May 2, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:05
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| Well, America's least intelligent were out in force last night at the White House. | |
| We'd like to provide our audience with something more substantive. | |
| And in case your head is still spinning from the recent outpouring of jingoism, for a little spin in the other direction, joining me now from Ontario, Canada, is none other than master counter-propagandist Stefan Molyneux. | |
| Stefan, thank you so much for joining us tonight. | |
| And I want to throw out for the first question, I know that this is an absolutely absurd Ridiculous presumption. | |
| But just for argument's sake, let's say that we can trust our government and that the general narrative about bin Laden's death is true. | |
| What does the way that this is being communicated by our government tell you that they are hoping to achieve with this? | |
| That's a great question. I would argue that this is right after the Ryan budget and the Obama budget cuts have been proposed, which cut trillions of dollars in spending over the next decade or 20 years. | |
| The one thing that even Ryan's budget doesn't touch is the spending for the military-industrial complex. | |
| Base funding for the Pentagon has doubled Over the past 10 years, not even counting the costs of the wars that America is involved in and the nuclear weapons spending in the Department of Energy, it's over $700 billion a year. | |
| None of that is proposed being cut. | |
| Now, everybody knows it's going to need to be cut if you're going to try and balance the U.S. budget in any way, shape, or form. | |
| So the fact that right after these intense budget negotiations have come out about spending cuts, when the Department of Defense budget remains unscathed, that they come out with this jingoistic, we got them after only 10 years and a trillion dollars success story, to me speaks volumes about the defensive position that the Department of Defense is getting into. | |
| So you think this is put out simply to bolster the justification for the military budget? | |
| Well, sure. Look, if the military budget is going to remain the same in 10 years, everybody knows these wars are winding down at the moment. | |
| What that means is that with far fewer taxpayers, because of the baby boomer retirement bulge, with far fewer taxpayers, they're expecting to spend the same amount of money in 10 years or 20 years than they are now. | |
| It's completely absurd. So they're going to need to pull out a few rabbits from their hats in order to get people to even remotely think about funding at that level. | |
| Well, speaking of pulling things out of a hat, do you have any specific concerns about what military interventions might be used to justify next? | |
| Well, sure. I mean, it's not escaped a lot of people's attention that, as you mentioned, Bin Laden was trained as a freedom fighter in the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets, which is where he learned, as you said, how to bankrupt the empire. | |
| Now, of course, America's going in and training the Libyan rebels, and it won't be long before the Libyan rebels turn against the United States, as these things always seem to happen. | |
| I guess my main concern is that it would have been much better for them to have caught him and tried him. | |
| Because then the Muslim world would have seen, if proof had been provided, that he was a criminal, that he did do these terrorist actions and so on. | |
| And I think that would have defused a lot of hostility. | |
| The fact that he was basically taken out and there's... | |
| The amount of money that America has to spend surely is enough to just gas people and not kill them, take them alive. | |
| But of course, Americans don't want to hear the other side of the story of what America has done in the Middle East and what has provoked these kinds of attacks. | |
| So I'm concerned that there's going to be retaliatory strikes which are going to be used to extend and expand American power domestically and overseas. | |
| Okay, so even I'm tempted to be hopeful when something like this happens. | |
| For something very specific, and there are a lot of people in the United States who are questioning this, but are saying, well, at least there's one less excuse for the government to keep us in Afghanistan, or to keep deploying troops to the Middle East. | |
| Is there any hope for Americans who want to see us return to a constitutional foreign policy, to a foreign policy based on justice? | |
| Can we use this to demand that the troops come home now? | |
| I think that every concerned and moral human being the world over should be pounding their tabletops and thundering at the top of their lungs, which I can't do because I have a cold, but thundering at the top of their lungs that this should be the end of the empire, that this should be the end of the intervention in the Middle East, that the last and major excuse for being there is now done. | |
| And therefore, the troops must come home. | |
| I don't know that it's going to work, but it's what everybody should be talking about. | |
| We can only hope so. | |
| Do you think there's any practical way that we can actually apply that leverage given the disconnect between our political system and the people here in the United States? | |
| I think that everybody who believes that the political system is responsive to the will of the voters, I don't happen to be one of those people, but I suggest that if you do have that belief, then you should strain every sinew in your moral soul to raise that cry to the very heavens to bring the troops home now that the beast is dead. | |
| Amen. Well, thank you very much, Stefan. | |
| Really appreciate the perspective. |
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