July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi everybody, it's Ivan Mullany from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| So this is the multi-generational tragic backstory behind Ivan Lopez's recent shooting and killing of three people and wounding of 16 more at the military base at Fort Hood in Texas, which of course was the location of the 2009 shooting situation where an officer killed 13 people. | |
| To put this in context, the US military is experiencing, after more than a decade, a decade of war, 22 suicides every single day. | |
| 22 suicides every single day. | |
| Far larger than the amount of deaths occurring from combat. | |
| And there's a reason, a series of reasons for all of this, which go back more than a hundred years, which we'll talk about. | |
| So the Iraq war veteran Lopez was being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder before he opened fire in his murderous rampage. | |
| He had been fully evaluated by a psychiatrist a month ago and he did serve for four months as a truck driver in Iraq in 2013 but his records show no physical wounds, no direct involvement in combat or any injury that might lead the army to further investigate what's called TBI or traumatic brain injury which is a big problem these days. | |
| He did enlist in the army in April 2010 as an infantry soldier and later became a truck driver. | |
| Lopez did self-report a traumatic brain injury while he was deployed according to the military. | |
| He had formerly been a policeman. | |
| He was undergoing a variety of treatments for conditions including depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbances. | |
| He was prescribed drugs that include Ambien, a sleep aid, and we don't know at the moment if he was on SSRIs. | |
| SSRIs are one of the leading drugs in a recent list compiled of the top ten drugs that cause violent behavior and if you look up SSRIs and shootings you will see that the one thing that many shootings in America have in common, overwhelmingly in common, all the way back to Columbine, is the degree to which | |
| The shooters were either on SSRI drugs, these mind-altering substances, or had recently quit them and were going through withdrawal. | |
| So, as you probably know, the military in the United States is really stretched to the breaking point. | |
| The result of more than a decade of war and perpetual tours of duty in relentlessly stressful environments is that the U.S. | |
| military is currently experiencing 22 suicides every single day. | |
| That is far more than soldiers killed by enemy combatants. | |
| In other words, the greatest enemy of the U.S. | |
| soldier could be argued is the civilian leadership that repeatedly deploys them in these rather useless wars. | |
| Why is it so difficult these days to be a soldier? | |
| Well, of course it always has been, but it's extrapolated and exacerbated by increases in technology. | |
| So, during World War II, the average combatant saw approximately 40 days of actual combat over a four-year period, so about 10 combat days. | |
| Every year. | |
| When you weren't in combat you weren't really at risk when you were behind the lines or when you were traveling. | |
| The big change which started in Vietnam was the introduction of the helicopter. | |
| Once you had the helicopter then you had the chance to move troops around very quickly and that changed things quite a bit. | |
| So 40 days of actual combat in four years for the average U.S. | |
| soldier in the Second World War. | |
| And in the Second World War, if you were a soldier and you were injured, one in three would die. | |
| That's now down to 10 to 12 percent because of, of course, increased battlefield medicine, faster response times, and so on. | |
| In Korea, the average combat days was 180 days, which is difficult to verify, to be sure. | |
| A combat day is defined as when you go out and you don't know if you're going to come back alive or dead. | |
| And in Vietnam, approximately 240 days of combat per tour. | |
| which was a little more than a year. | |
| Most soldiers in Vietnam did one tour, some did two and very rarely three. | |
| Now the default is multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. | |
| The troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are now experiencing over 310 days of combat per year. | |
| 310 days of combat per year. | |
| So that is pretty tragic. | |
| The closest parallel war was the First World War, when of course in France in particular the English and the Germans, the French and the Germans, and later after 1917 the Americans and the Germans and other Axis powers were locked in this trench warfare which just went on and on. | |
| The Second World War was much more mobile and of course troop movement was very slow, which is one of the reasons why in the Second World War there was much less combat per troop. | |
| At the end of the First World War in the United States, almost 40% of all hospitalized veterans suffered combat-related mental and nervous disorders. | |
| What in the First World War was called shell shock was rather rare, or at least not that much reported in previous wars, which had not been total wars with all of the wealth and power and godforsaken efficiency of a post-industrial economy. | |
| So they thought it was shell shock because people, men, were scared and unable to go back into combat and experiencing significant signs of mental distress. | |
| even though they didn't have any physical injuries. | |
| And they called it shell shock because they thought maybe something had gone wrong with the inner ears or something had gone wrong with the nervous system as the result of being close to this level of combat. | |
| They thought it was noise related. | |
| This actually sparked a considerable interest in Freudian theories because nobody could really figure out. | |
| And the goal was, of course, to get them back into combat as quickly as possible. | |
| During the Korean War, the official attitude was that mental breakdowns were to be dealt The best thing for the combatant was to be returned to the front lines. | |
| And only 6% of evacuations were for psychiatric reasons in Korea compared to World War II, where 23% of the evacuations were for psychiatric casualties. | |
| And a congressional report published in 1990 stated that 480,000 or 15% of the total 3.15 million Americans who served in Vietnam were 15 years after the war still suffering from combat-related psychological problems. | |
| The report also concluded that over 960,000 men and 1,900 women who had served in Vietnam had suffered PTSD symptoms at some time in their lives. | |
| Also, the degree of not just exposure to combat, but engagement in combat has changed considerably since the Second World War. | |
| So in his book, On Killing, Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman states that percentage of combat soldiers actually willing to shoot at and kill the enemy has traditionally been very low. | |
| So 15 to 20 percent of soldiers in combat are willing to actually point their gun at and shoot to kill the enemy, which is one of the reasons why the military has abandoned the conscription model It's not out of a newfound respect for individual rights. | |
| It's because you really don't get a lot of people actually shooting to kill at an enemy during a war if you have a conscription army. | |
| In order to improve this, this happened to some degree in Korea, but significantly more in Vietnam. | |
| To improve this problem of soldiers not shooting to kill, armed services developed specialized training designed to increase this percentage through conditioning and has got it closer to 95%. | |
| So 95% of soldiers now are willing to shoot at and kill an enemy. | |
| The psychological cost on the soldiers has been considerable. | |
| The more you develop the kind of cold-blooded murder instinct in soldiers, the less they're able to adjust back to civilian life. | |
| So you basically sharpen them until they snap after the war. | |
| This is one of the reasons why. | |
| So continual exposure to combat plus increased training to create murderers has significantly impacted the mental health, particularly of American soldiers. | |
| So why didn't people shoot They're guns in the battlefield in the past. | |
| Well, religious scruples against killing, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not kill, kind of takes root in people's brains. | |
| But an even bigger factor in the Second World War was shock. | |
| In one study of a division that saw heavy fighting in World War II, a quarter of the soldiers admitted that they had been so scared that they vomited. | |
| Almost a quarter lost control of their bowels. | |
| 10% urinated in their pants. | |
| And this was the percentage of killing, the percentage of killers in the Second World War was higher in Japan in the Japanese Pacific War than in the European war because it was easier to alienate one's emotions from the Japanese who looked different from Europeans. | |
| In an essay There is a photo which appeared as a human interest in Look magazine. | |
| It shows a pretty young American woman showing off the love letter sent to her by her marine boyfriend. | |
| He had written it on the skull of a Japanese soldier. | |
| So these and other reasons are the primary causes behind massive amounts of military suicides and the shootings that occur because of course significant portions of these broken kill bots are on psychotropic medications, SSRIs and other | |
| Mind-altering medications which are heavily heavily contribute towards a violent Thought suicidal ideation and so on so clearly this military machine is being bent to the breaking point. | |
| Of course, these wars need to end as quickly as humanly possible. | |
| And ladies, if you feel like you can't do much about it, you can. | |
| We men, as you may or may not be aware, we men will do pretty much whatever women say. | |
| In the First World War, there were women who handed out white feathers of cowardice, quote, cowardice to men of military age they found walking around the streets of England, particularly in London. | |
| And out of fear of these white feathers, perhaps they expected some sort of near fatal tickling. | |
| Men would sign up and go to war. | |
| Men will do just about anything to gain sexual access to women. | |
| So women, if you want to do something to really end End war, as we know it, the first thing to do is stop having sex with soldiers. | |
| If a man is a soldier, then don't sleep with him. |
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