April 27, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:51
3665 Western Civilization On Edge | Paul Joseph Watson and Stefan Molyneux
The battle against Globalism raged onward. Stefan Molyneux joins Paul Joseph Watson on Infowars to discuss Ivanka Trump's controversial refugee comments, the upcoming French election showdown between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen and the possibility of United States intervention in North Korea. Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com.YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/PrisonPlanetLiveTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/PrisonPlanetYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
It's Paul Joseph Watson in for Alex Jones, live on The Alex Jones Show this Wednesday, April 26th edition, and we're joined live by the one and only Stefan Molyneux of freedomainradio.com.
Stefan, welcome back.
Thanks, Paul.
Great to be here.
How are you doing?
Good.
Now, I just want to get into some of this Trump news just to start off with.
Obviously, we're going to get on to the French election.
That's going to be the bulk of the discussion.
But Ivanka Trump, we played the clip earlier.
Actually, if you can cue that clip up again, that would be illustrative for this part of the discussion.
Let's roll the clip.
This is Ivanka Trump on the Today Show talking about refugees.
Her father's far from popular.
The president's controversial travel ban, a stark contrast to Germany opening its doors to Syrian refugees.
Ivanka Trump now going further than her father on whether those refugees should be led into the US. I think there is A global humanitarian crisis that's happening, and we have to come together, and we have to solve it.
Does that include opening the borders to Syrian refugees in the United States?
That has to be part of the discussion, but that's not going to be enough in and of itself.
Now, Stefan, Ivanka Trump, she's meeting with Lagarde.
She's meeting with Angela Merkel, top globalist.
Merkel, of course, pioneered the disastrous migrant policy in Germany.
She's writing editorials in the Financial Times with the president of the World Bank.
She's calling now for the US to take in refugees.
Stefan, correct me if I'm wrong, that doesn't sound very America-firsty, does it?
Well, I mean, there's a lot behind it, of course, Paul.
I mean, if it is a humanitarian crisis of the first order, then it is the result of the government program called arms sales, called arming ISIS, called meddling in the Middle East, called regime change.
Just another example of how one disastrous program called regime change leads to another disastrous program called bottomless immigration from the third world.
Is there a humanitarian crisis?
Of course there is.
For some of the Syrians, there is a huge problem.
And the best thing to do if you care about this crisis is to resettle them in the Middle East.
The cost is very, very clear.
If you want to help 10,000 refugees, if you want to help them in the Middle East, you can resettle them for 10.6 million US dollars.
If you want to bring them to America, it's going to cost you 128.7 million dollars.
It is 12 plus times the cost to bring these supposed refugees, if in fact that's what they are, to America to resettle them.
If you actually want to help these people, then stop doing regime changes in the Middle East.
Help them resettle in the Middle East where they have a much greater chance of success in the long run.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm right in saying that the majority of these migrants refugees are illiterate in their own language.
Never mind English.
That's right, correct?
like.
Well, two-thirds of the Syrian refugees who reach Europe are illiterate in their own language.
And recently, I think it was in Italy, Paul, they did a scan of the people pouring in across the boats, right?
There's a lot of NGOs who set up this kind of Uber from Hell ferry service to bring people from North Africa into Europe, which is exactly what Gaddafi warned about if he was going to be ousted by the Obama-Hillary Clinton campaign.
Regime change goal in Libya.
He said if you take down this wall, everyone from Africa is going to try and flood into Europe.
And in Italy, they did an analysis of a bunch of the migrants who landed and only 3% of them were Syrian refugees.
And so, no, it is a massive migration from a Significantly overpopulated Africa, which has partly resulted from massive amounts of food aid and other kinds of foreign aid that's been showered on the continent, setting off massive birth rates in an overpopulation crisis.
And so again, we have this whole series of dominoes.
Ill-thought-out, virtue-signaling nonsense, destructive government programs just lead to more and more and more disastrous.
And I don't think that the Trump administration is going to take all this very seriously, but it is not very comforting to hear this kind of talk going on.
There was a report, I think it was out of Breitbart a few weeks ago, that showed that in a period of time since Trump got into the White House, the pace of refugees coming into America had doubled in comparison with the same time period under Obama.
So that is of massive concern.
The travel ban got shot down.
The figures I were looking at earlier showed that even at the height of ISIS's control of territory in Iraq and Syria, They had about 3.7 million people living under them, of course, under ISIS persecution.
Now they've lost more than half of their territory.
It's more like, to be generous, 2 million people.
You know, Germany has already taken in almost 2 million people in the last two years.
Those are actual refugees, which, of course, we can...
Counter the idea that it's a good idea to bring them in the first place with the illiteracy, with the problems with integration.
But, I mean, two million people.
The people coming into Europe are not Syrian refugees.
We've tried to make that point over and over again.
Do you think people like Ivanka Trump, who are...
Advising the president, and he's very impressionable.
Do you think, as you said, they're just doing this out of virtue signaling, out of naivety?
Or is this part of the concern that some people have got that neocons globalists are increasingly surrounding Trump and that the swamp is draining him?
Well, that's a good question.
Whether it is misguided altruism, that they want to do the right thing, they want to help people, or whether it is part of some sinister, destabilized Western civilization plan.
I gotta tell you, I mean, initially I was like, well, it's well-meaning people, but they just don't have the facts, they just don't have all the data, they just don't understand the consequences of what they're advocating.
But I tell you, Paul, since the information has been escalating and the disasters of this non-integration have been accumulating, it's really, really hard to ascribe these kinds of disastrous decisions and policies to mere naivete.
When you see, of course, as we've talked about before, in France the second generation of Muslim immigrants tends to be more radicalized than the first generation.
When you...
See this massive increase in migrant crime over 50% year over year in Germany.
When you start to see the emergence of a genuine rape culture in Sweden, it's really, really hard to continue to say, well, they're just misguided because the facts are very, very clear.
The challenges and the failures are very, very clear.
So people who are continuing down this road, I'm beginning less and less to believe in any kind of purity of motive.
Let's flash this headline up and I'll read part of it.
This is out of Information Liberation.
Neocon Paul Wolfowitz speaking privately with McMaster and Mattis.
The article states, Neocon Warhawk Paul Wolfowitz is now optimistic about President Trump and privately emailing HR McMaster and James Mattis to whore for more wars.
That's the commentary in the article in the Middle East.
We have a never-Trumper.
Helen Ferry is now part of the White House.
That came out in a Breitbart article this morning.
We have Wolfowitz speaking privately with Mattis, with McMaster.
We have Lindsey Graham saying he's the happiest dude ever.
Stefan, this 4D chess game is really getting quite convoluted, isn't it?
Well, I'm going to suggest that it's a marathon, not a sprint, which is kind of a cliche to say, but I think people need to remember that.
There was no question in anyone's mind who studied this matter in any depth that the deep state was going to fight back.
They weren't going to just roll over and say, well, you know, he got a whole bunch of electoral college votes.
So let's just hand up over this drug called power and all of this money and all of this deference and all of this control that we have over the population.
They weren't going to do it.
They view Trump as I think is this kind of bug that's approaching the windshield of the deep state.
And they think they view that they can co-opt him.
And, you know, is it possible?
Sure.
Theoretically, it's possible, which is I think his base needs to keep reminding him of what they put him in the White House for what they need for him to do.
Because if it's not going to be Trump, if Trump can't take on and win against the deep state, at least to some degree, then I'm going right back to abstract philosophy because political action will have proven itself to be thoroughly useless in practice.
And then we just have to hunker down and wait for the crash.
And again, the point I make is, you know, Trump is very impressionable.
He has different circles of people that surround him at different times, giving him different advice.
You know, the deportations have increased, that's a positive.
We do need to celebrate the positives.
The wall seems like it's being delayed.
But again, he's impressionable.
We're not abandoning him, but by the same token, we're not being sycophants.
It's credible, and we maintain our credibility and our consistency.
If we question him on these issues, like, if you send 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria to help the people who are fighting ISIS, that's a policy I've opposed for, what, five, six years now.
I'm still going to oppose that policy.
I'm not going to just suddenly do a 180 just because, you know, Donald Trump's behind it.
And that's your position, I guess, right, Stefan?
Well, if I sort of were to look at this sort of global chess master move, Paul, I would say something like the following.
The refugees are refugees because they want to go back.
That's sort of the theory, that you escape when your house is on fire to a motel, and then when your house is rebuilt, you move back home.
Whatever can contribute to any kind of political stability in Syria in particular, also in Libya and other countries that have been smashed by leftists and globalists, whatever can contribute to that stability, whatever, in a sense, noses we have to hold in order to support somebody who can bring political stability to that region, then we find out.
Whether it's refugees or economic migrants who are there to invade and potentially take over the culture, that's when we find out.
Because if Syria is stabilized under Assad, which seems like the only reasonable approach at the moment, if Syria is stabilized, then of course what can happen is we can say, okay, house is out.
Out of fire, fire's out, house has been rebuilt, off you go back.
Now, if they're like, oof, thank you for putting us up while our house was on fire, we'd love to go back home, then I guess we can look at it one way.
If, however, they vanish into the no-go zones and don't show up to go back home, then we can start to look at it quite another way.
And it is actually my prediction that should stability come to Syria, it will be the latter that will happen to a lot of these migrants in Europe.
Now, I want to move on to France.
Of course, we had the big election on Sunday.
We've got the second round coming up on May 7th.
The polls show that Marine Le Pen has basically got a mountain to climb to come back against Macron and overturn that deficit.
Actually, we're going to get into that after the break because we're running out of time on this segment.
We're going to go to a clip after the break where Macron visits, I think it's a warehouse or a factory, and within about 30 seconds is absolutely pelted with catcalls and boos.
And Marine Le Pen visits the same factory, I believe, or a different factory, but, you know, similar circumstance, big press scrum around her.
Workers at the factory.
And the reaction to Marine Le Pen is quite different indeed.
So we're going to play that clip after the break and go back to Stefan Molyneux of freedomainradio.com.
This is The Alex Jones Show Live.
Breaking news at infowars.com.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
How do you react to this event?
- It's my job. - It's my job. - It's my job. - It's my job. - I'm not going to go. - It's my job. - It's my job. - It's my job. - I'm not going to go. - It's my job. - It's my job. - I'm not going to go. - I'm not going to go.
- No, but I'm not going to go.
- No, but I'm going to go.
- And the media.
- No, but I'm going to go.
- I'm going to go.
- And the media.
- I'm going to go. - I'm going to go. - I'm going to go.
- I'm going to go.
- This morning.
- Your confrères.
- It's where the monsieur?
- It's where the TFDT.
- But it's not.
- No. - I don't know.
- No, I don't understand.
- Ah, but it's Sinoté.
- It's Mr. Louis who told me there are people who want to see you.
- Okay, now, those boos and whistles you heard in that clip were coming from workers at a Whirlpool factory in France, which was visited by the French presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron.
You can cut that clip now.
What's interesting about this is Marine Le Pen basically trolled him.
She turned up at the same factory.
All the workers rushed to her.
They were all rushing around her.
Adoration.
You can see the photo if you scroll down the West Monster article.
French workers cheer Le Pen, heckle Macron.
So he got absolute dog's abuse as soon as he arrived.
Marine Le Pen got worship, basically.
And this really crystallizes it for me, Stefan.
You know, I read an article yesterday.
I think it was the Telegraph.
And they were still billing Macron as a, quote, maverick outsider.
You know, Stefan, how many people in the real world, how many maverick outsiders emerge from within a ruling bureaucracy having had their campaigns bankrolled by Rothschild& Company?
You can always tell an outsider by how often they've attended a Bilderberg conference.
That is the way it goes.
He is a vanity hologram.
He's like Barack Oblander.
Because what he did, he's a marketing ghost.
He's a Chauncey Gardner.
Because before he announced his candidacy, this is taking his cue from the Obama campaign in 2008.
What did he do?
Well, he had a whole bunch of French voters surveyed.
25,000, pretty in-depth interviews, and figured out exactly what they wanted, which cliches would wrestle the vote from their stony hearts.
And so that's exactly what he did.
He got all of this marketing material out there.
He got all of what the voters want to hear.
And he produces a ridiculously convoluted and self...
Well, self-complicating, self-contradicting kind of campaign, and nobody knows what he's all about because he's just this vanity mirror.
According to a recent survey, only 31% of French voters have any kind of clear idea of what Macron is going to do when he gets office, and that's far below his rivals.
And what is he going to do?
Oh, he's going to cut taxes, but he's also going to increase spending on unemployment, and there's going to be a lot of spending on public infrastructure.
And he's going to shift for renewable energy and so on.
So yes, a lot more spending, but he's going to cut taxes, and I'm going to tell you whatever you want to hear, and I'm kind of pretty, and I have a skeletor for a wife.
So how that adds up to a compelling candidate, one can only say, good job, French public schools, you have completely stripped any critical thinking from your subjects.
With the renewable energy thing, they tried that in Spain.
It was an absolute disaster.
Youth unemployment shot through the roof, and that's one of the main reasons why young people are voting for Le Pen.
They've got a 25% youth unemployment rate, and yet Macron, on the same token, says that immigration is desperately needed to keep the economy vibrant.
How vibrant do you think that 25% youth unemployed feel about their economic future?
Well, especially new migrants, and especially if they're coming in from lower-end districts in Africa, there's just no way in any conceivable timeframe that they're going to be net contributors to the French economy as a whole.
That is completely insane.
Something's happened in the West, Paul.
Completely incomprehensible.
Like we've given up on the idea of just having babies.
What's wrong with having sex and having babies?
I believe the French are fairly proficient in the first part of that equation, at least.
What's wrong with just having babies?
Well, of course, what's wrong with having babies for the politicians, Paul, is that babies cost politicians money and don't give them instant leftist voting patterns, right?
So, of course, immigrants, particularly from third world, reliably vote for the left, which is why they're constantly want to be drawn in by the left.
And, of course, they can conceivably at least start contributing taxes, if not votes.
But if you have children, well, you've got to supply them with education and health care and people need bigger houses and so on.
So that costs politicians money and they only start paying taxes in about a quarter century or so.
So what politician will worth his salt in vote buying in the here and now wants to wait a quarter century for a more babies policy to pay off with additional taxes?
So this is part of the whole decline of the greed of the baby boomers who wanted everything for nothing.
And now we're all paying the price in potential collective cultural catastrophe.
And on that same subject, and we're going to get more into this after the break, the immigration aspect of it.
Six months after this guy ran down, mowed down 86 people, killed 86, injured over 400 in Nice, Macron came out and said that Europeans, quote, must get used to mass immigration.
He did it again after the police officer was gunned down in Paris.
He said French people had to learn to live with terrorism.
It seems there's some kind of a...
National psyche that dominates France, which is still based around total capitulation.
Given the current poll numbers, if we're to believe them, we'll get back into it more with Stéphane Molyneux, freedomainradio.com after the break.
Also, Alex Jones will call in live.
Don't go away.
We'll be back.
Stefan, I was just mentioning before the break, again, the immigration issue.
We have six jihadist attacks in Paris alone in the last three years.
You know, 21 jihadist attacks in France since Charlie Hebdo.
Yet Manuel Valls, the Prime Minister of France, and Macron himself, on numerous occasions, have come out time and time again and said, this is something that we have to live with.
Do you think it's, you know, part of the psyche, the national psyche of the French people, That is, you know, centred around submission and capitulation, given their history, or is that just something that's specific to the left as a whole?
This kind of Stockholm Syndrome, stick your head in the sand, identify with your captors, and just hope that it's all going to go away.
Well, I mean, it has a whole history in French philosophy and Macron studied philosophy, which, of course, is very, very impressive to people not in France, although fairly common to France.
And what's happened, of course, is that the left has dominated higher education and the media for, you know, at least 30 to 50 years in various Western countries.
Now, 50 years ago, it was the left...
Who were very, very big on nationalism, very, very big on national self-determination in the third world because it was really, really bad to have all of these Western powers in there dominating and bleeding dry the resources against the will of the people of those people in the third world.
And they loved, you know, Sukarno, Cabral, Ho Chi Minh and all these kinds of people because they were fighting to liberate their countries from external control and influence them to be nationalistic and patriotic.
Now it's completely reversed.
Now, any country in Europe that wants to get out from under the globalism of the EU is called far right because that's just a negative Nazi brand that you can attach to anyone.
Although Le Pen certainly economically is significantly left.
But she's on the quote far right as far as she respects the idea of nationalism and patriotism and has a respect for the domestic historical French culture.
So the left, of course, nobody seems to notice these serpentine twists and turns of leftist justifications.
When Western countries go to third world countries and strip mine resources against the will of the domestic population, that's colonialism, that's exploitation, that's really bad, and the way to fight it is with nationalism.
When third worlders come to Western countries and strip mine state resources against the will of the population through the welfare state, well, that's multiculturalism, and that's very positive, and anyone who argues against it Is a bad, fascist, Nazi, racist, blah, blah, blah, whatever, right?
These hypocrisies, at some point, we're going to have to pick up on these twists and turns and fight back intellectually against this nonsense.
And some countries are further along than others.
I think her decision to step down as national front leader before this final round is part of that effort to, you know, detoxify the brand.
The problem is, from what I hear, her father, who of course represents some of the worst aspects of the brand, he's set to give a speech on Sunday.
That is not going to help her campaign, so we'll wait to see if that comes off.
But another thing that you tweeted about yesterday, I think...
Which was this bizarre relationship between Emmanuel Macron and his wife.
You tweeted, quote, 15-year-old Emmanuel Macron kissing his 40-year-old married drama teacher who later divorced and married him.
Now, you know, Stefan, I understand that age gaps in relationships are perfectly natural and, you know, they can work within reasonable bounds, but a 25-year age gap?
What does that tell us about Macron?
Well, before everyone reacts with this, that's similar, if not the same, as the gap between Melania Trump and Donald Trump.
But of course, she was 28 when they met.
So yes, she was his teacher, 40 years old, and he was 15.
Now, the kiss is a more platonic kind of French style on the cheek kiss, but he very much wanted to pursue her.
He suggested that they write a play together.
I can only imagine it was entitled A Vacuous Oedipal.
But they wrote a play together and then she began to pursue him.
He began to pursue her.
His parents tried to move...
Him away from her, but they continued their relationship.
And one of her daughters was his classmate while she was teaching him when she began to fixate upon him at the age of 15.
Now, the age of consent in France is 15, and they say that it's a secret when their relationship became physical.
It's a secret, I imagine, for pretty obvious reasons.
But I don't think she's allowed to have sexual relations with a student if she is in a position of power over him.
And this is pretty horrendous stuff.
And Of course, we can just imagine if the situations were reversed.
And he was a 40-year-old teacher who began fixating on a 15-year-old teenage girl in his class and then pursued her and they ended up together.
It's pretty messy and it's pretty ugly.
But of course, it's France.
I mean, you have in France politicians all the time having these kinds of weird and creepy things set up.
And it actually sometimes even seems to help their cause in ways that pass my understanding completely.
Well, the thing that ties into this, Stefan, is, you know, we've got the polls showing 20, 25 points ahead for Macron.
The only thing that could probably, and, you know, don't trust the polls, they say, but this is quite a big gap at this point.
The only thing that could probably bring him down at this point within the next 10 days is a massive scandal.
They've already set the narrative that if a scandal does emerge about Macron, that it's Russian hackers to blame.
Once again, they actually had a New York Times article yesterday, if we can flash that up, I think we had it during the fourth hour, where they were saying again that Russian hackers had tried to penetrate Macron's party campaign emails very similar to the DNC leak.
There was actually another article which said that concerns about Muslim migration, there you see the New York Times article, there was another article which said concerns about Muslim migration were Vladimir Putin's fault.
And that was Marine Le Pen's whole campaign, they said, was concerns about Muslim migration.
But that was a narrative, a meme, that Vladimir Putin had inserted into the entire narrative.
Now, you've had 21 jihadist attacks in France.
You've had, what, 230-plus people murdered by jihadists over the past two and a bit years.
How on earth has that got anything to do with Vladimir Putin?
That's obviously an organic, authentic, natural concern for the French people, yet they still try to spin this Russian hacker's narrative.
Stefan, they're so terrified.
Despite the polls, they're so terrified of a scandal coming out about Macron, about Le Pen pulling off a miracle, that they're still spinning this Russian narrative as a kind of fallback.
It's incredible.
Well, there is this terrible situation throughout the West as a whole, Paul, as you know, where you arm everyone, you invade everyone, you bomb everyone, and then you invite everyone.
And this is such a disastrous self-contradictory kind of policy that one, again, we talked about earlier, I'm not sure I'm anywhere close to thinking that there's anything confused and positive and altruistic and benevolent.
You couldn't design a system more or better tripwire to take down Western civilization than to spend massive amounts to strip mine taxpayers for money, use it to buy arms, sell it to dictatorships all over the world, have very aggressive I mean it's completely incomprehensible from any standpoint other than a kind of seppuku on the entire culture.
It's just absolutely incredible.
I mean, we say some countries are further along than others.
I know there's big support in Sweden for the Sweden Democrats, which is actually surprising that they seem to be further ahead.
AFD in Germany seems to be falling behind.
They don't have great organisation behind their party.
So we've had, you know, we've had, populism is ebbing away after the situation in Holland with their election where Goethe Wilders failed to win.
Is it really ebbing away or are we just moving in at different speeds in different countries?
Well, the future belongs, Paul, to those who want it the most.
That is the basic reality of history.
And if the people who want to preserve their culture are willing to do what it takes intellectually and organizationally and politically, if they're willing to do what it takes to preserve their culture, why then they get to preserve their culture?
And if they don't want to do it, and if the other side is more organized and more efficient and more willing to do what it takes, then they will lose their culture.
And one of the great things that's happening in France at the moment is leftists are really being exposed.
Because you have, of course, Marine Le Pen, a woman who could become the first female president of France.
She's supported by a significant proportion of French women.
So French women want to vote for a French candidate to break through the glass ceiling itself.
We smash the patriarchy of globalism and the leftists hate Le Pen and the feminists seem to hate Le Pen, which shows that they don't care about women, they care about leftism.
You can see in France very clearly 5% of people in Paris voted for Le Pen.
The people who are voting for Le Pen seem similar to the people who voted for Trump, the people who are outside the cities, who are dealing with poverty, who are dealing with proximate migrant problems and so on.
And the socialists don't care about them either.
So the feminists don't care about women, and the socialists don't care about the poor.
And that's all you need to know about the French election, as far as the takeaways for other countries go.
And of course, Marine Le Pen will probably be back in five years' time.
She's got a niece, Marion Le Pen, who is, in some senses, even more conservative than her.
She also got the most amount of votes from women, which people tend to forget, again, with these feminists protesting against her, literally trying to block people from voting for her.
Let's move on though because we've got limited time.
Let's talk about North Korea.
Now this is always a difficult one because, you know, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un, they've been threatening to literally destroy the world for the best part of two decades now.
You never know how much of it is alarmism.
People in South Korea tend to roll their eyes at this point whenever these tensions build up again.
That could be, you know, a normalcy bias going on with that.
Obviously they don't want to fear that annihilation is imminent so they always reflect...
Go back to normalcy bias.
So how much of it is alarmism?
I mean we do have today Reuters reporting Trump has called all 100 senators to the White House for a meeting.
They're calling it an unusual move.
He's going to talk about North Korea.
Some are speculating he's pushing for support from those senators for an actual declaration of war.
Yet we've heard this same beating of the war drums, this same alarmism for decades now.
Just how alarmed should we be about the situation in North Korea right now?
Well, I think very alarmed.
I think very alarmed, Paul.
Because if there is the idea that there's some kind of surgical strike that they can take out the North Korean leadership in some sort of single-strike decapitation, that's my great temptation because history has shown that high IQ populations, and the Koreans are among the highest IQ population in the world, high IQ populations do very well through regime change.
And you can look at sort of post-Second World War Germany and Japan for examples of that.
More challenging or lower IQ populations do worse under regime change as we've seen in more recent wars in the Middle East.
So if they can go in and take out the leadership, then you are liberating 20 plus million people from the world's largest open air concentration camp.
I can really see that being a positive thing, sort of putting myself in their position.
I mean, they're so starved, as I talked about on the show recently, Paul, they're so starved in North Korea that even though they're genetically the same as South Koreans, they're four inches shorter.
And so it is a monstrous open-air prison there.
Some sort of surgical strike could go in to take out the leadership and replace it.
Unify the country, which is different.
Unification of East and West Germany was a lot easier than trying to do regime change in Iraq.
And so there is that possibility.
If it's a ground war, though, I think it's a disaster.
Because then they'll have enough warning.
They will be able to launch their nuclear weapons.
Seoul is just a stone's throw away.
You've got millions and millions of people there.
And that could be a true catastrophe for the region, the repercussions of which will be felt biologically, physically, radioactively for generations.
It's difficult because China came out a few days ago and basically in their official Global Times mouthpiece and said, you know, we will not tolerate regime change in North Korea.
But again, as you said, there is a temptation to be an interventionist in that sense because you know for a fact that it is.
They've literally got 200,000 political dissidents in concentration camps.
The figure's probably higher by now.
It's also different to the Middle East.
You're not going to get a vacuum where a bunch of horrible jihadists, even worse than the dictatorship, rush in and take power.
The tyranny that they're living under, I don't think people can grasp it.
We have defectors, people who have escaped into Japan, into China, come out with these stories.
I think one of my favorites is because it's based on the Prisoner series, which I'm a big fan of, and they copied it, basically.
People in North Korea, by law, it's mandatory that they have a radio in their apartment broadcasting propaganda during daytime hours.
They can't turn it off.
They physically can't turn off the government propaganda.
They can only lower the volume.
So there is that temptation, knowing the absolute terror of We're good to go.
How can we make people grasp the tyranny that North Koreans are living under?
Well, you can have a tough time with that, Paul, because, of course, it comes out of a communist history.
Anything that comes out of a communist or socialist history is going to be downplayed by the mainstream media.
You know, it's a real tragedy when you have world leaders or anybody reading 1984 not as a warning but as an instruction manual because, of course, you're reminded of the telescreens when you're talking about these radios.
But if you look at what's going on in Venezuela, where on average people have lost 17 pounds over the last little while, where you've got death squads being sort of put together by the government to put down dissent, when you have starvation, when you've got people hunting pigeons and rats just to try and stay alive, well, that comes out of socialist policies.
Therefore, it's going to be underreported on by the mainstream media.
The fact that North Korea has evolved from the usual horror show, right, of the communist revolution, Central planning and central control of the economy into the inevitable style and style cult of personality.
They don't want to talk about it.
It's just some nameless dictatorship.
They never want to talk about how it came about, which is the Soviets and the Chinese funding communists to invade the North and take it over.
So it's really, really hard to get the facts other than some vague nameless horror.
No lessons are being learned about central planning, about centralized control, about socialism and communism because that is the agenda of so much of the mainstream leftist media that they simply won't talk about the history.
You can't get any positive lessons.
That's why people come to you and I, Paul, to get the actual lessons that people need to learn from these kinds of tragedies.
Now you mentioned Venezuela there, Stefan.
You have Maduro handing out firearms to 400,000 loyalists.
We have this article, I think it's the SHTF plan.
They're giving guns to 400,000 loyalists.
They've had these massive street protests.
Isn't it interesting that they banned private ownership of firearms back in 2012, so they disarmed the population, armed the loyalist thug brigade?
I mean, Stefan, has there ever been a socialist experiment, not just talking about Venezuela, on any kind of scale that hasn't led to mass starvation and bloodshed as it looks like could happen now in Venezuela?
Well, I can't think of any time in history where the central banking, the money printing, the buying of votes, the increasing control of the government over the economy, the setting of prices, the limiting of production, it always leads to, and it sounds so terribly cold and clinical because it is human lives at stake, but this misallocation of resources that the great economist von Mises talked about is...
Almost a hundred years ago, in the 1920s, he talked about this.
If you don't have a free market, if you don't have a price system, there's simply no conceivable way to efficiently allocate resources.
Resources get wasted.
Resources get squandered.
You can think of France with their lakes of wine and their mountains of butter that all get destroyed.
You can think of all of this terrible socialist stuff that goes on with food production, where you dump food production into the third world, destroying agriculture and stimulating birth rates, which again produce starvation in the future.
It is human lives at stake when we have these abstract economic policies of centralized coercive control.
People die by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, and in North Korea, by the millions.
Okay, we're going to leave it there for now.
Stefan Molyneux, freedomainradio.com, the biggest philosophy show on YouTube.
