1278 True News 19: Somalia Part 2
Some responses to listener criticisms.
Feb. 10, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:34
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope that you're doing very well. | |
| I'm sorry to those who have emailed me saying, dude, where are the videos? | |
| I cannot live without the True News Fix. | |
| I apologize. I am a new father, which is somewhat important, but I'm also working on a new book called How to Achieve Freedom, based on the 12 million emails a week I get saying, Oh yeah? | |
| Well, how are we going to get to a stateless society? | |
| The short answer is, I don't know. | |
| The long answer is, I have a theory. | |
| And I'm putting forward in this book, which should be out in a couple of weeks, how it is, I think, that we can take positive and proactive steps within our own lives to really build the foundation for a stateless society in the future. | |
| And if you want to, if you're dying for this book, as I know some people are, You might want to start off with my other free book. | |
| Again, all of these are available at freedomainradio.com forward slash free in audiobook and PDF format, and for a couple of bucks you can get the print versions of most of these books. | |
| This is a sequel to the book called How Not to Achieve Freedom, which is a critique that I have of academics, religion, And political libertarianism. | |
| So, the book is coming along. | |
| It is a challenging and exciting thing to write, and I hope that it will at least answer some questions about ways in which we might be able to, at least I'm pretty sure we can, work proactively to bring about a statement of society. | |
| And again, it should be out in a couple of weeks. | |
| Other news and weather, I am going to be speaking at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, March 5th to 8th, 2009 in Nashua, New Hampshire. | |
| You can get more information at freestateproject.org. | |
| forward slash Liberty Forum. | |
| I am the closing speaker. | |
| The honor was last year Ron Paul and before that John Stossel. | |
| Not that I claim to have any kind of lofty heights of fame, but I can promise you a rousing and exciting and participative speech. | |
| It's going to be a back and forth with the audience. | |
| I'm going to be discussing the power and precision of what I call the against me argument, which is how you can win almost or triumph in almost any political debate that you have about any kind of status or government policies in about 90 to 120 seconds. | |
| If you believe me not, come and engage me in this conversation. | |
| I don't want to give an hour-long speech and watch people doze off in the back, particularly my daughter, but instead it will be a back-and-forth role-plays, some spontaneous improvisational kind of interactions which I think are the most engaging and enjoyable. | |
| So I will be speaking around 1.30 or so on Sunday afternoon, March the 9th, 2000. | |
| Sorry, March the 8th, 2009. | |
| I hope to be there for the whole conference from Thursday the 5th to March the 8th, which is the Sunday. | |
| My wife and I will be coming. | |
| We're just waiting on some paperwork to allow my gorgeous daughter Isabella to cross the border. | |
| So I hope to see you there and it should be a very enjoyable time. | |
| So, a number of people have, a fairly large number of people, have written to me to say, dude, you are so off the mark as far as Somalia goes, you are not even close to the mark. | |
| And that's fine. | |
| And the general criticism seems to be that my information came from 2006, but since then some foreign-backed, foreign government-backed insurgents have been laying waste to Somali society and so on. | |
| And... That's irrelevant. | |
| And I know that's an annoying thing to say. | |
| Let me make the case as to why that's irrelevant to the claims that I was making. | |
| I did not say that anarchy could resist all foreign governments. | |
| I did not say that anarchy would last forever no matter where in the world it was or what was going on around it. | |
| What I said was anarchy works. | |
| And anarchy does work. | |
| The fact that foreign governments are fueling insurgents and trying to overtake certain areas of Somalia is irrelevant to the question whether anarchy works. | |
| And just so you understand what I mean, an analogy would be, let's say I come up with a cure, For schizophrenia, right? | |
| Some pill that you pop which cures schizophrenia. | |
| And I give it to some guy who takes the pill and the vision's clear and he is no longer a schizophrenic. | |
| And then he goes out into the street and is set upon by three other schizophrenics and killed. | |
| Well, that does not mean that the cure doesn't work, right? | |
| It just means that there are other dangerous schizophrenics out there that we should apply this cure to as well. | |
| So that's the analogy of the stateless society within Somalia being attacked by foreign governments. | |
| It doesn't mean that anarchy doesn't work. | |
| All that means is that we should really apply statelessness to these other societies as well. | |
| The same way that if we cure a dangerous schizophrenic, we should also apply that cure to other people. | |
| The fact that he gets strangled by a group of other schizophrenics does not mean that the cure does not work. | |
| And of course, no cure for schizophrenia comes with the label that says, and you will never be strangled by other schizophrenics. | |
| So it's irrelevant to the question of whether anarchy works. | |
| So people may have questions about self-defense and this and that. | |
| That's all fine. But anarchy works... | |
| And so we should apply it to more governments in the region, if at all possible. | |
| And again, the book that I'm working on will hopefully give us proactive, positive things that you can do in your life to help move the world towards that delicious, wonderful, and virtuous destination. | |
| Now, a number of other people wrote to me and said, oh, Steph, oh, I love the kind of tension that comes off these emails. | |
| It's tasty. They wrote to me and they said, oh, Steph, oh, Steph, oh, Steph, let me pat myself on the head for you. | |
| Ooh, that's quite shocking. | |
| And they said, Steph, what you're doing is saying statelessness is better than some, you know, murderous ass-clown communist dictatorship, but that's not valid because you really want to compare The Somali Stateless Society to a, quote, mature democracy like we have in the United States, or, I mean, most people were writing from the United States. | |
| So it's true statelessness is better than a communist dictatorship, but a mature republican democracy, whatever you want to call it, the sort of modern democratic American system, is better than statelessness. | |
| Well, that's... | |
| Frankly, not too bright, and it's not following a basic rule of logical thinking, which I talked about in the original Somali video, which is really, really, really, it's important to compare like to like, right? | |
| You don't say, you don't put Danny DeVito at the age of 30 in a ring with a five-year-old Mike Tyson and say, you see, Danny DeVito is much stronger than Mike Tyson because you're comparing a 30-year-old to a A five-year-old, and if you put both the thirty-year-olds in, it may not be that it will go old Danny DeVito's way. | |
| So, you want to compare like with like, and what that means is that you don't compare a society a dozen years after the collapse of the existing government, you don't compare that society with a society that's had a couple of hundred years to mature and refine its status system. | |
| It's just Not valid. | |
| It's not a valid comparison. | |
| It's like comparing a 5-year-old to a 30-year-old in terms of strength and thinking it's any kind of reasonable or objective measure. | |
| So you want to compare like to like. | |
| So I threw together a few things that were going on if we take a snapshot of the United States system after the expulsion of the British, which of course occurred during the Revolutionary War and for some years, five years after 1776, I believe, the war was concluded. | |
| So, let's say that Somalia had the following conditions after the collapse of the government, which occurred in the 90s. | |
| So there was a dominant gang that was taking control over the whole country in Somalia, was becoming a new government. | |
| There was still a rebellion among some of the other gangs, and that rebellion was brutally and violently put down by the gang that was most dominant, which of course would be the US government. | |
| If a dozen years or so after the collapse of the former government, the new Somali warlords both permitted and protected and encouraged Slavery, would you consider that to be a negative? | |
| Well, of course, that was the case in the United States. | |
| The Fry's Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Chez's Rebellion. | |
| There was a quasi-war with France. | |
| Hundreds of thousands of citizens fled. | |
| Let's say hundreds of thousands of people fled Somalia with the new warlord coming in. | |
| We'd say, well, that's bad. People are getting uprooted. | |
| But that's, of course, what happened when the Tories migrated to Canada. | |
| Thank you for our big-ass conservative movement. | |
| What if the Somali, the dominant Somali warlord was conducting biological and genocidal warfare against the native population? | |
| And in one day alone, thousands of men and women and children in Somalia who were resisting the new warlord were burned alive and slaughtered in their own homes. | |
| What if foreign governments were swarming around the Somali coastline, kidnapping and impressing Somali sailors? | |
| What if the new warlord in Somalia was conducting naval aggression and an undeclared war in the Middle East? | |
| What if Twenty years after the Somali government collapsed in the 90s, a foreign government invaded and occupied the capital city. | |
| Would you consider that to be an indication of a failure of statelessness? | |
| What if, in the years following the overthrow of the government, an entire religious population in Somalia was declared an unlawful enemy combatant to be exterminated or driven from the state? | |
| Well, this occurred in 1838 with the Mormons. | |
| What if, what if 80 odd years after the collapse of the original Somali government, literally millions, over a million people were slaughtered in a civil war in Somalia? | |
| Would you say that was evidence of a failure of statelessness? | |
| What if it just got worse from there and 200 years, just to skip a whole bunch of other genocidal behaviors, 200 years after The establishment of a stateless society in Somalia, tens of millions of civilians In, | |
| say, Vietnam and Cambodia, were slaughtered by the dominant Somali warlord, and hundreds of thousands of Somalis were forced into this tribal gang of thugs and murderers, and hundreds of thousands of them were killed, millions of others were killed, the genocide was just staggering, unbelievable, and long-lasting. | |
| What if the dominant Somali warlord Carpet-bombed Agent Orange and other kinds of genocidal chemical warfare agents over another country, causing the deaths, of course, of hundreds of thousands of people and an entire generation or two of birth defects and mutations because of the accumulation of biologically hazardous and chemically hazardous material. | |
| What if this new warlord dropped more bombs on a tiny country like Vietnam than was dropped in all of World War II And pretty much decimated the entire country. | |
| Would you call that a failure of a state of society? | |
| So, it's really, really important Two things. | |
| Obviously, compare apples to apples, right? | |
| I mean, if you want to compare Somalia at the moment, you would compare it to what was going on in any kind of brutal transition of power. | |
| Not that Somalia was particularly brutal, but any brutal transition of power, you know, ten years afterwards, how does the country look? | |
| And the comparison, of course, is America in the 1780s, 1790s, early 2000s. | |
| Nineteenth century, and Somalia is doing a whole lot better than America was. | |
| It's not material that other countries are invading or supplying insurgents with arms and expertise. | |
| That is not a failure of a stateless society. | |
| That is a failure of statism, just as a cure for schizophrenia is not invalidated by attacks upon the cured victims. | |
| It just means that we should spread that cure wider. | |
| When you talk about the failures of a state, the society, it is very, very important to compare that To the failures of a statist society, such as the United States, and to look at your society from the outside rather than from the inside, | |
| right? Because you are a well-protected surf tax livestock who is left to be a free-range, career-choosing surf, and therefore is not radically interfered with, but outside the farm, The predators range far, wild and brutally throughout the world. | |
| Hundreds of military bases, overthrows of democratically elected foreign governments, genocides, murders, extraordinary renditions, tortures, detention camps and so on all run by your friendly local government in the United States. | |
| So, the important thing is to compare apples to apples. | |
| It's not a valid repudiation of the theory of a state of society that statist societies attack it, but rather, in a sense, it is a validation of it. | |
| But it's also important to really look at what status societies do, and not necessarily how they may protect your rights on occasion, but rather how they go and egregiously violate and slaughter innocent civilians throughout the world. | |
| So, with that having been said, I think that's enough to chew on for a while with regards to Somalia. | |
| And thank you so much for watching, of course. | |
| And I hope to see you in Nashua in early March 2009. | |
| And thank you so much for watching. |
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