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June 8, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:58
1677 The Death of the West Part 1: Prehistory to World War One (audio to a video)

Why and when the free West died... The roots of the century of genocide.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is going to be a lengthy and in-depth prehistory and history of the First World War.
And why am I focusing on the First World War?
Well, the First World War was the death of of the West in the way that the West had developed from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, into the Age of Reason and the age of a relatively free society, relatively free market throughout the 19th century.
It marked the end of the first century of unprecedented peace Within Western Europe from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 until the outbreak of pan-European hostilities, pan-global hostilities in 1914, Europe, at least Western Europe, was substantially at peace for the first time in its history.
The First World War destroyed almost to the last dollar All of the wealth that had been generated and created through the Industrial Revolution, and of course the amount of suffering that occurred to generate that wealth was enormous, but it was of course even more dwarfed by the suffering of the First World War.
The First World War ushered in modern governments, governments as we understand them correctly.
The governments of the 19th century, and I recognize and fully accept that there are massive problems with overseas actions of the governments, with the imperialism that was going on around the world, and we will get to that in this conversation.
But domestically, governments were largely what is called the night watchman state.
And that is a state that is primarily concerned with the protection of property and human life.
It is not proactive.
It doesn't go out with major missions, at least for most of the 19th century.
What it does is it waits for people to come and complain, and then it leaps into action to more or less create a restitution environment or a punishing environment.
So... For instance, you could take any drugs that you wanted in the 19th century.
There was private currency in the 19th century.
There was no prohibition.
There was no state-sponsored welfare state.
There were friendly societies and many, many private institutions for helping people in genuine need.
But the government was reactive generally, not proactive.
So a proactive government says, well, I need to go and solve the problem of poverty and of drug use, and I need to go and make The world's safe for democracy, and I need to go and help everybody overseas, and I need to educate the young, and I need to pay for the old in terms of pensions.
That's a very proactive state.
But that all came about because of the First World War.
The First World War was a complete turning point.
It was less than 100 years ago, today, 2010.
And it marked the end of the West, as it had been developing really from the 14th and 15th centuries.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, and sometimes a little bit earlier, some significant advances began to throw off the inky blackness of the Dark Ages.
So a shoulder harness was invented for horses, which allowed them, oxen, which allowed them to pull that much more.
Winter crops were introduced, turnips and so on, and agricultural productivity rose enormously, which allowed cities to develop.
With the development of cities came an increase in interest in Roman law.
The discovery of Roman law led to an increased interest in Roman philosophy, particularly Aristotle, who was non-Christian, of course, and secular and not a Platonic influence.
In fact, for most of the later Middle Ages, Aristotle was so popular, he was simply called the philosopher.
And there was no other that was of any particular import.
This, in turn, led to improved parenting standards, lower infanticide, less wet nursing, weaning out of children to be raised by strangers, the rise of the modern family, the development of science in the 15th and 16th centuries through Francis Bacon and others, the questioning of religious faith, the growing secularization and atheism within society.
You're not told this, but it's a really important fact.
The 19th century was just about the most atheist or unbelieving in superstition or religion a century that ever existed in the history of the world.
There was great skepticism when it came to state power.
There was great skepticism when they came to religion.
Most of the founding fathers were deists or atheists.
And it was this lack of superstition that we really can't remember now.
We've come so far down the other road of believing in a social collective, of believing in social contracts and believing that we are children or sheep to be herded around by our benevolent political or religious masters.
We really can't remember what it was like in the 19th century.
The 19th century, of course, had its share of problems, racism, sexism, a comparative lack of regard to the modern age, to the rights of children.
All of these are absolutely fair criticisms.
But it's really important to understand that the Renaissance, particularly the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, were all rebellions against What had been close to a half century of genocidal war, I mean, 300 years of a genocidal domestic wars of religion within Europe.
Germany missed out on the Enlightenment completely because it was being rent and torn apart by religious wars.
France went through its religious wars.
England had the Hundred Years Wars, which were religious.
The religious warfare that arose out of Martin Luther and the other Protestant thinkers, the people who actually got their hands on the Bible, who translated the Bible from Latin into the vernacular so that your average literate peasant, of which there were quite a few, could actually read the Bible.
What happened was that broke apart the monopoly of Catholicism, and it broke apart Christendom.
And what happened as a result was when you pair superstition with absolutism, You get a genocide.
That is just inevitable. When people have the stake of their eternal souls on particular readings based on personal bias, elevated to absolutism of sections of the Bible, you get religious warfare.
And religious warfare tore Europe apart from, I guess, when the 96 Theses were first nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg.
All the way through to the 17th and 18th centuries, and the people just got completely sick and tired of the separation of church and state, which was a staple of the Enlightenment and particularly of the Industrial Revolution.
The separation of church and state came out of...
An unbelievable weariness with the religious warfare that had gone on ever since the Bible had gotten into the hands of the general population and everybody had come up with their particular schisms, right?
And you had, you know, Calvinism and Zwingalianism and there was the adult Baptists, people who believed in adult baptism who were then generally murdered by other sects by being drowned as adults by saying, there's your goddamn baptism and they would kill them that way.
There were, of course, the Catholics, and there were some schisms in the Catholics.
There was the Greek Orthodox, there was the Russian Orthodox.
There were all of these schisms, and all at war, each of these religious groups was trying to get a hold of the power of the state, because once a religion got hold of the power of the state, it could create and impose a monopoly.
And much in the same way that special interest groups in a democracy are constantly trying to get hold of the public purse and get the government to pass laws favorable to them, In the same way, throughout this period in Western history, religious groups were constantly trying to get a hold of the power of the state, and eventually thinkers realized that this was an unsustainable situation, and the state and religion had to be separated.
And we will, as the West continues through its death throes, all of which came out of the First World War, The West will at some point, thinkers in the West, will join me and join many other thinkers in saying that the state needs to be separated from economics in the same way that we need to separate the state from religion because the special interest group, the imposition of coercion on less politically connected members of society is an escalation without end and a cancer which consumes the body politic.
So this is going to be an unabashedly long view of the First World War because it was such a transitional point.
Tens of millions of people slaughtered.
The involvement of civilians in mass starvation and bombings for the first time in human history.
The influenza virus that was spread by the returning soldiers killed tens of millions of more people.
Three percent of the world's population were killed off by this Spanish flu virus.
And it wasn't actually a Spanish flu.
That's a misnomer. The reason it was called the Spanish flu It's because Spain was not censoring its newspapers, and so the reports of the slew were actually real there, or at least they were censoring them less, whereas of course in the rest of the world censorship arose.
The censorship that arose out of the First World War, the government management of the press was enormous because the casualties and the news was so terrible.
The incredible punishments that were layered upon the Germans and their allies in 1919 in the Treaty of Versailles were so destructive that, as Marshal Pétain, a French general, said, this is not peace, he said in 1919.
He said, this is not peace.
This is armistice for 20 years, and he was right down to the last year, because, of course, the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, England declared war on Germany, and everything started all over again.
He was right down to the last year.
One of the central problems that occurred at the end of the First World War, which led to the Second World War, which led to the Cold War, which led to the War on Terror, and has created this cycle of perpetual war going on in the world, of which, again, the 19th century is a pretty glaring exception in many ways.
America's entry into the First World War in 1917 tipped the balance of power.
There were peace negotiations going on in 1916 and 1917 because the Allies and the Germans were almost completely bankrupt, had no money to purchase war materials, had no money to purchase and transfer food to the cities.
And so everything was grinding to a halt and everybody was going to just sign their treaties and go back to where they came from.
And that would have been a very telling and powerful damning of the incredible waste of human lives that the First World War represents.
But with America's entry, America sending over a million troops into Europe to fight on the Western Front, well, this, of course, when this began to occur, Germany panicked, of course, because they were resurrecting a two-front war.
The losses to both Germans and Russians on the Eastern Front were catastrophic.
So Germany began to work in a sort of spy format to overthrow the Romanovs, the Russian Tsars, the Russian government.
So they shipped Lenin over with guns and with money and materials.
They shipped him to Russia.
And he then, of course, using German resources, had a revolution which toppled the Romanovs, as was planned, took Russia out of the war.
And so the American entry into the First World War was one of the direct causal factors in the creation of 70 years of absolutely murderous and genocidal and expansionist Russian dictatorship, of course, the entry into World War I by America led to such a dominance of power on the part of the Allies that they could impose these absolutely crushing, crushing peace treaty on Germany, where Germany would have continued to pay reparations.
Until 1984, had it continued, of course, because of the amount of reparations that were stolen from Germany, or if you want to say, extracted from Germany, were crushing to the point where Germany had to print lots of money to pay off its foreign debts and its reparations that had been imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.
Because Germany had to pay off so much debt And so many reparations.
It printed lots of money, which led to the hyperinflation of the 1920s, destroyed the savings and the economic stability of the middle class in Germany, thus paving the way to Hitler.
Hitler, of course, paved the way to the Second World War.
The Second World War paved the way to the fall of China, to communism.
So it all was a complete disaster.
From a relatively free and increasingly free society, Russia, of course, was moving towards a more democratic, And centrist model of government because the serfs had been somewhat liberated and modernization of the economy was underway in the late 19th century.
This was all destroyed and reversed so that you'd rather be a peasant in the 19th century even if you were one of Dostoyevsky's father's peasants and Dostoyevsky's father.
His peasants actually hated him so much that they drowned him in vodka, killed him.
But rather than a kulak in the 1920s under the communist genocide against the largely Christian kulaks and other peasants, you'd rather be one of the serfs in the 19th century than a kulak or even an average Russian in the 1950s, early 1950s under Stalin or whatever.
And so, the increasing liberalization of the world that was occurring in Western Europe, and to a small and arguable degree, even among the colonies, this was all reversed by the First World War.
After the First World War, of course, you get income taxes.
Income taxes were introduced as a temporary measure in the first world war and of course there's nothing temporary ever about government policies or programs you have the expansion of fiat currency you have a rejection of the gold standard you have the beginning of international banking cartels lending money in increasing manners between governments and there's a strong argument that one of the main reasons that America went into the war on the side of the allies was because it had lent so much money to England and to its allies that if England and its allies had lost the first world war or even if there had been a sort of let's all just take our toys and go home kind of end of the war America would not have been able to recoup its lending the money it had lent and so it went to go and collect the debt by wiping out the Germans so we'll go more into that when we actually get to the origins of the first world war But I wanted to start way,
way, way back in time.
And this is more of a theory.
I'm not going to say that there's proof because it's a prehistory.
So I think there's lots of evidence for it.
And I think that there's an enormous amount of evidence in the modern world.
But I'm just going to clearly delineate that this that I'm going to talk about now is more of a theory.
Well, of course, I think it's a good theory.
And I think it's a valid theory.
But I'm not going to tell you that.
It's proof beyond a shadow of a doubt.
To really understand...
Why the First World War occurred and really what it was for and how destructive, how unbelievably destructive it was.
All of the fiat currency, abandoning of real basis for money, the government takeover of currency, all of this has led to the financial disasters that are going to bring down Western civilization in a relatively short period of time in its current form.
We'll still be here.
The houses will still be standing, but society will look a lot different relatively shortly.
All of these came into place. In the First World War, and if we want to understand why there wasn't a war, and then why there was a war, we have to go back quite far, far in time.
So, let's do that.
Ripple, ripple, ripple. So, let's start way, way, way back in time to a Stone Age Triangle.
Now, a stonish tribe is in many ways functionally indistinguishable from a guerrilla herd in that it is a force-dominated society.
It is the capacity for violence and aggression that determines the hierarchy within society.
So the most aggressive and the strongest males are at the top of the hierarchy.
And if we sort of look at The Stone Age tribe, if you are, you know, a young and strong male and you can dominate all the other males and mate with the females and maintain your position at the top of the hierarchy, you're very happy.
Of course, the problem occurs that you age.
And as you age, you get, well, obviously sexier and bolder, but you also get weaker, physically weaker.
And if you've got a paradigm within your tribe that the youngest and the strongest always dominate, There is a problem with the older generation of leaders, the older generation of alpha males.
As they begin to decline in strength and speed and aggression, they begin to lose their power.
Now, they don't want to lose their power, of course, right?
I mean, they want to keep mating and keep dominating, but they're losing their physical strength.
So what do they do? Well, it's absolutely fascinating what they do.
What they do is they invent a superhuman deity who supports their power.
So, if you gain power as a young and strong male, you don't want youth and strength to be the continuing method by which people get to the top of the pyramid.
You want to continue to have your power even when you get old and frail.
So, how are you going to shore up your power and authority when you get old and frail in your tribe?
You're going to invent a super leader who will punish Who will punish anybody who defies your rule as you age?
In other words, as your strength wanes, as your power weakens, you need to shore it up by inventing a God who will strike down anybody who defies you.
And that is how you terrify the youth, even though they're stronger and could take you down pretty easily.
You terrify the young men of the tribe into submission by inventing By inventing a super leader who has chosen and approves you, and who will strike down and punish anyone who defies you.
Now, my guess is that originally this punishment was meted out, right?
You'd say, ah, this god has cursed you, and then one of your followers would just go and kill that person in their sleep, and ah, he'd been struck down by the god.
But that didn't last too long.
And eventually, we don't have to get into the details, but it evolves into That you have to invent an afterlife, which is where the punishment occurs, right?
So you have to say, well, now you have a soul, you're going to live forever.
If you defy me, your aged grizzle and lung-in-the-tooth leader, God, a God, our God, is going to punish you for your defiance.
And it's going to happen in your afterlife, right?
So gods and the afterlife and divine punishment and the divine right of kings, in other words, the idea that God chooses the leaders and to defy the leaders, even when you physically can overpower them and beat them, to defy the leaders is to defy God, which results in eternal punishment forever.
This was not something that was developed out of a need to explain the reins of them.
It was developed and inflicted because of the need to maintain political power as physical strength declines.
When that happens, you need another class.
You need a priestly class.
To instruct. I mean, for a number of reasons.
First of all, the leader is too self-interested.
If I say, well, I'm the leader and you better not defy me because some imaginary god is going to strike down your soul, blah, blah, blah.
People may not take me very seriously because I'm obviously too self-interested.
So you need another class of more objective people to instruct.
The children on the divine right of kings and the supernatural retaliation in the afterlife for anyone who defies the aging leader.
And that's why you get a priestly class.
Now the priestly class are the actors and the storytellers and the con men and the manipulators and people who rely on verbal agility and like I should talk, right?
People who rely on verbal agility and storytelling abilities and charm to secure their income rather than Fighting in a war, or digging a ditch, or planting a tree, or harvesting a crop.
And so what happens is, the priestly class is created.
Now the priestly class want a monopoly on the god, right?
There were probably many gods that were invented, and all were competing in a Darwinian fashion for supremacy, and it was those gods Who promised the greatest benefits in the longest period of time, who survived.
Like if your God says, give me $5 now and tomorrow you will get $10, well that's easily disprovable.
So that God isn't going to work out.
So you need to get tangible things, but the things that you promise have to be unverifiable, or at least as long term as possible, which is why they get pushed into the afterlife.
Eventually. That's why Afterlife gets invented and the soul gets invented and all this stuff.
The priestly class then comes into being, who then trains the young about the god who shores up the power of the aging leaders and also creates a dynasty.
Every leader wants to appoint the next leader, right?
And he wants to appoint his own offspring, or her own offspring, I guess, in some cases.
And so you don't want there to be a rough tumble gladiatorial combat because you might have a second weekly offspring.
But you still want to give your offspring the power that you have.
And so the priestly class then says we have a lineage, right?
The king's son is now the king.
The king is dead. Long live the king.
And so that is another reason why you have the priestly class.
Not just to defend You're weakening power as you age, but also to ensure that you can give political power to your offspring as life continues.
So the priestly class will shore up the power of the political rulers, or the head mafia dons.
In return, the political leaders will grant a monopoly of religiosity, of superstition, to the priestly class, so that they don't have to battle it out with other competing religions.
And this, you can see, is very common throughout history.
It's very common even in the modern world.
And so what happens is the priestly class then become responsible for the education of the young.
And this is why human beings languished in a pre-scientific, primitive, superstitious, terrified, what we would consider in modern standards a pretty psychotic state of mind for thousands and thousands of years.
So even in the Middle Ages, people were so insane that you would have entire villages who would just up and start dancing until they died.
I mean, they were that mad.
They were that insane. One of the things that began to break the power of the priests in Christendom in the 13th or 14th centuries was the Black Death.
The Black Death, which wiped out up to a third of the European population, particularly struck down priests.
Because, of course, priests were by the bedside of people who died, so they would get infected.
And the priestly class was virtually wiped out during the Black Death.
Because the priests had always said that the wages of sin are death...
People began to be suspicious about the moral nature and virtue of priests because they were dying so much and that was considered a punishment from God and this is why we began to get other priestly classes began to compete again and you got the rise of science because the stranglehold, the Vulcan death grip of superstition over the mind of Western man had been somewhat relaxed during the priest decimating process of the Black Death.
Now, what happens is the priests train the young to give money to the priests and to obey the political leaders.
If anybody disobeys the priests, the political leaders will have them killed or tortured or ejected from the tribe, and so the parents have a strong interest to ensure the survival of their children to have them follow the religion of the tribe.
And this is what occurs.
Now, why is this important to World War I? It may seem strange, but it is absolutely essential to understand this, to understand why there was peace throughout the 19th century, at least in the West of Europe, and why it all collapsed into an absolutely murderous war, which has pretty much continued in many ways unabated ever since in many parts of the world.
We won't get to that this time.
I want to break this up into something reasonable.
But I think it's really, really important to understand.
We've got the priestly class who trains people to obey the political class.
The political class, in return for this favor, give a monopoly of superstition to the priestly class and eliminate competitors to the priestly class.
And both... The priestly class and the political class have had responsibility for the education of the young throughout history.
Sometimes it's more the priestly class, sometimes it's more the political class.
But there was one time in history when that did not occur.
When the education of the young was neither dominated by the priestly class nor the political class.
And we'll get to what happened in that situation and what changed to bring about World War I in that context.
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