said.
Wait, 17 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabia?
We invade Afghanistan?
What did we do, miss? So America goes in and Bin Laden then starts to apply, or Al-Qaeda, applies exactly the same lessons that the CIA and Bin Laden and the Mujahideen cooked up to go into Afghanistan, which is you draw the military power into your neck of the woods, you arouse local popular resentment, and you just start picking them off, and they have to spend way more money and way more goodwill fighting you than you ever have to spend fighting them.
9-11 costs, what, $150,000 to pull off?
America has spent, what, $500 billion responding to it?
Hmm, I wonder how that's going to go in the long run.
I wonder which empire is actually going to go down.
And so all of these kinds of things are the inevitable result of going to charge in and start shooting and blowing people up in other countries.
That the patterns of these things go right back to decisions that were made generations ago that we venerate!
That we venerate!
And we say, well, the First World War was a noble war, and then the Second World War was a really noble war.
Well, no. It was just cause and effect.
I mean, the Second World War can be arguably traced directly back to America's decision to enter the First World War, and then all the ramifications of that, including the Soviet Empire, including the Chinese Communism, including the nationalization of the oil companies by the Muslim governments, by the Arabic governments, and, of course, all the mess that has continued on since then.
Over and over and over again.
This just keeps going on and keeps going on and keeps going on.
Until we can pry our fingers off that fucking trigger, we are just going to spend our children's lives in blood until the end of time.
And why not give up the illusion that murder can be virtuous?
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