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Oct. 14, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:16
1174 True News 1: The Price of Patriotism

The first in a series of current event videos

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Hello and welcome to Naked News, a philosophical and principled examination of current events.
This is episode number one, October the 14th, 2008, The Price of Patriotism.
Welcome again. I thought I would just introduce myself since this is show number one.
My name is Stefan Molyneux.
I am the host of Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web.
Since I am attempting to educate, I thought I would mention just a little bit about my own educational background.
I did undergraduate work at both York University and gained an undergraduate degree from McGill University.
I hold a Master's in History from the University of Toronto, which is about as Ivy League as you get up here in Canada.
And I also have some pretty vivid and significant experience in the free market itself.
I was a software entrepreneur in the mid-90s.
I co-founded a software company, grew it, and then sold it.
So I have some pretty raw entrepreneurial experience, which I hope brings some value to the table.
Since 2007, I have been a full-time philosopher surviving entirely on listener donations.
I hope you will drop by the website.
I'll mention it later and see if you enjoy what is going on there.
So, how can philosophy illuminate the current financial crisis?
What really is going on? Well, I'm going to submit and I'm going to try and make a good case for it in this short presentation.
That you simply cannot understand this financial crisis without understanding history, without understanding the motives of those who are behind it, and without understanding the means that they are using to achieve their ends.
The first thing to understand is that the United States is by any definition of the word an imperial power.
The second thing to understand is that the way to bring down imperial powers, particularly Western ones, has been well understood for at least half a century, if not longer.
Imperial power? Well, of course, the United States has 761 overseas military sites.
And, of course, that does not include Iraq and Afghanistan.
And that doesn't include those creepy alias, under-the-rug, secret sites that we know next to nothing about.
As of the end of 2007, over a half a million service personnel, including sailors afloat, were deployed in 151 countries.
Almost 200k in Iraq and over 25k in Afghanistan.
If the Chinese army regularly marched up and down Red Square and told the president what to do, most Americans would feel a little chuffed at that as well.
It's a good way to understand how foreigners feel about this kind of behavior or involvement from the US military in their domestic affairs.
Imperial collapse.
Those who are opposed to US militarism and imperialism, they know their history, do not underestimate the intelligence of the oppressed.
There were two major collapses in Western imperial powers in the 20th century after the First World War.
The Habsburgs, the Ottomans and the Romanovs met their fate.
After the Second World War, of course, it was the British Empire and to a smaller degree French overseas holdings that collapsed and reverted to some degree, at least, these countries to self-rule.
The cause, of course, was financial exhaustion.
And the lesson was well learned by those who wish to oppose imperial powers.
To end an empire, you strike at its financial base.
So, what is the view from outside?
Since World War II, those who wish to oppose imperial powers will have well learned the lesson of the lack of economic parity between invading and defending a country.
Up to and around World War II, the costs of sending, say, a bomber from London to Berlin, equipping, arming, flying the bomber, building it, was roughly equivalent to the number of anti-aircraft guns you would need to shoot it down.
So there was a rough parity between invading and defending, which is why World War I as well was fought to stalemate.
World War II would have been fought to stalemate if the U.S. hadn't come in.
So the costs of invading, the costs of defending up until about World War II were roughly about the same.
But that has completely changed since the end of the Second World War.
Now, of course, you can bring down a $20 million aircraft with a $20,000 Stinger missile or a Tomahawk missile.
The costs of invading, of controlling, have become far greater than the costs of defending or harassing.
And I'm sure, of course, that most of you know that the U.S. government trained these Arab freedom fighters, these mujahideen, to wage what was primarily an economic war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, which, of course, helped propel the collapse of the USSR, of its economic system.
And one of these mujahideen, of course, that the U.S. trained was one Osama bin Laden.
So how can we understand this economic attrition?
What is the goal of the people who are attacking the financial base of the United States?
Well, the steps are relatively simple.
You provoke the superpower to invade a local country.
You can't go and invade Fort Bragg, but you can bring Fort Bragg soldiers to Iraq and to Afghanistan.
And then what you do is you wage a war primarily of economic attrition.
You use IEDs, you use Cold War Kalashnikovs, you use whatever cheap weaponry, whatever young idealistic idiotic recruits you can get a hold of to wage this war of economic attrition against the superpower.
What this does is it actually triggers the kind of economic steal from the public purse feeding frenzy in the two superpower state.
The Treasury gets depleted, the economic powerhouse gets weakened to the point where the government in its current state will not outlast the careers of those at the top, so there's a total feeding frenzy.
It's like a lifeboat panic. There are too many people, not enough lifeboats, and everybody just crowds and it goes completely nuts, which is why you've had a 40% increase in government spending since 2000.
It also, of course, helps us to understand why there has not been another attack in the United States since 2001.
Is it because the Department of Homeland Security is the one functioning and excellent government division?
Of course not. Government department?
No. It is because Al-Qaeda specifically, and you can look this up for yourself, they specifically struck at New York and other places in the United States On September 11, 2001, in order to draw the United States into a Middle East conflict.
That was their express intention in order to undermine and destroy it financially, not destroy the United States financially, any more than they wanted to destroy the Soviet Union financially, but simply to bleed the empire's financial base to the point where the troops get withdrawn, as they were taught to do by the very United States government that they later attacked.
Al-Qaeda's goals.
Clearly stated out there on the web, you can find them yourself.
Their goal was to trigger a collapse of the American empire through undermining its financial base, through this war of economic attrition.
And relatively easy to understand, of course.
Al-Qaeda spent a few hundred thousand dollars attacking America on 9-11.
The US government has spent trillions of dollars, quote, responding to this attack.
Clearly this is not sustainable.
However, of course, your taxes have not increased despite this war.
How is that possible?
Well, when we understand that, we are really getting close to understanding what is going on with this current financial crisis.
Covering up the costs of war.
Well, the trillions of dollars that are destroyed in a war, they have to come from somewhere.
If you're an American politician, Bush, say, and you ask the American population, say, you all have to pay 20% more taxes now, immediately, and it's going to go up from here, Because we've got to go and invade Iraq.
The American population is going to say, really?
20% increased taxes?
That's a bite, man. You better give me some damn good proof that Iraq is an imminent threat against the United States.
If you're going to ask people to pay for a war up front, then you have to supply a pretty good reason, or pretty good evidence, in fact, damn good evidence, that they're facing an imminent threat.
Of course, this would have been impossible.
But if you can fudge and defer the costs to the future, then the requirements for the proof of an imminent threat are virtually non-existent.
Standards of proof remain low.
This empty-headed chatterbox bobblehead patriotism remains the norm, which of course is what you have seen over the past half-decade.
In order to defer the costs of war, to cover it up, you get massive government borrowing, you get overprinting of this crap fiat toilet paper money we call the dollar, and you get the artificial suppression of interest rates to control what would normally be the resulting inflation, which, of course, when you suppress interest rates, you almost always get a housing boom.
Well, let's look at the effects of this.
This is the chart. Commodity, gold, other kinds of prices.
These are commodity prices, as you can see, pretty stable for the 10 years prior to early 2003 when the war started.
After that, we've had 140% increase in commodity prices.
This is why everything is going up in terms of price, and this is always the case during a war.
Let's look at gold prices.
Relatively stable until early 2003, and then they go from $300 and change to over $1,000.
Of course, this is an example of how overprinting is being recognized by those who are trading in gold.
Gasoline prices. Relatively in decline until early 2003, when they begin to climb enormously.
And last but not least, the US dollar index, which is the index of the US dollar against commodities and a variety of other currencies.
It's relatively strong until early 2003, then it begins a catastrophic decline, which of course is the point of what Al-Qaeda is up to, what the terrorists are up to, which is to wage the war of economic terrorism against the United States and get it to bleed its treasury dry, which will cause a withdrawal of troops.
So, once we understand this, what is going on with this economic crisis, You can place the specific losses that, unfortunately, you are getting hit with in your stock portfolio in context.
This is about this war of economic attrition that is being waged by foreign enemies, whose hatred is not against you, but is against the US government, its foreign policies, its occupation of foreign countries, its bossing, its undermining, its offense to their religious sensibilities.
It's control and influence over local powers.
Everybody recognizes in Saudi Arabia that the Saudis care a lot more about the United States and its funding of them than it does about the average preference of the Saudi citizens.
So the US is propping up all of these dictatorships around the world, which everybody knows, and they support this war of economic attrition against the United States to get the troops out.
So when you look at your bill for this, when you look at the price that you're paying I think it's important to recognize that this is the price of war.
This is the price of not learning history.
This is the price of not opposing this unjust invasion and not understanding what is actually going on in the world.
The moral decisions that you make have an immense effect on your life and the lives of those around you, not to mention your material wealth, your portfolio, the value of your portfolio, the value of your home.
So when you look at your bill and you see these numbers that have gone down catastrophically, one question to ask yourself is not an easy question, of course, but it's an absolutely essential question.
One question to ask yourself when you look at these terrible losses is how did I face the drive to war and the temptation of patriotism when the mob was howling its bloodlust and its thirst for blood and its thirst for vengeance and its desire for war?
How did I behave?
Did I behave with rational skepticism?
Did I raise difficult questions?
Did I behave with moral courage and attempt to talk those people out of their trees?
If not, Then the bill comes due.
It's not your fault.
It's not your responsibility. No individual, other than Bush perhaps, holds responsibility for this war or the response that the American government had to this provocation.
But how you behaved has an effect.
And if you want to put the losses that you're facing in context, look at your behavior.
Then and now, how do you face the prospect of the end of the war in Iraq, the end of the war in Afghanistan?
Do you support the withdrawal of American troops from foreign soil?
If you don't, these costs are just going to continue to mount.
Ethics. The betrayal of ethics has its price.
Those who failed the test of rejecting the thirst for war, the thirst for vengeance, the desire for blood, helped to drag us all down.
And it is a real shame. Unfortunately, we have a system where these decisions affect everybody else.
But it's not too late, of course.
You can change your approach.
You can take the high road.
You can take the difficult and challenging road of speaking out against unjust violence of this kind.
To save the world, to save yourself, to save your portfolio, to save the value of your home.
It is so essential to learn philosophy, to learn a little bit about history.
I've done what I can to make these materials available.
They're all free. Thank you so much, of course, for watching.
You might want to drop by freedomainradio.com to pick up a number of free books, free videos, free podcasts.
I have an Intro to Philosophy series here.
It's relatively easy to get through.
I hope that you will avail yourself of it.
Thousands of other listeners are on the Freedom Aid radio boards to help talk to you and listen to you about philosophy.
I hope that you will really take this opportunity because the salvation of the world, the future of your family, the value of your assets all really hinges upon the moral courage that we can show in the face of this mob lust, this desire for vengeance, this drive for war and the continuance of it.
So I hope, I hope That you will begin to turn this around in your life and speak out courageously and positively about the injustice and the evils of this kind of aggression.
Thank you so much for watching.
I really do appreciate it and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
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