All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 22, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:16
3081 Why Europe Owes The Migrants Nothing
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So, I work in the realm of moral philosophy, and I have a graduate degree in history.
My master's thesis was on the history of philosophy.
I've been working in and around ethics for quite some time.
It's really time to examine competently one of the great gotchas in history that's currently sprinting through our collective consciousness with regards to the migrant crisis in the European Union.
And the gotcha goes something like this.
The migrant crisis is payback for Western destabilization of Middle Eastern governments.
If you don't want these refugees, you shouldn't have bombed their countries.
Karma is a bitch, so suck it up!
Now, for a lot of people, I did a video, what pisses me off, about the migrant crisis, and you can sort of scroll through comment after comment along these lines.
It's a very emotionally compelling argument for a lot of people.
But here, my friends, is where we need to exercise the greatest caution.
Emotionally compelling arguments, by their very definition, need to be rigidly examined and resisted.
To avoid intellectual bigotry, we must subject the most seductive arguments to the greatest tests.
Now, this is straight on Kantian universalization.
A moral argument must, by its very nature, be universalized.
In other words, we must extract the principles that are either explicit or implicit in the moral argument and then test those principles against other scenarios.
If we are emotionally sympathetic with one scenario but recoil from another scenario which reflects exactly the same moral principles, then we know that we are in the grip of bigotry rather than rationality and all our decisions will be disastrous.
So, with regards to the European migrant crisis, the principle appears to be something like this.
A population must be punished for the immorality of their leaders.
The population must be punished for the immorality of their leaders.
That's not the whole story, of course, but even if we just take this, big problems with the formulation.
Would we be comfortable saying that all Jews need to be punished for the actions of certain Jewish leaders?
Should all Muslims be punished for the actions of certain Muslim leaders?
Should all African Americans be punished for the actions of certain African American leaders?
No, of course not, right?
This concept of collective guilt is impossible to sustain, either rationally or morally.
Merely by applying it to other groups, the immorality of the principle becomes clear.
Ah, but is the argument complicated by the fact that Europeans get to vote for their leaders?
Well, first of all, it's important to remember that citizens in the Soviet Empire also got to vote for their leaders, but pretty hard to argue that the Soviet totalitarian state reflected their deepest and most individual preferences.
Also, I mean, of course, any reasonably empathetic person recognizes the degree to which childhood propaganda limits the practical implementation of adult rationality.
It's kind of the whole point of propaganda.
Can we say that a woman living under Stalin's regime in 1950 was a voluntary communist?
Could we say that a child brought up under South African apartheid was a voluntary segregationist?
Children all around the world are indoctrinated into a wide variety of irrational beliefs and perspectives.
This is as true across Europe as it is across the rest of the world.
Secondly, it is impossible to divine the intentions of the population as a whole, even in, or perhaps especially in, a democracy.
And we all know how this works.
Politicians require enormous sums of money to fund political campaigns, and they get this money from those who want to invest in their future favors.
Those future favors the politicians grant their donors are almost always at the expense of the general population.
And thus, in a very real sense, voters only get to choose from a few pre-bought individuals who have already sold off the future freedoms of the citizens.
Also, politicians, as we all know, are not in any way, shape, or form legally bound to fulfill their promises or platforms.
If you support a candidate who promises to lower taxes, what recourse do you have if the candidate then raises taxes?
Remember George Herbert Walker Bush, read my lips, no new taxes.
Okay, except for this tsunami of new taxes.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to take your vote back?
I don't think so.
Photos who, let's take a more contemporary example, photos who support a candidate who, for instance, receives the Nobel Peace Prize and then repeatedly initiates catastrophic military actions have no practical way of stopping him.
Now, some say, of course, that the migrant crisis is blowback for the European involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
However, by far, the very largest anti-war protest in the entire history of mankind erupted throughout Europe in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.
Literally, millions and millions of European citizens energetically expressed their intense opposition to the invasion.
What happened?
The invasion continued regardless.
Now, in modern democracies, parties are almost never elected with majority approval.
Often fewer than half of the voters actually vote.
And so approval of the leaders can usually only be ascribed to maybe 10, 20, 25% of the voting population.
Here's another example.
Only 31% of African Americans approve the slogan, Black Lives Matter.
Most of them would like to hear All Lives Matter.
Is it fair to desire the punishment of all African Americans for any negative outcomes of this movement?
Of course not.
Only a minority approve of a specific thing.
So, if you're really going on this karma thing, you've got to ask yourself a very real, deep and important question.
Does the European population, or do the European populations, have any real control over the foreign policies of their leaders?
What would it take for the European population to prevent the militarism and interventionism of their leaders?
Protests obviously did nothing to change the invasion of Iraq.
Should there have been tax revolts?
People set themselves on fire?
Well, I never advocate illegality, but if we say that Europeans should have collectively stopped paying taxes in order to change the foreign policy of their leaders, well, then we must also say that slaves are responsible for their slavery because they never went on strike.
And of course, in Europe, as in most places in the West, most income taxes are deducted at source, which kind of nullifies the effects of such a tax revolt.
Now, if Europeans had all stopped paying their taxes, somehow foreign policy would doubtless have changed.
But of course, in the same way, if slaves had stopped working, slavery would have changed as well.
But surely we can have sympathy for the intense negative repercussions the slaves would have experienced if they had all chosen to go on strike.
In the same way, Europeans cannot be held directly responsible for the foreign policy decisions of their leaders.
Furthermore, even if everyone in Europe approved of a particular politician or a particular politician in their country, such approval is not a rubber stamp of all potential actions that politician could take.
Politicians are a package deal and they involve a considerable amount of holding your nose.
You might vote for a politician who promises to avoid war while not approving of his promise to increase taxes.
For you, the avoidance of war is more important than holding the line on taxation.
There is no rational way to assume that even if everyone in the country votes for a particular candidate, that they approve of every single one of his current or future proposals or actions.
It'd be like saying, okay, you really like that Italian restaurant on the corner.
Okay, they sold it, and now it's a Chinese restaurant, so I guess you like that one equally.
Things change.
You can't be guaranteed to approve of everything.
Plus, you may be voting against someone else by voting for someone, more as a rejection of someone else than a vote for a particular kid.
There's no way to know, right?
Also, it's pretty hard to criticize a population for failing to come to reasonable conclusions when debate is actively censored.
For example, any skepticism towards an opposing culture in Europe is generally branded as xenophobic, racist, bigoted, laced with Nazism, etc., All over the Western world, media witch hunts regularly erupt in hysteria against anyone who pushes back against the dominant narrative, and these witch hunts have very real consequences for people.
Sometimes they lose their jobs, their incomes, their reputations, their health, sometimes even their families.
Can we reasonably blame the 16th century European population for believing that the Earth was the center of the universe when reasonable debate on the matter was stifled and punished?
Of course not.
Furthermore, when it comes to foreign policy intervention, my friends, remember, a number of Middle Eastern countries supplied weapons and money to various factions within Syria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and so on.
But nowhere in the mainstream media is the argument that, say, Saudi Arabia must be forced to accept refugees' blowback for its foreign policy, even though they have hundreds of thousands or 100,000 at least of air-conditioned tents for the pilgrimage to Mecca, just ready for the Syrians to move into.
And of course, for those who remember the war against Iraq, the invasion of Iraq was sold to the population as a whole, particularly America, using a variety of lies.
And, you know, we know for sure weapons of mass destruction.
He tried to buy ingredients for nuclear weapons.
He's aligned with Al-Qaeda.
A lot of people, they were constantly repeating Saddam Hussein and 9-11.
Just massive amounts of falsehoods.
And a principle of reasonable and decent common law is that the receiver, the innocent receiver of bad information, is not to blame.
Rather, the liar is legally or morally responsible.
The man who cries fire in a crowded theater is the guy prosecuted, not those trying to escape.
And...
That's an important thing to remember, that even with all the anti-war protests, there were still a lot of lies that were used to sell the war to people and to sell this foreign intervention.
You know, remember Condoleezza Rice's famous statement, we don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud.
They were told that weapons of mass destruction could be sent from Iraq to mainland America, all of which was, of course, false.
So, who is responsible?
I think common law makes it clear.
So, who is going to suffer from all of this?
These are moral questions that aren't that hard to answer.
Without a doubt, the quality of education for the average native European child will be significantly reduced as a result of the migrant crisis.
Look, there are only so many resources available for education, and the degree to which they're going to be inevitably diverted to deal with multilinguistic and multicultural issues is the degree to which fewer resources are available to native children.
The more translators...
The fewer teachers.
Also, of course, when you have a lot of people who are coming in who don't speak the language, who don't have the history, who were raised in a different environment, who may be largely unschooled, a lot of time and attention is going to be paid to those newcomers, and that is at the cost of the progress of the native children.
So is it fair to punish the children of Europe for the unstoppable actions of their parents' leaders?
I think you're going to really stretch that moral responsibility until it twangs in your hand.
So, people say, of course, well, it was Western bombing.
You see, Western bombing that killed all of these people.
Well, let's look up the numbers.
Has Western bombing killed many people?
Well, yes and no.
So, less than one-tenth of a percent of those killed in Syria were killed, and accidentally so, as a result of Western drone strikes or bombs.
Now, the Western drone strikes and bombing has actually killed 15,000 ISIS fighters, it's claimed.
If those ISIS fighters had lived, how many Syrians and Iraqis would they have killed?
Overall, about 250,000 Syrians, 250,000 Syrians being killed in the Civil War, a little over 200 by Western bombs, which have arguably saved thousands of Syrian lives by killing ISIS fighters.
So who is killing all the Syrians?
Not Western bombs?
A lot of it is the dictatorship in Syria.
Some of it is ISIS and others.
It's not Western bombs who are killing the vast majority of the Syrians, but apparently only the West is to blame.
I guess that's just another example of white privilege.
Now, when it comes to understanding the degree of control that citizens have over their leaders, you have to remember that The presence of central banking in fiat currency.
Central banking is when largely privately profited but government-regulated and controlled banks create the currency.
The currency is not tied to gold or oil or any basket of commodities.
It's not limited in the way that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are.
It is made-up money.
They can type whatever they want into their own bank account and the result, of course, we see in the economy with these booms and busts and inflations and hundreds of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities and so on.
The presence of this central banking and the capacity of governments to type whatever they want into their own bank accounts has removed essential elements of decision-making for the European population.
The decision, and there's many, many decisions, just focusing on the decision to intervene in Middle Eastern countries has cost Europe and the West hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.
However, this cost has been diluted, hidden, and buried because of this borrowing and money printing and the deferral of taxation called government bonds and so on.
So in other words, the European population did not have the price signals.
How much does it cost us to intervene in these countries?
So without these price signals, without taxes going up to pay for it, they can't make rational decisions about the value of these kinds of interventions.
So to take an example, just the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan alone has cost each American household over $75,000.
However, no bill has ever been sent.
No taxes have been directly raised to cover this cost because the Federal Reserve simply creates the money to pay for the war, which creates the resulting, although diluted, financial instability, inflation, unemployment, housing crashes, booms and busts, to name just a few effects.
And there's not one person in a thousand who can trace and understand the causality.
So come on, can we rationally expect people to take a dangerous stand against policies which they cannot change, and which seem to cost nothing?
One of the main purposes of fiat currency is to disconnect the people from the costs of destructive policies, so the politicians don't have to directly raise taxes in order to pursue their agendas, which numbs the resistance of the citizenry.
Would you get angry at an epileptic who knocked over a coffee cup while having a seizure?
The European population has less control over their leaders than an epileptic has over his limbs.
So if you want to start judging the Europeans or anyone collectively, okay.
You want to know what they think about the migrant crisis?
A few steps need to be followed, which I humbly submit to you.
The last one will blow your mind.
Number one, an anonymous referendum needs to take place about the migrant crisis.
Number two, the actual cost of accommodating the migrants would need to be added to the tax bills only of those who approved the accommodation of the migrants.
So you say to people, we're going to have a referendum.
And so the first part, we'd have to skip the anonymous part, but that's all right.
So it's anonymous referendum at least.
Secondly, if we're going to have a referendum, let's have people sign their names and say, I support the migrants.
I want the migrants to come in.
Great.
Then only those who say yes are the ones who get the bills.
And those who don't say yes don't get the bills.
And that would be number two, because then people are making decisions with their own money.
It's very, very easy to just stand on top of a mountain of delusion and squawk your own moral perfection to the entire world when other people have to pay for it.
But when you have to pay for it, that's where we see the rubber meeting the road, so to speak.
Number three.
So as I talked about in a recent conversation, there are these no-go zones scattered across Europe where in general the police are afraid to grow.
These are migrant communities.
So based upon the existing no-go zones that are scattered across Europe, Multiply those no-go zones by the new population so that Europeans are clearly informed how much territory they're likely to permanently lose to migrant settlements.
These no-go zones where the police are afraid to go, where the local laws barely apply, you just need to say, do it on a map.
Say, based upon the immigrants, based on what's happened so far, this is how much of your population you are likely to permanently lose to these migrant settlements.
Again, just give people the facts.
Number four, the actual facts about immigrant crime, and in particular, rape statistics, would need to be widely disseminated throughout the media.
We just need to, people need to have the facts before deciding whether or not to have people come into their country.
When you hire someone, they generally go through a background check.
The government certainly demands it if you're working with anything sensitive.
So let's just have the facts out.
And certainly the facts are actively suppressed at the moment, which tells you everything you need to know.
Okay, number five.
To truly know what Europeans feel and think about this, which hunts against anyone expressing doubts about the value of mass Middle Eastern migration into Europe would need to end.
True freedom of speech and open debate would need to be restored.
Look, if multiculturalism is such a value, then everyone, even the skeptics, need to have a voice, right?
You can't say multiculturalism is a value and then say shut up to the entire skeptical domestic population who has concerns.
That is not multiculturalism.
That is a form of totalitarianism.
So, let's have an open and frank discussion about what's going on.
Number six, in order to sort out those fleeing oppression from those pursuing welfare benefits, a moratorium on welfare benefits to migrants would need to be enacted.
Because, of course, some people are fleeing conflicts.
Some people have just decided to leave the camps in Turkey where they're pretty safe and taken care of and they want to get to Europe.
Some people are going through European countries with lower welfare benefits to get to European countries with higher.
Welfare benefits.
So, no welfare benefits, and that way we know who's coming in is most likely to be people who are genuinely fleeing oppression, and that's number six.
Number seven.
All right.
Those who want to help the migrants must sponsor them financially and legally, and put them up maybe even in their own houses.
Look, If you want the migrants, then you believe in the values of diversity and multiculturalism.
Well, charity and integrity begin at home, right?
So, put up a group of young Syrian men in your own house and be financially and legally responsible for their current and future decisions.
That's a way to help.
Now, this is the one I said was going to blow your mind.
Okay.
Here we go.
For those to help allay the fears and concerns of those who are concerned about the growth and spread of the migrants, no-go zones throughout Europe, here's what you need to do.
So European leaders, yes, I'm looking at you, Angela Merkel, you need to drop your security, European leaders, you go and live anonymously in disguise in the no-go zones for at least a couple of weeks, right?
So people are scared of these no-go zones, they're scared of the insular nature of these migrants, so go and prove everyone wrong.
Take off your security, put yourself in a disguise, and go and live in these no-go zones for a couple of weeks.
Now, I want you to wear body cameras that automatically upload live footage to the Internet so everyone can see how well or how badly you are treated as a woman, as a Westerner, and, you know, dress the way you'd normally dress.
Dress the way you'd normally dress.
T-shirts, shorts, whatever it is going to be.
Now, if European leaders believe in the virtue of their actions...
And how well everyone's going to assimilate, they should have no problem going to live in these no-go zones and demonstrating to the whole world, and in particular to the European multicultural skeptics, what cultural enrichment really looks like up close and personal.
If you want these migrants to come and live in your country, the least you could do is go and live among them to show all the skeptics how wrong they are and how well everything is going to go.
So I put that invitation out To the European leaders, ditch your security, go in disguise, get yourself body cams, live uploads, go live among these people, live in the no-go zones, walk around, engage with people, dress normally, expose your Western values, and see what happens.
And maybe everyone's fears can be allayed that way.
Maybe you'll have a wonderful time.
But if you don't want to do that, then you're full of crap.
Everyone who doesn't want to do that is full of crap.
Now, of course, none of this is about to happen to these sort of points that I made.
So given that none of this is about to happen, Europeans, and in particular European children, are in no way responsible for the criminal blunders of their leaders.
To suggest otherwise is to hold an infinitely higher standard for Europeans, as opposed to any other ethnic group, which is hideously racist and immoral.
If only the Europeans are completely responsible for their leaders' actions and nobody else in the world, then you've just cranked up your standards for Europeans and thus downgraded the standards for everyone else, which is racist towards Europeans and everyone else.
So let's tidy up with just a couple of miscellaneous arguments.
Okay.
So the arguments, the sort of blowback argument that Europeans must take Middle Eastern refugees because the West has bombed and destabilized their countries fails on other levels as well.
Okay.
Let's say it's true.
Let's say it's true that Europe has bombed the Middle East to the point where entire societies have been destroyed.
Okay.
Okay.
Then, Europe is in a state of war with the Middle East.
If you've dropped enough bombs on another country that you've destroyed that society, and you and you alone have largely done this, guess what?
You are in a state of war with the Middle East.
If this is the case, we could reasonably complain about the origins of the situation, but so what?
No country in history has ever rationally accepted hundreds of thousands of young, able-bodied men from a region it is currently at war with.
In 1940, England, of course, was at war with Germany.
If hundreds of thousands of fit, young German men had attempted to infiltrate England illegally, this would be called an invasion and would have been met with staunch resistance.
When Israel was in a state of war against its neighboring Arab states, if hundreds of thousands of military-aged Arab men had attempted to cross the border into Israel, it also would have been viewed as an invasion and would have been dealt with appropriately.
So if your argument is that Europe has destroyed these countries, then there's a state of war between Europe and these countries.
Which means you don't...
I mean, I don't even know what to say!
The argument that Europe must take refugees from a region it is currently at war with is completely irrational.
Now, of course, this argument doesn't attempt to justify any bombings of Syria, Iraq, or any other country.
It simply notes the natural consequences of being at war, one of which is to not import hundreds of thousands of young men from the region you are at war with.
Okay, if you're going to try and solve that by saying, okay, well, Europe is not currently at war with the Middle East, okay, then there's still no rational case for accepting all the refugees.
Okay?
It doesn't matter whether there's engagement or involvement, because there are lots of countries not currently at war with the Middle East, and why Europe would have to take them all makes no sense.
And foreign intervention?
Okay, during the Second World War, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries supplied oil to the Germans.
Does that mean that Saudi Arabia would have been responsible if millions of Europeans had fled the Second World War?
During the Second War, again, America supplied England with massive amounts of military aid.
It's called the Lend-Lease Program.
Does that mean that America should have imported millions of military-aged Japanese men after Pearl Harbor to make up for it?
Makes no sense.
So if Europe is responsible for the collapse of Middle Eastern societies, then Europe and the Middle East are at war.
And refugees from that war can't be received.
If Europe is not responsible for the collapse of Middle Eastern societies, then Europe is under no obligation to take in refugees from a civil war.
It would be the same relationship during the civil war in the United States in the 19th century, should Mexico have been forced to accept those fleeing the conflict, young men?
Now, you could refine the argument, of course, you could say, well, Europe is not currently at war with the Middle East, but that the West initiated policies that inadvertently resulted in the collapse of Middle Eastern societies and thus is obligated to take the refugees.
Well, by Western standards, with the exception of Israel, Middle Eastern governments are generally pretty despotic and totalitarian.
The goal of the Arab Spring in many of the Middle Eastern countries was to bring about evolutionary or revolutionary change in their governments.
If the West helped to topple despotic regimes, it could be argued that this created a potentially liberating opportunity for the long-suffering Middle Eastern peoples.
I mean, to take a historical analogy, France provided significant support to the American revolutionaries in their fight against British rule in the 18th century.
When British rule was overturned, America did not descend into pre-medieval barbarism.
The end of a despotic regime does not automatically translate into a savage and murderous civil war.
Many of the revolutionaries during the Arab Spring desired a change in government.
This was provided to some degree.
What happened afterwards is not directly the fault of the Western powers.
So, for example, if your house is on fire, you beg for my help to put the fire out, and I do help you put it out, my obligation kind of ends there.
If you set fire to your house again, that does not give you the right to come and live rent-free in my house.
Ah, you might say, but what if the European meddling caused the collapse of these governments by accident?
Does that make Europe responsible for taking in all of the refugees?
Eh.
By accident?
That's history, man.
The basic fact that most of the wars throughout history have been started by accidents, by incompetence, by mistakes.
I mean, according to legend, one of the wars in the ancient world started because one soldier struck at a snake about to bite his leg, and the other army saw the flash of light on his sword and charged.
Wars are generally not planned down to the last detail, but often arise out of confusion and misunderstanding and quick tempers.
You know, it's called the fog of war.
For a reason.
And, you know, the other thing too, of course, is that if people say, well, the European and Western governments were so incompetent that they tried to bring peace and freedom to the Middle East and turned it into a smoking hellhole of civil war, well, those same governments that you consider so destructive and so incompetent are also going to be responsible for settling and integrating these new migrants.
So are they suddenly going to become much more competent?
I The argument that social or political destabilization automatically leads to a brutal civil war removes free will and moral responsibility from those in the region.
Look, Arabs are not dominoes mindlessly pushed over by Western foreign policies.
I mean, I think you could probably make a pretty good case that adult Arab men are at least somewhat more morally responsible for what happens in their societies than, say, European children.
And of course, a lot of these Arabs are preferring to live in Europe, and Europe is only taking them because of the separation of church and state, and a relatively free economy, and a limited democracy.
So, of course, a lot of the Arabs are aware of these values.
They have not fought intellectually for the expansion of these liberating values in their own countries, despite the multi-century example of Europe right next door and an internet, which makes communication of these values far easier than it was, say, for 16th century European intellectuals fighting for these things.
So, the argument that the origins of the conflicts between Europe and the Middle East have some relevance to the current refugee crisis are invalid.
Either Europe and the Middle East are at war, in which case no refugees can be taken, or Europe and the Middle East are not at war, in which case Europe is not responsible for taking any refugees.
So in the interest of time, I've decided to keep this a little bit shorter.
Believe it or not, this is short for me.
So I hope that you will comment.
I will look forward to further refining and putting forward these arguments.
Let me know what you agree with, what you disagree with, what can be helpful.
This is one of the great Thank you so much.
Have yourself a wonderful day.
I look forward to your feedback.
▲
Export Selection