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Nov. 11, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:25
907 Remembrance Day

Words on war

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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
It is November the 11th, 2007, Remembrance Day, and I wanted to share a couple of thoughts about this question of soldiering and war.
My family has had quite a long involvement in warfare up to, I guess, Maybe two generations ago.
Actually, no, three generations ago, pretty much my entire male side of the family on my father's side was wiped out in the First World War, and then my parents, particularly my mother, suffered horribly during the Second World War.
She was a refugee or on the run, pretty much as an orphan, mostly orphaned in Germany.
So there have been some pretty intense experiences my family has had through war.
And I wanted to spend just a moment or two talking about the question of war and soldiering and what is always talked about, and of course what is never talked about, which should be no surprise to those who have seen my Socrates video that I thought I would read a short piece of fiction.
So here, I just wanted to sort of, this is some of the stuff that is talked about in war.
So this is the Globe and Mail.
It's a family of fighters.
You can see here, there's pictures of people under a tree, and there is a picture of a guy with his family, and so on.
Family says, from the Spanish-American War of 1898 to Afghanistan today, relatives of Quebec's Voyeur clan have been involved in military service for generations.
Their saga provides a glimpse of how soldiering changes, yet war remains the same, and how it can shape a family forever.
Everyone has their own reasons for becoming a soldier, but that's not what matters when you're kneeling on the ground in the dark by a broken-down truck during an enemy ambush in a dusty village.
It doesn't matter that you have wanted to wear a uniform since you were five building Lego tanks in your bedroom.
Or that being a soldier is in your blood all the way back to your great-grandfather.
You just want to finish your mission and see your men home.
You want to live.
And there is an inside, this is a reputable, this is our New York Times, this is a very reputable newspaper.
And there are images of what it is to be a soldier inside the paper, right?
So there's a guy here leading up against a tank, and there's a guy here leading up against a propeller with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and More guys sitting around chatting here.
These sorts of pictures are very common.
Again, from the same newspaper, we have pictures of guys beaching in Normandy.
We have pictures of guys storming around in Afghanistan.
We also have, on the front here, pictures of guys...
Well, sitting around chatting and laughing and so on.
And you do see this, of course, in reports or discussions about soldiers.
You see this quite regularly, this idea that, you know, it's a tough, dirty business.
What's always talked about is sacrifice of giving up your life for your country, of fighting and dying for the freedom of those you sort of, quote, protect and so on.
Oh, there's one other thing I wanted to mention in here as well.
Around war, of course, our failure to learn from history condemns us to repeat it, as has been wisely pointed out.
And here, a new book has come out called After the Reich by a historian, Gilles Macdonald.
And he doesn't talk about Iraq or the Middle East.
He talks about what happened in Germany after the Second World War.
Because the history of the Second World War always starts with the suicide of Hitler.
And then there's some vague talk about the Marshall Plan, which of course had nothing to do with economic restoration, but was just a money shuffling or money laundering routine for war profiteers.
And this is from the article about this book.
It says here, this is a Second World War that we have not heard much about, but one that still sounds very familiar.
In Germany, the Americans operated prisons on the sites of former Nazi concentration camps that often adopted the torture techniques of their previous masters.
Abu von Berlin, I believe.
Tens of thousands of suspected insurgents were left to starve or freeze to death, or were subjected to beatings, mock executions, and humiliating abuses while hooded.
There was summary justice, thousands of executions carried out with no trial, atrocities committed by soldiers, profit-seeking contractors and private sector opportunists, Abused their security contracts and made profits from political connections on a scale greater than in Iraq.
There was leadership chaos with plans invented after the fact and money arriving years too late.
There was widespread civilian starvation and misery.
At one point, when it became evident that thousands of German military prisoners were starving to death, Which was against the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war.
The US leadership did what?
Did what? Anybody? Anybody?
Seem familiar? The US leadership simply changed the statutes so that the prisoners would no longer be classified as prisoners of war.
Exactly what happened six decades later at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
This fantasy, of course, that culture can change human nature, that we are one class of moral human beings and they are the exact opposite class of moral human beings, is a foundational myth for the exploitation of us as tax livestock.
And this kind of fantasy continues perpetually in the world, that we can go over there and do good, but in exactly the same circumstances, our enemies will do evil.
But for the most part, human beings have no moral compass, because their moral compass It's destroyed and undermined by the myths of family, nation-state, or culture, and religion, of course.
But the fact of the matter is that human beings in the same circumstances pretty much do the same thing.
When we go over to Germany and we're in charge, then there is a mass slaughter, a minor genocide of tens of thousands, and this is all that's reported.
It was far higher than that, I'm sure, at least according to my mother.
Tens of thousands of Germans were slaughtered like pigs or starved to death, cruelly tortured, raped, abused.
And, of course, we know that this, if you know anything about the history, this is constantly talked about as what occurred during the Russian campaign coming in from the east.
Americans and Russians are fundamentally pretty much the same.
Power corrupts everybody pretty much to the same degree.
Culture is no protection. Loyalty to the abstract myths of nation-state, of Western virtue, of being an American, of being a Christian, it does not stop this kind of fall into a kind of satanic evil, which we're all susceptible to.
In these kinds of situations.
But, of course, what is not talked about in any of this is the same damn thing that is never talked about.
They fought and they died for our freedom.
Look, they are smiling and grinning and maybe looking sad in a trench and so on.
But you can't show the pictures of what is really occurring, which is murder.
I mean, imagine what would happen if you had, on the cover of Time magazine, the picture of an American infantryman pushing his bayonet through the throat of an insurgent.
This is war.
That is the essence of war.
Or a, quote, insurgent or Iraqi civilian writhing in flames under an American attack.
Head blown off, all of these.
You can't even show pictures of the bodies, let alone the murder.
But you have to constantly show these snapshots of, you know, tired, tough but determined men.
Out defending your freedom.
But it's all complete nonsense.
I mean, these people are cannon fodder.
The taxpayers who are forced to pay for them are cannon fodder.
The wars never achieve what they want.
This is a whole thing in here about, well, the First World War was confusing, but the Second World War was a really noble war.
Because, because why?
Oh, well, Western civilization was threatened, you see.
And we had to fight back the Nazis.
And, um... It's all the purest nonsense.
Yes, France was liberated and put into the hands of socialists, and yes, England retained its freedom to impose socialism on its own citizens, and all of the Eastern Bloc fell into slavery, where it was formerly quite free, which is particularly ironic in terms of Poland, which England went to war to defend originally in September of 1939.
It was surrendered to a mass dictatorship within a few years after the end of the Second World War due to really bad diplomacy and the funding of the wrong people.
Hundreds of millions of people fell into the pit of communism in China.
Pretty much five years or six years after the end of the Second World War, more people were enslaved than before it.
I mean, it is not a noble and just war.
This is the ruling class attempting to defend itself.
It only reacts when threatened, right?
I mean, none of the British ruling class really reacted to protect the British people from Germany until their own rule was threatened.
And then it's like, let's throw all of these people into the furnace and call it just.
It's ridiculous and horrendous and exploitive.
I thought I would read a small bit of fiction for you.
At least this provides some of my perspective on war.
This is not from a published book, so I'm not trying to sell you anything.
This is something I'm sort of working in the process of getting published.
This is from a book called Almost.
And there's two scenes from it that have to do with the First World War.
And the first is about a young man.
Quentin was not stationed on the front.
Before the war, he'd been a fairly competent businessman and so was employed as a supply sergeant.
He was close enough to the front to feel some danger, to feel the vibrations of shelling, but it was rare that anything exploded anywhere near him.
Once a plane had crash-landed within a hundred years of where he worked.
Once. A stray shell had felled a bare tree that fell on his shadow.
But other than that, the war was little more than a background rumble and a foreground stench.
While he did not see the slaughter firsthand, the front seemed to him...
Like a brutal disassembly plant, where whole men were sent to be separated into their component parts.
The courage of the soldiers was beyond belief.
They knew that their chances of survival were marginal at best, and that surviving was not always preferable to death.
Efforts were made to shield the incoming soldiers, colonials mostly and towards the end Americans, from the endless tents of the wounded, but the smell was impossible to shield.
Extreme maiming returns the body to an infantile state, and the reek of feces, urine and blood hung in the air like the scent of a medieval nursery.
There was no part of the body that was immune to injury.
Shells got the extremities, magnesium got the eyes, mustard gas, bullets the innards, and cold or infection the fingers and toes.
Nature, it seemed, conspired with war to empty the planet of young men.
Anesthetic was in short supply and deaths from shock were common.
The body simply did not contain enough natural painkillers to survive shrapnel, blood loss, and amputation.
Doctors could only save a few who came along.
Even those they saved were subject to the most horrible infections.
It seemed that every species of bacteria had flown to France on the promise of an endless feast.
And those boys who had left small towns for the excitement of seeing a foreign country soon found their only view To be the inside of their own minds, their eyes, taste, touch, all stripped.
And there was a deadening in the hearts of those who survived as well.
And it was born of a rational hopelessness.
Previously, war, a dangerous bloody business, was nonetheless a career of sorts where skill, training and fitness played significant roles in determining victory.
Success was never guaranteed, but horsemanship, marksmanship, and skill with the sword certainly swayed the arts.
And the generals basically fought the same war that had been fought since the Battle of Agincourt, when the high, armour-piercing arrows of the longbow had begun to unseat the power of the mounted knight.
There were no planes, no tanks, no submarines, no chemical warfare.
There was on occasion biological warfare as plague-ridden corpses were catapulted into towns under siege, but this did not affect strategy.
But the army, since it dealt with life and death and the fate of nations, was very, very conservative.
Quentin had been told one story which seemed to capture this problem perfectly.
A bunkmate of his had joined the army in 1911, a few years before the war, and had been painting the road leading into the base when he had spilled his entire can of paint.
Rather than cleaning it up, he had simply painted the edges into an enormous square.
In 1915, he had returned to the base as an infantry instructor, and driving in, he had noticed that his huge white square had been faithfully repainted in the four years since he had first spilled it.
The Great War required wrenching changes in army leadership, in thinking, creativity and innovation, but originality seemed such a sickly, faltering plant that it failed to grow no matter how many men's veins watered it.
There was so much destruction and so little innovation that the individual skill of the men in the trenches had almost nothing to do with their survival.
The best cavalry in the world could be defeated by a sixteen-year-old farm boy with a Tommy gun.
Sheer luck separated the living from the dead.
A soldier forgot his ammo, ran back to retrieve it, and his companions in a foxhole took a direct hit.
Another bent down to tie up his shoe, and a bullet took his best friend behind him.
A cigarette was passed to a brother.
A sniper found the glow and shot him dead.
There was no rhyme, no reason.
And here's another short passage in the book.
This is his future wife's experience of the war.
When war came in 1914, Ruth's three brothers, uncle and father, were all assigned to the Western Front.
There was much excitement in the household in the summer and early fall.
The men were all worried that the war would be over by Christmas and that they might miss the fighting, the greatest test and best story that their generation might have to offer.
However, as the reality of the Great War became clear, perceptions began to change.
War, formerly thought of as dangerous but glorious, now stood revealed as dangerous and squalid.
The fronts formed early and seemed immovable.
The generals, all trained in a time of wild charges and the supremacy of the horse, seemed unable to comprehend the waste of sending wave after wave of men against machine gun nests.
Only after the guns had overheated was any progress made.
After the general European peace of the past hundred years, the appetite of the god of war seemed to have increased sharply, probably because he'd had so little to eat.
The letters Ruth received from her brothers were full of love, courage, and hope, but there was something between the lines that spoke of bewildered, almost bitter hopelessness.
And sometimes this was not so between the lines.
Her youngest brother, how often the youngest have so little to lose from telling the truth, wrote, I used to think that being in a war was charging up a hill with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.
But war is nothing like that.
War is sitting in the mud, waiting for someone twenty miles away to push a button and blow you to smithereens.
The fronts were always just about to break.
They had to, for even by 1915, no war had ever lasted so long without a breakthrough or cost so many lives.
The shocking truth was that between 1914 and 1915, more British soldiers were killed than had died in the previous thousand years combined.
Then in 1915, the second year of the war...
Ruth lost three brothers, her father and an uncle, all within three weeks.
After two deaths, the army tried to get the others out, but was too late each time.
Ruth was awarded a medal, which she fingered in fundamental disbelief.
Two brothers succumbed to the new mustard gas.
Another died of a small foot wound, which became infected.
Ruth's father stepped on a mine, and her uncle just...
Ruth disappeared under a hail of shells.
His body was never even found, let alone identified.
Ruth was shocked almost into her component atoms and instantly merged with the growing herd of bereft women who seemed to lose their sex at the same time as they lost their men.
An entire generation of men, raised from squalling infancy, cleaned and cuddled and loved and trained and filled with all the warm expectation of companionship into their mother's old age, all wiped out, gone.
Twenty years' labor, a lifetime of anticipation and hope, all destroyed.
The women saw this, and their wombs seemed to falter and dry up.
Why breed sons for this kind of slaughter?
They wondered, staring out their windows, their fingertips leaving red welts below their black eyes.
And the myth of male leadership, which was also a central pillar of these women's perception of the world, also took a blow from which it never truly recovered.
Not only had men not anticipated the slaughter of the Great War, but they had done very little to end it once it started.
Idiotic generals threw their troops at withering bullets like a spiteful child, hurling disobedient-led soldiers into a roaring fire.
Women began to realize the truth.
Men are not as smart as they seem, or claim, or pretend.
And Ruth...
Well, after all five of her closest male relatives were wiped out, Ruth gave up on the idea of having more children.
So might cows, if they knew the abattoir which awaited their calves, shy away from bulls.
She turned away from her husband because she could not bear another loss or consider having another child, and fell into herself.
In the time between the deaths and the details, Ruth became obsessed with the terrible question, how had they died?
This was a mere cover for the far more terrible question of why.
The thought of them suffering was utterly unbearable.
She preferred to...
Imagine their ends, which were cloaked with fog and shrouded with flags.
The reality of blood, bullets, and bowels was beyond her, and that made her afraid to read the letters of their comrades, those who had survived.
One of them came, a sergeant, and they sat in the tearoom in August of 1915.
It was a bright day, but she had no love of the sun.
It gave her headaches and made the world look happy.
So she was there with her children, who sat for once, still and silent, staring at the visitor, who was a stoop-shouldered man of twenty-four, who had cut himself shaving and kept mopping his throat with a red-spotted handkerchief.
"'Thank you for coming, Mr.
Eldred,' said Ruth, staring at her teacup.
Mr. Eldred ate slices of poppy-seed cake, two at a time.
"'Well, I thought it was proper.' He said, and Ruth noticed that his voice had a delicate, whispery sound, and she imagined him in a fetal position, running in a slippery circle in the mud, choking on gas.
Now, I only knew your father.
He was our division commander, and I know that we're all very brave when we write home.
We try to be jaunty, you know, like we're having a little adventure.
It's taking a tad longer than we first thought, she murmured from one of her father's early letters.
Yeah, that sort of stuff.
Rocked, really. You don't have anyone out there anymore, do you, Mrs?
Ruth shook her head, hanging in the balance of telling him that all five men in her family were dead.
But she changed her mind.
That would be most unkind, to give him a sense of the odds.
That's good, said Mr.
Eldred, nodding slowly. It should be all at once, or not at all.
Then he shuddered slightly, and she thought of dreams where you're almost falling and jerking back wakes you up.
But, he continued, I know what the telegrams say.
Nothing, really, but where and when.
And the letters are brave.
Well, not brave.
We wanted to believe them as much as anyone, I suppose, so there's nothing you can hold on to as you get older.
Will you get older, Mr.
Eldred? She wondered, another fissure opening in the rubble of her broken heart.
Probably not much. And there was a letter, he said, but you should read it when I'm gone.
He reached into his pocket, took out an envelope, and handed it over.
Ruth turned it over in her hand.
The ink was washed, faded.
The paper was abraded, as if it had been rubbed repeatedly.
She lifted it to her nose and sniffed.
Fields. Fog.
Blood. Almost.
Almost. The black symphony of war.
It's been washed, she said.
Just...
wet. He murmured, glancing away.
A finger on his right hand twitched there on the knee of his woollen trousers.
And Ruth saw him opening her father's ragged coat and pulling the envelope, this envelope, out of his breast pocket, out from the widening wound that was swallowing him whole, and later by the light of a candle, rubbing it with water.
The handwriting had to be kept, the blood had to be washed away, so tricky.
And it was doubtless happening throughout the front, on either side of no man's land, in thousands of dugouts and trenches.
And some soldiers would be shot through their letters.
And the letters could no more be stitched back together than they could.
The proverbs are all wrong.
In this new world, the pen mostly bows to the sword.
I'll read it later, said Ruth, touching the paper to her forehead for a guilty moment.
He was a brave man.
Mr. Eldred said, leaning forward.
It was a mine. He knew it when he stepped on it.
That click, almost no one hears it.
He was a good man.
He threw the letter to me.
He looked at the sky.
He closed his eyes.
He folded his hands in prayer.
He took a step and was no more.
Ruth did not flinch.
She felt as wide as water, as empty as a spent cloud.
He could not save himself.
There was nothing to do.
But, Mrs, it's important to know that he had a chance to square things with his Maker.
That's more than most get.
I don't know if I want to know when I have to go, but that's...
Well, I wanted to tell you a little about him.
I mean, you have a right to know, so you can mourn.
His death was just a moment, and there were a lot more before that moments.
After you, I mean, but before that.
He saved... I made some notes and asked around.
He saved many men.
He covered one when a shell came.
He sent another one back behind the lines just before his dugout was shelled.
There was a cook who was gonna...
kill himself.
Sorry, miss. But your father wrestled him to the ground and saved him.
And he once held us back from a raid where most everyone was killed because it made no sense, like a lot of things.
And he would send boys back for a rest when they'd had too much, and he sent men home when they had small injuries and could have stayed.
He was a good man, missus, and many sons will be named after him.
Mine, certainly, you know, if I... Mr.
Eldred trailed off and another pair of poppy seed slices went into his mouth.
He wiped his eyes.
You have been very kind to come.
She said slowly. The room seemed enormous.
She half expected a distant tinny echo.
He shrugged and smiled.
I've got a tongue of stone, miss.
I can't do anything justice.
Certainly not your father.
But I wanted to let you know.
Is there anything I can do for you?
No, that's fine. I thank you for the food.
I never get used to...
I was a stout man before all this.
I weighed 22 stone when I was 22.
I hope to weigh that again.
After Mr. Eldred left, Ruth opened the envelope.
There were a number of other envelopes inside.
One for her mother, one for herself.
Some more. She turned the envelope over, and three other envelopes came out.
With a kind of dread, she picked them up and turned them over.
They were addressed to her brothers.
Her dead brothers.
With a wet thud of her heart, Ruth knew that very soon she would be holding letters from her dead brothers to her dead father, and it would be like holding out her pale hands and being received into a circle of ghosts where there was no sun.
She opened her letter and read, Dearest Ruthie, So I have come to a bad pass after all.
As I write these words, I feel with all the faith in my being that I will come back to England and be near you for all my remaining days.
Thus I hope that this letter will never be read, and I am looking forward to taking all these grim scribbles and consigning them to a fire.
I see us all doing this as a family, while Jack plays something lively on the piano, cheering as each one goes into the flames.
But you are reading this now, and so it has not come to pass.
Do not fear for me, or grieve for me longer than is absolutely necessary.
I have been a tremendously lucky man.
I have had the love of a good woman, the reward of a good career, and all the tender joys of happy and boisterous children.
I have lived with a clear head and a full heart and mortal man can ask for no more.
I am sure that my end was unpleasant, but I don't want you to think of that.
Death is just the shadow of the doorway as we step from this world of sorrows to a better realm.
I believe that an angel has been watching over me through all my days of peril, and if I am snatched at some point, it is doubtless for the best.
However much it must hurt those who remain, the unfolding of the ineffable plan, while beyond the capacity of reason to fathom, will all be clear after we pass through that doorway.
Dearest Ruthie, I hope that you live a long, happy life.
Which is most unselfish of me, of course, for I yearn to see you again when you come through that door.
I shall be the first to fall upon you with kisses, even if I have to elbow a thousand angels aside to do so.
When I went to war, we knew that we would be parted for a time.
Now that I have fallen, our reunion is but delayed for a little longer.
In the face of infinity, it will seem as nothing.
Thus, my dearest daughter, I have only one thing to ask of you.
Please, if you live for a hundred years, never think of me as dead.
I am not dead.
I am only waiting.
With all the love in my heart, your father.
A hard cannonball had formed in Ruth's chest.
It was a sweet, sentimental letter, which should have sent her sprawling on the carpet in an Italian orgy of grieving.
She felt her father's courage, his gentleness, his love, but the letter simply said to her, his mind, in this letter so tender, is nothing now but broken meat.
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