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Nov. 11, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

19:22

1208 Remembrance Day 2008 -- video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Auax5rpJPI

Did millions really die to set us free?

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
	It's November the 11th, 2008, Remembrance Day.
	And I think it's worth talking about what remembrance means of war, and of soldiers, and of the slaughter of the battlefield.
	So I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes about that, so that we can Begin to make something better out of the endless bloodshed of war and genocide and tyranny by not remembering and praising the wrong things.
	I'd like to start with two quotes.
	The first is by the great Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who says, Violence has nothing with which to cover itself except the lie.
	And the lie has nothing to stand on other than violence.
	Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose the lie as his principle.
	And the second is an old Chinese proverb which says, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
	So, what is so often said about The soldiers of the 20th century in particular, and the soldiers who are fighting now in the 21st century, is that they fought to make us free, which is a wonderful sentiment and one which should evoke tremendous gratitude if, in fact, there was a shred of truth in that statement.
	If soldiers fought to make us free, Then surely we should be far more free after a hundred years of near-universal war than we were before.
	The end of the free era of human progress started in 1914, when the First World War erupted across Europe, And it continues now, and so if our soldiers,
	if these tens of millions of men and women and children, hundreds of millions, died, to make us free, then what should be the first empirical test of that statement would be to say, are we more free now than we were in 1912 or 1913?
	In those days, There was no income tax.
	There was no corporate tax.
	The federal governments and the local governments throughout the world survived on six or seven percent of national income raised through excise tariffs and so on, customs duties.
	There were no papers that you had to carry.
	There were very few licenses you had to possess.
	There were no passports.
	There were no passports. You could travel from one country to another free.
	You could come to America and sail under the raised arms of the Statue of Liberty, and unless you were currently coughing up your intestines, you walked into a country free and clear.
	Surely if those Men and women and children were slaughtered like pigs for our freedom.
	We should be even more free now than we were before the First World War, when there was no Federal Reserve, there was very little government control of the economy, no passports, no papers you had to carry, no Department of Homeland Security.
	But it's not true.
	I mean, it's not even close to true.
	It's frankly the exact opposite of truth.
	And there's this myth that is around, that people believe, that the way to honor the deaths of so many millions of people, the murders,
	they died like slaughtered pigs, Gassed pigs, bombed pigs, that the way to honor this is to say that we achieved some tangible, positive good out of their deaths.
	That's how we are supposed to honor their deaths.
	And I do not believe in an afterlife.
	But if I did, If I did believe in an afterlife, there would be a chorus of eviscerated ghosts screaming at us that their deaths helped enslave us, and to honor their deaths is to name the truth of what happened to them and to us as a result of these wars.
	We can't make their deaths good, of course, but we can try and rescue some positive and forward momentum of human progress and human virtue from these hundreds of millions of deaths, and we don't do it by pretending that they died to set us free, because we are less free, far less free now than we were before these slaughters began.
	You know, the amazing growth in wealth in the 19th century, with all of its problems, of course, in slavery, no rights for women, children treated like dogs, with all of its faults, which were considerable, the wealth that was generated by the 19th century, by the Industrial Revolution, was staggering.
	Do you realize that almost to a dollar, the First World War wiped out all of that progress?
	All of the accumulated wealth of the 19th century was torched and destroyed by the First World War.
	And the First World War, this is what we call progress.
	How did the First World War start?
	Well, a guy from one country killed a political leader in another country, and then to capture this terrorist, a war began.
	Does that sound familiar?
	This is how little progress we've made.
	And why have we made so little progress?
	Well, because we don't understand violence.
	we still believe that you can strangle a soul into virtue.
	A very brief tour of the 20th century helps us to understand that the eruption of violence in the First World War, And countries go to war when they're doing well.
	They don't go to war when they're poor.
	They go to war when they're doing well.
	But this is a statistical fact, and you can look this up on Psychohistory.com if you like.
	So what happened?
	Well, there was this war that began out of nothing, out of a single assassination for the sake of one man dying.
	Ten million died.
	In the trenches and a further 10 million died from the influenza epidemic that was spread by the soldiers returning from the front to a weakened population.
	All of these men were slaughtered and three years after the war began, by 1917, the Allies were exhausted and they were going to all go home and not Screw up Europe.
	They were going to rewrite the original boundaries, and they were all going to go home.
	And if they had done that, if that had been allowed to happen, the 20th century would have been entirely different than it was.
	But what happened was, our good sick friend Woodrow Wilson got the U.S. into the war, brought millions of troops over, of which 100,000 were slaughtered, and 300,000 Americans evaded this draft, because back then they had some sense of honor.
	And the entry of America into the First World War prolonged it by at least a year, causing millions and millions of more deaths, and it gave the Allies such an upper hand that they could impose this brutal Treaty of Versailles on Germany, and the blockade that continued long after the war was ended in November of 1918.
	This blockade, where no food, no medicine was allowed to get through to Germany, This continued, causing the deaths of many, many thousands more German civilians.
	Mothers watched their children starve to death, die of simple illnesses for lack of medicine.
	Tens of thousands of American civilians, innocent civilians, perished as a result of the sanctions that continued after the end of the war.
	I believe it's true, I would have to check, but more civilians died in Germany than any other country.
	Except France, in the First World War, and this leaves a scar and a desire for vengeance.
	So the brutal Treaty of Versailles, which imposed unbelievable reparations payments on Germany, screwed up the economy.
	They rewrote the borders of Europe in a completely insane way, carving off chunks of Czechoslovakia and other countries.
	We're carving off chunks of Germany, handing them to Czechoslovakia, to Poland, to France, full of German people who all wanted to reunite with their country, in the same way that if taxes and California were given to Mexico, you would yearn to rejoin the United States.
	It set the stage for the Second World War.
	The German government printed all of this money to pay off these insane reparations, or face another blockade, and possibly invasion.
	So they printed all this money, which caused hyperinflation, which spread around the world, destroyed the middle class in Germany, set the stage for a thug like Hitler to come in, and Germany was so desperate when America came into the war,
	In 1917, Germany was so desperate to stop fighting this two-front war with Russia on one side and the allies, Russia in the East and allies in the West, that they shipped Lenin into Russia, armed and funded, to overthrow the Tsarist regime.
	And this is why you had, in 1917, the foundation of the Communist Empire, which tyrannized huge sections of the world for the next 70 years.
	If America had not come into the First World War, you would not have had a Second World War, you would not have had a Cold War, you would not have had the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
	You would not have had all of Eastern Europe swallowed into this cavernous maw of disgusting, vile and violent socialism, communism, These people did not die to set us free.
	They did not die fighting any enemy other than the ones that the previous deaths had created.
	Violence is a genie that attacks everyone.
	We all want a gun that we can take out and point at someone else, but as It's said in Lord of the Flies, a spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.
	It goes into both bodies. You cannot unleash violence on others without it coming back to you, which of course is 9-11 and all of the other repercussions that have come from American imperialism.
	So the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
	are paid killers and I say this with a great degree of sympathy to young men and women who are suckered into a life of evil through propaganda and the labeling of heroic to a man in costume who kills for money.
	I say this with all sympathy to the destructive effects of propaganda which keeps alive religion and patriotism and the military and the police and wars.
	The lies of collective virtue, and the lie that honor is accepting ordered killings for money and prestige and pensions, because morality is a technology that is invented.
	You don't say that a medieval doctor was a bad doctor because he didn't prescribe antibiotics, because they didn't exist.
	We create the possibility of moral choice by communicating the truth about ethics to people.
	That, to me, is where real heroism and real respect for the dead lies.
	Real respect for the dead lies in exhuming the corpses and hearing what they would say, if they could speak now.
	And they would say, if any ask us why we died, tell us because our fathers lied.
	Tell us because we were told that charging up a hill and slaughtering our fellow man was heroic and noble and honorable.
	But these hundreds of millions of ghosts who circle the world in agony, remorse, will not be released from our collective unconscious until We lay the truth of their murders on the table and look at the horror that is the lie that murder for money can be moral, that murder for prestige can be moral.
	How do we support the troops?
	By taking away the ethical support for the evils that they do.
	These poor young men and women propagandized into An undead ethical status.
	Lied to about what is noble and virtuous and courageous and honorable and decent and good.
	To the point where they're rolling hand grenades into children's rooms.
	Under the illusion that that is going to make the world a better place.
	We have to stare this in the face.
	If we want to remember why these people died, they did not die to set us free.
	They did not die to make the world a better place.
	They died because we are ruled by sociopaths.
	They died because collective murder is the moral fantasy of mankind that guns and violence and bullets can create a better world.
	The only thing that can create a better world is the truth, is virtue, is the honor and courage of standing up to the genocidal lies of mankind and calling them lies, ultimate corruptions.
	That's what I want to remember.
	My family on both sides suffered so much in these wars.
	My grandfather's generation in World War I... Most of the men were killed.
	In the trenches. It's not that far back.
	On my mother's side...
	My mother was born in Berlin in 1937.
	Not where you want to be.
	Shipped to orphanages in a time of war, the horrors that she experienced probably can't be encapsulated in language.
	The destruction, the burning of the world that she inhabited.
	The traumas and the horrors of this century of Staggering bloodshed after the brief respite of the 19th century.
	This addiction to blood, we...
	We're like feral vampires.
	We're like rabid ghouls.
	This addiction to blood and the idea that If we pour more bodies into the whole of the mass graves of the 20th century, if we pour more bodies and more blood, we can build some sort of cathedral to a better place, but it doesn't happen.
	It doesn't happen.
	We can throw as many young men and women as we want into this pit of slaughter.
	It will never be full.
	It will never do anything other than sink and recede further into the depths of hell.
	We can't...
	We can't build a better world on bodies.
	We can't build peace on blood.
	If we don't look back and see the army of the dead of the 20th century that is calling out for us to see that they died to enslave us, that whenever there was a war, The government grew and grew, and never went back to its original shape.
	And that we are still so addicted to this lie, this fantasy, that we honor the dead by adding to their number.
	What we need to do is remember that these bodies bury us.
	This ocean of blood that we create through the fantasy that violence brings virtue, drowns us, drowns our children, drowns our future, drowns the world.

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