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May 24, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:37
2389 Why, Oh Why Did I Have a Child?
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
A quick update for those who are interested in my cancer status.
I met with a radiologist yesterday and after going through two more rounds of chemo and some radiation treatments, the chance of recurrence is down into the low single digits of a percentage point.
This with the caveat that both chemo and radiation do slightly increase the risk of cancer later on in life.
But the phrase later on in life is undeniably positive when you're facing cancer.
So I will take these odds with gratitude.
So far I must give this the award for the best cancer ever.
So these are going to be some questions that have come in.
I'm going to answer these mostly off the cuff.
This is not detailed and rigorous philosophy but A wild fairy spring of random indignatory opinions, but I hope that they'll be of some help to you.
And if you would like to throw some questions my way, you can email them to mailbag at freedomainradio.com.
I'm an avid watcher of FDR videos, says an alert listener.
Stefan is very aware that the world is rife with problems that are only getting worse.
With that in mind, I would like to know why he decided to have a child.
Why put a child in modern society's path?
Wouldn't it have been easier to leave it as a truly free spirit on some astral plane rather than bring it to earth, born into wage and status bondage?
Well, I'm not sure about the last part, but why put a child in modern society's path?
Oh, I think, why put modern society in my child's path?
I think that would be the more relevant question.
I really wanted to meet...
An unfettered soul in the form of a child.
I really wanted to meet a mind uncluttered by propaganda and lies and superstition and patriotism and all the other foot-binding, brain-twisting technologies and prejudices that are laid.
The children's mind is squeezed through and broken by.
I view, you know, like in the 19th century, there was this practice of foot binding among Chinese women.
They would crush the feet in an excruciatingly painful sequence, crush the feet so the toes curled back into the heel, and these women would hobble around for the rest of their lives.
And there were some ways in which you could try and straighten it out, but it was, you know, mostly a mess.
Most people's brains, I think almost everyone's brains these days, is that way broken and smashed.
And, I mean, a lot of my adult life has been attempting to straighten out the smashed bones of my own mind from all of the propaganda and lies of brutality that I experienced while growing up and even as an adult.
So, I really, really want to meet Someone who would not be smashed up by lies.
And so from that standpoint, I think it was a very good decision to have a child.
I don't view the battle as over.
I don't view the fight as lost.
Otherwise, I wouldn't continue to do what it is that I'm doing.
We have not lost.
In fact, we have a far better chance for victory now than we ever have before.
We're actually having this conversation.
Do you know that True original rational thought in the past was really like stars in heavy fog.
You had to climb to the very top of a nearly airless mountain for many years and learn to breathe the most rarefied of oxygens in order to see a few faint stars in the night sky.
Now, well, these are astral fireworks available to everyone, even those at the bottom of the sea dwelling in bath escapes far from the light of reason.
The internet has allowed us to communicate without gatekeepers.
There are no people barring the way to clear and honest communication among free minds.
And so this is the best chance philosophy has ever had this show.
50, 60 million downloads.
I mean, that's 50 million, 60 million stars in the night sky.
That are now visible to anyone who cares to glance upwards.
So, yes, of course things are getting worse in some ways, but that's to the best.
You know, there is going to be a war between the sociopaths who run society and the empathetics who want to reform society according to universal moral principles.
Clear battle lines are drawn, and things are always going to get worse before they get better.
That's natural.
That's inevitable.
I mean there is a battle.
I mean our entire society has been founded on the hierarchy of those who have the least capacity for empathy, the greatest capacity for exploitation.
All of our social institutions are Inherited from the incredibly superstitious primitive Stone Age nature of our tribes in the past.
You know, it's funny to hear people like Sam Harris and so on talking about how ethics and superstition come from the primitive childhood of our species and should be cast aside and then go on to praise the state.
What is the state but a hierarchy inherited from the primitive superstitions of our species?
And sorry, we have to cast it down.
We have to move it aside.
We have to clear the path to an empathetic and equal future.
And they're going to fight back and they're going to use every evil tool at their sharp-minded disposal to attempt to win.
I get that.
And I'm very proud to be near the forefront of this battle and I invite you to come along for the ride.
It is the most essential battle and it is a battle without weapons other than reason and clarity and integrity and passion and commitment.
And so this is the most heroic battle the world has ever faced.
We finally have an arena Where the psychopathic gatekeepers are no longer squelching communications between free minds.
So, let's get it on, brothers and sisters.
So, I'm new to the idea of a stateless society, and I'm still trying to work things out.
In your last video, at the end, you claimed, I don't hang with status.
You used the analogy of being against racism, yet having a friend who's the head of the KKK and going to his barbecue.
You seem to say that it would be ridiculous and unethical.
Causing yourself to be a primary target.
Taxation is clearly theft and amoral.
It's used for heinous acts on the part of the government.
It's certainly moral to contribute to the government through paying taxes in any or other way.
Do you pay your own taxes?
Okay, I've answered this a whole bunch of times before, so I'll just touch on it very briefly.
There are no ethical considerations in place when there's a gun to your head.
There are no ethical considerations.
Ethics requires free choice.
Ethics requires free choice.
Virtue requires free choice.
There is no ethical considerations in place when there's a gun to your head.
Let's say you force a slave to sign a contract.
Is the slave bound to that contract?
Of course not, because you forced him.
That's like saying if you kidnap a woman and force her to marry you, that the marriage is valid.
No, the marriage is not valid.
Well, she said yes.
Well, she didn't have a choice.
She was kidnapped.
So the fact that I have a gun to my head to pay my taxes, if people don't want to pay their taxes, I consider that extremely unwise because the state will take you out.
They'll blackback you just the way they did Adam Kokesh, who was arrested for resisting arrest.
And I've been trying to come up with a good analogy, but it's too insane for even my analogy-prone brain to come up with anything useful about it.
But they will black bag you, they will throw you in the rape rooms, and you will be then lost to the necessary battle for the future.
But if you want to pay taxes, it's fine.
It's like saying to someone who has a gun to their head, From a robber.
Is it ethical to give the robber your wallet or not?
Forget the ethics of the victim.
Let's focus on the ethics of the perpetrators and work on focusing on that.
The ethical problem is the guy with the gun to your head, not what people do in response to the gun to the head.
So don't try and put me in any kind of amoral or immoral category when I'm responding to violence I neither chose nor approve of and violently disagree with, at least emotionally and intellectually.
And do not attempt to snare me in any kind of ethical net when I'm simply trying to survive in a brutal environment which I had no part in creating and I'm attempting to fight with everything in my being.
Which book has the distinction of being the most influential upon your perspective?
I watched your interview where you named The Fountainhead as the book and perhaps it is the one I've never read.
That is the one and I've never read Ayn Rand.
When you broke down the other gentleman's philosophy I was properly stunned.
Oh, Dostoevsky and so on.
Well, I'm going to put together a recommended reading list.
First among these would be the books that I've written, simply because I think that they add something that isn't there before that's most important, otherwise I wouldn't have written them.
So you can check out all my free books at freedomainradio.com.
But I'm going to put a list together of recommended reading or books that have been heavily influential to me, which is going to be on the website over the summer, and of course I'll post all the links to that everywhere that I can.
So hopefully that will help answer your question.
I have a quick question.
How does an anarcho-capitalist society protect priceless artifacts that belong to the society's heritage and culture?
I understand that there's no one way to do something in a free market, but how could the destruction of the Mayan pyramid no more have been easily prevented in an ANCAP society?
So this was in Belize.
A road crew destroyed a Mayan pyramid.
Well, I don't know.
Obviously, asking how things are going to be done in a society 100 or 200 years from now is like asking me what is a computer going to look like in 200 years.
I have absolutely no idea.
If it's a free market, it'll look vastly better.
If it's a Venus Project Society, it will be a Marxist, high-flaming robotic overlord.
And if it is a state of society, it will be similar to a 2K-pad computer from 1984.
But if you care about these Priceless artifacts, then buy them.
Put together a Kickstarter project and buy them, and then nobody will be able to go and destroy them.
If people care about stuff in society, they buy it.
Like, if you want to park, go get together with your friends so you can start a movement and buy a park, and then nobody will be able to get rid of it.
But private ownership is the way to protect anything, and it's a great way to reflect society's real values.
I'm re-listening to the Fountainhead.
I've been bouncing two thoughts around in my head.
I'm an avid listener of yours, so I thought you might have insight or two.
One, Gail and Dominique both talk about how they do not get the same feeling from nature that they do from skyscrapers or the New York skyline.
I find that I get the same sort of wow feeling from each of them.
Do you think this could be a result of religious indoctrination that I couldn't completely shake off because I might be subconsciously perceiving nature as something created or I'm missing her point entirely?
That's a very interesting question.
I thought about this myself quite a bit.
After high school, when I was 18, I needed money to go to college and I was as broke as broke could be.
And so I got a job as a gold planner and a prospector and spent a grand total of about 18 months living in a tent in the woods summer and winter.
Bugs and frozen.
I actually remember taking a shower.
I warmed up water on the stove.
We actually had to use jet propane fuel to heat the prospector's tent because it would just get too cold otherwise.
Still, there was snow on the floor and ice on the ceiling when we woke up in the morning.
Quite brisk, let me tell you.
I remember taking a shower outside at about minus 30 and having the water freeze on my skin.
It just got cold so quickly.
And I didn't actually find nature to be hugely beautiful when I was kind of jammed into it for a long period of time, you know, when you're slogging your way through the tundra with an 80-pound drill on your back in snowshoes and constantly tripping over brambles that are under the snow.
Faceplanting into the snow with then having to have people help you lift the drill off your back so you can keep going.
Not so particularly beautiful when you have to try and breathe through your teeth so you don't inhale too many bugs when you're sloshing your way through a leech-infested swamp to stake a claim.
Not so enjoyable.
So nature kind of upfront is not a particularly beautiful place to be in my experience, but it's a wonderfully relaxing place to look at if you've spent your whole time looking at buildings.
Cities have their beauty.
It tends to be from, you know, a little bit further away.
New York is beautiful, but when I went down to a speech in New York, it seemed rather grimy recently.
And my oh my, the constant siren infestations of the street at all times, day and night, did get a little wearisome.
So if you've spent a lot of time in the country, there can be something beautiful about a city because it's a variety in your look.
If you spend a lot of time in the city, I find escaping to the country and going for a hike and looking at nature is a beautiful thing because it's a variety.
It's a change.
But, you know, I generally prefer cities to the country as a whole.
I think cities are the natural habitat of a rational human being.
And there's nothing artificial about cities.
There's nothing artificial about a beaver dam either.
It's just the way we construct our homes.
The only artificial things about cities is the degree to which, you know, governments and zoning and all that kind of property taxes and all that tends to distort them.
So, nature can be extraordinarily beautiful and majestic and there's a lovely timelessness to nature.
Just look at some of the Ansel Adams photographs of Grand Mountains and so on.
It's just gorgeous.
So, there can be some beautiful and timeless stuff about nature, but there is a kind of wow factor about Times Square as well.
So, I think they're both wonderful.
So, I agree with you.
I don't think that nature is created, but rather evolves.
So, the second question is, why does Dominique not punish herself by trying to marry Tuhi who has complete understanding of his evil instead of Gail?
Well, I think, you know, this is just my, again, personal opinion and perspective.
Toohey is mostly asexual, and so you could really look at Toohey as having unconscious homosexual impulses towards Howard Rourke, but I don't think she would have any luck being able to practice her feminine arts on Toohey, who is either asexual or perhaps gay, which, and again, it's not that the gay is anything to do with the evil, it's just that at that time it would be very hard to be open about it.
I am an anarcho-capitalist.
I work for a local government agency as an assistant to an elected official.
I have the opportunity of advising him on a daily basis how to decrease the influence, power, and theft of the local government agency.
Do you believe this is hypocritical of me?
I don't think hypocritical is, I mean, you obviously would probably have to, I mean, have to hide what it is that you believe from this official, right?
So there's already deception in the relationship, right?
Because you can't say to him that the – you're head of an evil organization that initiates the use of force against innocent and usually disarmed citizens.
So, I mean, again, I don't – I don't want to focus on your ethics.
I want to focus on the ethics of people who are initiating the use of force and approving and agreeing of that.
I don't tend to focus on the ethics of the slaves.
I tend to focus on the ethics of the slave masters.
The person with the whip in the hand is the person to focus your moral attentions and energy on.
You know, if you find that you can chat with a politician and get him to not pass some law, you know, fine.
I mean, I think that's, I don't think it's going to solve anything in the long run because there are six million other politicians out there working to flex the might and muscle of the state and strengthen its, you know, tentacle-gripped ring around the human neck.
So it's not going to solve anything in the long run, but if you, you know, if you want to do it and you can achieve a little bit of good here and there, you know, again, I would focus on the peaceful parenting stuff, as I've constantly said, but, all right.
Since, if I do not misunderstand, you have been a Randian, I wonder if you could comment on a Wikipedia article on Leonard Peikoff.
It almost scared the living daylight out of me.
If I do not misunderstand, he considers it morally justified to nuke Iran.
He also claims that Israel is the only moral entity in the Middle East because the nomadic tribes living in Palestine do not have an advanced concept of property rights.
I've heard a little bit about this sort of stuff from Leonard Picoff.
Now, Leonard Picoff had an extraordinarily violent childhood, right?
He was beaten within an inch of his life, and I don't believe that he's, as far as I understand it, he's not really dealt with a lot of that stuff.
So the fact that he has, you know, convulsive aggressions pouring out of him from time to time, I would simply recognize as unprocessed trauma of early childhood violence and terror.
You know, the Israel-Palestine thing, You know, Israel is continually expanding with its settlements into Palestine against international law and it's truly brutal.
It's just another example of how the victims can become the victimizers so quickly and how the state corrupts everyone and everything, right?
So they've got checkpoints.
They've got constantly managing and controlling the Palestinians.
They're denying Palestinians' right of free access movement, property rights, self- Determinism and so on and almost every country in the world except for the US and Israel recognizes that a two-state solution is at least in the short run the only practical solution to this conflict but Israel continues to want to expand into Gaza and is continuing to do that and that's not particularly good to say the least.
It's easy to look upon the Palestinians as, well, they're primitive, they're nomadic and whatever, right?
But the reality is it's not the fault of the Palestinian children that they happen to be born into a Palestinian tribe and happen to be indoctrinated, as so many people are, as almost everyone is, into the irrational beliefs of their elders.
You cannot blame the children who are grown up in that situation, who are forced to believe certain things and who see Right?
The view of Israel as a significant oppressor.
And for more on this, I simply refer you to people like Noam Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky.
So, yeah, you can't go around nuking Iran for heaven's sakes.
You're going to nuke a whole bunch of children who, it's not their damn fault, they happen to be born in that country.
And Iran is not expanding into other countries or into other geographical regions in the way that Israel keeps trying to.
And Iran, as far as I know, has not tried to invade.
Oh, no, because they had the war with Iraq.
But, yeah, so, I mean, the way that we solve human problems is through the better treatment of children.
There's no other way to do it.
So nuking Iran is not the way to solve it.
All right, so if we do not try to hold our elected officials accountable for their criminality, who is going to?
Why do you believe there can be no consequences for these people in the long run?
I am interested in stopping the political and social carnage and don't entirely understand your stance when stating that the criminals running the global scam cannot be brought to justice.
It is serious business that the martial law tactics are getting more out in the open.
What do you see as the inevitable end to all the evil which is unfolding in front of all of us?
There is no inevitable end.
The end is going to be based upon the choices and courage of good men and women and children.
So, there is no possibility of holding elected officials accountable for their criminality.
This is the whole problem with the state.
Who will watch the watchers is one of the oldest questions of politics, right?
You set the police in charge of dealing with criminals, but what happens when the police become criminals?
This is the law of infinite regression.
You can't possibly solve this problem of who will watch the watchers, who will police the police, who will bring justice to those who have a monopoly on bringing justice to others.
You can't solve that problem.
The only way to solve the problem of who will watch the watchers is to make the watchers compete with each other And to be beholden to customers in voluntary financial transactions.
It's the only conceivable way.
A balance of power is driven by the voluntary desires of customers.
It's the only way to watch the watchers.
Who watches the watchers?
Everyone.
Who watches whether Apple products should succeed over Microsoft products?
Well, by and large, you know, absent, you know, in monopoly, state grants and privileges and patents and copyrights and so on, forget all that stuff just for the moment.
Who watches whether Iron Man 3 is going to make more money than Star Trek Into the Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, something or other.
I don't know what that one is.
It's the audience.
The audience determines these things.
And so they voluntarily compete to appeal to the audience and the audience decides, the consumer decides who wins.
That's the only way to watch the watchers is to have voluntary audience or customer participation in a free economic situation.
Then if you appeal to your customers, you do well.
If you don't appeal to your customers, you don't do well.
That's the only way to watch the watchers.
So in the provision of justice, in the provision of protection, in the provision of national defense, the only way to watch the watchers is to have the voluntary, non-monopolistic entities attempt to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and to have the natural laws of economics drive the interaction.
So if you're a defense agency and you start amassing some secret army of You know, giant ant robots that are going to take over humanity.
Well, you're going to have to charge more for that because that money has to come from somewhere that's going to be an immediate signal that you're up to something no good and people are going to leave you.
They're not going to want to pay double your rates because they don't want a robot army and they don't want to pay double the rates.
This is the only way that you can watch the watchers is have financial interests and voluntarism drive the interactions.
The inevitable end to all the evil which is unfolding in front of us, that's up to you, that's up to me, that's up to everyone who wants to, you know, shoot the candle of virtue up into the night sky and see what it illuminates.
I genuinely believe that things like Austrian economics, other kinds of free market economics have taken root in the minds of the leaders to the point where they know what the solution is to the financial crisis.
Nobody's willing to do it yet because you can last for another couple of years, you can last for another, you know, enough time for politicians to Get money out of the system and find enough to retire on.
But when that window closes, then a politician will be put forward who is going to be able to liberate the economy.
You won't believe how quickly the narrative will change when the existing Tax serfdom and hyper-regulation and hyper-control of the economy, once that can no longer sustain itself past a single short-term career of a politician, the narrative will completely change and everything will be liberalized.
I mean, most things will be liberalized and we will go back to a more free market situation.
We have to keep promoting the values and virtues of the free market so that people will accept that kind of change as something that may be morally good or morally necessary or morally possible at least.
But they will turn on the dependent classes and the entire narrative will change.
You know, people have almost no sense of continuity.
They have almost, I mean, it's really, we're in this 1984 switcheroo world where, you know, we are now at war with East Asia rather than Eurasia.
We've always been at war with East Asia and everyone just goes along with that.
The narrative switches with almost no reference to the prior state of affairs because people don't have reason and evidence.
They are Helium balloons in a high hurricane.
They just flow wherever the media tells them to.
Sad but true.
And so the narrative will change the moment that politicians can't survive where things are, the moment the crisis hits.
And there will be a massive relaxation and loosening of the restraints upon the free market.
And there hopefully will be a new renaissance that will sail us through to something more sustainably free.
Uh, Stefan, why don't enough people believe that economic incentive is the only driving force that could possibly improve our world?
It's as if they feel it's unethical.
Why is that?
Ah, well.
I'm not sure that economic incentive is the only driving force that can possibly improve our world, but there's some aspect to that.
So why do people dislike profits?
Why do people dislike, well, you're only doing that because you make a profit.
You're only doing that because you want to make money and therefore that's considered to be a bad thing.
Well, I mean, I think that one's not too hard to figure out.
The people who hate profits, what they want is resources from you without providing value.
There's positive economics, whereas I sell you an iPad and that's going to make you happier more than the 500 bucks it costs you for the iPad, so that's a win-win.
I want your 500 bucks more than I want my 12 millionth iPad.
You want an iPad more than you want the 500 bucks we trade.
It's a win-win.
That's positive value.
Negative value is, hey, I just injected you with some horrible illness and now you have to give me 500 bucks for me to cure you.
Right?
And in the former, it's, you know, both people are voluntarily going into the transaction and want it to happen.
In the latter, it's kind of like an assault.
I've introduced a negative into your life.
You know, I've kidnapped your children, I'll release them for whatever amount of money.
That's negative economics, right?
And the two major agencies of irrationality in the world, religion and the state, both work on negative economics, right?
So religion doesn't provide you with value.
Religion threatens you with damnation and hell and suffering and sin and self-hatred.
And, you know, they infect you with an imaginary disease called original sin or whatever it's called in the various religions.
And then they offer to cure you for money.
I mean, it's completely mad.
This is not positive economics.
The government basically says, you pay us or we throw you in jail.
So they have the secular hell versus the supernatural hell, but these are both negative economics.
These are not voluntary chosen win-win situations.
They're win-lose, right?
Pay these people off so don't throw me in jail.
Pay these people off so I don't go to hell.
Or suffer the mental curse of self-hatred.
Or, you know, pay these people off so I can masturbate without getting hairy palms.
Whatever it is that nonsense that they come up with.
So the people who are into win-lose, they have to hate profits.
They have to denigrate profits, right?
And socialists who are statists tend to denigrate profits.
Communists, of course, tend to denigrate profits.
Fascists also tend to denigrate profits, which is why they put so many controls over government industries and semi-private industries in a fascist environment.
And the church, of course, has always had a problem with things like profits and usury and so on.
Simply because when you are a win-lose paradigm, state wins, you lose, religion wins, you lose, you have to violently oppose a win-win paradigm because it's the opposite.
And if the win-win is recognized as the only truly moral human interaction, then Then the win-lose paradigms fall away, right?
So I think that makes more sense.
Somebody recently sent me the following message.
I think this will be the last one I'll do.
How would you respond to these general assertions?
If you don't support our soldiers, you can go follow someone else.
I would bet that you are a part of a military family and have no idea what we go through.
And it's all so you can sit back and say, I don't support war or soldiers.
No, the soldiers don't like the war any more than anyone else, but they're willing to sacrifice their lives to save you.
So please, go spread your anti-soldier rant somewhere else.
After Vietnam, when people blamed the soldiers and not the government for the war, they regretted it.
After they made the soldiers outcasts and said that they were evil, they realized 20 years later that these men did not agree with the war any more than themselves.
But these men fought for their country when asked to, instead of sitting at home behind a screen cursing the lies of loved men and women.
I don't care if you support the war.
War is wrong, but support the men and women who go and risk death so you can play your drums and sit behind your screen.
Well, that is...
That's a whole mess of panic in one paragraph.
So we'll just touch on these sentences briefly because I've seen this kind of stuff before.
Okay, so in the modern world, you don't have to join the military.
Of course, in the past, you were mostly forced into the military through the draft and so on.
But in the modern world, yeah, I absolutely guarantee you that military families go through hell.
I mean, they do go through hell.
Every time there's a phone call, you're terrified that someone is dead or there's a telegram or something.
It's just horrifying.
It's monstrous.
I mean, every night you go to bed wondering if you're going to wake up to one less pile of flesh in the gene pool.
It's horrible.
But the idea, of course, that this is somehow related to your freedoms seems to me hard to understand.
I mean, the major problem with a government military is not the draft, and the draft is merely an effect.
The major fact is that the first war is not overseas, the first war is domestically, which is that if you don't pay for the military, they will, you know, black bag you and throw you in prison, right, where 350,000 men get raped or sexually assaulted every year.
So you get tossed into these rape rooms if you don't support Paying for the soldiers.
So I said the war overseas, the imperialism overseas is only an effect of the imperialism at home, right?
You're forced to pay at gunpoint for the soldiers and the equipment and the incredible environmental destruction that occurs.
Like the war in Iraq goes through as much gasoline and energy in a day as the entire economy of India, which is like a billion people.
It's just horrendous.
So If you don't understand that the military overseas is funded by violence domestically, and that you can't have the violence overseas if you don't have the violence domestically.
And the violence occurs in sort of three ways, right?
The first is direct taxation, which is not usually used to pay for war.
Otherwise, people would rebel against the war because they'd have to pay more immediately for the war.
So number one is the direct taxation.
Number two, of course, is the debt, which is just a general aspect of the childism, the prejudice against children that we face in society, which is that children don't matter.
Children are there to be broken on the mills of society's delusions.
Children are there for the profits of teachers' and teachers' unions.
Children are there for the convenience of parents to pour all their crazy shit into the child's brain rather than examine their own traumas.
Children don't exist fundamentally as moral entities.
Children are You know, little wild animals, savage slaves to be broken and molded according to the irrational preferences of their elders.
National debt, of course, is one of these instances.
We can just pass the debts on to children because children don't matter, right?
And the third, of course, is the printing of money, right?
Which is often how war is funded so that people get this diffuse inflation years after the fact and not one person in a thousand or ten thousand actually has any understanding what is occurring in these situations.
So, they're willing to sacrifice their lives to save you.
To save you.
Well, as far as I understand it, Vietnam was not encircling America with giant UFO lasers.
Neither was Korea.
I don't believe that the fact that Iraq invaded Kuwait was going to fundamentally affect America in any particular way, shape, or form.
And, of course, most of the hijackers on 9-11 came from Saudi Arabia.
So what did they do?
Miss, as some comedian put it.
So how on earth was Saddam Hussein harming or threatening America in any way, shape, or form?
And, of course, Saddam Hussein was largely installed and maintained by American foreign policy.
So, it's really hard.
I mean, if we're really worried about Aggression from overseas governments, I would imagine that the first thing you'd want to do is stop, say, America from selling weaponry to foreign governments.
America is by far the biggest arms dealer, arms seller in the world.
It's the one way in which the American government is funded and corrupted by the military-industrial complex.
So, I mean, I don't even know where to start about the various ways in which American-made weaponry gets into the hands of everyone in the world.
I mean, it's just insane.
And you can follow this just about everywhere.
You can go and Google this and find out.
There's even maps.
But America is by far the biggest armed seller in the world.
So if you're worried about people having weapons in the world that might be used against Americans, first thing you do is stop American government from selling weapons overseas.
But that's never going to happen, right, as long as there's a government.
So, to sacrifice their lives to save you, again, from what?
From some guy living in a hut in Afghanistan?
What the hell was he going to do to you?
Some peasant in a village in Vietnam?
What was he going to do to you?
So, after Vietnam, when people blamed the soldiers and not the government for the war, they regretted it.
Well, of course.
I don't blame every soldier for the war.
I mean, the soldiers are raised with all this propagandistic nonsense.
The government is obviously the one that starts the wars and so on, and it's pretty hard to flee the draft.
So I do have a lot of sympathy for the soldiers who were lied to and went out and did the most abominable things in the most abominable circumstances.
It's horrendous.
So I have some real sympathy for the soldiers.
I mean, this is some 18, 19-year-old kid who's grown up on a steady diet of delusions about The value of the military and the nobility of this green gang.
But these men fought for their country when asked to.
What do you even say about that?
There's no such thing as a country.
You can't fight for the country.
I mean, I don't believe a tree or a piece of dirt or a bush or a shrub or rock has ever told me to go overseas Bayonet people in the chest or throw bombs over a wall.
So the country didn't ask.
And the fact that you're willing to go and kill people because somebody asks you to is hard to imagine as any kind of mark of nobility or integrity.
Hey, go kill that guy.
Great!
Go strangle the homeless guy.
Well, that's not heroic.
I mean, that's just being an empty vessel to be filled up with the psychopathic evil lusts of other people.
I mean, that's not what you want to be as a human being.
That's not what you want to be.
And they weren't asked to.
They were mostly forced to.
And their uniforms, weapons, and pay were supplied by people who had guns to their necks, so it's hard to imagine that being virtuous.
And this idea that, you know, this comes from, we stand on a wall so that you can criticize us, we protect your rights so that you have the freedom to criticize us, well, I don't really think that's true.
Certainly if you look at the police as a domestic army, not a lot of great stuff going on with the police these days in terms of their just willingness to arrest and incarcerate just about anyone at will, at whim.
So, I don't really...
And of course, a lot of the vets who come back traumatized, they end up joining security forces, which is another way in which you train people overseas to be ready to brutalize the domestic population.
Once you've scrubbed any last trails and vestiges of empathy out of their systems, they can come home and be a truly terrifying killbot robot.
Domestic suppressors for the local taxpayer livestock population, so that's a problem.
I don't care if you support the war.
War is wrong.
But support the men and women who go and risk death so you can play your drums and sit behind your screen.
Again, I'm forced to pay for these people.
You're forced to pay for these people.
The fact is that they're going out and they are drumming up immense backlash.
You know, one of the things, I mean, it was horrible what happened in England recently.
This soldier, a machine gunner, who obviously had launched a huge amount of bullets overseas in Afghanistan, a machine gunner, got hacked to death by two British-born, I guess one of them at least were raised in a Christian family and converted to Muslim in 2000, Islam in 2003.
And they said, we're sorry that your women have to see this, but the Muslim women see much more than this every day.
And that this is the backlash that comes.
This is the blowback that comes.
It's horrendous.
It's monstrous.
So the idea that by going around and murdering people overseas, we are somehow making the domestic population more safe, well, Several thousand people in New York would disagree with that if they could speak, and lots of other people around the world, four people in Benghazi, a British soldier, and everybody who was traumatized by seeing that, might disagree with the fact that going around and poking at these hornets' nests overseas is somehow protecting the domestic population, even if we discount the idea or the reality that the domestic population is brutalized at gunpoint to pay for these overseas ventures anyway.
So, again, I'm sorry to leave that on such a note, but I just think it's It's really important to understand that this imperialism does not protect the domestic population.
Imperialism is not designed for any of that whatsoever.
So, this is Van Wallen from Freedom Aid Radio.
Thank you so much for watching and listening.
Please remember that the show is entirely supported by listeners like you and, yeah, you, the guy standing behind the you.
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If you guys could chip in, I would really appreciate it so that we can help build the show.
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