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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:06:51
The Truth About World War I: The Hidden History
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Mullany from Freedomain Radio.
I hope you're doing very well.
I hope you will get comfortable as we take a tour through, certainly in the West and certainly in Christendom, what can accurately be called the most tragic and divisive and far-reaching genocidal and murderous event that has ever occurred in Western history, the First World War.
The First World War, of course, as you know, I'm sure, erupted in 1914 between European powers and fairly ancient empires, and was in many ways a family conflict in that many of the rulers who waged war against each other were blood relations.
And I've got Myths of World Wars available on the Freedom Aid Radio YouTube channel if you'd like more about that.
To get a sense of what was eclipsed in human society, what was destroyed in human society, the vast and enormous cathedral-like potential of the 19th century that was shattered, gassed, maimed, tortured, brutalized, and buried under bloody mud in The four years of 1914 to 1918.
I think it's important to take a bit of a glimpse beyond the charcoal shroud of smoke that covers those teen terrible years into what was called the bourgeois century, which was really the 99 years of no major wars in Europe from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 until the opening of hostilities in 1914.
What occurred during that century, unprecedented in its peace, in its prosperity, is so hard to imagine as we have been so far on the other side of dealing with the endless rock slides and human debris and catastrophes and fascism and national socialism and communism and totalitarianism and debt and fiat currency of every kind.
Taking a glimpse beyond the piled-to-the-moon bodies of the First World War and looking at the 19th century is, at least for me, kind of an agonizing emotional process, as well as a mental process, because it was such a glorious place of human potential, the 19th century.
Of course, the Industrial Revolution had its horrors, there was child labor and so on, The gauge of wealth that was created in the 19th century is really in the population.
European population more than doubled in the 19th century.
Whenever people begin to get wealth, they begin to work hard, they begin to accumulate capital, and the standards of living begin to increase.
What happens almost immediately is children live who otherwise would have died.
And the children who were in the chimneys, the children who were working in the mines, the children who were in the inking factories, a la Charles Dickens, those children would otherwise have been tiny bodies in a grave rather than sooty faces in a window.
And that's really important to understand.
The presence of child labor is often the beginning of wealth.
Children would otherwise have died who now got to live.
And population increase is also important.
If you give people who've been grinding their way through millennia of medieval poverty excess capital and wealth, they have more children.
Those children then eat up the excess capital and wealth.
Those children create population growth which drive down wages and so on, but at least they're alive.
And if you look at the caloric intake of workers throughout the 19th century, it did significantly increase.
the invention, of course, of railways, the introduction of advanced farming methods, was absolutely essential to creating the food production and food distribution system that kept the urban lumpenproletariat alive.
And so there is a lot of misconceptions about the 19th century, but if you look at the chart of human income in the 19th century, it really begins to spike.
And the reasons for that were, of course, manyfold.
But to look back at that time, I hesitate to call it a golden age, because that is to shoot you an entire century through the dewey sentimentality of a film shot through the lens of a honey brand muffin that's not what I'm sort of looking for but just to go through a few of the freedoms that were available to human beings not that long ago throughout Europe there were no passports.
They didn't visa didn't have to stamp entry and exit.
You could go and live anywhere.
You could go and work anywhere.
You did not need to have your papers on you.
You did not need to have a passport.
You did not need to have official permissions.
Now, Russia sort of tipped halfway between the East and the West.
It was considered pretty barbaric that in Russia you needed some, there were travel restrictions, this was considered barbaric.
In the 19th century, we saw the end of formal slavery, at least throughout the British Empire and America.
And of course, in South America as well.
This was unprecedented.
After hundreds of thousands of years of human slavery, in which all races, cultures and creeds and religions participated, it was white Western Christian Europeans who brought a foundational end to this age-old curse of mankind.
That was the end of serfdom, formal serfdom, even in Russia.
And these were amazing, amazing opportunities.
For the vast majority of people throughout the world, at least the West, there was no income tax, very few sales taxes, a few tariffs and tithes.
But income taxes were maybe 1-5% on about 2% of the population.
And this vastly increased, of course, as did almost all government powers.
During the First World War, you had a relatively stable currency compared to what has happened since the creation of the Federal Reserve in the United States, where the U.S. dollar has, over the last 101 years, lost more than 98% of its value.
There was, of course, no major European wars.
Astounding, shocking, given the incredibly bloody history of Europe, particularly religious conflicts.
There was the rise of science.
There was the rise of medicine.
Until the late 19th century, you were better off not to go to a doctor than to go to a doctor.
A doctor would be more likely to make you worse with the advent of science and medicine, particularly double-blind experiments and the casting off.
of superstitious remedies, there was amazing progress in that.
Literature was amazing.
Women's rights and freedoms began to expand, and there was a decline of child labor.
As soon as most parents have enough money to keep body and soul together, they choose to send their children to school.
There was, in England, a very strong free trade movement.
It was called the Anti-Korn Law League, also known as the Carptonites.
They really hit hard at mercantilist rules wherein the landed nobility opposed free trade.
They wanted to grant charters and rights and so on and do the usual crony capitalism or capitalism that characterizes a mixture of state and economy and they pushed very hard to To roll back all of the post-Roman Empire and medieval restrictions on trade.
They wanted to roll back the power of the medieval guilds.
They wanted to reduce the length and time of apprenticeship.
They really wanted to expand and open up free trade.
And you saw the rise, I mean this was a century or two earlier, in Amsterdam, the rise of the stock market, where you could invest in companies who could then attempt to gain market share and growth.
There was astounding and astonishing openings up of opportunities wherein a blind Scotsman could become a famous engineer despite being blind.
I mean just amazing astounding things.
Imagine the steam engine, cotton ginnies, mills, all of the things that made the foundation of wealth.
possible in the West and what was so incredibly tragic was this mountain of Capitalist mountain of wealth that was built up on the backs of laborers on the backs of human suffering on the backs of Growing free trade this mountain of capitalist mountain of wealth that
was almost down to the last goddamn shilling destroyed in the First World War.
Almost down to the dollar.
The wealth that had been created in the 19th century was destroyed in the First World War.
My own particular family history is tightly bound up in the wars of Europe in the 20th century.
My ancestors, significant numbers of them, died in the First World War.
My grandmother on my mother's side, who's German, was bombed in the Dresden attack of 1944, actually in a bombing raid that was participated in by an uncle on my father's side.
And this fratricidal warfare of the European nations certainly had a very deep impact.
My family was nobility up until relatively recently and you know it's great being nobility I suppose in some ways.
One of the downsides is that you didn't have to lead the charges in the trenches and very much the Nobility, the better educated, the more cultured, were wiped out even more ferociously than the average person in the First World War.
The cream of the crop, the cream of the intelligentsia, the cream of the society were destroyed at a much greater rate even than everyone else.
In the 19th century there was a backlash against growth and freedom and opportunity and free trade in particular.
There were two groups, two classes, and we'll touch on this at the very end as well.
There were two groups of classes that ferociously undermined free trade and capitalism.
One of them were the priestly classes because free trade and capitalism are very much secular, very much earthly focused.
And it's not like you can't be religious and be into free trade, but it's very much of this world.
It is not monk-like.
It is not the sacrifice of earthly pleasures or earthly ambitions or earthly lusts.
It is the harnessing of them for hopefully the greater good of Society as a whole.
And priests, there's a famous 19th century theologian who said mankind is in danger of being laughed out of religion.
There was a growing secularism, a growing atheism.
And this was not, of course, viewed with great favor by the priestly classes.
The warrior classes, which is really the more martially accurate name for the aristocrats, also did not find free trade and the growth of the bourgeoisie, of the capitalist classes, of the middle classes, to be much in their favor.
These people are not good economic managers.
I guess good at flogging peasants and good at hunting foxes and so on and going to balls, but not very good economic managers.
For more of this, I guess you can watch Downton Abbey.
When goods cross borders.
Soldiers don't.
And when soldiers cross borders, goods don't.
They tend to displace each other.
This was originally attributed to Frederick Basquiat, but apparently the quote can't be tracked down, but it's nonetheless, I think, true.
When free trade was flowing back and forth across Europe, the aristocratic classes were being out-competed in economic efficiency by the middle classes, by the bourgeoisie, by the petty bourgeoisie.
And the Long-standing peace, relative peace of the 19th century in Europe meant that the martial classes, the warrior classes, the murder classes were becoming less and less relevant, less and less important to Europe.
And so these two classes, you know, they do not go gently into that good night, my friends.
They organize counter-revolutions when freedom and liberty and trade and wealth and volunteerism in involuntarism, when those are destroying or undermining the priest classes and the warrior classes, they fight back.
They fight back.
Everybody forgets the backlash.
And one of the differentiating characteristics is that in free trade, the targeting of children is really not that productive.
And one of the differentiating characteristics is that in free trade, the targeting of children is really not that productive.
I mean, in the 19th century now, you know, Barbie this and right.
I mean, in the 19th century now, you know, Barbie this and right.
But in the 19th century, children had very little money.
But in the 19th century, children had very little money.
And whatever money they did had was generally controlled by the parents.
And whatever money they did had was generally controlled by the parents.
So targeting the children was not particularly beneficial.
So there was, of course, the growth of Lancashire schools and wonderful schools of education, wherein you could actually get a very high quality education for the modern equivalent of $30 or $40 a year.
You would be taught by the older kids.
You would in turn teach the younger kids because the best way to know if you know something is see if you can teach someone else.
And there was wonderful flourishing trade schools.
There was wonderful flourishing education for children that was geared towards children paid for by the parents in general or by charities.
And Europe, there was this backsliding into mercantilism, nationalism, imperialism.
How was this?
How was this achieved?
Well, it was achieved through Government education through the institution of government education led by Bismarck in Germany.
So we'll get to that in a second.
Let's talk a little bit about the end result of this propagandizing of children.
What happened to the West?
So two scholars have described the carnage of World War One on the British side.
Over 2 million British servicemen were wounded in body or in mind.
Their lives were never to be the same again.
Untold numbers of all classes and backgrounds suffered grief and hardship through the loss of or debilitating injury to fathers, brothers, sons and friends.
The long shadow of the war extends right up until the present day.
Many families across Europe and indeed the world will still be affected through psychological and physical scars.
On both sides, the war claimed the lives of over 18 million people.
About 2.4 million of which were civilians.
An additional 4.5 million civilians died from starvation and various diseases.
The number of wounded civilians has not been measured, but it doubtless runs in the millions.
Amongst military men, 20 million were wounded, and because of the nature of trench warfare, a lot of the injuries these men sustained were located in the face, missing noses, ears, jaws, or entire faces shredded by machine gun fire.
British newspapers in the post-war days lamented that most of these veterans are almost condemned to isolation unless surgery can repair the damage.
Did you know, not many people do, that the modern development of plastic surgery came out of the necessity or the hope to repair the damaged body of war.
Sometimes hundreds of thousands of men had to go out in public wearing masks.
According to the American Geographical Society, the population of Europe in 1914, and of course the overwhelming majority of the victims of the First World War came from the Old Continent, was a little over 450 million souls.
The victims of war comprised almost 10% of the European population.
Large parts of the European intelligentsia were utterly wiped out.
An estimated 97% of Oxford and Cambridge graduates were commissioned to fight.
And amongst university students in Britain who participated in the war, one in eight of those did not live to see the end of it.
The horrors unleashed by the first total war in human history prior to the First World War, wars were largely fought by professional soldiers in fairly remote areas or fairly localized battlefields, you know, 10, 20, 30,000.
And this was the fate of nations.
This was the fate of nations, decided the mobilization of millions and millions of men and the Total war made possible by the industrialization and wealth accumulation of the free markets of the 19th century meant that the freedoms furnished the swords that slew the species.
And this is one of the great tragedies of freedom.
That freedom will create a wealth and power and machinery and technology and manufacturing process that are very easy to switch over to wartime and the wealth that is accumulated in peacetime is used to create the bullets that mow down the populations.
Peter Parker, a British writer and noted webslinger noted, what set the Great War apart from all previous wars?
And what gives it, in its retrospect, its special interest and poignancy is that it was a civilian's war.
Almost half a million civilian men joined the British army voluntarily in a little over a month after war was declared.
1.2 million men volunteered by the end of 19 followed by another one and a quarter million in 1915.
In 1916, the draft was instituted.
In total, almost 2.7 million British men chose to enter the slaughterhouse of World War I. How is this possible?
I try to explain this to my daughter and she says, she's five, and she said, Daddy, I wouldn't take a billion dollars to go to war because having more money wouldn't make it any more likely for me to survive.
So, of course, up to 1916, the British men weren't even conscripted.
They enlisted voluntarily.
Governments all over Europe had raised their armies through a draft Why?
Why were British men so eager to throw their lives away?
Certainly by 1916, by the beginning of 1916.
I think the psalm was in 1916, but the slaughterhouse of the trenches was clear.
Now, I believe That one of the major factors in turning Europe from a nascent paradise of free markets and peace was the government takeover of the school system.
When schools are run for the benefit of children and parents, they teach skills negotiation, they teach things that are going to add economic value.
They don't teach you the value and virtue and valor.
of throwing yourself into the fire of war like you're some lead soldier hurled by a spiteful and angry child.
It does not pay a voluntary free market school to indoctrinate children into the value of service in warfare.
It does not add to their economic value, but it certainly serves the warrior classes.
And That happened throughout Europe in the 19th century.
So British military historian Professor Sir Michael Howard wrote, The British public schools were established, mainly in the 19th century, to instill into the new middle classes the values of the old gentry.
This involved unquestioning obedience to higher authority, care for those under one's own command, and, where necessary, a readiness to sacrifice one's own life in fulfillment of both.
Now just a note, public schools in most of the rest of the world means government schools.
This means private schools that are open to the public and heavily influenced by government requirements and really much heavily influenced by aristocratic blue blood.
Warrior class preferences.
The historian continues until the end of the 19th century war had been for the British a distant affair conducted by small professional armies bred to the task by a small professional army bred to the task.
But with the dawn of a new century, it soon became clear.
that war was now a matter for the entire nation, and that a massive army would be needed to wage it.
Such an army would need officers on a scale far exceeding the tiny elite that had sufficed earlier generations, and in 1914 the public schools stood ready to supply them.
Other historians have remarked, those who were to fight and die in the Great War were shaped, of course, by more than just their schools, but for the social elite who attended them.
The public schools exerted A conditioning for better or worse of such power that their old boys were incapable of freeing themselves entirely from its spell.
The period leading up to World War I is considered by some to be the golden age of the public school system in Britain.
The most influential educator, And school reformer in the 19th century in England was Dr. Thomas Arnold.
He was headmaster at the rugby boarding school.
Full disclosure, I also went to a British boarding school at the age of six, where I stayed for some years.
And I have certainly some personal experience of the brutality and viciousness and violence and isolation and harshness of the British boarding school system.
Many emerging private schools in the 1830s and later public schools were modeled after his ideas.
He described the educational structure that he promoted and the qualities it should develop in a student.
What we must look for here is first, religious and moral principles.
Secondly, gentlemanly conduct.
Thirdly, intellectual ability.
See, first, religious and moral principles.
Religious principles means conformity to the priest class.
Moral principles means conformity to the warrior class.
Gentlemanly conduct.
Warrior class?
Intellectual ability comes, I guess, a distant third.
In a letter to a friend, he wrote, quote, rather than have physical science the principal thing in my son's mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament.
Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy, which means subjugation to God and King.
In British public schools, the greatest emphasis was put on sports, which is of course true of the old Spartan model versus the Athenian model.
There was a study of the Greek and the Roman classics, Christianity, patriotism, and the building of character, which means obedience.
The teaching of character was described by some other historians, and the notes for all of this will be under the video.
Quote, character was imparted through the traditions and the hierarchies implicit in the public school system.
The unwritten code of behavior in public schools included ingredients such as unquestioning loyalty to the school and house, subordination of self to the team and school, reverence for manliness, stoicism in the face of physical and emotional pain, and the requirement to be self-effacing.
Much of this groundwork was in place before the boys joined at 13, with many boys attending preparatory schools whose core purpose was to mold their charges for the public school experience.
Schools could be cruel places for boys who stepped out of line and did not show respect for their superiors.
Any indications of precociousness or cheek were dealt with harshly and peremptorily, out of sight or earshot of adults.
The powers given to prefects to inflict corporal punishment, virtually on whim, were matched by the expectation that boys would accept such punishment without flinching or squealing.
Character was imparted further through organized games, which enhanced physical strength and fitness and taught boys to overcome pain and fear.
Boys learned to lay their bodies on the line, to put team above self, to remain calm under physical danger, and uncomplaining at injury, even when severe.
Rugby and cricket are the highest expressions of schoolboy sport, teaching differing physical and moral qualities, the one more team-based, the other more individual.
Now the sports, of course, A rehearsal for war.
There's your team, there's the other team.
You're differentiated by uniforms and you simply obey the rules and there's violence and teamwork and the desire to subjugate.
It's win-lose.
In the market it's win-win.
The market is all voluntary transactions.
Praxeologically speaking are win-win.
If I have a dollar and you have a pen and we wish to exchange those, I wish to do that because I want the pen more than I want the dollar and you want the dollar more than you want the pen.
We have both got what we want.
Human happiness, satisfaction of human wants is always fundamentally increased and cannot in any other way occur in situations of voluntary trade.
Sports, fine, you know, I like sports too, but they are win-lose and they are preparation for martial combat.
Another historian writes, the public schools of Britain had a fitness regime that a Spartan would blanch at, lashings of physical contact sports such as rugby or Eaton's version of it, the war game plus lots of cross-country runs and cold showers.
Cederberg's school song required its athletes to laugh at pain.
Besides toughening up, the warriors in weighting sport instilled military skills.
After all, most sports contain some DNA of their military origins.
What else is cricket but using a shield to protect oneself from a projectile?
Living conditions were also brutal.
Eton was one of the most famous, of course, of these schools.
And it has been said that various battles in England were won on the sports fields of Eton before the warriors ever got to the war field.
Eton was a boarding school attended by some of the most famous and rich families, powerful families in England.
No central heating in the dormitories.
When I was in boarding school, we were in these metal cots with springs and thin mattresses and it was cold.
It was cold to the point you could see a breath.
It was cold to the point you couldn't sleep sometimes.
The lighting was dim at Eton.
The hot water was very rare.
The lavatories were a mean and intimidating experience for the young and anxious.
For reasons I will let your imagination deal with.
Poor nutrition.
Please sir, can I have some more?
Poor nutrition was the norm.
Physical weakness.
Endless exercise.
Bad food contributed to frequent outbreaks of infection.
School registers recording on an almost annual basis the deaths of pupils.
A former student of another elite boarding school recalled, in all my years in Westminster I never ceased to be hungry.
Now when I was in boarding school, and I'm not comparing my experience to These people but food was short in short supply so you would get your meal and you would have the choice you would eat it quickly and then hope to get some seconds or you would eat it slowly hoping to feel more full but you could never be sure of feeling full or getting seconds.
Like most totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian regimes, free time was significantly frowned on and to be avoided.
Idle hands are the devil's work.
Every hour you've got to spend either in the chapel or the classroom or the sports field.
As one rector claimed, if I was asked what was the most dangerous occupation for a boy's hours of leisure, I should at once name loafing.
So these British public schools where the leadership, the elite, the warrior class was replicating itself, and these values and virtues, you know, I grew up in England, these values and virtues that are in the warrior class really trickle down very heavily to the rest of society.
I mean, English social character is very much, at least was, maybe it still is, very much defined by what goes on at the top in the warrior class.
So these British public schools were these quasi military camps, not just in principle, but also in practice.
So in the 1860s, in England, some schools set up the rifle volunteer corps to prepare for the perceived threat of the French Emperor Napoleon.
The third, the militarization of these Supposed institutions of learning was further escalated after the Second Boer War from 1899 to 1902 against the largely Dutch settlers in South Africa, South Africa called Boers.
And there was a series of significant setbacks for the British Army.
Even though they were considered to be superior in technology and experience, it took them three years to suppress the Boer Rebellion, which was quite a challenge to the third-of-the-planet-sun-never-sets-on-the-British-empire paradigm.
I mean, how on earth can you maintain an empire if you can't put down some farmers, for heaven's sakes?
So there was a considerable amount of bad decision-making that was in the ball.
Well, interestingly enough, it's actually where Churchill got his start after he was captured and freed himself from a POW camp in a rather daring set of adventures.
So the citizen soldiers were criticized for their lack of skills, particularly in the area of leadership.
So in 1900, at the height of the Boer War, headmasters of the British public schools all got together to say, well, how can we make our colonial forces more brutal and more efficient or more warlike?
One of the Headmasters declared it was part of their patriotic duty to consider quote, how best they could lay the natural foundations of participation in national defense through the boys in their schools.
During a 1904 conference, the Headmasters decided to set up committees to consider the desirability and feasibility of making training in the use of arms compulsory on boys in public schools.
So in 1908, the Officer Training Corps, or OTC, came into existence under the direct command of the government's war officer.
He wrote, at seven years old, I was a member of the Navy League and wore a sailor suit with HMS Invincible on my cap.
Even before my public school OTC, I had been in a private school cadet corps, on and off.
I had been toting a rifle ever since I was 10, in preparation not only for war, but for a particular kind of war.
A war in which the guns rise to a frantic orgasm of sound, and at the appointed moment you clamber out of the trench breaking your nails on the sandbags and stumble across mud and wire into the machine gun barrage.
Two historians commenting on Orwell's description wrote, Public schools can indeed be seen as well-oiled machines, very successful at filing down individuality and machine tooling young men ready for elevated positions in society in Britain, the empire, or the battlefield.
One student wrote in August 1914, recalling his boarding school experiences, quote, We were fighting for king and country and empire.
We have been taught to worship God one day a week, but to worship country and empire seven days a week.
Warrior class, backlash, training the sons of the despised bourgeoisie to serve the commandments of the warrior classes.
This patriotic fervor was also accompanied by a desire for self-sacrifice.
A student who attended the Rugby Boarding School summarized the public school man's position in the war and the reason why so many young men volunteered for slaughter.
Quote, His whole training, the traditions of his kind, had prepared him for that hour.
From his earliest school days, he'd been taught that it was the mark of a gentleman to welcome danger and to regard the risk of death as the most piquant source of life.
Or as Nelson said, Battle of Trafalgar, I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.
So, Bismarck even earlier in Germany had set up, I mean the state which so often turns into the warfare welfare state, government schools, strengthened unions, set up unemployment insurance and old age pensions and so on and just generally expanded the machinery.
of the state, which gives everyone the heroin high of immediate wealth transfer while decaying and undermining the wealth that makes such expansions possible in the first place, as we see in the later stages of the Western Empire here in the opening decades of the 21st century, as we hang before a precipice unraveling as we see in the later stages of the Western Empire here in the opening decades of the 21st century, So all across Europe.
The governments had taken over education.
It happened in the 1860s in England, it happened in America, it happened in Germany even earlier.
Governments took over education, directly or indirectly.
And when governments take over education, Education now serves the state and what does the state most want out of education?
Well, they're all based and we've got a presentation coming up called the truth about public schools, which we'll go into this in more detail.
But what do governments want out of education?
They want soldiers and they want workers.
I mean the church wants adherence, the government wants soldiers and it wants workers.
And that was the explicit goal of the Prussian model.
The government takes over the education.
The children are not your own anymore.
The children are not your own anymore.
I have friends whose children are now going through this process, which they're fighting tooth and nail, even here in Canada.
Mild, nice, donut-in-the-eye Canada.
The land of friendly cannibals to the north.
And the amount of government propaganda that these kids are having to withstand is shocking and astonishing.
I mean, when you go to learn to be an electrician, they don't tell you how necessary government it is and how wonderful government it is and how without government gravity would reverse itself and we'd all fly into the arms of Saturn.
Because they actually want to teach you something about how to do electricals.
But governments, they sow propaganda and they reap Conformist taxation.
So when you turn education over to the state, your children are now raised by the state.
They bond with the state.
We are all like ducklings.
You know, you've seen those experiments where there's an orange balloon and the ducklings are shown when they come out of the egg and the ducklings just follow that orange balloon.
It's their mother, whatever they see at the beginning.
We're not that dissimilar.
When you hand your children over to the state, they now serve the ends and needs of the state.
And your freedom is not long to go.
So, education on the one hand, religion I think is fairly well understood.
What's often not as well understood is women's role in this as well.
Again, we're just focusing on England here because it's the most interesting example and tragic example of the volunteers who went.
So you've probably heard of the practice of handing white feathers to men you found.
If you're a woman, you'd carry around these white feathers, particularly nasty kind of woman, carry on these white feathers.
If you see a man not in uniform, you hand him a white feather, which is a symbol of, of course, cowardice.
It was spearheaded by the British feminist movement.
So women across Britain continued the white feather campaign long after the conscription policies of 1916.
In fact, Britain's largest women's suffrage organization expelled its pacifist members.
The other feminist organizations turned into pro-war militants whose enthusiasm for war rivaled the radical right.
And I don't want to say much.
I guess I'll mention one thing.
And you probably know this too, but it is really quite astounding.
You know, in the Christmas time, 1914, I mean, one of the reasons that people signed up was of course the religious and kill-bot class conditioning of the schools and the churches.
And another was that war had generally been a fairly short adventure before.
And so, you know, of course, everyone signed up in the summer saying, Oh, you know, get me to there.
Because, you know, this has been 100 years since we last had a good old war, and it's probably gonna be over by Christmas.
So get me to the war on time was the big drive.
When the lines began to harden in France, and there was one village that was literally fought over for over four years, and nobody ever took it.
Christmas Day, 1914.
1914. The guns are silent.
And over the craters and the body parts and the barbed wire and the little pockets of poison gas and the burping earth of feral discontent, the soldiers wake to hear singing. the soldiers wake to hear singing.
It's a great day.
It's Christmas.
They wake to hear Christmas songs.
And they hold the white flags up, and the Germans and the British, and in other places the French, they climb into No Man's Land and they clear... They don't fight.
They sing songs with each other.
They share drinks.
They try to learn each other's language in a rudimentary fashion if they didn't speak it already.
They embrace.
They play soccer in No Man's Land.
They are brothers, they are friends, they are not slaughtering each other for a day, for an idea, for a belief, for Jesus.
This was completely horrifying to the commands on both sides of the conflict and soldiers were severely disciplined for this and severe discipline 100 years ago was a pretty significant thing.
But that day of peace and brotherhood and drinking songs and football is an astonishing moment of crystalline brotherhood in an otherwise suicidally, fratricidally malevolent conflict.
It shows to me just the power of an idea to end slaughter, the power of a thought of the possibility of peace spontaneously emerging between people who the day before and the day after will return to attempting to kill each other in as great and horrible manner as possible.
That has to me always been Absolutely an astounding moment in human history.
And when I first read about that, when I was a kid, it haunted me.
It haunted me for like 40 years.
It's haunted me that you can put down your rifles and your grenades and your machine guns and you can on the power of thought on the power of an idea you can walk and meet people who you were formerly trying to slaughter hug them sing songs with them make jokes with them play games with them and then return back to the slaughterhouse
this capacity of an idea to break the cycle of violence has really i'm sorry i told you has really been haunting me for these these many decades The idea that there can be thoughts that can put the safety on weapons has always been astounding to me.
And I have, of course, throughout my life, struggled and striven and Sweated blood it feels like.
To find this key, this key that turns every day into hug your enemy Christmas time.
And I have, sorry, I have, I've looked everywhere.
I have looked everywhere.
I have looked in history.
I've looked in philosophy.
I've looked at religion.
I have looked in psychology.
I looked in self-knowledge.
I have looked in neurology.
I have looked in everywhere to try and find this, this philosophical Santa Claus.
That brings a scabbard for the endless sword of the species to put this goddamn stuff away and stop killing each other.
And stop hurting each other.
For nothing!
For flags!
For sociopaths, for the people in charge, who you and I have as much in common with as a zebra does with a lion.
I'm reading a book and you can find it at freedomainradio.com called The Origins of War and Child Abuse about how war is not about resources.
It's not about territorialism.
It's not about nationalism.
Fundamentally, it's the acting out of early childhood.
I think that there's a lot of truth in that, which is why I'm so insistent on talking about people in this conversation about their histories and saying, man, you got to get to therapy, man, you got to get some self-knowledge.
You've got to deal with this trauma.
Don't hit your children.
This is all part of trying to turn that day December 25th, 1914, to try and turn that day into something we cannot, or we don't have to be ejected from because the sun goes down and the sun comes up and the bombs go up and the bombs go down and the body parts go all the fucking place.
So, We can have that.
We can have that day forever if we want as a species.
You can read through Alice Miller.
Poisonous Pedagogy.
Adolf Hitler was beaten so severely he went into comas.
German children were hung from hooks.
German babies were hung from hooks in tight swaddling, infested with parasites and ticks and and so when he refers to enemies of the state as parasitical bloodsuckers, he invokes powerful body trauma memories in people.
But that when I read that as a child that day, December 25 1914.
December 25th 1914.
That's when I knew, I knew, I knew.
And I think I was seven or eight when I read it, 40 years ago.
I knew that violence, warfare, bloodshed, murderous rage, terror, trauma, The cycle of violence that we are attempting to burst out of, to struggle free from, to cast aside, to shuck off like a snake's skin of hellish history.
That the cycle of violence that so sweeps up the natural world where everything eats everything and that a mere idea, a mere thought, it's Christmas today.
That thought stopped.
War.
Thought can stop war.
That's been everything I've been about since I started working on this conversation.
It can be done.
It must be done.
It must be done.
We can't.
We cannot as a species climb over any more goddamn bodies.
There's too many.
And at some point it'll be too many to recover from.
And then we slide back into medieval or pre-medieval barbarism to dark ages barbarism armed with the most savage star-shredding interstellar weapons that the remnants of the free market have coughed up to plague us from here to eternity.
Anyway, I'm sorry for that diversion.
Emotions, they're just another kind of information.
So what happened?
Let's, for the sake of my dehydration, let's move past the war itself.
And one of the major consequences and most terrifying and tragic and bloodthirsty consequences of the First World War was the rise of Bolshevism.
So how did this happen?
Well, in 1914, with the outbreak of the war, Germany, of course, found itself in a very dangerous position, as it is always stuck right in the middle of Europe.
It's got Russia on the eastern front and the Allies in the west.
And the moment that Germany gets into a two-front war, it's just a matter of attrition, particularly with the power of the Royal Navy.
Under the command of Churchill until the disaster at Gallipoli, if I remember rightly.
But the power of the British Navy was to blockade Germany.
And this meant, of course, mass starvation among the citizens.
Although Germany was not invaded, people suffered enormously.
And you can read All Quiet on the Western Front and Hero's Journey Back Home for more on this.
Russia was particularly unstable in 1914.
It was really on the verge of a socialist revolution and it became a pretty easy target for subversive activities.
So over the course of the next three years from the outbreak, from before the outbreak, Germany actively funded the development of the Russian Bolsheviks, providing Vladimir Lenin with more than 50 million Deutsche Marks in gold!
In gold!
Not just hot off the printing press and smoke them if you got them.
Richard von Kuhlmann, Germany's foreign secretary at the time, admitted, Russia appeared to be the weakest link in the enemy chain.
The task, therefore, was gradually to loosen it and, when possible, to remove it.
This was the purpose of the subversive activity we caused to be carried out in Russia behind the front.
In the first place, promotion of separatist tendencies in support of the Bolsheviks.
It was not only until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels and under different labels that they were in a position to be able to build up their main organ, Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and appreciably to extend the originally narrow basis of their party.
And of course, the Russian army, I mean, the Eastern Front has always been pretty horrendous.
The Russian army lost more than 75% of its forces while fighting the Central Powers in World War One.
And this, of course, was good fodder for the socialist and communist revolutionaries.
So Germany was instrumental in the rise of communism in Russia, which later, with the key support and funding of the Russian Communist Party, spread to other parts of the world.
Of course, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and most of Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
So the German funding of... I mean they sent...
Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is worth a read on this because the Germans sent Lenin through Finland to go to Russia armed with weapons to have his revolution and Russia as the seat of Bolshevism which was of course devoted to worldwide revolution to the establishment of a communist dictatorship over the entire planet
Then spread around the world French scholars have estimated the death toll of 20th century communism at 94 million people 20 million people died in Russia 65 million in China and so on and so on and This the unintended domino consequences of these kinds of issues are absolutely enormous and terrifying
The decision of Wilson, after of course committing to not get into the war, the decision of President Wilson to enter into the First World War in 1917, tipped the balance of power so much on the favor of the Allies that they were able to impose this draconian peace on Germany.
Otherwise everybody basically would have gone home.
And one of the reasons why the Allies wanted America to come into the war is that if everybody had gone home, then it would have been very difficult to start a war again in the future.
Because if 40 plus million people had died and nothing had really changed.
Then the next time the killing classes wanted a war, most people would say, I kind of remember the last time we did that.
Nothing really changed.
So maybe not.
And they didn't want that.
They needed a decisive victory for the existing governments alone to stay in power, let alone the aristocratic classes to stay in more perpetual power.
They needed this decisive victory against Germany and its allies.
And they couldn't get that without The participation of America and of the Jews, which we'll get into in a minute or two.
When America came in, this absolute disastrous Treaty of Versailles was imposed, massive reparations, the destruction of Germany and its standing armies, no air force and so on.
The Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, wrote I think The Economic Consequences of the Peace Treaty or the Versailles Treaty about how horrendous it was.
He didn't want big reparations or he didn't want massive trade restrictions because he wanted what was proposed at the end of the Second World War through the Marshall Plan was investment into Europe after the war to rebuild its economies rather than preying upon the vanquished economies and thus causing massive unemployment and social discontent and so on.
Now, naturally, he wasn't a hugely saner voice in many economic policies, in my amateur opinion, but like many people with sensible things to say, his voice barely carried in the wind, let alone carried the day.
So one of the direct consequences was the rise of Bolshevism and truly toxic and slaughterhouse based communism.
Almost 100 million souls killed in the name of egalitarianism.
Well, I guess they were all equal after that.
And another consequence was fascism.
Benito Mussolini, who became the fascist dictator, of course, in Italy, was originally a socialist.
Socialism, and I won't get into this in great detail because that's a whole separate presentation, but...
Communism took a great blow in the First World War, and this is why it switched to cultural Marxism and the undermining and allying itself with minorities and so on, and the undermining of the free market system by provoking endless resentments and complaints of inequality.
Of course, the First World War shouldn't have happened, according to Marxism, because the working classes are all having each other's interests in common.
It all should have been playing soccer on Christmas Day in 1914.
But the fact that everybody was so... all the working classes were so rabidly nationalistic...
rather than recognizing their common economic interests, that there was no revolution, that they didn't crack their offices, that they didn't, you know, refuse to fight, that they didn't, you know, huge plot.
And Mussolini was originally a socialist and was so disgusted by the socialist and or communist lack of predictive ability and what was going to happen in the First World War that he turned straight to fascism.
So the destruction of the gold standard.
Ah, I know it sounds boring.
Absolutely, hugely essential.
The fund the war effort was staggering.
I mean, the amount of economic destruction in the war wasn't just the lives.
Of course, it's the diversion of resources.
I mean, everybody who's on the front is not creating the next iPad.
So Every country that participated in World War I inflated its money supply, printed, printed, printed, to the point where inflation became rampant, and they could no longer pay their debts.
I mean, the only exception, of course, was the United States, which was an economic superpower, entered the war late, and was never invaded, and so on.
So soon after the fighting began, these countries declared bankruptcy.
Or, as governments call it, we went off the gold standard.
Which is mighty like me saying, well, I'm going off the standard called paying my bills.
No, just declaring bankruptcy.
And all the wealth, as we talked about, that had accumulated during the Industrial Revolution was wiped out.
The global rise of the modern curse of fiat currencies, of massive inflation, of economic instability, of all of the vile muckety-muck that governments can do because they can create their own money and control interest rates, this all goes right back to World War I.
Massive government takeovers of the economy, putting the economy on a war footing.
Massive section of the economy through governments, that is the war, does that as well.
The rise and institution of income tax, fiat currencies, elimination of gold standards, destruction of trade treaties and so on.
This is horrendous.
And of course massive restrictions on free travel, which came out of a fear of communists coming into America.
And you can see The Free Domain Radio presentation called The Truth About Immigration for more on this.
And we're sort of getting to the end.
I really appreciate your patience so much in this essential area.
And I'm sorry if this is a wind sprint through volumes of fascinating information, but I really, really appreciate your attention in this.
The Middle East.
Conflicts in the Middle East.
Don't they just seem to go on forever?
Haven't they started forever?
Well, no, not exactly.
So England needed credit and Jews not exactly foreigners to the provision of credit.
So in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration Britain formally agreed to aid Jews in the creation of a homeland in Palestine.
And of course this had been decades of Zionist lobbying that was finally paying off as a result of this European fratricide and suicide of virtually the entire culture and economy of the West.
According to a confidential British memorandum from 1924, with Russia leaving the Allies and Italy on the verge of defeat, the military situation had become exceedingly critical and the Balfour Declaration was, quote, designed to enlist on behalf of the Allies a sympathy of influential Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world.
The approval of the U.S.
for this was crucial.
I mean, everybody knew it was going to be pretty much the only military power left standing after the war.
So, Woodrow Wilson, who was pretty sympathetic with the Zionist agenda, didn't need a whole lot of convincing, so the British government occupied Palestine and established a mandatory government squashing Muslim opposition.
Following World War II, of course, the British Empire collapsed and withdrew from Palestine, allowing the Jews to establish Israel.
Now, prior to the British occupation, Jews and Arabs in the region had existed peacefully for centuries.
There's been only one small conflict between Arabs and Jews since the 11th century.
Since the 11th century, one small conflict between the Arabs and the Jews.
And some native Jews were even assassinated by Jewish militias for trying to undermine the Zionist movement.
They did not want a homeland.
They did not want the Zionists, the local Jews there, and they were assassinated for resisting it.
So this constant Arab-Jewish violence that characterizes the region is, to a large degree, though not exclusively, a byproduct of British interference in Palestine, which arose out of World War I. We've got, I don't mean to be pitching all our own stuff here, but we've got the truth about Israel and Palestine.
There's more information on this topic.
After the Allies defeated the Ottoman Empire, They partitioned all of the territories, all throughout the Middle East and other areas, according to political interests.
They had no regard for ethnic, sectarian, and tribal differences.
One thing that's true, and this is a challenging thought for a lot of people, one thing that's pretty true in biology is that subspecies don't tend to coexist very well in the same geographical area.
Like if you've got a red squirrel and a grey squirrel comes in, one of them's going to win, because they're all competing for the same resources.
And in the Middle East, when the Ottoman Empire, which had largely developed along cultural lines and tribal lines and religious lines and so on, when that was all smashed up and the Allies carved everything up, you ended up with like bitter enemies in the same country with a democracy or some reasonable facsimile thereof.
Well, that's a recipe for endless conflict.
And so all of the Arab on Arab conflicts that you still see Sunni and Shiites in Iraq and so on and All of this out of World War One and World War Two.
Of course, direct domino falling result of World War One.
The Treaty of Versailles only possible because of American involvement from 1917 to 1918.
And Woodrow Wilson, with the typical wisdom of the organization, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Great War.
And the destruction of the German middle class, the necessity, as the German government felt under the Weimar Republic, of having to print so much money to pay off the war debts that hyperinflation resulted destroying the of having to print so much money to pay off the war debts that hyperinflation resulted destroying the economy, destroying the middle class and creating a power vacuum and a stability vacuum, wherein Hitler and his National Socialists rose to power in direct conflict, of course, with the wherein Hitler and his
During the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which was, if I remember rightly, in a special note of humiliation, they got the railway car from some prior conflict and forced the Germans, they got the railway car from some prior conflict and forced the Germans, where some surrender had occurred, and forced the Germans to sign
During the signing of the treaty, Ferdinand Foch, French Field Marshal and Commander of the Allied Forces during the closing months of World War I famously proclaimed, this is not peace.
It is an armistice for 20 years.
And his prediction was only off by about 80, 65 days.
World War II did start 20 years after the treaty was signed.
So, I don't have a lot to end with.
I want to share with you something.
There are among us, and neuroscience is fairly clear on this in terms of sociopathy and psychopathy and so on, and sadism, there are those among us who are not constituted as you and I.
We have intraspecies predators, sociopaths, and evildoers who delight in causing human pain, who do not have mirror neurons which allow them to empathize with other people, who view you and I as objects to be used, as objects to serve their preferences, who would no more imagine empathizing with us as we would think of empathizing with our bicycle.
Well, where do you want to go today?
It's a tool to get us where we want.
And in the ghastly horror chamber of human farming known as geography and countries and nationalism.
These rulers do not view us as anything other than livestock to be used for their particular preferences.
You are a tax livestock.
You are a warrior livestock.
You are a guilt livestock for the priests.
You are a crop.
You are something which produces resources which other people can manipulate you into giving them.
Our failure to understand that we are not all one species, that we are divided, and that there are people who you put the wires up to their brain and you show them deliberate cruelty and their happy hormones light up.
They take delight.
They feel joy in this, that we are not all one species.
And until we can really identify these dangerous predators who love to rule and really work to even out this addiction we have to conformity with evildoers, I mean the world will simply get more and more dangerous.
And I don't know of anyone who knows how to cure these brain ailments or these brain configurations.
There's no neuroplasticity that I know of that can reverse sociopathy.
And so we must, we must work to prevent more breedings of these cold eyed, steel fingered human farmers.
Because when we continue to breed people of exceptional ability who have no empathy and view us as resources, we will forever be dominated because we have lives and they have a lust for power and the lust for power As is shown in many studies among monkeys, the lust for power is as addictive as an addiction to cocaine.
When monkeys rise in the hierarchy of power, they receive very distinct and significant biological rewards.
We are rewarded as a drug for the ascent of political power, of control, of using others as resources, males and females, and particularly helpless children.
But the way of producing these human monsters is, to my admittedly amateur knowledge, fairly well understood.
And you can go to bombinthebrain.com to see more presentations and interviews that I have done about this topic.
But, of course, if we treat our children with peace and love and negotiation and joy and we do not punish and we do not harm and we do not strike and we do not bully, well, Then we do not create these predators.
And we create in our peacefully raised, confident and secure children a wonderful mechanism by which they can clearly identify these predators.
You know, if all the children in Rome speak English and someone comes in speaking some sub-Saharan African popping, clicking language, they pretty much know that that person is not speaking what they're speaking.
The more children raised peacefully, the more visible these predators will be in society.
and therefore by being visible, they will be rendered inconsequential.
That's my 40 years worth right there, which is why I talk to people about parenting and talk to people about therapy and talk to people about self-knowledge and sympathize with people who've had their difficult childhoods if that's what they want to talk about.
and Because we cannot survive these predators much longer.
We have too much surveillance equipment.
We have too much computing power.
We have too much military power.
We have too much tracking equipment.
We cannot survive these predators.
If we continue to ignore these predators, and we continue to breed these predators, and we continue to subjugate ourselves and our offspring to these predators, at some point they will have enough power that there's no way to escape the zoo.
Or the farm, at some point.
This can be traced a lot back to the First World War, and if we truly learn the lessons of the First World War, that it was harm to children, and to some degree the corruption of women, and the subjugation and enslavement of men, and the subjugation of men to these predators, this is what led to the war.
And once we know what leads us to this kind of murderous conflict, Then we know the way back.
And we can reverse it and we can move in the other direction for once in our godforsaken history as a species.
We can step back from the brink and we can walk back to the cathedral of sunlit possibility the 19th century represented.
We don't have to keep dragging being dragged off the cliff by the heavy rocks of an unfeeling history both personal and cultural.
We can turn back.
But we must know the way.
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