If “The Christmas Truce of 1914” could happen for one day - why couldn’t it happen every single day? Stefan Molyneux comments on the grim calculation that people make when they are caught in the machinery of war and the true nature of heroism.
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| Isaac wrote in after seeing the Christmas Truce video, which we put out on Christmas Day, and he said he felt it was your most moving video yet, but it begged a question. | |
| If that could happen on one day, why can't the Christmas Truce happen every day? | |
| Hmm. | |
| That's a good question. | |
| So, for those who don't know the story, very, very briefly, in World War I, There was no shooting on Christmas Eve and the trenches were close enough in World War I that the British and the Germans could hear each other and a German baritone Broke the frigid silence of that frosty Eve singing, | |
| Holy night, silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. | |
| In German, which I haven't spoken since I was about three. | |
| But after they listened to this beautiful German baritone singing Silent Night, they then returned with their own songs, and the songs went back and forth, and they ended up with some people who spoke each other's language. | |
| They brought a football out. | |
| They played soccer in no man's land. | |
| And this was a huge problem. | |
| You know, what is called discipline in the army is simply making soldiers more afraid of their commanders than they are even of the enemy. | |
| Boy, if you think the enemy is on the other side of the trench, you don't understand warfare. | |
| In warfare, the enemy is on your side of the trench. | |
| You know, just watch Mel Gibson's early movie, Gallipoli, for a view of soldiers who know, going over the top, and it's shredded with the angry hornets of nationalism, of the bullets just rip them apart. | |
| And the reason why do they go over... | |
| The trench wall to near a certain death. | |
| Well, they go over the trench wall to near a certain death because they have at least a chance of surviving out in no man's land, but any man who does not go over the top of the trench wall is shot by his commanding officer. | |
| And I don't know if that was common, I don't know if that was everywhere, but there are certainly indications of it and stories of it. | |
| So, in war, you face the enemy on the other side because you actually have a better chance with the enemy on the other side than you do with the enemy on your side. | |
| Desertion of duty, dereliction of duty, these were in the past. | |
| I don't know about the law now, but they were in the past. | |
| Military crimes, often punishable by death. | |
| And, um... | |
| And of course, if you got killed in the line of battle, then you would get the pension, right? | |
| Those two cops, the Hispanic and the I think Asian cops who were just shot by the black guy in New York, they were posthumously promoted to the highest level of detective because their spouses gained 100% of the salary and benefits until they die. | |
| So if you go over the top and you're killed in the line of duty, you might get a medal and your war widow is going to get her benefits. | |
| But if you are shot for dereliction of duty or a refusal to walk into the hail of gunfire, then... | |
| What happens is you are obviously... | |
| It's a dishonorable discharge of gunpowder, to say the least. | |
| I don't believe that any pensions go flowing towards your... | |
| So, for your family, for your kids, for your life, you go over into the enemy territory. | |
| So, it was not just that the soldiers in World War I... Just decided to kumbaya themselves in no man's land. | |
| What happened was, for whatever reason, military discipline, i.e., if you go over and fraternize with the enemy, we will shoot you, or we will court-martial you, or we will throw you in the brig until time eats your bones. | |
| So, there was a breakdown in the command structure. | |
| What is called heroism in war is not that. | |
| It is a rational calculation of 80% chance of death ahead versus 100% chance of death behind. | |
| The enemy is not the guy on the other side of the field. | |
| The enemy is the officer behind you with the pistol who will shoot you if you don't fight. | |
| This is the fundamental reality of it. | |
| And if we understand that about war, and I mean, heroism is a tough word. | |
| I think that the true measure of long-term heroism, I mean, there's short-term heroism and running into burning buildings to save people and so on. | |
| Magnificent. | |
| I hope to do it if the opportunity arises for me. | |
| I sure hope that at least someone will do it should the opportunity arise for them. | |
| And I'm in the building. | |
| So that kind of heroism is not to be taken lightly, is a powerful and essential and really a necessary part of human civilization, but there is the silent kind of heroism that prevents situations from coming into being. | |
| To bravely face down a potentially terminal illness is heroic, but In a way, it's even more heroic to oppose the situations which lead to those kinds of disasters. | |
| In other words, a complicated way of saying war in heroism or heroism in war can be powerful and deep and necessary and brave and courageous and, well, just plain heroic. | |
| But I think that we all would rather the heroism, the silent heroism that occurs, that prevents and avoids That, I think, is the heroism that we all want. | |
| You know, if someone could prevent my house from burning down, I would be quite content with not having some sweaty-toothed madman rush into my room and save me. | |
| You know, just don't have my house burned down, and I'll do without that extreme heroism in the moment. | |
| And because we have a definition of morality and of heroism, of courage, and so on, that is defined to serve the powers that be. | |
| Human beings naturally want to be good, which is why sin works, because sin is the deity saying you're bad or you're wrong, and why punishment works and ostracism works and so on. | |
| So because we want to be good, the best way to get us to be good is to redefine virtue as service to the masters. | |
| As obsequence to the emperor, as kneeling down before the Sith Lord of infinite flag-wrapped historical prejudice. | |
| Thank you. | |
| And when you think of heroism, you rarely think of... | |
| Verbal battles, of verbal courage, of those who can see war coming from such a great distance that they can change the course of history to avoid it, to prevent it. | |
| Those people are rarely recorded throughout history. | |
| They are rarely fated throughout history because, of course, the rulers want you to associate heroism not with prevention, but subservience. | |
| Not with avoidance, but obedience to their whims and wishes. | |
| And when you look at the war, in the First World War, or any war really, You see only a very narrow view of the combat. | |
| You see guys pouring out of trenches and fighting each other in the middle. | |
| You don't see all the guns that are forcing them there, and all the guns that are forcing people to pay for this violence and brutality. | |
| There's two guns outside the frame pointed at the soldiers, which is why they are fighting. | |
| Now, I believe that the real heroism—I know this sounds self-serving, but what do you expect? | |
| I'm trying to be good— I believe that the greatest heroism, the most beneficial heroism, is to widen the frame of our view of war, so that we don't see two groups of men acting like feral animals, clawing and killing and head-butting and skewering and guillotining and bayoneting and garroting and all of this kind of stuff. | |
| That's what we see on the battlefield. | |
| And we don't understand human nature and we say, how can people do this to each other? | |
| Well, we have to widen the frame. | |
| And we have to widen the frame so that we see that guns are pointed at these men that will shoot them dead if they don't do that. | |
| And without widening the frame to see the guns that are pointed at the soldiers who will be murdered if they do not fight and murder. | |
| We call it human nature. | |
| Well, human beings are just feral. | |
| Well, if they're just feral, why do we need to point pistols at soldiers to make them fight? | |
| Why do we need a draft? | |
| If people are just so naturally feral, why do we need taxation? | |
| Which is the conscription of currency. | |
| Why do we need taxation? | |
| To pay for war. | |
| Why do we need centralized currencies? | |
| Why do we need fiat currencies? | |
| Why do we need central banks? | |
| If we're just so naturally feral, then this should happen with no coercion whatsoever. | |
| You don't need to point a gun at a hungry lion to have it chase a zebra. | |
| It will go and do that because that's its nature. | |
| But whoever you have to point a gun at is not following their nature. | |
| You can see the most bizarre and absurd things which if your focus is narrow enough give you an unbelievably distorted view of human nature. | |
| You will see let's say a man Willingly walk into a combine harvester chewing up the wheat and be pulled apart by the machinery and you'd say, what a crazy suicidal guy. | |
| But let's say that his wife and children are held hostage and if he does not do that they will be murdered. | |
| Well then you've widened the frame to see the hostage takers by the side of the field. | |
| And the whole point of propaganda is to get you to narrow your focus so you don't see the guns orchestrating the entire macabre dance. | |
| The gruesome machinery of human disassembly is powered by lead, hot lead to the forehead. | |
| And my goal and purpose, as I've always said from the very beginning, from years and years and years ago when I started, to see the gun in the room, to see the gun in the war. | |
| You know, think of the opening of Saving Private Ryan. | |
| You say, wow, why are these guys doing this? | |
| Well, because if they don't do it, they'll be shot. | |
| We're court-martialed and whatever, right? | |
| And if they're shot, then there's no pension for their wife and kids. | |
| They are disposable livestock. | |
| Because you never see the officers behind the men who have the guns, the officers with the guns herding the men to fight each other and shooting those who will not murder, we don't understand war and its fundamentals. | |
| So for me, the reason why this can't happen every day is because we confuse men violently herded and forced to murder each other. | |
| We confuse those people with humanity as a whole. | |
| It's like the Christians versus the lions in the Roman Empire. | |
| We say, wow, you know, those Christians, they really like, I guess, being eaten. | |
| I guess maybe it's how they get to heaven or something. | |
| It's like, no. | |
| Because if they go in with the lion and they've got their little trident or whatever and their net, at least they've got a tiny chance. | |
| But there's a guy with a sword who will cut their head off if they don't walk into that amphitheater. | |
| It's the same thing with the gladiatorial combat. | |
| You go fight this guy for our entertainment, or we will shoot you. | |
| Well, garrot you, I guess. | |
| So my goal, just widen the view. | |
| Widen the view. | |
| There was grim, ugly, vicious, sociopathically driven, sociopathically driven, rational calculation in the trenches. | |
| I've got a tiny chance if I go over into no man's land, and if I die, my wife and kids are taken care of. | |
| This is how the mafia works, right? | |
| I mean, if you're a made man in the mafia, and you go out, and when you go to the mattresses, and you go out and shoot guys, and then if you get killed, they'll take care of your wife and kids. | |
| But if you run away, they'll hunt you down and kill you. | |
| And your kids. | |
| And your wife, maybe. | |
| I don't know. | |
| What do I know about the mafia other than what M. Scorsese tells me? | |
| But... | |
| It is a rational calculation. | |
| I have more chance going into no man's land than I have of staying here. | |
| Because if I stay here, they'll just shoot me. | |
| And if I go over there, I might live. | |
| And maybe I'll just get wounded. | |
| But here, they'll shoot to kill. | |
| They're not going to just shoot my hand. | |
| They're going to shoot me in the head. | |
| Double tap to the forehead. | |
| I'm out. | |
| I'm done. | |
| And dishonorably buried. | |
| A coward. | |
| No medals. | |
| No pensions. | |
| No nothing. | |
| It's a rational calculation. | |
| It's nothing to do with heroics. | |
| I mean, if your plane is heading into a mountain, you can't control it and you jump out. | |
| You do that because if you go into the mountain in the plane, you're dead for virtual certainty. | |
| But if you jump out, maybe you'll land in a lake. | |
| Maybe you'll land in a haystack. | |
| Maybe, I don't know. | |
| It is a chilling and grim rational calculation. | |
| That people make in war. | |
| And once you get caught up in that machinery of war, it is almost impossible to extricate yourself. | |
| And the way forward is almost doom. | |
| But staying or trying to go backwards is almost certain doom. | |
| So it can be that every day. | |
| But we need to widen the view of how people are herded Into war, calling soldiers heroic in many ways is like calling cows in an abattoir suicidal. | |
| Well, no, that's just where they heard it. | |
| Now, that having been said, like I wish to reiterate that there are incredible acts of courage that occur in war. | |
| There are people who go out into no man's land to pull back friends. | |
| There are people who go back for the wounded. | |
| There are people who save civilians. | |
| There is incredible acts of heroism that occur in war. | |
| And I don't wish to wish those away or diminish them or anything like that. | |
| But... | |
| Wouldn't we all love a world where those acts of heroism were not required, not necessary? | |
| I think that's the heroism that we want to focus on. | |
| Does that help at all? | |
| That's really interesting, Stefan. | |
| It's an honor and a privilege to speak with you. | |
| Yeah, if you can hear me, the video... | |
| In your very moving video on the Christmas truce, you mentioned being strongly moved as a young person by knowing that an idea in minds can do this, could stop a war like that. | |
| That kind of struck in my mind the thought that there are So many ideas. | |
| You know, there's more ideas than we could count, and there are so many minds. | |
| So what was it about this particular idea that made this... | |
| I mean, I guess the closest thing to a miracle, depending on how you look at things, happen? | |
| Does that make sense? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Now, I mean, to push... | |
| at freedomainradio.com slash free. | |
| I do an audiobook reading of it. | |
| I agree with the thesis that children raised peacefully will not be prone to these kinds of aggressions or covering up these kinds of aggressions. | |
| So I think spreading out peace and negotiation with children is the way to go. | |
| I mean, the one thing that we do know about human nature is that there's no such thing outside of adaptability. | |
| We adapt to our environment. | |
| We adapt to our circumstances. | |
| And if children adapt to peaceful circumstances, they will adapt the world of war to their own peaceful natures. | |
| That, I think, is the best and only hope we've got. | |
| I mean, we have tried anti-war propaganda. | |
| Ever since the 1970s, there have been unbelievable tidal waves of a more realistic, though still narrow, view of the war. | |
| Because you've got the grunts going through the jungles of Vietnam, and even in MASH, there was a scene where one of the One of the head doctors, they have a new, I think it's a kind of sticky phosphorus or something that melts people's skin, and he just gets so incredibly angry that human beings are still working out new and even more ghastly ways to disassemble each other. | |
| And there's a very powerful speech in that that I remember from when I was, I guess I was a teenager or whatever, when that was coming out. | |
| Or maybe it was in reruns, I can't recall. | |
| But there is... | |
| A perspective that we just need to get, that we cannot blame human nature for what exists in the world, because that is to say that there is no pressure put upon children to adopt certain characteristics, obedience, invisibility, submission, and so on. | |
| This is how we are raised. | |
| It's in a lot of parenting, it's in almost all schools, it's in almost all religious instructions, to stand in awe, to drop your jaw, and drop to the floor, on your knees, obey, obey, obey. | |
| And he who speaks up, he who speaks back, is dishonoring the dead. | |
| Dishonoring the dead. | |
| As I said before, we scarcely honor the victims of war by adding to their number. | |
| That's like having a pro-smoking campaign, because 400,000 people a year die of lung cancer in America. | |
| Well, we don't want to dishonor the dead by opposing smoking more cigarettes. | |
| That's what we need. | |
| We want to honor their sacrifice. | |
| No, we wish to learn from their sacrifice. | |
| Otherwise, their death truly was in vain. | |
| I had a playwright came to my... | |
| When I first was in college, I was at a campus of York University, and my professor bought in a playwright. | |
| Who had written a play about the time Trotsky was detained in Canada, of all places. | |
| I think it was during World War I. And I've always been fascinated, and I've written a whole book on Russian revolutionaries called Revolutions, which again, you can get at freedomainradio.com. | |
| And Sergei Nehaev, who was a Russian radical of the 19th century, he's a character in my book. | |
| He apparently was able to talk guards into letting him go after they'd arrested him. | |
| And there was a government official, a bureaucrat, who was sitting with Trotsky, and they had these conversations. | |
| And I actually looked up the play recently. | |
| I've been meaning to reorder it because the playwright actually did a good job of reading it to the class. | |
| And I just remember one exchange in particular where the Canadian official says to Trotsky, who's basically saying how the capitalist class, by which he means the banks, the financial classes, and so on, is running the war for its own profit and has no interest in honor or whatever. | |
| And the man says, well, my brother is over in France, and if what you're saying is true, then he might die for nothing. | |
| And Trotsky says, well... | |
| If he dies, he died for nothing, no matter what I say. | |
| This is a paraphrase from like 30 years ago, and maybe he was already dead or something like that, but I was really struck by the fact that a thinker could make the case and change someone's mind about war. | |
| How do we justify war? | |
| How do we justify war? | |
| War is always portrayed as self-defense, right? | |
| War is always portrayed As self-defense, as the righting of a wrong, right? | |
| Whether the wrong was the splitting up of Germany or the limitation under the Versailles Treaty to 100,000 troops and no air force and so on, or whether it was against the Jews who Hitler felt had betrayed him in World War I by switching sides and funding the British and Americans in return for the Balfour Declaration, which is the foundation of Palestine, Israel, blah, blah. | |
| Like, whatever it's portrayed as, well, you see a bunch of The Saudis flew planes into the World Trade Center, so let's go fuck up Afghanistan! | |
| It's like, as the old comedian says, what do we do? | |
| Miss? | |
| They're Saudis! | |
| So it's always self-defense. | |
| Always self-defense. | |
| And it's always, "We're perfect, they're evil. | |
| We're good, they're malevolent. | |
| We're on the side of the angels, they are the devils." And... | |
| That requires an us-versus-them mentality from the very beginning. | |
| From the very beginning. | |
| And it requires the indoctrination upon children of the fantastical idea that they have more in common with their masters, with their political leaders, than they do with the soldiers in other countries. | |
| That is mad. | |
| That is absolutely mad. | |
| And it only takes one metaphor or analogy to make that clear. | |
| You know, if I'm a cow in this field and you're a cow in that field, do we have more in common with our farmers? | |
| The farmers who own us, who milk us, and who will eventually kill us for meat? | |
| Do we have more in common with our farmers or with each other? | |
| I think the answer to that is quite clear. | |
| But to do that, we need to take away hierarchy, we need to take away obedience, and we need teachers and preachers and parents to stop causing or forcing children To emotionally bond with a hierarchy based on more power. | |
| Bigger power. | |
| Parents are bigger. | |
| Parents are stronger. | |
| God is everywhere. | |
| The teacher can punish you. | |
| So obey. | |
| Well, that means that children gain a natural allegiance and respect for and a bonding, a Stockholm Syndrome almost, with those who have more power than when someone who's got power comes along and says, do something. | |
| It's very hard for people to resist. | |
| Very hard for people to resist, and I really sympathize with all of that. | |
| So it's a lot of complex stuff, but I think fundamentally it just comes down to identifying the hidden aggression so we don't end up with the very visible aggression. | |
| That's great. | |
| Thank you very much, Stephan. | |
| That was fantastic. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| A great question, and feel free to call back anytime. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Take care. | |
| Take care. |