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June 23, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:25
1687 True News: The 'Violence' of the G20 Protests

Putting 2 burning cars in perspective...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to everybody who was so welcoming and positive and friendly at the 2010 Porcupine Festival in New Hampshire.
I just came back from a glorious couple of days there.
I had a number of speeches and debates and went around and chatted with everyone.
It was a great, great pleasure.
And that's an anarchist gathering, my friends.
Everybody left all of their goods lying out there.
The vendors and everything lying out overnight.
Not a single thing was stolen.
And everybody was really great and kind and positive.
And I highly, highly recommend it.
And I hope to go back next year.
The G20. The G20 has just finished up in Toronto where 20 world leaders have convened in downtown Toronto to talk about how to save an unsavable system, which we will get to in just a sec.
Why would they choose Toronto?
What a completely insane thing to do.
Why don't you meet on an aircraft carrier?
Why don't you meet at an air force base in Nunavut or someplace way up north where you won't have to spend 1.1 billion dollars of taxpayer money on security?
Well, Because they're entitled and because they're insane and because they're not very nice people.
Now, you have probably seen the endlessly replayed reels of one or two cop cars burning and black-clad anarchist hobbits throwing stuff through windows and so on.
We don't know what exactly happened, but I thought that there were a few precedents that might be of interest to you.
In 2008, the Denver Post, I'll put the links for this below, the Denver Post reported that undercover police dressed as protesters attacked police, which resulted in 106 arrests and indiscriminate pepper spray attacks into the crowd.
What happens is that police infiltrate the protesters, dressed as the protesters, and then when they're about to be discovered, they attack other police, which usually results in an arrest, thus getting them out of that situation.
In 2007 at the SPB summit in Quebec, three protesters were cornered by a union leader.
They had rocks in their hand, bandanas, they were dressed as anarchists, they claimed to be anarchists.
They were cornered by the crowd and were revealed as police officers.
Three days later, after a massive public outcry, the head of the police The department did reveal that they were, in fact, police officers.
And he said that they weren't doing anything wrong.
But, of course, they did have rocks in their hand.
And there is a video, again, you can see it below this, of one of them attacking a police officer with a rock.
So you can draw your own conclusions about what happened in Toronto.
Would I be shocked if it were a false flag attack?
I must tell you that I would not be.
One of the things that is very telling about this, and most people come away from seeing a police car burning and someone hitting a Starbucks window with a chair and say, this is why we need the government.
But this is all complete nonsense.
Let me tell you. What the reality is behind the G20 protests.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but it really is completely ludicrous.
And it's very hard to keep a straight face with all of this going on.
It is the bizarre mutated pantomime of a decadent and dying system.
So $1.1 billion worth of security centered in a square mile or two of downtown Toronto.
Thousands and thousands of policemen around.
A thousand or so in full riot gear.
You've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of arrests.
You've got illegal searches and seizures as far away as a GO train.
You've got people being stopped and demanded for their ID being demanded and being illegally searched.
You've got the suspension of all reasonable laws and even many unreasonable laws.
And with all of this amazing concentration of brutal state power, thousands of police, thousands of riot gears, highly trained, you've got rubber bullets being fired, you've got pepper spray, you've got machine guns, you've got everything under the sun, concentrated in a one-mile block of Toronto.
And what happens with all of this amazing laser-like concentration of state power?
What happens?
Well, a few dozen skinny white punks who may or may not have been police officers undercover take over to downtown for about an hour.
No one gets arrested.
No one gets stopped. The car is just left to burn.
While, of course, the media can get all of the photo ops that it wants of all of this anarchy and chaos and violence and so on.
But this is what's so ridiculous.
People say then, well, we need a government because there are these violent people, even if these violent people are anarchists, which I would question.
And if they are anarchists, they're not real anarchists.
The real anarchists were out there not stealing from everyone else at Porkfest this weekend.
This is what happens when you have a government.
No matter how much money, time, effort and material and manpower it pours into controlling and keeping a situation safe, you still have a group of 75 unarmed kids.
Taking over the downtown core for about an hour.
It was two hours until they decided to put the cop car out when it was on fire.
This surely is an argument that if $1.1 billion worth of security and thousands of incredibly armed and well-trained cops can't keep businesses safe from a couple of unarmed kids dressed in balaclavas, then surely we understand the government can't keep us safe in any way at all.
It's like drugs in prisons, right?
They say, oh, we're going to get rid of drugs.
We have a war on drugs. The government can't even keep drugs out of prisons, which means that if you turn society into a prison, the government still cannot keep drugs out of the hands of people.
The example of the G20, the lesson to be learned, is even if we turn society into a police state, nobody is safe.
The government will never provide you the security that it claims.
Quite the opposite. It was the presence of government that caused This violence either directly because they were agents provocateurs in there or because the G20 leaders and all of the riot gear brought out You know, idiot, retarded, quote, anarchist punks to go out there and act out their harmed childhoods on innocent Starbucks.
So I just sort of wanted to point that out.
A few other notes that I think are important.
The World Trade Organization protests in Genoa in 2001.
A protester was killed after being shot in the head and run over twice, twice, by a police vehicle.
The Italian Carabinera also later beat on peaceful protesters as they slept.
And even tortured some at the Diaz School.
It later emerged that the police fabricated evidence against the protesters, claiming they were anarchist rioters to justify their actions.
Some Carabiniera officials have since come forward and say that they knew of infiltration of the so-called Black Bloc.
It's the same guy as in Toronto.
of black bloc anarchists and the fellow officers acted as agents provocateurs, black flag operations.
At the free trade area of the Americas protest in Miami late November 2003, more provocateuring was evident.
The United Steelworkers of America calling for a congressional investigation stating that police intentionally caused violence and arrested and charged hundreds of peaceful protesters.
So I think that's important to understand.
It would have been if 25,000 people were out there protesting peaceful, you had a few dozen who were violent and the police all ran away because, you know, they're so brave.
These men in blue, the thin blue line between us and By God, anarchy.
They're so brave that the moment a few kids come forward with chairs, they all run away and allow the media to film all of the chaos.
So then they can say, you see, we have to spend $1.1 billion because that's what it takes to abandon the downtown core to rioters for an hour or two.
It's madness. Madness, I tell you.
Let's look at a few other facts.
And again, the links for these are below, and I'll try and end up relatively shockingly quickly today.
A cop car or two burns.
No cop gets hurt.
No one gets really hurt.
A rubber bullet or two is fired and a whole number of people are arrested and locked up for eight to ten hours with barely any water.
And this is considered to be violence.
You see, philosophy is just like economics.
Well, philosophy is a superset of economics.
Economics is all about seeing what is not seen, the unseen and hidden consequences of particular actions.
For instance, when you have a government program that creates a thousand jobs, then everybody says, yay, a thousand jobs, and everyone who's got the job says, I love this government program because I have a job.
But economics says, well, wait a sec, where did those thousand jobs come from?
Well, they came from the government taking money from the free market at gunpoint and spending it on political beneficiaries.
And so if you look at just a thousand jobs that are created, which is the obvious gain, but you don't look at the hidden costs of the two, three, four or five thousand jobs that weren't created as a result of taxation, of money being taken out of the private sector where jobs would be created in a sustainable way and being put into the public sector where jobs are created in a temporary way and people get skills in something that's not going to last, like census takers and so on.
If you just look at the positive Don't look at the hidden costs, then you're living at a very surface and, frankly, kind of idiotic level when it comes to looking at the world.
So here the media is trying to tell you that the violence that is being represented at the G20 summit is a burning cop car or two and some broken windows.
So that is the violence that needs to be focused on.
And they have video footage of that.
Now, of course, they have video footage of the other violence that is occurring.
Of course, a number of the G20 countries are involved in the illegal invasion and genocide of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Where hundreds of thousands of people have been slaughtered.
And dear God in heaven, can we not at least summon a few little smidgens of human sympathy?
Why has not one media outlet reported and said, my gosh, if this is how we, as a civilization, respond...
To the riots of a few dozen people, a cop car or two burning, a few broken windows.
Can we imagine how the people of Iraq must feel?
Can we imagine how the people of Afghanistan must feel with bombs and guided missiles and shattering of infrastructure and bombing of cities and millions of them having to flee their country and live in internment camps on the borders of their countries?
If this is how we react to a little smidgen of violence in our midst, can we just spare a shred of human empathy to what is going on to these poor people over in Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries around the world where people are being oppressed?
We cut off other people's hands and we call it justice.
We get a sliver under the nail of one finger and we cry, anarchy!
Chaos! My God.
If there were a God, he would not judge as kindly as a culture.
So let's look at the real violence of the G20. As of 2006, it is estimated that at least 9.25 million people are currently imprisoned worldwide.
These are worldwide statistics. I didn't break them down by G20, but the G20 has a good proportion of these.
There's 9.25 million people imprisoned worldwide.
is a huge underestimation because, of course, there are a lot of repressive regimes where people are not considered to be imprisoned or not reported as being imprisoned.
Now, of course, the majority of these imprisonments occur in the Western world!
In the Western world!
Why? Because of the war on drugs.
In absolute terms, the United States, a key G20 member, currently has the largest inmate population in the world, with more than 2.5 million people in prisons and jails.
More than 1 in 100 adults within America is currently in prison.
Although the US represents less than 5% of the world's population, over 25% of the people incarcerated around the world are housed in the American prison system.
So common is the prison experience that the federal government predicts 1 in 11 men will be incarcerated in his lifetime, 1 in 4 if he is black.
I did a count. The number of troops worldwide, 75 million paid killers worldwide, 75 million hitmen willing to shoot whoever a guy in costume points his finger at.
The system can't be saved.
And this statistic is very simple.
The GDP of the world is $61.1 trillion.
I've done a count-up of the national debts around the world, and it totals over $58 trillion.
So the massive amount, the maximum productivity of the world is $61.1 trillion and $58 trillion of that is debt.
Now GDP is a bullshit number because it includes government activities.
It includes the salaries of government employees, which of course is not GDP. It's gross domestic parasitism, I guess you could say.
It fits in the acronym, but not in the economic reality.
Not all of it, but most of it.
The system is completely screwed.
The system is like the Titanic and the G20 leaders are like the guy, you know, falling down before he hits that propeller at the end of the movie.
The system is dead.
As I said over a year ago, close to a year and a half ago in my Statism is Dead series.
Statism as a philosophy, the existing corporate fascistic Kleptocracy, the government's systems that all rely on selling off children to foreigners and printing money, i.e.
counterfeiting your way into relative and temporary prosperity.
And by relative, I mean it enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor.
The system is a wounded beast.
It is rattling its last gurgling breath.
There's no wiggle room.
for these leaders to do anything and Barack Obama saying let's have more stimulus i.e.
let's have more theft because stealing makes everybody rich as we were all taught in kindergarten remember you were told not to bring in your own lunch but just steal other people's lunch and then hand it out a little bit because that way just like jesus with the fishes everyone gets enough to eat if only if only if only we get these g20 leaders to be five years old again and start all over again with a kindergarten teacher saying don't hit don't steal don't use force don't blah blah blah Then we would have a different kind of system.
We would have a free system, but that is yet to come.
So the system is dead and gone.
There's no wiggle room. They can't raise taxes because that will kill economic growth.
They can't cut spending because they will face a revolution if they cut spending.
They can't borrow more because nobody has any money to lend.
Everybody's just printing out money to lend.
And so the system that they're out there trying to fine-tune is crazy.
They're just wiggling a joystick on a plane that's about to hit a mountain.
I mean, plus it's cut from the fins.
So, it's complete nonsense what is going on there.
It's just, it's a vacation for them.
The fact that they get to inconvenience an entire city doesn't matter to them because they're entitled narcissistic assholes.
But I just wanted to point out that to look at a cop car burning, forget all of that, forget all of that.
Think of what is going on to the people at the receiving end of our savage amounts of military spending and destructiveness in particularly Muslim countries.
Give a thought to your Muslim brothers and sisters who are on the receiving ends of these bombs and picking up limbs the way that you and I pick up newspapers when we come into our house.
Give a thought to the people unjustly locked into these concentration camps, we euphemistically called prisons, where they're being beaten and stabbed and raped on a regular basis.
Give a thought to the next generation and the generation after who will have to dig out of a fiscal hole so deep it makes the Arizona crater look like a golf chip.
So give a thought to all of that.
Forget about, even if it was just a bunch of skinny white trustafarians out there partying themselves up and setting fire to a cop car, because, ooh, that's really a great philosophical argument.
Forget about all the nonsense you see on the media.
The real violence is at the very root of the system.
It is at the very root of using organized institutional oligarchies with guns to solve social problems, which, as we can see from the past, the present, and the future...
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