1341 True News 35 - Obama and the Torture of Logic
Sadly, in a statist world, this is called 'progress'...
April 27, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:13
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope that you're doing very well. | |
| This is a short tour of the tangled, nihilistic, twisted, brain-deadening mess of US policy with regards to torture. | |
| And just a note to begin with, I think it's interesting. | |
| If you ever want to know... | |
| What the government is actually doing, what you want to do is look at the moral behavior or the immoral behavior that it is most vociferously and violently condemning in others, and that's a pretty sure guarantee that that is what the government is actually up to. | |
| You know, like those priests who denounce homosexuality. | |
| The more vociferous the denunciation of homosexuality, the more you know. | |
| Well, anyway. So, for instance, out of Truthout, we have the Bush administration's stunning Geneva hypocrisy. | |
| I agree with everything except the use of the word stunning, which is entirely inappropriate. | |
| While making allegations of Geneva Conventions abuses by Saddam's troops in Iraq, Bush administration officials like Donald Rumsfeld were authorizing violations of the Geneva Conventions. | |
| See, this is what I mean. If you want to know what the government is up to, look at the immoral behavior they're most viciously condemning in others, and that's what they're actually doing themselves. | |
| Newly released U.S. government documents detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Convention's protections of war captives stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq war when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers. | |
| Quote, If there is somebody captured, President George W. Bush told reporters, On March 23rd, 2003, I expect those people to be treated humanely. | |
| If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as, wait for it, war criminals. | |
| Can you imagine? Donald Rumsfeld said, sorry, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clark, who has no secrets, says, It is a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention to humiliate and abuse prisoners of war or to harm them in any way. | |
| As President Bush said yesterday, those who harm... | |
| P.O.W.s will be found and punished as war criminals, she said in March 24, 2003. | |
| The same way Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, great war name, told BBC that, quote, the Geneva Convention is very clear on the rules for treating prisoners. | |
| They're not supposed to be tortured or abused. | |
| They're not supposed to be intimidated. They're not supposed to be made public displays of humiliation or insult. | |
| And we're going to be in a position to hold those Iraqi officials who are mistreating our prisoners accountable. | |
| And they've got to stop. | |
| Anyway, I'll put the link to this as usual after the write. | |
| And Obama has come out, he has released these memos, and actually it was because of a lawsuit that the memos were released. | |
| And of course the people involved and the names were blacked out. | |
| Because, you know, the government's all about democratic accountability, right? | |
| And he said, well, you see, but we must look to the future. | |
| Look, come with me. | |
| Let us go and look at the future rather than the past, right? | |
| And that, of course, is a rather remarkable statement. | |
| First of all, I mean, it just tells you the level of intellectual discourse that's going on in America. | |
| This guy is supposed to be a professor of constitutional law. | |
| And the best legal argument he can come up with for not prosecuting murderous and torturous war criminals is, look to the future! | |
| Look to the future! I mean, what is he, trying to sell you a 401k plan? | |
| Anyway, so it's completely mad, right, to say look to the future. | |
| There's two aspects to law, of course, and this is not my argument, this is just a general argument. | |
| There's two aspects to law. | |
| We punish people who steal for the act of stealing in the past, but also so people won't steal in the future. | |
| The future is at least half the efficacy and purpose of the law of any kind of punishment for wrongdoing. | |
| You see, it's not so much that we just want to throw these jerks in jail, which is where they should be, But we want to make sure that in the future, people think twice before authorizing and committing torture. | |
| So when you say, let's think about the future, that's exactly why you would want to prosecute these people in the past, right? | |
| So that you can alter the decision points of people in the future. | |
| So, but again, this is like, what is he, like, taking a, he's got a PhD in bad manipulative mom guilt tactics. | |
| He's like, well, let's not throw blame around. | |
| Let's just move on, everybody. | |
| Shh. Right? | |
| I mean, it's ridiculous. | |
| It's Queen Victoria at a tea party, quote, ethics, right? | |
| But I think it's important to recognize that there's a huge degree of progress here. | |
| This is what counts for progress in a state of society, and I think it's important to look at. | |
| In the Civil War, about 600,000 Americans were slaughtered for the sake of political disagreements or the desire for the federal government to impose taxes. | |
| In the First World War, and the 30,000 people, if I remember the figure rightly, We're thrown in jail for disagreeing with the conscription or for disagreeing with the Civil War. | |
| In the First World War, tens of thousands of people simply refused to show up for the draft, and thousands of people were thrown in jail. | |
| In the First World War, Eugene Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party—I'm not a socialist, but you let people disagree, right? | |
| Was in jail for 10 years, and I think he either died in jail or was finally released because he was gravely ill to die outside of jail. | |
| And that's pretty impressive. | |
| Of course, in the Second World War, tens of thousands of people were deported, thrown into internment camps and so on. | |
| And then, of course, I mean, this is the insanity of every legal system, but we'll just talk about the American one at the moment, that... | |
| Kennedy was not prosecuted for getting involved in Vietnam or for the Bay of Pigs, a fiasco. | |
| Nixon, I mean this is the insanity, right? | |
| Nixon He continued and escalated a war which killed, slaughtered, murdered literally millions of people in Southeast Asia. | |
| Millions of people in Southeast Asia. | |
| He is synonymous with Hitler in Southeast Asia. | |
| In Cambodia, in Vietnam and other countries. | |
| And this, of course, Vietnam had done nothing to threaten the United States. | |
| There were no weapons of mass destruction in Vietnam. | |
| And yet the U.S. dropped more bombs on Vietnam, a relatively small country, than were dropped throughout the entire course of the Second World War. | |
| Sprated with Agent Orange, there's still mutations, birth defects, still areas that are uninhabitable even decades later, or decades later. | |
| Now, Nixon did all of this and what was he prosecuted for? | |
| A potential involvement in a third-rate burglary attempt to get some secrets from someone in the Democratic Party or some secrets of the Democratic Party in a hotel. | |
| But you understand, you can authorize, execute the deaths of millions of people and nobody really cares, right? | |
| Because the war protests stopped as soon as the draft was ended in the first round and as soon as the war ended. | |
| And nobody continued to prosecute, you know, Nixon and Kissinger for war crimes, which, of course, is what they had actually committed. | |
| And then, of course, Nixon was, well, prosecuted for or the investigation was building for Watergate. | |
| He quit and then Gerald Ford stepped in. | |
| Tripped and pardoned him. | |
| And this, of course, is why we have these continuing escalations and brutalizations of executive power, right? | |
| Because the future is built upon the moral decisions of the past, right? | |
| A one degree change, like a 2,000 mile A sea journey, a one degree change in your navigation, ends you up on a completely different continent sometimes. | |
| And when you don't address, redress the crimes of the past, you lose all moral credibility, right? | |
| I mean, imagine, you call up, you just don't pay your taxes, right? | |
| And you get your call from the IRS and you call them back and you say, no, no, no, you misunderstand. | |
| President Obama says we need to look to the future and not to the past. | |
| So forget about prosecuting me for any non-payment of taxes. | |
| Let's look to the future, and let's see if I pay them in the future, and if I don't, don't worry, because then it will have been the past, and we can look to the future again, so you never have to prosecute me for any non-payment of taxes. | |
| Or, if you are caught with some sort of vegetation, mind-altering vegetation in your pocket, you get to the court, you say, no, no, no, see, President Barack Obama has said, we need to look to the future, so let's see if I do drugs in the future, let's not worry about whether I did them in the past, right? Because that's The finely honed constitutional legal mind of Barack Obama has said, we don't worry about the crimes of the past. | |
| We only look to the future in some sort of nefarious and nebulous kumbaya grapple hippie hug method. | |
| So it is actually kind of a weird state of progress that instead of killing millions of people through its foreign policy, the United States has taken that down to, you know, a couple hundred thousand, displacing, you know, five to seven hundred thousand more. | |
| Shockingly, that is, in the statist world, what we call progress. | |
| And at least memos are being released, even if they are under a lawsuit. | |
| And yes, the crimes are not being prosecuted, but at least they're being openly identified as crimes, right? | |
| Because I don't remember Ford talking about the war crimes of Nixon or of Kissinger or of the other people who were involved. | |
| At that level in the Nixon administration and in the Kennedy administration. | |
| So at least, I mean, of course, there's no prosecution, right? | |
| Because America is still too full of sociopaths to prosecute for war crimes. | |
| It would trigger too much of a political reaction. | |
| But at least they're openly being called war crimes, and at least the death count has been reduced by a factor of, you know, 10 or so, or 5. | |
| And that, shockingly, in a state of society, can be called a progress. | |
| So I just wanted to sort of put these thoughts out there. | |
| Of course, it's completely ridiculous for the government to hold any kind of moral standard up, right? | |
| As I was saying earlier, if you want to know what the government is up to, look at what they're condemning, right? | |
| Barack Obama condemns greed on Wall Street at the same time As ripping off the American public to pay off his friends in Wall Street who are greedy, right? | |
| So he's damning greed at the same time as he is pursuing and rewarding greed, right? | |
| So if you want to know what the government is doing, look at that which it is most publicly condemning, and I guarantee you that is the best and first place to start when it comes to figuring out the current crimes. | |
| Just look past the din of the protestations of virtue for the seedy underbelly of vice, which they almost always Thank you so much for watching. | |
| As always, I look forward to your donations. |
Export Selection