Jan. 12, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:56
4283 Terrorism, War and History: Propaganda Decoded
Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio, responds to a listener who disagrees with his girlfriend about America's involvement in war over the years.▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour 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▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
Hi everybody, Stephen Rolland here from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well!
So, a fine young man, or I guess man, I don't know how youthful he is or isn't, has written in to say that he has conflicts with his girlfriend.
He's sort of started off on the zeitgeist Spectrum, I suppose, looking at how awful what he thought the free market was and then accepted the arguments that what is currently called the free market is not that at all.
You know, the term that's been used is capitalism and, you know, just crony capitalism and so on.
You know, just like I got a message the other day from someone who was saying, well, but You don't understand that prisons have been privatized and this is an example of how the free market doesn't work because there's an incentive for judges who may have
investments in prisons to send more prisoners there and i think one judge in america was recently convicted of this that uh... he had uh... investments in private prisons and was continually or teen ranches or something like that was continually sending more prisoners there so yeah but that's not the free market government defines the laws the government persecutes the laws the government has a terrible system where in most people
in the states end up merely giving plea bargains rather than having any day in court and they are threatened or rather bribed with years of freedom and threatened with years of incarceration if they don't toe the line and confess.
And this is exactly what used to happen in the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn writes about this that as a captain, I think he was a captain in the Second World War, he was threatened with insane punishments.
He had to write out his guilt and confess, and then his punishment, I think, was ameliorated to some degree.
And it's insane.
And it, of course, all paid for.
Government control and tax dollars do not a free market make, right?
So the moment something is paid for with tax dollars, you are not in the realm of the free markets.
So anyway, he and his girlfriend have disagreements about things like World War I, World War II, and they also have disagreements about America's involvement in Vietnam, and they also have sort of the question of how do you define terrorism and so on.
Well, America has had the goal of promoting the free market all over the world for, you could say, sort of at least the last century.
Now, the two biggest advances in the free market, which is really basically why the whole system is still standing, the two biggest advances in the free market were India and China, which America had absolutely nothing to do with.
America had nothing whatsoever to do with the growth of the free market in China, and had absolutely nothing to my knowledge to do with the growth of the free market in India.
The growth of the free market over the last few decades, really in these two countries, has had a massive impact on world poverty.
Hundreds and hundreds of millions of people have pulled out of poverty in the greatest creation and production of wealth and alleviation of poverty the world has ever seen.
And what did this have to do with the military-industrial complex in the US?
Well, it had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
The other place where free market principles were at least extended from brute communism was the late 80s fall of the Russian Empire.
And now you could argue, and some people have argued, that Reagan won the Cold War by pushing Russia to having an arms race and pushing Russia to invest more and more in its arms.
I don't see how America making arms forces Russia to buy arms.
I think it had a lot more to do with Afghanistan and just the general illogic of a priceless productivity system.
Priceless meaning that which outpriced without price.
But what did America have to do with the transition of a Soviet or communist style of economy to a relatively somewhat vaguely free market-ish economy?
Well, nothing.
Nothing.
The movement of sort of the Southeast Asian countries and there's more of a free market had to do with what?
Where American involvement occurs, where does freedom go?
Does freedom increase or does freedom decrease?
Wars are the health of the state, as has been ably noted, and as I've pointed out, the state is the health of war.
You can't have wars without fiat currency, at least modern wars, limitless democratic wars.
And so, if you want to evaluate American foreign policy, you look at the goals and you look at the facts.
And that's what you do.
Right?
I mean, the goal was to bring democracy and peace and the market to Iraq.
I mean the place is just a moonscape of hellish, no matter how well-intentioned, hellish human results.
Inhuman results, really.
Do Europeans have more economic freedom now than before the Second World War?
Do Americans?
Of course not.
After almost a hundred years of fighting communism, I mean the Americans and the British first got involved in the 1920-1921, if memory serves, fighting against the Russians, against the Bolsheviks.
It's been almost a hundred years of fighting communism and how's that working out?
Right?
Communism from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
So those who make more should pay more, and those who have the greatest needs should receive more.
Well, the whole idea of a graduated income tax was Marxist.
It was Karl Marx who first came up with it.
And America that implemented it, in 1917, if I remember rightly, slightly before going to fight Marxism, they implemented the core aspect of Marxist ideology.
Eight of the ten planks of the Communist Party have been enacted since Russia was fighting communism.
So, if you look at foreign policy, you simply look at the goal, which is to spread freedom, and the free market, and democracy, and republicanism.
I mean, America is a republic, was founded as a republic, which is supposed to be, you can vote on the periphery, but the core Bill of Rights, the core human rights, are inviolable by the majority.
How's that worked?
If you look at the whole welfare state and the degree to which the rich are taxed and the degree to which the poor receive benefits, from each according to his ability to each according to his need, has been implemented on a scale and spending such a sum of money that Marx's head would literally explode if he could see the trillions and trillions of dollars, unimaginable, more than the whole wealth of the world in his day,
just in the last 40 years have been transferred just in America to the poor, he would be astonished.
So you look at the attentions and you look at the results.
The stated goal of the welfare state in the 1960s was to eliminate, to accelerate the elimination of poverty.
Poverty was already being eliminated and to accelerate the elimination of poverty.
And what happened?
In Cambodia, which the US dropped close to 3 million tons of explosives, which is almost 50% more than the Allies dropped during the entire Second World War everywhere, America dropped on
A country about the size of Oklahoma with a population roughly equivalent to New York at the time dropped three million tons of bombs destroying vast tracts of the country and killing seven percent of the entire population of the country and this of course helped create destabilization and created the Khmer Rouge who were anti-american and anti-capitalist and all that
And so they ended up, what, further slaughtering 20-25 percent of the country's population, driving everyone out into cities and creating the killing fields of Cambodia.
Not sure I miss you, Spalding, but it's some pretty good work.
So that's, I mean, just in a very brief tour nutshell, that's the result?
Is there a country that America set its sights on to keep it free of tyranny that it kept free of tyranny and made free?
I mean they've been fighting against Castro for 40 plus years.
They've been fighting against Al Qaeda for 13 plus years.
And how's all that going?
And that's just, I mean, a very brief tour of the externalities of American foreign policy.
What about the internalities?
If they're aiming to make external countries more free, it must be because the American government, at every level, at all its levels, must be really excellent at making Americans more free.
Right?
And so they must have learned how to do this at home, and then brought all of this wonderful expertise to foreign countries.
And of course it's complete nonsense.
I think in the 90s a black in Washington DC, which is really right outside the window of the Capitol, the White House, A black man in Washington DC was 770 times more likely to be murdered than a man or woman living in Austria.
770 times.
It seems to me that the Austrians would have a good case on US foreign policy principles of invading the US and saving us or saving them from the American government.
The American government can't run schools Can't run the post office with any kind of efficiency, can't maintain roads, can't keep bridges running, has a hugely decaying infrastructure, has created a vast dependent class.
1.6 million Americans last year were arrested for drug offenses.
Since the war on drugs, global consumption of opiates has gone up almost 40%.
So even when they have, they can't even keep drugs out of prison, so even if they turn the whole world into a prison they can't get rid of drugs.
The astonishing immoral incompetence and catastrophic results of government programs will in the future be something so astonishing to historians that they will not be able to understand how we could have called for government involvements or cheered yet another government initiative.
I simply won't understand it.
How could we possibly believe this?
So in other words, if the American government was very good at bringing freedom to other countries, we would assume that it would be even better at bringing freedom to its own citizens.
It's good at not educating them, but propagandizing them.
It's good at buying votes by shoveling imaginary money from one group to another.
We used to have civil rights and now we have snivel rights.
It's good at breaking things and blowing things up, destroying families.
But it's got no interest whatsoever in bringing freedom to the masses.
As far as terrorism goes, and I've got a true news about this.
I think it's number five.
There was, of course, back in the day, a couple of decades ago, a whole bunch of countries got together and really wanted to define terrorism so they knew their enemy, but they had to give it up because they could not find a definition of terrorism that didn't include what they themselves were doing.
Terrorism, broadly defined, is generally the use of violence to achieve a political goal.
The political goal is a goal to adjust the laws or processes of the country or leadership and by that definition all government activity is terrorism because all government activity is the use of violence to change the laws, structures and leaders of society.
All laws... Farmers say we want more subsidies for soybeans And they lobby for that.
Well, that's the use of violence or the attempt to use violence to manipulate the public purse to get money they have not earned from people who do not wish to provide it.
You could say the only non-terrorist government activity is failed lobbying, in which case the bribe didn't work.
So it's pretty hard to look at, I mean, just the US in the 20th century and find out where it has used its might, muscle and power to expand freedom domestically or in other countries.
And this all is because of the lack of courage of philosophers.
The lack of willingness of philosophers to, in a very deeply principled way, interject themselves into the public discourse.
Look, if you want to make people free, you educate them.
about actionable freedom.
Political freedom is something that arises out of a deep abhorrence of the non-aggression principle and a deep abhorrence of the non-aggression principle is when you understand and are willing to advocate and accept this principle without shying away from it because of childhood trauma wherein you were hit or beaten.
In other words, if you were raised through violations of the non-aggression principle, you're going to shy away from consistent application of the non-aggression principle Which means that you will shy away from limitations in state power.
Just the moment somebody says the non-aggression principle is immoral, deep down in your subconscious, the parents' hands and fists and belts and spoons, they all heave into view and you recoil from the conversation.
You have been Conditioned.
You have been adverse conditioned to principled non-aggression through your parents violating non-aggression in their raising of you.
If you wish to instruct other people on freedom the first thing you must do is live your values yourself and the second thing you must do is provide them peaceful voluntary actionable ways for them to be free or to pursue freedom If you say, blow people up, then I think it's immoral, and most people won't do it anyway.
So you're just teaching people, if you tell them to pursue the political process, well... The political process is still about imposing your will on others.
Even if your will is that their will should not be imposed upon you, if people don't understand that philosophically, then you'll just get this Scott Walker of Wisconsin style revolt.
Where people feel entitled.
It's my money.
Social Security.
I paid into it.
I've paid my taxes.
I'm a citizen.
I deserve.
It's entitlement.
It's what they're called.
I'm entitled to this money.
It's my money.
Mine!
And people then think that you're stealing their property because they don't understand.
But if you give them personally actionable, peaceful ways to pursue and achieve freedom in their own lives, and you are an example of what that looks like, well, You know, if you have a factory on some island producing the most terrible food imaginable and everyone's getting fat because it's just full of sugar and fat and tastes good and all that, you know, do you tell people you've got to go and take over that factory?
You've got to bomb the factory?
You've got to Try and get yourself elected to the board on that factory?
No!
You don't do any of that stuff, right?
You simply stop eating that food, you become healthy, you lose weight, you exercise, you become enviable to others, and you tell people just you don't have to eat the food.
In fact, it's bad for you to eat the food.
To do whatever you want, it's bad for you to eat the food.
And that's what I do.
With predatory illusions and those who are the carriers of them.
Illusion is an STD.
Literally.
And that's what you end up hated for, right?
By some.
It's peaceful.
It's actionable.
Anyone can do it.
And you find out whether people actually really believe and are committed to What they claim they believe and are committed to.
Should I get off the pot?
Put up or shut up?
Or as they used to say in taxes, he's all hat and no cattle.
Just pretend cowboy.
Well, the hat is the words, the cattle are the actions.
Are you all hat and no cattle?
People don't like that.
I get that.
I understand that.
But so what?
So what?
Ooh, people don't like it.
You know what they'll like even less?
Social collapse.
Yeah, I think they might have a little bit more of a problem with not being able to eat than having to confront their own addiction to supporting the violence of the state and the verbal abuse of religion.
Well, yes, I think they'll find a little bit more tricky things in their lives than being criticized or maybe even ostracized for immoral and destructive beliefs after months and months of trying to be convinced otherwise.
So, I hope that helps.
I, of course, hugely appreciate these questions.
Please keep them coming!
Always enjoyable to know what's on the hive mind of the listenership.
