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Feb. 24, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:10
1286 True News 22 - 9/11

Thoughts on the prosecution of state crimes, with reference to 9/11.

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Good day, everybody. I hope you're doing very well.
This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web.
And in response to a fair flurry of listener questions and watcher questions, I'm going to share some thoughts on 9-11, government involvement, truth or conspiracy theories, and so on.
Now, My history is that I was introduced to the topic of US government involvement or the fabrications perhaps involved in the official or media stories of 9-11 a couple of years ago.
I looked into them. I read some of the evidence on this show.
Obviously, as an empirical rationalist, I can't Say the truth of the matter where the evidence is contradictory and inconclusive, and so I put forward the information, and this drew a number of truthers to me, and we had some chats back and forth,
and I haven't dealt with the topic in a long time, but since there's some question about, you know, whether I have anything of value to offer, I thought I would share a few thoughts, and you could tell me whether I have anything of value to offer, so...
I don't possess the technical engineering skills to assess what the evidence of the videos and the this and the that and the stress and the temperature of the gasoline.
I mean, I don't know. Plus, of course, the evidence is all gone, right?
I mean, the towers are down.
It's all been melted down.
It's all been broken up. It's all vanished, right?
There's nothing left to examine.
We just have what seems to be contradictory and inconclusive stuff.
And I did read, you may want to Google this, in Skeptic Magazine, there was a very good article on 9-11 claims, the truth of claims and rebuttals to them and so on, which I found to be very convincing.
So, again, I'm not saying it's impossible that the U.S. government was involved or had for knowledge or planted or planned or I don't know, but I certainly would not put much stock in that position.
That having been said, and before you all bury me with statistics and data, I still believe that I have strong common cause with the truthers and can even offer them a way to get what they want Without going through the difficulty of trying to convince an indoctrinated and sceptical population using inconclusive and contradictory evidence,
requiring a great deal of technical knowledge and no ability to use first-hand information because the evidence is all terse.
I also found myself, and I'll get to that in a sec, when I was interacting with truthers, and I'm not saying this is true of all truthers, but my experience was that they sort of put forward these obviously somewhat wild claims, just as self-evident, right?
Then this inclusive evidence is produced, and when you question the evidence or provide counterexamples, they seem to get kind of angry.
And that is not a very comforting sight.
That doesn't really help people to accept difficult The opposite of what they've been propagandized to believe.
If you really want to help people to understand a radical viewpoint, you have to, first of all, understand that it's radical, that they're going to be skeptical, that the burden of proof is upon you, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and to build your case slowly and, of course, to not get angry at people who question you, because that is a sure sign of intellectual immaturity and defensiveness.
So, that's not a good approach.
That's just sort of my tips as somebody who's been forwarding certain radical ideas for, I guess, about a quarter century now.
The burden of proof is on you, right?
I mean, if I'm going to say we should have a state of society, the burden of proof is on me, and I can't get angry at people who question that because it's a very unusual position.
And, I mean, I can get angry, but I'm just completely shooting myself in the foot.
As regards to what my core goal is, which is to spread reason and peace throughout the world as best as I can.
So, what is the thesis of the truthers?
Well, it is that the government is both capable of and executes murder on a grand scale, that the government is capable of cover-ups, that the media is complicit in the crimes and so on, and the media participates in the cover-up and so on.
And that is important to understand, right?
I mean, if you've got a guy you're prosecuting for murder, and he's committed a couple of hundred murders, how many murders do you need to prove in order to convict him?
Well, really not that many.
So let's take this parallel.
There's some serial killer named Bob, and we are the lawyers for the prosecution, to prosecute this Bob the murderer.
And let's say that Bob has signed a confession to killing 300 people.
You know, with his bare hands, he has killed 300 people.
And let's say we're the prosecuting attorneys, and let's say we go in and he pleads not guilty or whatever.
Let's say he's crazy, right?
Now, if I say in my opening speech to the court, Well, Your Honor, I am going to begin prosecuting Bob, for whom we have signed confessions for 300 murders and absolute clear evidence, his DNA, fingerprints, smoking guns, whatever, right?
Semen on the blue dress, whatever you want, right?
It's open and shut. We've got video, we've got eyewitnesses, we've got everything, right?
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to solely focus in my prosecution on trying to prove that Bob was the lone gunman on the grassy knoll who shot JFK. I'm not going to focus on these other murders.
I'm not going to focus on the signed confessions.
I'm not going to focus on all of the perfect video smoking gun evidence.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to attempt to prove that Bob was involved in the JFK shooting.
Well, what would the judge say?
The judge would hold up his hand and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
Listen, Whitey, you have signed confessions for hundreds of murders, you have all the evidence that you need to prosecute, so why on earth are you trying to prosecute some obscure murder without any conclusive evidence?
What can I say to that?
It would be kind of nutty, a nutty approach to take.
Because surely, if we are the prosecution, we should go with the strongest possible case up front, right?
We don't wait till later, right?
Especially because of, you know, double jeopardy and so on, right?
So, if when we are trying to establish The thesis, or prove the thesis, that the U.S. government or governments as a whole are capable of murder on a grand scale and cover-ups in the media and this and that, if we are interested in that thesis and proving that thesis.
But we start with 9-11.
We're kind of implicitly saying that that's the best case we have.
But how can that be?
How could it conceivably be that to prove the thesis of government murder and cover-ups and so on, that we would need to start with 9-11?
That's not even in the top 500 of things that we would start with, in my opinion, when it comes to looking at empirical evidence of the immorality of certain aspects of statism.
I mean, as I believe, statism is the initiation of force.
The government is an agency that initiates force, and therefore it's immoral by definition.
But if you want to go with empirical evidence, you wouldn't even find 9-11 that's the top 500 of the prosecutions, right?
For instance, right? American casualties in Vietnam, 211,471.
Vietnamese casualties, 561,719.
One person every two days is killed by unexploded U.S. ordinance in Laos.
It will take another 100 years to clear Laos of all of the unexploded U.S. ordinance.
Just up until 1993, there were 234 instances in which the United States used its armed forces abroad in situations of conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacekeeping purposes, this does not even count, covert operations.
Some of the greatest hits.
Again, you can find this stuff on the web.
I'll put the links off to the right-hand side here.
1898 US government seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain.
In 1917-1918 became embroiled in World War I. Over 100,000 US servicemen slaughtered.
First half of the 20th century sent Marines to protectorates, such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
There have been covert US military operations in Africa, South America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is a death toll in the tens of millions.
Tens of millions.
There are two million American citizens in what can only be described as the torture cells of modern state prisons, more than half for nonviolent, quote, crimes that are simply imaginary, like having a particular piece of vegetation in your possession.
Now, this is just a tiny, tiny, you know, tip of the iceberg stuff, although the body count is absolutely horrendous.
This is all undisputed.
This is all undisputed.
Nobody claims that the U.S. did not slaughter millions of people in Cambodia and Vietnam in the 60s and 70s.
Nobody claims that there aren't millions of Americans in jail.
Nobody claims that there weren't covert operations in Iran in the 50s, in Nicaragua in the 70s, in the 60s, in other Latin American countries that the U.S. was not.
Propping up dictators all over the world does not continue to prop up dictatorships all over the world, does not sell Arms all over the world is not the biggest arms dealer in the world, all of which is criminal and genocidal activity that the US doesn't send troops in where no countries have ever threatened the United States.
And the list is literally pages long of these kinds of interventions.
These are all undisputed.
They are admitted to.
They're in the history books. There's documentation.
There's no doubt. You don't need esoteric knowledge of core steel temperatures and trusses and impact sites.
I mean, this is all... Public, common, easy, accepted, non-controversial knowledge.
And, I mean, come on, people, what about Iraq?
We've got millions have fled the country.
Over 100,000 have been slaughtered like rabbit dogs of Iraqis in a war without a shred of legal or moral justification that violates the international law of aggression and is a war crime and a genocide by definition.
It's sold through fear-mongering and over 900 documented lies and falsehoods about the causes and starting of the war.
And why are over 100,000 Iraqi lives not that important relative to the 3,000 or so who died in the Twin Towers?
Why? It seems a little bit Non-empathetic to the value of human life in Iraq to say, well, we're going to focus on the government involvement in the deaths of Americans on 9-11 than the clear and unambiguously immoral genocide of the Iraqis, to just mention one genocide among many.
I mean, if it's only Americans that you care about, well, thousands and thousands of Americans have died, and I think more than 10,000 or 15,000 have been injured or killed through non-combat situations in Iraq.
This is Clear, the government is capable of murder, the government is capable of cover-ups, which was the entire modus operandi of the lead-up to the Iraq war.
Lies and falsehoods and smears and hysteria and smoking guns and mushroom clouds and all this kind of nonsense.
Whereas the government says, it's all proven.
It's all proven. You do not need to bring an ambiguous 301st body to our mass murderer's prosecution to put him away.
You do not need to make the case based on 9-11.
In fact, I would strongly suggest that making the case against the immoralities of, say, the US government based on a focus on 9-11 It's actually kind of like a defense of the US government,
because it confuses, it throws a lot of smoke up, it discredits those who morally criticize the government by lumping them in with a certain cadre of people who seem to be kind of volatile and immune to rational criticism or There's counter evidence and so on, right? There's some tinfoil people, but not all, right?
But we all get lumped into that, right?
So the more you go out, ah, 9-11, no evidence, getting angry, getting irritated, coming up with all this stuff, and oh, they pulled the buildings, and this means that, and building seven, and building whatever, six.
The more you do that kind of stuff, the more it makes it harder for those of us who have a clear and empirically validated and proven and documented and accepted moral case against The evils of statism, right?
So it's sort of like if you hear about, you know, Charles Manson or whatever and you're the prosecution and you say, well, what we're really going to go after with Charles Manson is we're going to completely bypass and ignore all the bodies that his cult produced and we're going to focus on a hotly disputed parking ticket.
Well, that really is bypassing and ignoring all of the major and proven crimes for the sake of an unproven and minor crime relative to the body counts So, if it would actually be an action of the defense, right, to go back to Bob the serial killer with his 300 signed confessions,
the defense would attempt to throw up the smokescreen of, well, there's this one controversial possible murder in JFK, grassy knoll, and it would be a big smokescreen job which would confuse and bewilder and help everyone forget The 300 signed confessions, right?
So it's kind of not an attack upon the state to focus on this kind of hotly disputed, no evidence, no evidence possible kind of crime.
Not no evidence, but no compelling or conclusive or closed evidence.
You're kind of defending the state when you attack it based on 9-11.
That's what I'm trying to get at.
And so stop doing that, right?
You don't need to. You can prove the immorality of the state, capable of murder and cover-ups, complicity of the media.
You don't need to go to 9-11.
There's all of this other stuff which will allow you to over-evolve that and make the case.
Clearly, you don't need to come up with a hazy and fuzzy 301st body when there are 300 signed confessions already.
And, you know, last but not least, I mean, a lot of the people who are truthers, if you're a truther, and I'm sorry if this is offensive to you, but these are just my perspectives, right?
I'm not saying anything's proven here, right?
These are my perspectives. But, I mean, y'all are smart, right?
Y'all are well-read and curious and, you know, often have great language skills and good debating skills.
I mean, man, you know, use your abilities in something that's actually going to gain traction.
I mean, you read Day of Deceit, I mean, FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance, and the Bay of Tonkin was made up, and, you know, all the wars that the, read The War Racket by Harry Brown, the late Harry Brown.
All the lies, the government gets into these genocidal murder situations, all based on lies and propaganda and slander and falsehoods and cover-ups.
I mean, you just don't need to get involved in 9-11 to make the case.
And if you took all the energy that people poured into the JFK assassination and the RFK assassination, all the other conspiracy theories that float around, you just don't need them.
They are a complete distraction from the core case against the state, which is twofold, in my opinion.
The first is that The government is, by definition, a group of individuals who claim the moral right to initiate the use of force against usually legally disarmed citizens in a specific geographical area, and two, that there is evidence of democide all over the world from states.
They are one of the largest killers of mankind as governments, right?
You have 160 to 250 million citizens killed by governments outside of war in the 20th century alone.
I mean, you just don't need to add Another hazy parking ticket to the long line of genocidal crimes in order to close the case.
In fact, starting with that kills the case.
So if you want to get the state, focus on that, which is already accepted, and stop focusing on the stuff that is controversial and alienating to people.
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