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May 26, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:20
1367 Foreign Affairs Demo

A sample show about foreign affairs with a potential cohost.

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Hello, this is Stefan Molyneux from FreeDomainRadio at FreeDomainRadio.com.
This is a test possible feature on foreign affairs with Alexander Ramarisanti, who runs littlealexinwonderland.wordpress.com, who has been a friend of FreeDomainRadio for quite some time, and he was interested in doing some shows together on foreign affairs.
So we took it for a test drive, and please let me know what you think at host at FreeDomainRadio.com.
This is our conversation.
Now, as far as the Middle East stuff goes, I have done a little bit of work in that area, in the podcast, a pretty long time ago.
And I have it down as a topic I'd like to deal with, and so I think your expertise in this area would be great.
I mean, to me, it's the worst elements of statism and the worst elements of religion combining.
And the thing that...
I'll give you my two cents on it, and you can tell me whether it's anything you'd be interested in.
I mean, the Palestinian view, which is, why on earth have we been thrown out of our homes because Germans killed Jews?
You know, what on earth does that have...
I mean, that's like locking up a guy in New Hampshire because some guy in Kansas stole a car.
That makes no sense, right?
So the Palestinian view, which is, you know, give them part of Germany, give them part of Brazil, I think, offered up some land for Israel and so on.
But of course, the Jews, or I should say the Jewish leadership at the time, Ben-Gurion and so on, they all wanted to be in this particular spot.
Why?
Because of religious ideology, right?
Because of superstition.
And so even though I wouldn't necessarily say that the best thing to do would be to carve off part of Germany and give it to the Jews, it certainly would have been a more just solution rather than making the Palestinians pay for what the Germans did, which of course is completely irrational and only makes sense in the crazy world of religious imperatives.
So these kinds of problems arise because of the irrationalities of certain aspects of religiosity.
And you can't solve the problem as long as the religious impulse is that strong within the region.
Well, another point to add to that is that there's a difference between the Orthodox, the true hardcore Orthodox Jews and the political Zionists.
I mean, the political Zionists are the sects who, yes, wanted Israel there for, you know, they have their little religious reasons that they'll say on television and whatnot.
They'll say, this is a Jewish state, this is our holy land, we're the chosen people.
But it's also very convenient for these extremely powerful people, especially, I mean, you think back to 1948, you're talking about Basically the center of the world.
You're talking about a great trade route where Israel is located.
That's an amazing trade route from Southeast Asia, China, Russia, Europe to get to Africa and so forth.
So that's kind of the historical significance of that land.
The Knights Templar, during the Crusades, they privatized the roads and they were taxing people to use those roads and they were cashing in and the Catholic Church didn't like it.
So the Catholic Church went and they started beheading all the Templars.
But why did the Templars want that piece of land?
Because Israel, that land that we can now call Israel, that's kind of that X that marks the spot where every trade route goes through there.
That is interesting. I didn't know that.
So, sorry, go on. I mean, if you just look at a map, you see how rational it is to want to control that piece of land.
Historically speaking, we're thinking before...
Before the great advances that we have in, you know, sea navigation.
But still, I mean, if you're traveling by road.
But now, I mean, things are shipped in many different ways.
But there is that historical significance there as well.
And then you have the oil question.
You know, this is... 1948 was the time when...
That was kind of the beginning of the time when the oil conglomerates were...
Using state power, using protectionist powers to basically prop up dictators in the Middle East.
You know, I mean, you've probably heard of that study shortly after 9-11.
I mean, you've heard it probably a million times.
You know, they always say, they hate us for our freedoms.
They hate us for our freedoms. Well, I mean, you and I, we know that's not a fault.
We know that's a fault, right?
I mean, they don't hate us for our freedoms, they hate us because we're there, you know?
And it always comes back to they hate us because we're there if you want to get real with it.
If you really want to be real, if you actually want to poll the individual people, there's a pretty common consensus.
The main reason why, quote-unquote, they hate us is because you prop up the dictators who oppress them.
And a big part of that has been using the state of Israel as a military base.
It's a de facto military base.
You know, just about...
I mean, a lot of Israel-Palestine scholars can...
But you can even just look at the foreign aid numbers that go to Israel from the West and from the lobbies.
It has very little to do with Judaism.
Propaganda has a lot to do with Judaism.
Propaganda has a lot to do with Judaism.
That's where the religiosity comes in.
That's how it sells.
Let me just ask you something, and I really do appreciate what you're saying.
I think it's fantastic. I want you to keep going, because this is great stuff.
But when you say it doesn't have anything to do with Judaism, I mean, I'm certainly aware that America wants its military partner in the region, right?
And that would be obviously Israel, which gets billions of dollars of aid and weapons a year.
But would you say that the average Jew is...
Sort of using the cynical cover of culture or religion or, you know, Judaism has these sort of, it's a three-headed monster, right?
It's either culture or it's a race or it's a religion, depending on what it is you want to achieve.
That's why I say the religiosity of a propaganda tool.
It's the most powerful propaganda tool they have.
I mean, there was actually just a poll over the weekend.
51% of Israelis are in favor of attacking Iran, like right now.
Like, right now, they're in favor of attacking Iran right now.
Why? There's no, you know, the only...
But is that because, like, would you say that the average Jew is solidarity with my Jewish brethren, or is it, well, this is just a story we tell to the non-Jews so that we get what we want?
I mean, to what degree is the sort of cynical use of this kind of rhetoric, to what degree does it go into the average Jewish community?
Or is it mostly at the top, but the Jews underneath are saying...
Yes, I believe the rhetoric, not the geopolitical realities.
My personal opinion from observation, I would say that people are, that individual people are taking down the Kool-Aid.
They're taking down the Kool-Aid from the state leaders who have interests that have absolutely nothing to do with Judaism.
But it's very easy to mask, very easy to, how do I say this?
It's very easy to sell Getting into a war that's going to risk your brothers and sisters if you use religion.
It's very easy to sell...
Or tribalism or whatever kind, right?
Yeah. It's just easier to sell that when you have that moral story of God.
You say, God wants it this way.
You can't even talk to those people when they start bringing up God, right?
So it's just a very effective propaganda tool for people, individual people, the population of Israel who do have very strong faith, call it whatever it is, but in their heads they make decisions based on that faith.
But I don't think, I have no reason to believe, I should say, that the political leaders are making decisions based on the same sort of mystical faith.
Does that make any sense?
There's a separation between the classes.
The classes are making decisions for different reasons.
The political class is making decisions to keep themselves in power.
The intellectual class is, of course, making decisions so they can keep getting funded by the political class.
And then you have the sheeple.
They're just taking in what the intellectual and political class feeds them.
Using whatever emotional crutch they can to guide them in a certain direction.
Right, right, okay.
Now, it makes sense, and I obviously would not say this is specific to Judaism, but to all kinds of collectivism or tribalism or nationalism.
So, why do the—sorry, we're not picking on the Jews here, we're just looking at it in this context.
So, why do the—I mean, the intellectual or the political leaders want to attack Iran because, I would imagine, twofold, right?
A, it's perceived to be a threat because of its toying with the nuclear question.
And B, because it has fantastic natural resources.
It depends on who you're talking, the political class?
Yeah. Like, why do they want to, like, why are they trying to sell this war with Iraq?
The only reason on paper, you know, I mean, you can, again, they're going to bring up mystical propaganda, you know, they're an existential threat.
First off, Iran is not an existential threat.
There's nothing to prove that Iran is an existential threat outside of rhetoric from the political class in Israel and the United States.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has done snap inspections of Iran's facilities.
I think it's 14 in the last six years.
They've always come back with a clean bill of health.
Roger Cohen from the New York Times just interviewed the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency who said Iran wouldn't have a nuclear weapon two to five years tops.
But he also said that it would be insane, his words, insane, for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.
And that's for obvious reasons.
If they develop a nuclear weapon, they're going to get bombed, right?
Yeah, I mean, their ruling class wants to stay in power as much as everyone else, and a nuclear weapon doesn't help them do that.
No, it obliterates them.
Developing a nuclear weapon is suicide.
And Ahmadinejad said over the weekend that having nukes would be, quote, politically retarded.
So you can throw that, those are his words, politically retarded.
So you can throw that existential threat out the window.
So what else is left? A couple of years ago, this is around the axis of evil speech that George Bush let out.
Iran wanted to start selling oil on the euro and not the dollar.
Every time a country wants to start selling their oil on the euro and not the dollar, they become a terrorist.
The state that sponsors terrorism, they become an enemy, they enter an axis of evil.
That's what happened with Iraq and what happened with Venezuela, and that's what happened with Iraq.
Right, because Hussein was contemplating switching from one to the other, which is considered to be one of the reasons behind the invasion.
Is that fair to say? I mean, I've heard that.
I don't know the degree to which it's verified.
Again, it's the only reason it makes sense.
Because we know weapons of mass destruction didn't exist.
We know we don't give a crap about him killing his own people because he killed most of his people on the U.S. dime.
And after he was killing those people, the U.S. kept rewarding him.
Oh yeah, of course. He was used as the pawn against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s when the U.S. was arming both sides.
So yeah, I think we can all understand that.
If people really care about the health of the people...
Right, right. Okay, go on. I mean, yeah, I'm just saying when I see that these reasons that come out of people's mouths are inconsistent, it's kind of along the same reason that you use in your UPB book.
It's a way that I approach a lot of foreign affairs issues.
When a world leader says, we need to attack country X because they're doing Y, well...
Is this political leader doing Y? If they're doing Y, if it's wrong when X does it, but not wrong when I do it, then that can't be the real reason.
There has to be something else, right?
Because if Y is absolutely reprehensible, why are you doing it?
Yeah, which is Chomsky makes this argument over and over again, and it's perfectly valid, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's probably, that's actually where I, he actually calls it his form of International relations, moral relativism.
That's what Chomsky says over and over again.
But I take that same approach with Iran.
To get back to this Iran point, Iran is not an obedient Middle Eastern country.
Saudi Arabia is completely obedient.
One of the most brutal dictatorships in the world, Saudi Arabia.
They let the Western oil companies come on in and do whatever they want.
They manipulate the prices and they manipulate the dollar a little bit, you know, because they have to actually sell their oil on the dollar, right?
And they set the prices. But that's where a lot of oil is coming from for the rest of the world.
So they want to have oil being traded on the dollar.
Now Iran has a lot of resources, just not very good oil.
And The Saudi royal family actually wants to jack up the price of oil back up to $75, $80.
Venezuela wants to do the same thing.
Venezuela wanted up to $100 the last couple of months.
So Western oil companies are...
They want cheap oil.
They want cheap oil ASAP. But that can't happen if Iran's going to trade on the euro.
Because when the oil...
When it funnels through the euro, then...
Then the Euro, that makes a higher demand for the Euro.
Which, of course, you know, demand when it comes to currencies, and you've studied a bit with Austrian theory, when demand raises for one currency, it lowers the demand of another because they're all relative to each other.
So if there's a reason, if there's a true reason for Iran, the only one that makes sense at all, the only one that is at all consistent, the only one that is consistent with The actual nations involved with their interests.
It would be the petrodollar.
What you're saying illuminates something for me, which is great, which is that I've always had trouble understanding why the dollar hasn't fallen further than it has when the US government has like 60 to 70 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities and everyone gets that this deficit is lunatic and the system is unsustainable.
Why does the dollar have any traction in the world market?
And I think what you're saying, if I understand it, and correct me if I'm not, if I've got it wrong, what you're saying is that the U.S. dollar regains or keeps some portion of its traction because it is the petro currency, and if some of that were to switch to the euros, it could go into a kind of freefall.
Is that what you mean? It could go into a definite freefall.
And even China is pooling reserves with the Southeast Asian countries right now.
It said that Russia, actually, Vladimir Putin at the Davos, there was a World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, I believe it was February.
Vladimir Putin made a long speech, you can find a transcript on the Wall Street Journal, but he was saying that he suggested the world moving away from the dollar being the global currency.
He also suggested a gold standard.
Which, again, that kind of made me think, yeah, that made me go, huh?
You know, Vladimir Putin, this Mr.
KGB is advocating a gold standard?
Well, they've got some gold, right?
They have reportedly up to 60% of the world's gold is buried somewhere in Russia.
So, I mean, again, this is their national interest, but states are starting to realize that they can move away from the dollar, but if oil were taken away from the dollar, I mean, what's What's left?
And this, of course, sorry, this also explains something else.
This also explains something else for me, at least I think it does, and let me know if this is in the right ballpark.
The other question that I've sort of had is, why the hell is China still borrowing U.S. dollars when they know, even more so than many people in the U.S., what a financial basket case it is?
And, of course, China is a voracious consumer of oil, and they need to borrow the U.S. dollars in order to trade in petro-currency.
Is that... Part of what's driving that?
Yes and no.
Well, a lot of what China does is they buy a lot of the T-bills to bring in oil, but one thing that China's been doing is they've been exchanging arms for cheap oil in Africa.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the massacres in Africa for the last five to ten years have been pretty brutal.
I mean, you have A civil war in Congo that's been going on for, I don't know, I guess, like 12 or 13 years now.
Something like 6 million people have died.
Obviously, we've heard about the Darfur genocide, which has displaced something like 3 million people in Sudan.
Well, Sudan is a big oil producer.
China's been trading them small arms.
China and Russia, actually, have been trading Sudan's small arms for cheap oil.
For years and years and years, there was an embargo, and then a study came out last year that Russia and China were still trading small arms for oil.
The only thing is that China still has something like 1.3 billion people, so they can't get all of their oil from Africa.
They're still going to have to get it from places in the Middle East and Central Asia.
They do still need the dollar to buy oil.
No, but is there something else that's driving the...
I mean, Japan and China are two of the largest creditors of the United States.
And what is driving their decision-making?
I can't even come close to figuring that out because I don't have your training and expertise.
But what is driving them to continue to lend money to the U.S. government?
I mean, they can't imagine that they're going to get much of the interest, let alone the principal, back.
So what is that?
I couldn't tell you.
I mean, that's something for, you know...
I mean, that's something that people speculate.
Obviously, the conspiracy, let's go take it a step further with the conspiracy, you know, that China wants to make the yuan, Y-U-A-N, that's the Chinese currency, that they want that to be the global currency.
And that can happen.
Sorry, you said they wanted that to be the golden...
I just missed that second word....the global currency.
Global currency, yeah. Yeah, that all currencies in the world are based on the one.
Right. As opposed to right now being based on the dollar.
But how is borrowing the dollar?
How does borrowing the dollar? Now, obviously, if they, sorry, how does lending to the US government?
They buy treasury bonds.
Right. If they want to cash in those treasury bonds, there was a congressman who said on the floor a couple of months ago, the biggest The greatest weapon of mass destruction isn't a potential bomb in Iran, it's a banknote in China.
If they just want to cash in, start cashing in those treasury bonds, well then the U.S. couldn't print the money fast enough to pay it off.
Right. So the conspiracy theorists, again, this is what...
And this has actually even entered the mainstream, that one day China wants to sell their treasury bonds and the U.S. will say, well, we can't print the money for you.
And then China negotiates the world currency being the one.
And this isn't so fringe as it was.
I mean, this is kind of fringe, and I always kind of...
I took it with a grain of salt.
Years ago when I would hear people say it, but the Chinese premier has actually voiced concerns lately.
Publicly, it was in the New York Times a couple of months ago that he was concerned with America printing too much money.
There was an article in Telegraph today.
China is concerned with the Federal Reserve printing too much money, and they're kind of poisoning the well.
They're starting to poison the well on the U.S. dollar.
Which, like you're saying, you know, you were saying, why are...
Why is China and Japan, why are they still even playing with the dollar?
Why are they playing the game with the dollar when they can use other currencies, when they can boost up other currencies?
Why are they doing that? China's doing currency swaps with Argentina.
I've told you they're the small arms for oil trading in Africa.
They want to start pooling Southeast Asian reserves, all the islands and all that.
They can have stronger reserves so a dollar crash doesn't affect the crash of their currency.
These precautions are being taken.
How long these plans have been?
How long have these meetings been taking place?
How long has this rhetoric existed?
We really don't know.
But now it's coming to the mainstream.
I don't know.
Maybe in the end the conspiracy theorists are right and we see that China's motive For buying so many U.S. Treasury bonds has been that they knew that it would fail and that they would be the knight with shining armor with their currency.
That's a very cynical point of view, but I wouldn't say it's incredible at all.
Yeah, and I think it's important to remember that China looks upon, say, America as a young, retarded civilization, right, compared to the longevity of their own civilization.
They just look at America as, you know, an idiot preteen, you know, kind of thing, because it has not sustained itself relative to, you know, the length of the Chinese culture and civilization.
So I would not underestimate the Chinese overlords in terms of their intelligence and wisdom and cunning, I guess, in these areas.
Well, the political class of China is, I mean, it's...
You really can't compare it to too many other political classes.
You could probably then say the intellectual class as well.
Oh, they're genius. I mean, it's such a huge country to run.
The UN, since its inception, I know this was true as of 2007.
I don't know if I had followed any of the awards that came out in 2008, but between 1948 and 2007, China received the most public policy awards in the UN. Than any other country in the world.
Is that right? Wow. So, yeah, the international community definitely recognizes China's effective public policy.
Effective toward what objective?
You know, that's up for speculation, you know?
Right, right. I mean, you can only really say, and of course we're libertarians, so we're going to make the assumption that if the objective is strengthening the power of the state, yeah, China's going to receive a lot of awards, right?
I mean, that's the only objective, that's the only standard I can see for basing these awards, these very public, you know, these aren't closed doors or anything, these are public awards given out of the UN, so...
Well, I think, you know, one day...
In the eyes of the state of China has done very well.
Yeah, and, you know, the UN is not going to be impressed by basic things like One day of the economic engine growth based on mostly liberalized trade.
One day of China and India's economic growth lifts more people out of policy than the entire 40-year history of the welfare state, right?
So that, to me, is an enormously impressive thing that these states have done.
Yeah, definitely.
Or, as we would say, not done, right?
Which is to not interfere with the natural.
Yeah, taking a step back and Allowing for some sort of spontaneous sort of development.
I mean, I'm Indian, actually.
And I've been there many times.
My grandparents, everyone in my family who was born there, grew up there, will say that they would much rather live there now than 40, 50 years ago.
Oh, absolutely. And it's still, you know, it's still a very centralized state, but One difference with India and China, though, is that India has a bit more state power as opposed to federal power relative to China.
There's a bit more power in the States.
Of course, China is completely centralized.
Right. India evolved out of principalities, right?
So it's going to have more localized history.
Well, you still have, you know, anarchic villages.
So to speak, in India that are, you know, stateless, I guess I should say.
Not so much stateless on paper, but no one bothers me.
Right, right.
You know, just villages where...
I mean, that's actually the village where I'm from is like that.
I mean, you don't have... There are no governmental forces that come in.
In a neighboring village, of course, you know, the elders are the clerics.
They don't really crazy, you know, religious type of Sharia law I guess you'd call them cooperatives.
They'd be similar to communes or cooperatives, except the state doesn't really get into their mess.
But you do have diverse economic structures, diverse levels of urbanization in India, and some of which are voluntary, some of which are not.
I mean, just like any time a state quote-unquote liberalizes the economy, You do have public-private partnerships that step on the poor.
Those obviously exist as well.
But that's a big part of state power.
It's very convenient that when the state, quote-unquote, liberalizes the economy, they still have to have that partnership with the private sector that they're, you know, quote, giving power to or whatever.
Yeah, well, if you want to keep it, you've got to lock it off.
Otherwise, we're going to take it away.
Oh, sure, yeah. First and foremost, you have to keep us happy.
I mean, Venezuela, the only difference, really, between Hugo Chavez and a lot of these other desk businesses, he just does it outright.
If a private industry doesn't want to kiss his ass, he just takes it away.
He's putting pressure on a private media company right now.
He just... Just nationalized, I think, the third biggest bank in Venezuela.
Yeah, so it's, you know, it's kiss my ass or I'm just going to take it all.
Otherwise, you know, it's kiss our ass or we're going to tax you for something, some little business practice that you do.
And then, of course, the smaller businesses that use these same practices, there's nothing immoral about them.
They're just going to get wiped out because they can't cover the overhead.
Right, right. Now, let me ask you something else, and I don't want to take your whole day up, but you're a very good fount of wisdom and knowledge in these areas.
If you had to put your prognosticator's hat on and look at the next five to ten years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, what do you think you would see?
That's... Iraq is a real clusterfuck.
I mean... I love it when you use these technical Latin terms.
It is. It's an entire clusterfuck.
There's so many factions within Iraq, and it's not just the tribes, the Sunnis, the Shias.
You have your country people, you have your city people, you have your oil people, just like any other country.
There are a lot of different factions, many different interests among many different groups of people, among many different individuals within those groups.
And add on top of that, an occupier.
You know? I mean, how do you predict that?
You know? I mean, if you're asking will the occupation still be there, you know, will the U.S. occupation still exist?
I don't see why it wouldn't exist.
And as long as... Yeah, 10 years, they're still going to be there.
I mean, they're building these monster permanent bases.
I mean, they're still in Japan 60-plus years after the Congress.
They're still in Germany 60-plus years after.
They're still going to be there. They're like...
They're like burrs. They're like sticky things, right?
You know, you can invite them in, but you can't...
Well, they won't even invite it in, but you just can't get them out once they're in.
Well, this kind of goes into my point.
I mean, as long as the occupation exists, there's going to be an embossing.
Take North Korea, for example.
North Korea just conducted some nuclear tests underground.
North Korea isn't going to attack anyone with a nuclear weapon.
They have something like 10 to 15.
Those are the very liberal estimates of North Korea's nuclear arsenal.
But why is it a big deal?
To ask a better question, why does North Korea give a crap about having a nuclear weapon at all?
It's because the US is occupying bases in South Korea.
So as long as there's an occupation in Iraq, You're going to have some jingoistic rhetoric and jingoistic research programs, jingoistic-looking research programs, out of the neighboring countries because they're going to be threatened.
And within the country itself, you're going to have villages up in arms.
You're going to have militias develop.
You're going to have political factions who want to overthrow the ones who are enabling the occupiers.
So as long as that occupation exists, you're going to have turmoil.
It's difficult for Well, not foreign occupiers, at least.
I mean, there's resistance to domestic occupiers.
There's always going to be resistance to domestic occupiers.
Imagine foreign occupiers.
So to really put on a prognosticating hat, it's It really depends on how people react to the agitation, and I don't see how it can be good.
Yeah, I mean, the one thing that I've noticed with, one of the things that I've noticed with statism is that when you put a violent structure around any particular problem, what happens is you kind of freeze it in time, To take a silly example, but it's actually quite relevant, public education was taken over by the government in sort of the mid to late 19th century throughout most of the West.
And then it kind of froze in time, right?
So you got people with 40 kids in a classroom, a chalkboard, and chalk, and that's how they instructed the mid to late 19th century.
Fast forward 100, 120 years, they're still doing it the same way, despite the immense changes in everything else.
And What happens?
Many demands for better education.
Right, right. And if you look at what's happened with the welfare state, right?
I mean, the number of poor people were declining until the welfare state came in, and then it froze, right?
Just got stuck there. Because it's like a time stop spell in some old Dungeons and Dragons metaphor, right?
It's like a time stop spell.
What happens is things just freeze, right?
And so if you look at religiosity in the Soviet Union, it was declining up until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
And then it just kind of froze.
It didn't get better. It didn't really get worse.
It just kind of went underground. And then when the violence is taken away, everything just kind of starts again, you know?
It's like the Sleeping Beauty thing, you know?
It goes to sleep. And regarding Iraq, you kind of articulate my point a lot better.
When you say there's going to be a war on something, whether it's a war on illiteracy, a war on drugs, a war on crime, you're just going to either create more drugs, crime, terrorism, illiteracy, or it's just going to stand still.
Yeah, you can't wage a war on an adjective, right?
It's not like you're shooting a dictionary.
There's only ever a war on people, right?
I love all these metaphors, right?
It's always a war on people, and not even an adjective.
I mean, drugs. Just take drugs.
That's a physical object.
You want to destroy the world of drugs.
Well, we know that's false. A, you can't do it.
B, as long as you try to do it, there are going to be organizations that understand it's very profitable to try to get away with it.
Right. Black market. So anytime there's a war on something, so as long as the occupation exists, you're going to see death and destruction.
Right, and I think it's going to...
Yeah, and I think, so I think if we look sort of, I would put my little hat on, right?
You're more cautious because you're more knowledgeable.
I just put my hat on anywhere.
You have enough knowledge to know that it's more complex than I think it is.
But, I mean, to me, probably the most accurate answer is that it's going to be pretty much the same in 10 years as it is now because society stops when a huge blanket of force descends upon it.
Everything becomes so claustrophobic and constipated that there is no natural progress possible.
It's like expecting animals in a zoo to evolve, right?
They just don't because the whole impetus for evolution is not present because everything is so controlled in the environment.
So I think it's like a freeze time and it's going to be pretty much the same in 10 years, in 50 years or until it stops, right?
Yeah. I mean, India, sorry, the other example would be that India, under the rule of the British, under the Raj, The standard of living for the average Indian for the hundred years up until independence was almost the same and declined a little bit.
There was no progress on the economic sphere for the average Indian because everything just gets frozen in time when you get this big blanket of force over a country.
Well, the Indian Revolution, which is why I don't completely rule out the possibility of...
Like I said with Iraq, who really knows?
We want to prognosticate.
Who really knows? But...
The Indian Revolution is an extremely unique revolution.
It's an extremely unique revolution where people just decide to stop working for their dustbin.
I mean, you'd say they created another state and started working for that dustbin, but they wanted the British out of there to stop working for them.
And they've done better since the British were gone.
Yeah, definitely. They went from, you know, kind of an absolute slavery to just, they just stopped working for the Bostons.
Right. And it worked.
Yeah, no, they've made great progress since dumping the Brits.
And this, of course, is what I think is going to be different with the United States.
I mean, the argument could be made, and I think it's a pretty good argument, though I'm not saying it's conclusive, the argument could be made that the reason why India was able to do what it did was because England broke itself in two during the First and Second World Wars and lacked the martial will and the resources to continue to dominate an empire.
And of course, if the American dollar, which fuels, you know, it is the petrodollar, but in many ways it's also the dollar of international arms trade.
If the American dollar goes into a freefall as a result of a lack of funding from other governments, Then the iron grip of the American dictatorships around the world will inevitably relax significantly in the same way that, you know, the French, the British, the Germans, the, you know, the Dutch, right?
So when the domestic economy is broken, as is the case with Russia in Afghanistan in the 80s, when the domestic economy breaks, the rule of violence localizes itself where it's usually there's some better chance of progress.
And so I think that that could occur if the U.S. I mean, that's the big variable, I think, which will occur in Iraq is if the U.S. dollar breaks or the U.S. economy breaks, which of course is the goal of Al-Qaeda, it's what they're doing, it's why they're doing what they're doing, then there will be a change in Iraq and things will start up again.
The occupation would be unaffordable.
I mean, it would be impossible. Right.
Imperialism is a net negative except for certain small sectors, right?
Yes. But I'm actually going to get going to a neighbor's barbecue in a minute.
Alright, well listen, I appreciate the conversation.
I found it very interesting.
Is this the kind of thing that you would like to...
Is this the kind of thing that you were talking about?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, anytime you want to, you know, do a segment on a certain issue, you can just send me an email on the issue and, you know, we could set a time within, you know, 24 hours of that email or whatever.
Wait, you're assuming the shows are going to be less than 24 hours long, but I think we can assume that.
Listen, can you get, and I'm happy to send you the PayPal for it if you don't have it or have the money, if you could get a webcam, then I have a sort of dual screen recording software that allows us to have that.
Okay, I just need to pick up a new one.
Mine just prepped out on me earlier last week or something.
Okay, we'll get one of those.
Okay. Let's have a conversation that way so that we can also post it as a video because that's quite a popular way of getting this kind of information out as well.
Okay. All right.
Well, have a great barbecue, man. Thanks for the chat.
Nice chatting with you, too. I appreciate it.
All right. Great talking with you, Stephen.
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