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Jan. 20, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

25:40

2890 American Sniper: The Chris Kyle Story Revealed

Why has ‘American Sniper’ done so well at the box office? United States Navy SEAL Chris Kyle became one of the most lethal and dangerous snipers in American history. His pinpoint accuracy not only saves countless lives but also makes him a prime target of insurgents. Kyle served four tours of duty in Iraq, but when he finally returned home, he found that he could not leave the war behind.

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	Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope you're doing well.
	This is the philosophical review of Clint Eastwood's movie, American Sniper.
	A viscerally Powerful film with a truly outstanding performance by Bradley Cooper, who I've been a fan of for many years.
	I spent some time in theatre school, did a bit of acting myself.
	The man's performance blows me away.
	He's just basically morphed into a war golem of near-infinite accuracy.
	And there will be spoilers in the review.
	I will try to keep them to a minimum.
	But if you haven't seen the film and don't want to know what happens, stop now or forever hold your peace.
	So, as you probably know, there was an American sniper credited with the most kills in the US. 160 confirmed kills out of 255 probable kills.
	Not the best sniper ever in history.
	That, I think, is a Finnish guy who had 550 odd kills against the Soviets in the Second World War, but not bad for a sniper.
	The movie is gripping, exciting.
	You kind of have to get into the mindset of the way that the movie works.
	Because The movie has as much moral relationship to reality as Lord of the Rings does to the Second World War.
	What I mean by that is there is a sequence wherein there are these bombings that occurred in Kenya and Tanzania against U.S. embassies in 19...
	98, and that's sort of one of his incentives to motivate, like he says to his brother, look what they've done to us!
	And then after 9-11, then they go sailing off to fight insurgents in Iraq.
	Now the reality is that the real guy who was a rodeo guy had a terrible accident, was dragged around in a rodeo by an animal and ended up with like broken ribs and pins in his wrist and so on and tried to get into the army in 96 and then was eventually taken in.
	Later on he was rejected because he'd been such a physical wreck after his injuries.
	But there is this There's a sequence that seems almost inescapable in movies and stories about Iraq that, well, you see there was the bombings, and then there was 9-11, and then we went to war against Iraq.
	Like, these things are somehow causally connected.
	Almost half of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11.
	I think another 15 or 16 or 17 percent are not sure, and a few people know the truth, which is that Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do.
	With 9-11 and this argument that was put forward by Condoleezza Rice and others in the grim days leading up to the 2003 invasion was that we don't want to see the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud, that somehow this Fairly landlocked desert country is going to come up, conjure a navy, sail across the vast thousands of miles of oceanic distance, and invade America.
	Well, the reality is, of course, that Hitler couldn't even cross, what, a dozen miles across the channel to invade England with all the might at his disposal.
	The idea that Saddam Hussein would be able to invade America is something that is truly astounding.
	It's like waiting for the mosquitoes to develop an air force and take out the Luftwaffe.
	So, there is this portrayal that's put forward that Iraq was invaded because of 9-11.
	And this is something that is so ridiculously false that it scarcely needs repeating, but it's something that has become part of the American narrative.
	And that is really kind of chilling to see within living memory, not 12, 13 years ago, this story still continuing, that the war in Iraq had something to do with 9-11.
	What tragically has happened in Iraq, and Iraq was a huge mess to begin with, of course, under a secular dictatorship under Saddam Hussein, who'd largely been installed and had his weapons of mass destruction sold to him by the Americans.
	It's now been replaced.
	Generally, what's going to happen with Iraq is you had a secular dictatorship now being replaced by fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship, which is most likely what's going to happen.
	The areas around Baghdad already seem to be falling under the control of ISIS and these monsters out there just executed 13 boys for watching a football game and all kinds of mess.
	So it is fascinating to just see how this is not at all addressed in the movie.
	And I'm not saying, of course, that this is something that would be the experience of the soldiers out there, although I bet the soldiers out there, some of them are pretty bitter about no weapons of mass destruction when that was the context by which they were sent over there.
	And if you watched the movie, you would genuinely think that this is what happened.
	And that's kind of terrifying to see just how distorted history can get so quickly.
	But it's also perfectly understandable.
	In the world that this young man grew up in, his father has a very powerful speech where he says, there's three kinds of people, son, there's...
	There's the sheep who don't think there's evil in the world and don't know how to protect themselves.
	And then there's the wolves who prey upon the weak.
	And then there's the sheepdog who use the natural powers of violence and aggression to fight the wolves and keep the sheep safe.
	It's a very powerful way of putting it.
	And the physical abuse that Chris Kyle probably suffered in his youth is indicated by the father, you know, pulling his belt out, putting him on the table and basically saying, I'll beat the hell out of you if you ever become a wolf.
	And that element of what happens in one's childhood defining one's own life almost forever is a very powerful thing.
	Not mentioned much, but that is a very powerful way of delineating the world for people.
	And, of course, you don't want to be a sheep, you don't want to be a wolf, so a sheepdog is kind of what he becomes.
	And one of the reasons why all of this stuff, this distortion of history and this belief that it was for a good cause happens is that if you get...
	There's two things that happen in war.
	Number one, if you put men in a dangerous situation, they were killed to protect each other.
	Number two, if a nation suffers enough for the cause of a war, it will invent a just cause for that war, even where none exists.
	An ex post facto justification for the horrors that the country have experienced.
	And this is something that Chris Kyle, or the character in the movie, talks about.
	I was there to make sure that these insurgents, these, as he calls them, savages, did not kill any of my friends, did not kill any Marines, did not kill any American soldiers.
	And that's what his job was.
	And to be perfectly honest, if I were out there in Iraq, you know, I would really want that guy, Chris Kyle, above me, pounding on the long gun.
	I mean, that's what I would really like, because he would keep you safe.
	And that's the way it works.
	When you throw men into...
	A situation where it's kill or be killed, they will work to bond and save each other and fight with each other, and they're ending up fighting for each other against the enemy.
	The for each other is primary, the against the enemy is secondary.
	And the way that people circle the wagons when they're under attack is one of the main reasons why this kind of foreign policy disasters always add to the chaos and violence of the world.
	The idea that you go and invade a country and then you can turn it to some sort of magical democracy.
	I mean you can do it in a weird way if you're willing to bomb the living crap out of everything that moves.
	I mean Germany was invaded of course.
	Germans after the First World War were willing to have the Second World War once they got the living crap bombed out of them by the RAF and the USAF. During the Second World War They studied war no more and they've been meek as lambs ever since.
	Same thing after thousands of years of Japanese or at least hundreds of years of gruesome and brutal Japanese imperialism throughout the region and ungodly and unholy treatment of POWs in the Second World War.
	When The Japanese mainland was bombed and nuked and so on.
	They gave up on war.
	It's almost like if the war happens overseas and it's only the men who suffer, then war just continues.
	But if the bombs drop on the civilians, i.e.
	if it's the women who suffer, then War becomes unacceptable.
	So you can turn a country to peace if you're willing to literally carpet bomb the whole place.
	And that's not for sure a certain thing.
	But if you don't invade a country that is totalitarian in nature, and don't interfere with it in general, Then it will collapse of its own accord.
	So if you look at the two major dictatorships of the 20th century that lasted beyond the Second World War, the USSR was Russia and was China.
	And both of those countries, the dictatorial aspects of the extreme central planning, socialist, communist aspects of those countries collapsed in the absence of external involvement.
	And that's an important thing to understand.
	India had a highly socialist economy bequeathed on it by all of the Ivy League intellectuals coming out of England after the Second World War.
	India was not invaded and India became more free.
	Dozens of years after the American invasion of or police action or whatever you want to call it in Korea and Vietnam, Cambodia and so on.
	These countries turned more towards free market policies and an open economy and so on.
	But it almost never happens during the actual invasion.
	And so This idea that you go in and pump 3600 rounds of pure leaded freedom into a country and set it free from its chains seems to be, historically, almost a complete fantasy.
	Chris Kyle did write in his autobiography That he says about killing between 160 and 255 people that it was fun.
	He said, quote, I loved what I did.
	I still do.
	If circumstances were different, if my family didn't need me, I'd be back in a heartbeat.
	I'm not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun.
	I had the time of my life being a SEAL. It is, to liberals, to people on the left, it is always incomprehensible when a right-wing or Republican phenomenon, either in the book or the movie or wherever, does really well.
	Because it's sort of like, I think Pauline Kyle was a movie reviewer, maybe at the New York Times in the 70s, and she said, like, baffled, she said, I can't understand How Richard Nixon became president?
	I mean, nobody I knew voted for him.
	There's this world outside the sort of liberal bubble.
	And this is what the movie is keying into and is evoking for people.
	It is a...
	I mean...
	Clint Eastwood is a Republican slash libertarian.
	Chris Kyle has been described as a staunch Republican.
	See, in the media, you can't just be a Republican.
	You have to be a staunch Republican or a far-right Republican or a fanatical Republican or a fundamentalist Republican.
	You can't just be a Republican.
	And if you're a Democrat, you're never even introduced as a Democrat.
	You're just a pundit.
	You know, like how anyone who's skeptical of immigration in Europe is automatically on the far right.
	Anyway, xenophobic.
	So, to me, it's always interesting when you see this general incomprehension when a really Republican movie comes out.
	The character...
	I don't know the degree to which he is the same as the man himself.
	But the character repeatedly refers to the Iraqis as savages.
	He says he believes in evil.
	He sees it over there.
	He's an agent of the light fighting evil.
	And that is something that is almost always portrayed from the left as crazy.
	What do you mean you believe in evil, right?
	To be on the left...
	is to believe in the perfectibility of human institutions.
	To be on the right is to accept the imperfectibility of human nature.
	See, on the left, they want to design this world.
	We get enough central planning, we get the welfare state, we get this jigged, we take taxes from here, we put them over there.
	These institutions can be perfected and we can have paradise.
	And that's kind of an atheist mechanistic way of looking at the world.
	On the right, at least in America, because of The idea of original sin and sin as a whole.
	Human nature is highly fallible and therefore you cannot have structures, social structures, governmental structures composed of fallible human beings that can do great good.
	Human beings will always be corrupted by evil, which is why people on the right prefer smaller government and people on the left who are more atheist or agnostic want larger government.
	And so the belief in evil and the belief of doing the work of the Lord to fight evil And to protect the greatest country in the world, which he says, and again, if this was a left-wing movie, it would be, you know, oh, what an idiot, you know, whatever.
	Bad things would automatically be thrown against anybody who believed in The Shining City on the Hill, the greatest country in the world being America, in the movie.
	So this...
	The approach that the movie has to really foundation on fundamental American values, particularly Southern American values.
	God, country, family.
	It's explicitly talked about in the movie.
	These are very foundational values.
	It's always fascinating for me to see when people on the left come across these kinds of movies, it's like They can't come because nobody they know is like that.
	Nobody they know understands that.
	Nobody they know believes any of that stuff.
	So it's like when conservative books do really well, as they tend to do, I don't know anyone who would read Ann Coulter.
	I don't know anyone who would read Mark Levine.
	I don't know anyone who watches O'Reilly.
	I don't know anyone who listens to Rush Limbaugh.
	So how can they possibly be so successful?
	Because there's a whole world out there of Americans who believe very fundamentally and very foundationally in the existence of evil and the existence of God and the noble mission of Of America to serve as a shining beacon of light, peace, freedom, and democracy the world over, although most of them would probably prefer republic over democracy.
	So it is fascinating to see just this incomprehension when a conservative movie does really well.
	It's like, I don't know anyone who would watch that.
	There are, of course, some of the usual and brutal clichés in the movie.
	So if you're going to be in a war movie, You want to be very good-looking, because if you're very good-looking, you are a-okay.
	Bullets bounce off chiseled jaws, but if you have like a weak chin, you know, you're splat.
	Bullets like there's a gravity well.
	It's like the good-looking guy goes over the top and keeps going, you know, like one of those fake arrows that goes around your head.
	But it's a gravity well if you're an atheist or if you doubt the mission or if you are weak-willed or if you panic or if you are kind of homely-looking, you know, you're dead.
	And so all the good-looking people do well and all the bad-looking people die.
	The guys who doubt the mission...
	The guy who doubts the existence of God, right?
	Dead, right?
	And that's very explicit in the film, so I won't get into it.
	It's very explicit.
	I mean, the guy actually says, it was doubt that killed him, not the bullet.
	Doubt in the mission and so on.
	But, I mean, doubt is sort of a mark of intelligence, right?
	I mean, those who do not doubt don't learn.
	I don't doubt gravity.
	I don't particularly think too much about it, just accept it as a fact of life.
	I don't learn that much more about gravity.
	I doubt lots of things in the world, which is why I explore.
	An inability to doubt is an inability to learn.
	So, that, I think, is...
	An important aspect to the movie.
	There are all of these cliches.
	The randomness of war is hard to understand for people who've not really studied it.
	It might come from a military family At least on my father's side, going at least back to the, so far being traced back to the 11th century, the Battle of Hastings, which is why I have a French last name.
	It came up from French and France, William the Conqueror, Battle of Hastings and all that.
	And somebody wrote, I think it was one of the poets of the First World War who wrote that when you go to war, you think that you're going to be charging up a hill on a white horse with a sword, but the reality is some guy 20 miles ago pushes a button and you blow up.
	There is a horrible randomness to modern warfare.
	There is, of course, skill involved in warfare, and this is part of the general strangeness of seeing these kinds of movies, that whenever there's a firefight, the Americans all intelligently take cover, and then all of the enemies come pouring through the doorways like retarded stormtroopers and just get mown down.
	And that, I mean, unless they're actually just trying to kill themselves to get into heaven, it doesn't make any sense to me.
	I mean, I've seen better AI in video games.
	If you could just upgrade the insurgents to your average Call of Duty bot, they'd be doing a lot better.
	They'd take some cover.
	I think that these firefights end up being lots of stalemates.
	Like, everyone's got cover and no one wants to come out.
	Of course, that's not particularly dramatic.
	You do see that occasionally.
	Generation Kill had some of that stuff, just the stalemate, just the waiting game.
	But this idea that you take cover and everyone just comes running across the parking lot and you can just shoot the crap out of them just doesn't make any sense.
	And this disproportionate death, you know, like the Jedi never miss and the stormtroopers never hit.
	So in the last part of the movie, that just gets kind of ridiculous, which, you know, when I'm in a movie, I sort of suspend belief.
	I suspend my particular ethics.
	I suspend my skepticism.
	I really try to absorb the movie as it stands.
	You know, because if you're...
	Some people who listen to my reviews, oh man, it would be no fun to go to a movie with.
	I'm actually great fun to go to a movie with.
	I completely lower all of my barriers and I enter into the world of the movie.
	And I don't sit there saying, you know, it's totally racist that orcs are like always ugly and like the gay elves are always pretty.
	I mean, that's totally wrong when you think it's very luxist.
	I mean, that's not what I'm doing.
	I'm just like, okay, orcs and elves, cool!
	Arrows, ah, Mordor!
	But then afterwards I'll sort of think about it, but I open my heart to the movie and just let it run through me like a freight train through a tunnel.
	That's probably kind of sexual.
	But anyway, I open myself up to that, and I think it's the best way to experience it.
	You don't want to be emotionally distant and skeptical and clinical and analytical during the movie.
	There's plenty of time for that afterwards.
	And so...
	From that standpoint, I get the movie.
	I get the movie's popularity.
	I really understand it.
	The idea, as Chris says in the movie, you know, basically...
	I'm fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.
	I'm fighting to protect your freedom.
	You know, if you criticize the military, they say, well, you know, it's great that I'm off there protecting your freedom so that you can snipe me in the back with your pathetic, weasley, lefty words and all that.
	And I get that perspective.
	For people who've sacrificed...
	And the level of sacrifice, of course, I mean, the Iraqis most of all, but like from the sort of home world view, from the view inside the biosphere of empire, the people who've suffered and hundreds of thousands of people have suffered enormously.
	I mean, tens of thousands of brutal injuries.
	Thousands and thousands of deaths.
	And families shattered, like the divorce rate for Navy SEALs is like 90%.
	And lives shattered and even those who came back, the PTSD and suicidality, I mean, more American vets have died from suicide than from enemy bombs.
	In other words, the invisible shrapnel that goes into the head of a brutalized experience is worse than the physical damage that can occur on the battlefield from a headcount standpoint.
	The amount of suffering that the war has engendered within the Empire is so prodigious that a clear moral myth like American Sniper is like a cache of water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.
	It is something which is going to be greedily consumed.
	The idea that People died ending evil.
	It's so seductive and I can really understand why people would be so drawn to that if I had lost a child to this brutal combat, to this war.
	I would not want to watch a movie which says that the war was a fiction.
	I mean, the war was based on a true story.
	Sorry, the war movie was based on a true story.
	The war was based on a fiction, and that's a brutal thing for people to experience and really process.
	The amount of bitterness that would engender to the enemies above rather than the imaginary enemies outside would be almost too much, I think, for people to bear.
	I think the movie is worth watching.
	I found myself fascinated by the acting.
	I found myself viscerally engaged in the combat sequences, which are at a very applying electrodes to the base of the brain Bringing up your lizard brain monkey beta fighting madness.
	I mean, it is very visceral in that way.
	Expertly directed, the sound is gripping, and the music is very minor.
	And the arc of the story ends, of course, as I'm sure everyone knows, in a peculiar kind of tragedy to travel, which I think starts next month.
	So, I think it is, obviously, like all war movies, it requires the participation of the military and the government and so on, so it's going to have massive elements of propaganda.
	It's great that all the good-looking people make it through.
	That's natural.
	I mean, Pat Tillman, of course, in real life, a very good-looking football player who ended up, as it was revealed, killed by friendly fire.
	That's not the way.
	Bullets don't care how good-looking you are.
	They just bounce around randomly until they find a heartbeat to extinguish.
	So I would recommend seeing the film.
	I would recommend opening your heart to the premises of the movie.
	Plenty of time for sort of skepticism and analysis afterwards.
	But I think you'll be well rewarded and you will learn a lot about the mindset of some pretty brave people, obviously.
	You know, whether they're crazy or not, I don't know.
	But it certainly takes a kind of courage that I'm not sure I could muster in those situations, although were I to be attacked, I'm sure I would be able to muster that.
	But to go over and do that kind of stuff and find it fun is obviously a foreign mindset to me, but like all foreign mindsets, I think there was a French philosopher who said, nothing human is alien to me.
	It's well worth exploring, and I think the movie does a good job of leading you through it.
	This is Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.

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