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May 28, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

14:52

2392 The True Meaning of Star Trek Into Darkness

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, breaks down the not so hidden meaning within Star Trek Into Darkness. The point is not to raise arms against enemies, but to lower your arms before your children.

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	Hi, everybody.
	It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	So this is a philosophical review of Star Trek Into Darkness.
	Now, this is a film that has a great deal of power at an allegorical level, and I think I'm going to make the case for that.
	There's some which is known by the makers of the film.
	J.J. Abrams and the actors have talked about how it's an allegory for American imperialism under Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and so on, but I think it goes much further than that, and...
	For those of you who don't know, I come from a very strong artistic background.
	I take university-level writing courses.
	I studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada.
	I wrote plays, wrote novels, poetry, short stories.
	I have a very strong artistic background.
	I played Macbeth in Shakespeare and so on.
	So I've done a lot of artistic stuff, and I view the most powerful allegories as representing stories which accurately but metaphorically describe what people don't want to talk about but can't stop thinking about.
	In this case, it would be, of course, imperialism and particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	And I think if you understand the parallels that are going on in the movie, you'll see how powerfully this is still affecting our consciousness.
	And the moment we can start talking about it directly, we can do something to bring these damn wars to an end.
	so so The general story, and this is going to be spoiler central, so please go and watch the movie before you continue, but...
	The general story is that these superhumans, 73 superhumans, were created and, sorry, they sort of rose to power in wars in the 1990s in the sort of Star Trek universe, which started, of course, in the 50s and 60s.
	They came to, they conquered half, a quarter of the world or something like that, or half the world, and then they were beaten and they were put into this cryogenic sleep and shot into space.
	And then 300 years later, this, you know, wizened Robocop guy wakens them up and starts to use them to design weapons for the upcoming war that he anticipates is going to happen with the Klingons.
	Pause and look at the Star Trek universe as it was viewed in the 1960s and why it worked allegorically so well.
	There were, of course, three spheres of influence in the 1960s.
	There was NATO, a North American Treaty Organization, which was, of course, Europe and to some degree the United States.
	That was sort of the West.
	And then there was Russia.
	And then there was China.
	And there was sort of the Far East in terms of, to a smaller degree, there was Japan and so on.
	Now, in the Star Trek universe, it's pretty clear.
	The Klingons are the Russians.
	The Romulans are the Chinese.
	And the Vulcan, particularly Spock, are the Japanese, right?
	Because he's half-human and half-Vulcan.
	And Japan in the 1960s was, you know, a recent enemy, but now was occupied and was becoming more of an ally and so on.
	So this is why you get the half-and-half thing.
	Now, in the story...
	One of them awakens.
	Khan awakens and attacks.
	He puts a bomb at the bottom of a big building in a big city.
	This, to me, is allegorical to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 where Islamic extremists put the bomb in the basement and so on.
	So that, to me, is sort of a starting point to this.
	But he then attacks Starfleet and he flees to a remote, uninhabited area of the Klingon homeworld, which is, again, right on the edge of the border between Federation airspace and the Klingon airspace.
	And this, of course, is Afghanistan, right?
	Because it's sort of remote and rocky.
	It's under the Klingon sphere of influence close to the border.
	So this, of course, in the 1980s, Russia was invading and occupying and attempting to maintain its control over Afghanistan.
	What's interesting is that Khan is using weapons that are developed through the Federation to fight off the Klingons who come to get the Staffly guys who've come, like the Kirk of these guys, who come to go and get him.
	This is, to me, directly analogous to the CIA's funding of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan who were fighting off the Russians.
	You know, one of the great lessons of modern warfare is that attack is almost infinitely more expensive than defense, right?
	Because you had the Mujahideen trade by the CIA who were taking down, you know, $25 million Russian MiG planes with a $25,000 or $50,000 Stinger missile, which is one of the things that contributed to the collapse of the Russian Empire.
	To attack is almost infinitely more expensive than it is to defend.
	And this is how Bin Laden and the Mujahideen learned that this is how you take down an empire.
	So the CIA trained them to take down Russia by causing Russia, you know, extreme financial harm by destroying the weapons of invasion with the very cheap weapons of defense.
	The same thing, of course, is happening now in Iraq and to a smaller degree in Afghanistan as well.
	So the fact that Khan, who represents bin Laden, is using the Federation weapons to fight off the Klingons after he's been trained to develop and build and he's been trained in these weapons is directly analogous to the CIA's training and funding of the Mujahideen under bin Laden to go and fight off the Russians in the 1980s.
	So then...
	What happens is the Federation has sleepers, right?
	These guys who are in cryogenic freeze, right?
	There's 72 of them plus Kahn, 73.
	And one of the things that's used in spy terminology is a sleeper cell, which is where somebody's able to be activated to act against your enemy but is dormant and so on.
	So the fact that there's these sleepers, to me, indicates another sort of We're good to go.
	That's really important to understand.
	Now, what happens then is that they find out that these guys have been awakened or that the Khan has been awakened in order to help them build these horrible weapons, which are supposed to be used to provoke a war with the Klingons.
	And what happens, of course, is that the war with the Klingons doesn't actually materialize.
	What does materialize is the war with Khan slash bin Laden.
	Now, isn't this really the case?
	With America and Russia, that they trained these guys to go and fight the Russians and defeat the Russians mostly economically, which is why the US economy is in such a mess these days, because they're using the same economic weapons of disproportionate cost of attack and defense that the US taught them about the Russians now using against America.
	And so the war with the Klingon Empire never materializes, just as the war with Russia never materialized.
	But what happens is you end up with a war with those terrorists that you created to fight the enemy, which is, of course, the war on terror that is happening now.
	There are some things that are not even subtle, right?
	So there are 73 of these terrorists, and how many virgins do you get in the Islamic paradise if you die a martyr?
	I mean, the number is not accidental.
	I mean, this is a direct reference to this kind of stuff.
	So what happens then is that Khan takes over A Federation vessel and crashes it into a city.
	Again, I mean, you couldn't make it any less subtle if you tried.
	I mean, you couldn't.
	You know, other than having a bunch of people run after the starship saying it's a false flag attack.
	But because...
	Of course, Bin Laden, through his proxies, took over American-built planes and flew them into American buildings.
	So the fact that Bin Laden Khan takes over a Federation-built starship and crashes it into a city is not...
	Even remotely, not even remotely subtle.
	And then what happens is, Spock beams, he gets away, and then Spock goes and has a fistfight with him, and they dispose of him on a floating vessel, right?
	Dispose of Khan on a floating vessel.
	This, of course, so this whole big fight, this whole big war with starships and photon torpedoes and all that kind of stuff, It comes down to local hand-to-hand combat.
	And this, of course, was the end of Bin Laden in the real world, right?
	Again, according to the official story, the SEAL Team Six went in and killed him and all that stuff.
	And they disposed of him on a floating vessel, right?
	Which was they threw his body overboard on a ship.
	So I think that's really important to understand.
	The level of parallels are so obvious and so, I mean, on the nose that I would actually probably have marked someone down from it.
	It's too obvious, too clear.
	So I think if you look at it from that standpoint, there's something very interesting to be said about the danger of creating weapons out of people, turning people into weapons.
	A weapon you fire, it goes and blows something up and that's done.
	But when you turn a person into a weapon, it's almost always a case of boomerang.
	There's almost always a case of blowback.
	And I think that's really, really important to understand.
	So at the end of the movie, there is a ceremony.
	I think it takes place a year after the crashing of the spaceship into the buildings of the city.
	And they talk about if lives are lost, don't immediately seek for revenge and so on.
	Not a bad sentiment.
	They even had some veterans as extras in the audience of that.
	And at the end of the movie, they say it's dedicated to the post 9-11 veterans and so on.
	And It's an interesting sentiment.
	People mistake the cause of these wars.
	The root cause is not poverty.
	It's not even fundamentally imperialism.
	It's not blowback.
	The root cause fundamentally is the government's power to print money and tax citizens at gunpoint.
	That's the root cause of war.
	They say that war is the health of the state.
	This is nonsense.
	The state is the health of war.
	You simply can't have war if the government doesn't have the power to borrow, print money, and tax at gunpoint.
	Because the costs of war are so astonishingly high that unless the citizens are drugged into losing their lifeblood through vampiric infestations while they sleep, they will rebel against the war immediately.
	I mean, if you immediately got a bill for $100,000 for a war, I bet you'd put down your flag and, you know...
	Pick up your hippie peace symbols pretty quickly, but people are drugged by the diluted costs of the war, deferred and extended and extrapolated and generally hidden from immediate view.
	It is a slow death.
	It's like instead of burning to death, it's like freezing to death where you just kind of get warm and comfy and then go out that way.
	The root cause of war is the government's power to tax the monopoly that the government provides banks on the provisions of currency services and the government control of interest rates and the government's power to enslave the unborn through selling off fetuses to foreign bankers.
	So the root cause of war is not...
	Of course, it couldn't be addressed in a Hollywood film.
	I would be mad to imagine this is why it's a Hollywood film.
	But the two other things that I would mention is that...
	They're all mad.
	The heroes, the spark, they go through these unbelievable near-death experiences with almost no trauma whatsoever.
	Wisecracking jokes.
	They're all sociopaths, right?
	Because sociopaths don't have that sense of fear.
	They don't retain that sense of emotional throughput.
	So, you know, you're fighting sociopaths with sociopaths, which is never going to end war.
	This is something that is really, really important to understand.
	The war This current war, the war in the movie, is only continuing because the enemy was not defeated in the previous war, but was only put to sleep.
	And then it's reawakened for the next war.
	The Federation, fundamentally, is fascistic, right?
	I mean, it's all military all the time.
	There's almost no reference to any non-military.
	It's a complete fascistic universe.
	I mean, it's Benito Mussolini on steroids.
	And...
	Because there's almost no mention of the free market, and of course, I don't know, where is this technology coming from?
	It's not coming from the government.
	It can't produce a thumbtack without sticking itself in the thumb.
	But in this fascistic universe, the Federation, the Star Trek series, can only continue as long as it has enemies.
	This is really important to understand, right?
	That the drama of war only exists because there are enemies.
	And so the Federation needs the enemies.
	This is the most important thing to understand.
	Just look at America.
	Even just the post-war period.
	I mean, just run through all of the foreign attackments and involvement in wars, you know, from Korea to Vietnam to Iran to the Contra scandal to, oh God, getting involved in Guatemala, getting involved in Iraq, getting involved in the first Gulf War.
	I mean, the continual manufacture of enemies is essential to the growth of the fascist state, which is why, in this story, the enemies never go away.
	They're put to sleep.
	And then they're shot back out into space, and at the end of the movie, they're put to sleep again.
	They don't end the enemies, because to end the enemies is to end the hierarchy, is to end the Federation, is to have a world of peace.
	This is really, really essential to understand.
	You will never see parenting.
	There's a little bit at the beginning where a guy wants to take care of his daughter or whatever, but you'll never see parenting in any of these sorts of movies because this is all about fighting made-up monsters that you keep alive in order to continue fighting, right?
	This is a bloodthirsty, blood-soaked, hierarchical, violent universe which can only be maintained by the continued brutalization.
	This is why you'll never see, you know, let's reform parenting to end war.
	I mean, this is so incomprehensible to people who are addicted to the fight or flight and freeze mechanism of continual warfare, which is where we are still addicted so tragically as a species.
	Where there's not a war overseas, there's a war against taxpayers, there's a war against the unborn, there's a war against drug users, there's a war against you name it.
	There's always a war against something at all times, because the only thing that we can think of, given the brutality of most of our upbringings, is that we must use the might of the state to solve delicate social problems, which is like trying to build a house with a bunker buster.
	You'll get a lot of noise and smoke, but you won't get a whole lot of house.
	Because the fundamental solution to the problem of war is not to stop raising arms against enemies or decide to go fight or not to go and fight.
	It's simply to treat your children with peace, love, virtue, negotiation, consideration, gentleness, kindness, respect, dignity, and all that kind of stuff.
	That's the true revolution.
	There is no revolution, fundamentally, but parenting.
	And the point is not to raise arms against enemies, but to lower your arms before your children.

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