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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:49
Syria: The History and Future of Imminent War
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Hello everybody, this is Stefan Mollen from Free Domain Radio.
This is an update on Syria.
So, as you've probably heard for the first time in about 250 years, the British Prime Minister has been rejected by the House of Commons in a war resolution that's last occurred in the late 18th century, which shows, of course, that the British public, or at least the politicians' reading of the British public, is that the number of lies told to initiate the Iraqi war have actually taken root in the minds of the population, and there's a certain amount
of skepticism about the rush to war in Syria, which I think is a wonderfully good thing.
It's really quite a shame that a million Iraqis had to die for people to wake up to government-led propaganda.
But you take your rays of light where you can find them, I suppose.
Now for those who don't know much about Syria, it is a country that was pieced together really out of the runes of the Ottoman Empire by the Western colonial powers.
They usually just drew a map, and the map was not in accordance with ethnic groups or religious groups, and so one of the reasons the Middle East is a mess is that the countries didn't develop organically.
They were imposed, for the most part, or at least to some degree, by Western powers.
And what this means, of course, is that the amount of hatred and discord in the religious and cultural groups within each Middle Eastern country's border requires, or at least seems to demand, a very authoritarian style of government.
And as you can see from the wreckage of what happened in Iraq, When an authoritarian dictatorship is removed, all of the ethnic and religious groups begin to attack each other.
Remember, of course, the Middle East is in a pre-reformation state, which means that if we want to understand how the politics and conflicts work, the closest analogy is very early Middle Ages Europe, or in particular the wars that were fought after the Reformation, but before the separation of church and state.
In Europe, the wars between the Swingalians and the Baptists and the Anabaptists and the Lutherans and the Calvinists and the The Catholics and so on resulted in about a hundred years of virtual slaughter.
One of the reasons why Germany remained so primitive and violent into the 20th century was it missed out almost completely on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment because it was being wracked by internal wars, religious wars fundamentally.
So if you want to understand the Middle East, it's something that the West has gone through, but this is when the state is united with religion.
And, of course, every religious group is trying to gain control of the state to impose its religion on everyone else.
They have not gone through the Reformation state.
And the exhaustion with religious warfare that characterized the Enlightenment period in the West, when people said, well, religion is getting us all killed.
There was a traveler who traveled through Germany in the 18th century
who said that he almost never saw a tree without at least one uh... heretic or blasphemer hanging from it and so it's important to understand that in the middle east they have yet to uh... they haven't suffered enough tragically this is how human beings seem to have to learn you know if you don't learn through philosophy if you don't learn through reason and evidence then you have to learn through unbelievably bitter experience for which the adults are largely responsible and the children are almost never responsible
And it's yet to go through, this separation of church and state, and skepticism towards religion.
It was led by the French Enlightenment, by writers like Voltaire and so on, who were very skeptical towards religion.
And once we degrade a religion to a kind of cultural opinion, then we don't view it as an absolute that must be imposed through the state.
And that is the beginning of the potential of a civilization, but the Middle East is not Not there yet, and it doesn't look to be imminent at the moment.
So the Western powers drew these containment walls, these countries, these borders, around randomly dispersed cultural and religious groups.
Both, of course, culture and religion are a species of irrationality, and irrationality by its very nature must be imposed coercively and propagandistically, which is why the more irrational a culture is, the more dictatorial It's a government that tends to be, and the more abusive it is towards its own children, because you can't get children to believe crap without being aggressive and abusive.
And so you have this conflict in the Middle East, in most of the countries in the Middle East, because there's a wide disparity of non-organic cultures and religions, and you have very powerful states.
Each culture and religion is trying to gain control of the state, and the states must remain extremely authoritarian in order to repress the irrational diversity and absolutism of these religious and cultural groups.
So Syria was formed in 1922 and went through a wide variety of the usual coups and uprisings and everyone clawing to try and gain control of the massive face cannon of the state to impose their vision of the world, their irrational vision of the world on everyone else who was equally irrational and wanted to do the same to them.
From the sixties up until 2011 it was really fundamentally under martial law and Assad faced an uprising a couple of two years ago or so with the Arab Spring.
Remember that whole bit of hope where everybody thought that some sort of popular movement would bring some diminishment of authoritarianism in these governments and he faced this uprising and he dealt with it in You know, a typically brutal, fascistic manner.
Disappearing people regularly, killing children, dumping bodies on the streets.
I mean, the man is thoroughly satanic in every sense of the word.
And this has really been going on for two years.
Estimates are about a hundred thousand people have been killed.
About a million and a half have fled from Syria into Jordan and other countries.
Interestingly enough, 1.6 million or so of the people currently in Syria We're refugees from the Iraq war and naturally they're just flowing through from one brutal conflict to another.
Syria's major ally is Russia and Russia has been supplying arms, some say to both sides of the conflict, but it's really important to remember that the arms sales around the world is what makes these kinds of dictatorships really possible.
And so the governments that claim to protect you from outside threats are those who are actually supplying arms to these outside threats.
It's kind of a circular, flow-through, spiral-to-hell economy, but that's the way it generally works.
Now, recently, of course, it has been put forward that Assad has used chemical weapons on his own people, you know, like he just owns them like livestock, which I guess is kind of true.
And It's really, really important to understand that there does seem to be some evidence that chemical weapons were used.
Nobody knows who used them.
Obviously, there's no order that's been written down by Assad for this kind of stuff.
It's important to remember that, to my knowledge, at least no Western country has intelligence operatives, has agents or spies in the Assad regime anywhere close to the levels at which the decision to use chemical weapons would have been made.
So that's really, really important to understand.
Nobody has a clue who, if these weapons were even used, nobody has a clue who set them off.
Al-Qaeda, of course, is heavily focused on operating within the country and Al-Qaeda would love to see Assad deposed so they could easily have faked this kind of stuff or actually released it and then everybody's gonna rush to blame the dictator.
And they do that because they have no knowledge.
I mean, this is not a court of law.
You hear some evidence, you might see some chemicals, but you can't go cross-examine, you can't examine the official records, you don't have any transcripts of the meetings where this might have happened.
This is really important to understand.
Look at the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case where you had eyewitnesses, you had phone calls, you had very specific and precise information as to what happened in the location.
So even with taped phone calls, with eyewitnesses, with medical evidence, with cross-examination, with a full court of law, the verdict remains incredibly controversial, with people very evenly split on both sides as to the innocent or guilt of Zimmerman.
And that's when you have a huge amount of information.
There's still a huge amount of confusion about what actually happened.
With the chemicals, potential chemical warfare in Syria, nobody has a clue.
They have no clue.
Now interestingly enough, and I'll show you some pictures here, what has happened is John Kerry sat down for nice, tidy, cozy dinners with Assad.
And this is of course Quite interesting.
He is, of course, a multi-decade dictator.
And you could say, well, this is before he brutally started repressing his own people.
But this is the nature of the guy, that he was able to do this.
And of course, it's not like he's been real friendly to reform over the past couple of decades.
There's no particular freedom of press.
They've arrested bloggers all throughout the 90s and early 2000s.
They've, you know, tortured and killed both adults and children, raped boys as young as 11 in their prisons, according to reports.
And so this is the kind of guy he was, and when these heads of state in the U.S.
sit down for a pleasant convivial dinner with the guy, one of two possibilities occurred.
Either they're sitting down with him because they think he's a nice guy, in which case they have no intelligence, no knowledge about anything to do with the regime.
If you think he's a nice guy, then you don't have any clue about him.
And if you don't have any clue about him, then don't claim that you know something about who did these chemical weapons.
They don't have a clue.
U.S.
intelligence is ridiculous.
Two of the major failures of U.S.
intelligence, despite Hundreds of billions of dollars in funding over the Cold War.
They had no clue that Russia was about to collapse in the 80s and they had no clue about 9-11.
So let's not hold our breath for US intelligence to get anything right because those would be two pretty obvious and important ones.
The fall of Russia and the breakup of the Soviet bloc in particular should have known something about that.
It was one of the major events in world history.
So when they sit down for dinner with this guy they either think he's a nice guy in which case They don't.
They can't claim to know anything about the regime or anything about anything, in which case, what the hell's their job?
They're supposed to figure these things out, right?
It wasn't that hard to figure out.
Just go to Wikipedia and you can find out about the guy.
Or they knew that he was an evil dictator, but they thought it was a wonderfully fine thing to break bread with him.
And I think John Kerry brought his wife to dinner, you know, because it's important for everyone to get along.
So I think that's a very important thing to understand.
The U.S.
doesn't have a clue.
Nobody else has a clue about what's going on inside of Syria.
The U.N.
went to inspect, but they're just shown what the regime wants them to show.
They don't get free range.
They don't get carte blanche to interview people and then get them out of the country.
So there's just no possibility that anybody knows anything.
It's really, really important to understand.
Now for the U.S.
This is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel.
I'll keep it pretty brief.
But for the U.S.
to complain that Assad is using chemical weapons, a little bit precious.
This is the country, the U.S., that used white phosphorus in Fallujah as part of the Iraq invasion.
It's true.
Vicious, vicious stuff.
Burns uncontacted.
Here's the human skin.
And I believe it's made with chemicals.
I don't believe it's made with pixies and ebony wood.
The U.S.
used that.
If you go back a little further in time, Agent Orange was used extensively throughout Vietnam.
Vietnam was a conflict, of course, where the civilian population was decimated by two to three million.
They don't even know.
It's half a holocaust.
They don't even know.
And this was because there was indiscriminate chemical bombing of Civilians and so there was Asian arms which used white phosphorus has been used napalm has been used which is a chemical fire adherent as well and of course America was the only country to have used nuclear weapons against a civilian population in Japan for no military purpose whatsoever.
At the end of the Second World War in Japan, Japan, before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government had offered unconditional surrender with the caveat that they wanted to keep the emperor in place.
And the U.S. said, "No, we demand no emperor." And they hesitated, then they got the living crap bombed out of them, and, you know, half the kids in these cities were turned into nuclear shadows, stuck to a wall.
And then the Japanese surrendered and the U.S.
let them keep the Emperor anyway.
You may have noticed he's still kicking around, or at least his descendants.
So this was all to no purpose.
So the idea that the U.S.
is going to be heavily bothered by the use of chemical weapons is... I mean, what can you even say?
It doesn't matter.
Now, there is, of course, a huge danger that Barack Obama's original solution was just to lob some Scud missiles into Syria, which is, I mean, incredibly destructive.
They have no idea what these chemical weapons are, or who's in charge of them, or even if they exist anymore.
So whatever they do, they're just going to lob weapons in to no purpose.
It's just like Throwing lawn darts over a fence into a playground, whatever you hit, is not likely to be anything particularly dangerous, but sure will rouse the resentment of everyone on the other side, particularly the parents.
So the idea that the U.S.
is just going to lob these Scud missiles in from the warships and do anything is ridiculous.
Never going to happen.
And so That's important to understand as well, that anything being talked about is purely symbolic.
Now, I mean, Obama has wet-fingered the wind and figured out which way things are blowing and has read the pretty obvious tea leaves of the British population's response and that the only ally that America has Now, Obama has been very disrespectful, I guess you could say, to the British government.
They've called France their best ally.
He's made a number of insults towards England.
Now, of course, remember, he comes from Africa, and England had a lot of colonial powers in Africa, a lot of colonial authority, and so the Kenyan population is not that big and that keen on England, which is one of the reasons why his foreign policy with regards to what's called the special relationship between America and England has been so disastrous.
Now don't get me wrong, it is desperately tragic what is occurring in Syria and it is likely going to have to continue for a couple more years.
We do seem to be sort of constitutionally arranged in our souls as a species, at least at the moment, that we almost never seem to learn by reason and evidence.
We always seem to have to learn through unbelievably bitter, traumatic, painful, and murderous experience.
I don't know exactly what Teflon-Krypton shield we have around our frontal lobes that resists any rational arguments, that resists skepticism, resists critical thinking, but that's where we are.
We are bulletproof to the snipers of reason at the moment, and it is tragic to see what is happening.
In particular, the kids who are born into Syria have no choice about where they're born.
They're just born into this living hell.
The intellectuals face death, of course, if they speak out against religion or speak out against cultural irrationalities and superstitions.
Irrationality plus absolute results in death, in one form or another, in human society.
You can be irrational as long as you get that it's a subjective preference.
You can be absolute if, like science and math and engineering, you are objective and rational.
But when you put irrationality and absolutes together, which is the foundation of Patriotism and most cultures and religion in particular, then you have a living hell on earth.
And unfortunately this is where we are as a species.
It's no better in the West in some ways, although we have had the legacy of a more rational time.
We're still living on the legacy of more rational time, just as we're still living on the capital generated in the post-war boom.
We are consuming the rationality and the capital, which is going to be a problem.
But the last thing I wanted to say If you look at the two staggeringly incredible and amazing advances in human societies over the past 20 years, the first place you have to look at are two places where literally hundreds of millions of people have crawled out of poverty into the middle classes.
And these are places where there's been almost no intervention from the West.
This is really, really important.
So, the two countries I'm talking about, of course, are China and India.
Imperfect societies, to be sure, but as far as getting people out of poverty, the last 20 years have seen the single biggest proportion of humanity escaping poverty that the world has ever seen.
And by that I'm including the Industrial Revolution, the post-war boom, even the Agricultural Revolution.
of the 11th and 12th centuries AD in the West, where they figured out that if you put a harness on a horse rather than choke it, you can plow a lot better.
They figured out turnips or winter crops, how to do crop rotation and so on, which increased agricultural productivity between 10 and 20 times, laid the foundation for cities, laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.
That has nothing.
Those events have nothing on the amount of wealth increase and escape from poverty that has occurred over the last 20 years or so in China and in India.
Yeah.
In India, just 50,000 families every month get out of poverty because they have had some free market reforms, some voluntaristic trade principles and so on, some less intervention in the economy.
Syria is a fascistic state-run economy, which is one of the reasons, along with the war, why the economy has shrunk 35% in the last two years.
It is important to remember that to not intervene in a country is really important.
When you start intervening in a country, when you start lobbing bombs in, when you start screwing around with the With the politics and the economics, and you give it foreign aid, and you sell it weapons, and you get heavily involved, it tends to make the country worse.
And this is really, really important to understand.
Let's just take a look at a picture of a couple of the last presidents and how this endless war for endless peace that occurs.
Now, if you look at countries like China and India and Singapore and Hong Kong, these are countries that have not received the benevolence and wonder and joyous evil of American interventionism, foreign aid, subsidized or free agricultural these are countries that have not received the benevolence and wonder and joyous evil of American interventionism, foreign aid, And It's really, really important to understand.
There is this weird thing.
So much of what is true is counterintuitive, right?
The world looks flat, but it's actually round.
The sun and the moon look the same size, but they're quite different, I hear.
And it looks like the sun rotates around the earth, but it's not.
A lot of what is true is just kind of counterintuitive.
And a lot of what it is to help people is to leave them alone, right?
There's this enabling, as we all know, psychologically, where you go and cover up for your husband's drinking or You cover up for someone's drug use, or you keep bailing them out, and so on.
This laissez-faire thing, which is sort of the cry of the French merchants to one of the French kings who said, how can I help you?
He said, laissez-faire!
Leave us alone!
Stop trying to help us!
This is very important to understand.
We have this impulse, oh, terrible things are happening in Syria, and so on, and the Russians are starving to death, so let's, you know, send aid and weapons to Syria, and let's send free grain and stuff to Russia, and so on.
There is this tendency that we have Which is just charity, it's just getting involved and often in really terrible ways.
But the success in the world where people actually achieve positive things, sustainable growth, getting out of poverty, That occurs when governments stop interfering with everyone.
It's one of these counterintuitive things that sometimes, from a state perspective, you know if you want to go help Syria, you know, go fly over send your own money or whatever, but from a government perspective, helping other countries become free, helping other peoples become self-sufficient.
These are just other government programs.
It's another government program.
Foreign aid, arms sales are just other government programs.
And I think if we look at places like Detroit or Washington DC, Washington DC has the highest murder rate in America.
And if the politicians can't fix what's outside their own windows, what are the odds of them fixing a country about which they know virtually nothing, whose dictators they invite over to break bread, and the only thing they can do is lob weapons at the dictators in terms of selling them arms.
They can lob scuds at what is almost certain to be a civilian population.
And they can give money to dictators, which is then used to buy arms and weapons.
There's really nothing that can be done by the government to help these countries.
And the less they help them, the better off they will be.
I hope this helps.
If you would like to help out this show and help it reach more of an audience, fdrural.com forward slash donate.
Thank you so much.
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