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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:56
The Truth About How The US Will Save Syria
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Hi everybody, it's DeFan Molling from Freedom and Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
I hope that you will be patient with me as we unpack what is really going on in the drive behind the proposed strikes against Syria.
It's not to do with oil, it's not to do with foreign policy, it is entirely due to domestic concerns which we will show later in this presentation.
But let's start with the official narrative, the story, the fiction, the movie.
So, about a year ago, Obama said there is a red line in the sand regarding the use of chemical weapons.
If you are a country that uses chemical weapons, then you must be bombed, you must be attacked.
And the story is that the leader of Syria, a brute named Assad, used chemical weapons against his own people and therefore must be punished.
The U.S. claims that siren gas attacks, or a siren gas attack, killed 1,429 people, including more than 400 children.
Very precise numbers. We'll figure this out in a moment.
And as a result, the U.S. proposes lobbing tomahawks against Syria.
Of course, the principle is that any country which uses chemical weapons is guilty of war crime and therefore must be punished.
Let's just have a quick look at the moral authority of the United States in this area.
In this conflict, America sprayed approximately 20 million gallons of chemicals, including the highly toxic Agent Orange on Vietnam and the surrounding countries.
The express purpose was to destroy agriculture, food supplies, and the entire jungle ecology.
The result? Well, 400,000 Vietnamese killed or maimed.
500,000 Vietnamese born with birth defects, and you can multiply this many times to get a sense of how large these numbers would be in US figures.
2 million Vietnamese suffering from cancer and other illnesses as a result of basically 10 years of chemical assaults upon innocent civilians in Vietnam.
In 2012, the Red Cross estimated that about a million Vietnamese have disabilities or health problems related just to Agent Orange, not even counting all the other chemicals dumped on the poor country.
In 2009, Israel was reported to be attacking civilians in their own country with chemical weapons.
Amnesty International found, quote, indisputable evidence of the widespread use of white phosphorus in densely populated civilian areas.
Now, white phosphorus is basically like flame glue that sticks to human flesh and melts people to the bone.
After these allegations were made by these non-governmental organizations, the Israeli military assaulted a human headquarters in Gaza with a chemical attack.
The Israeli military first denied the allegations and then said, well, okay, we did.
If the Israeli government is using chemical weapons against their own people, and governments which use chemical weapons against their own people must be bombed, why didn't President Obama try to bomb Israel?
Gosh, that's a toughie.
I guess we'll mull that over. It's supposed to be a red line.
Red line's a principle. Well, we'll mull that over.
Perhaps we'll come back to that later. What is the relationship between America and the Satan's sweat known as white phosphorus?
Well, in 2004, American journalists embedded with U.S. Army units in Iraq reported the use of white phosphorus in the largely civilian city of Fallujah.
U.S. commanders first lied.
Ooh, it's a pattern.
It's hard to figure out.
Are they lying? Are they breathing?
They said, no, you see, the chemical weapon, we used it to illuminate targets or create smoke screens.
I guess if the targets are currently melting, they are, in fact, illuminated.
They then confessed, after a while, to using this weapon to melt human beings, including women and children, to death.
I guess it would be tough to...
Attack a country inhabited by people, by a military, using chemical weapons against civilians if you've already attacked the country and are using chemical weapons against civilians.
It's a tricky one. Now, if you really want to see some truly grim video footage and photographs as well as eyewitness interviews with Fallujah residents and U.S. soldiers, you can see the Italian television documentary Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre.
Now, there was a guy, Saddam Hussein, that the U.S. found was just terrible in his use of chemical weapons.
You may remember 5,000 Kurds killed by chemical weapons.
And of course, as they said, America knows that Saddam has chemical weapons because they have the receipts after selling them to him.
So CIA records decisively prove that Washington knew that Saddam Hussein was using the following chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
Sarin, nerve gas, and that old World War I favorite, mustard gas.
Washington, while knowing that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons, a true devil's brew of chemical weapons, continued to hand over massive amounts of intelligence into the hands of the Iraqi military while it was in its war against Iran.
Washington informed Hussein of Iranian troop movements, knowing without a doubt that he would use the information to launch chemical attacks.
This is known as aiding and abetting a war criminal.
In 1988, Washington warned Saddam Hussein of Iranian troop movements that would have had him lose the war.
And so they basically kept him in power then, and of course, in the first desert storm war, because you need an enemy for reasons we'll get into about the economics of the military-industrial complex in a few minutes.
So in March of 1988, Hussein attacked a Kurdish village occupied by Iranian troops with the devil's brew of chemical agents.
5,000 killed, 10,000 injured, thousands more died from complications, diseases, and birth defects.
And Washington continued to support him.
Later, of course, when they wanted to invade the country, they brought this up as a reason why he needed to be taken out.
But it's completely schizophrenic, as you understand this stuff.
I mean, at a more minor level, but still important, tear gas, of course, is prohibited for use against enemy combatants in battle.
There's something called the Capical Weapons Convention, much, much less fun than Comic-Con.
Tear gas was used against the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the U.S. in 2011 and was part of a much grimmer escalation of violence by U.S. police.
Again, more of a footnote, but not unimportant.
In 1993, the FBI pumped tear gas into the Waco buildings.
Knowing that women, children, and babies were inside, the tear gas was highly flammable and ignited.
It burned to death 49 men and women and 27 children, including babies and toddlers.
So attacking enemy soldiers on a battlefield with tear gas is a war crime.
What about babies?
These very tough moral dilemmas.
I can't unravel them.
All right, let's look at Iraq.
Using chemical weapons, using biological weapons, using weapons of mass destruction, and particularly targeting non-combatants or civilians is a war crime.
The U.S. military has poisoned Iraq with thousands of tons of munitions made from depleted uranium, a toxic and radioactive nuclear waste product.
So more than half of the babies born in Fallujah from 2007 to 2010 were born with birth defects.
This doesn't even count the ones who are going to get leukemia and cancers later on.
More than half of the children were born with birth defects.
Cancer and infant mortality have also dramatically risen.
Christopher Busby, the scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radioactive Risk, has said, quote, These are weapons which have absolutely destroyed The genetic integrity of the population of Iraq.
This is not just killing people.
This is corrupting the genetic integrity of an entire population because this stuff will get passed on and passed on and this is a multi-generational biochemical radiation attack upon an entire population.
Busby authored two of four reports on the health crisis in Iraq and described Fallujah as having, quote, the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied anywhere in the world, anywhere throughout history.
The highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied.
A thousand people, Killed by sarin gas.
1,400 people killed by sarin gas.
Even if it's true, even if a side is responsible, which is highly contentious, which we'll get to in a second, compared to destroying the genetic integrity of an entire population and leaving radioactive waste embedded in the landscape, thrown into the air, bound into the very wind, which radioactive materials have half-life longer than the life of the planet Earth.
It's really hard to get on board with American outrage.
Come on. I mean, this is a president.
He's going to lie to you.
Remember all those campaign promises?
Hey, he got the Nobel Peace Prize.
What a great guy.
The President Obama and Bush before him endorsed extraditional execution, extraordinary rendition, and torture, all of which are prohibited by the Geneva Convention.
Enthusiastically endorses war crimes.
The NSA spies on its own citizens in violation of U.S. law and denies it until court.
What credibility can these people possibly have with you?
Anymore, please, please.
Do you know if their lips are moving?
Then you know if they're lying.
The U.S. objects to killing people with chemicals, yet kills prisoners.
With lethal injections of, I don't believe it's roses and unicorn horns, I believe it's lethal chemicals.
What is the charge?
Well, Britain and France have released reports, or really just memos, justifying their assertion that the Syrian government launched chemical weapons in Damascus on August 21, 2013.
Each report, and the longest is a grand total of nine pages, relies mostly on circumstantial evidence, and they disagree with one another on some details, including the number of people who died in the attack.
Kind of important to at least know how many people died.
If you don't know that, then it's really hard to establish with any credibility who actually ordered it.
There's no smoking gun, there's no presidential orders, there's no people who are reporting that Assad ordered this.
Now, a UN team spent four days investigating this August 21st incident.
The samples it collected from the site and the alleged victims of the attack are currently being examined at the Chemical Weapons Organization's labs in Europe.
So, they've gone on site, they are gathering information, they're going to produce a report.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged the U.S. to delay any strike until after the results of that investigation are known.
Because remember, the U.S. may have a slight history of jumping the gun.
The U.S. may, in fact, occasionally go to war or launch military action without correct information, without decisive information.
But at least the U.S. has learned this lesson and won't do...
No, I guess apparently they haven't.
So U.S. officials have dismissed the U.N. probe, saying it won't tell them anything they don't already know.
Which is that they want to go to war, for reasons we'll get to in a sec.
Now let's look at some prior evidence.
There was a siren attack in Syria in March of 2013.
Not six, seven months ago.
Did you hear about this? No, I don't think you did.
Did you? Now, Russia went and sent a whole bunch of scientists and researchers to figure this one out.
Russia has a strong connection with Syria.
And they have delivered a 100-page report laying out the evidence to the United Nations.
So, if a crime has been committed, let's look at similar crimes in the past.
This is not brain surgery CSI, people.
This report asserts that it was the Syrian rebels, not forces loyal to President Assad or Assad's army, that carried out the attack.
Kind of important. The last chemical attack.
Appears to be, and the evidence strongly points to, if not conclusively, proves that it was the rebels.
Oh, and by the way, the rebels that we're talking about, not these guys.
They are guys who, when they kill, the leaders of one of the rebel forces, when he killed a guy, actually cut open his chest and ate part of his heart.
So these are not exactly Star Wars rebels.
Um, they're the ones who seem to have carried out the March attack.
The case that Secretary of State John Kerry recently put forward included claims that were disputed by the United Nations, inconsistent in some details with British and French intelligence reports, or lacking sufficient transparency for international chemical weapons experts to accept at face value.
Wasn't there, gosh, there was some Colin, Colin James?
Uh, Colin Forth?
Colin Farrell? No! Colin Powell?
Did some report about the decisively certain nature of the intelligence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was allied with Al-Qaeda?
He did that in the UN 2003?
I don't know. Just look it up if you want.
Because, you know, this kind of stuff often happens before, but it's hard to remember.
All right. So the Obama administration dismissed the value of a U.N. inspection team's work by saying that the investigation arrived too late for the findings to be credible and would not provide any information that the U.S. didn't already have.
Well, they got there pretty quickly after the attack.
The U.N. spokesman Farhan Haack counted that it was rare for such an investigation to begin within such a short time and that the passage of such few days does not affect the opportunities to collect valuable samples.
According to the UN's website.
For example, Hark said sarin can be detected in biomedical samples for months after its use.
As the New York Times report noted, two human rights groups dispatched a forensic team to northern Iraq in 1992 and found trace evidence of sarin as well as mustard gas for years.
After a chemical attack.
So maybe a couple of days.
Don't really matter if you can still detect it after a couple of years.
But, again, the purpose is not to figure out whether any of this stuff was used and who was responsible for it.
The purpose we'll get to in a sec.
So, John Kerry. Oh, there was some guy who was really against the Vietnamese War in the 60s.
Came back. Wouldn't it be terrible to be the last guy to die for a mistake?
Boy, it's just amazing what power can do to clarify people's moral opposition to war and how he's a pro-war sociopathic hawk.
Kerry claimed that the United States reached a death tally in the attack of 1,429, including 426 children.
Where did they get this from?
A preliminary government assessment, which is akin to saying Robin Williams' genie, from Aladdin.
Anthony Kordsman, a former senior defense official who is now with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, took aim at the death toll discrepancies in an essay published Sunday on the organization's website.
He criticizes Kerry as being sandbagged into using an absurdly over-precise number of 1,429 and noted the number didn't agree with either the British assessment of at least 350 fatalities or other Syrian opposition sources, namely the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has confirmed that At least 322 of the deaths, which I guess is about 20% of what Kerry claims.
And that's not unimportant.
If you're off by a factor of 5 in your death counts, can we really believe anything else?
An unclassified version of a French intelligence report on Syria that was released Monday did not clear things up.
They confirmed only 281 fatalities, not over 1,400.
Yeah, sounds like rock-solid stuff to me.
Ah, the US. Every time it tries to dig itself out of a hole, it gets halfway to China.
The US also claimed its intelligence had, quote, collected streams of human signals and geospatial intelligence that showed the regime preparing for an attack three days, three days before the event.
The U.S. assessment says regime personnel were in an area known to be used to mix chemical weapons, including sarin, and that regime forces prepared for the August 21st attack by putting on gas masks.
They knew three days ahead of time.
What are the other attacks, terrorist attacks, that the U.S. might have known about ahead of time?
It's September. It's not far from the 11th, but I just can't remember.
Sorry. I don't know what's going on with my head today.
So, U.S. government claims that it knew for three days ahead of time that the government was going to launch a chemical attack and where it was going to be.
And so, why didn't the U.S. warn the rebels about the impending attack?
I mean, they're on the side of the rebels.
They're arming and supporting the rebels.
Why didn't the U.S. warn the rebels about the impending attack and save hundreds and hundreds of lives, including 420-odd children?
Why did the administration keep silent about the suspicious activity when, on at least one previous occasion, U.S. officials raised an international fuss when they observed similar actions?
On December 3, 2012, after U.S. officials said they detected Syria mixing ingredients for chemical weapons, President Barack Obama repeated his warning to Assad that the use of such arms would be an unacceptable breach of the red line he had imposed that summer.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chimed in, and the U.S. and the U.N. withdrew all non-essential staff from Syria.
So the last time Obama saw Assad mixing chemical weapons, he said, Don't do it, baby.
Don't be crossing that red line, honey.
And then this time they said nothing.
But they claim to have known about it days ahead of time.
Last month's suspicious activity was not raised publicly until after the deadly attack.
And Syrian opposition figures say the rebels were not warned in advance so they could protect civilians in the area.
Again, complicity with war crimes, not great.
Does this sound familiar?
For those of us who were around in 2003, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says, when we ask for further clarification, we receive the following response from the U.S. government.
You are aware that this is classified information, therefore we cannot show it to you.
So, there are still no facts, but...
Trust us, says the U.S. government with regards to intelligence-based attacks.
So what are the sides?
Well, of course, after the Arab Spring of about two years ago, people got chafing under the multi-decade rule of Assad and his family and began to rebel.
And Assad reacted in a horrible way, you know, slaughtering people, murdering people, dumping bodies in the street, killing children, and so on.
And this drew, you know, like a vacuum, all the crazy groups in the Middle East to go and fight against Assad.
Who has the last secular regime, the last regime without a central bank that owes money to the World Bank or the IMF? I'm sure that has nothing to do with anything.
Many of the rebel groups leading the charge against Assad have strong ties to Al-Qaeda.
So, if I understand this correctly, very close to the 12th anniversary of 9-11, the American government may be lending material and military and financial support to groups strongly tied with the group responsible for 9-11.
That sounds... Arming Al-Qaeda, when has that ever proved a problem in the past?
Arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, giving Bin Laden money and teaching him how to take down an empire by targeting it economically through guerrilla warfare?
It's never been a problem before.
It won't be one now, obviously.
Now, Russia, of course, has close ties to the Assad regime.
And what happens?
Well, if the U.S. sides with the rebels and Assad wins, It's pretty bad all around, right?
Because you've pissed off that regime even more and all of its allies and so on.
So that's not good. Now, what if America enforces a no-fly zone and so on?
Well, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, says, well, if we put a no-fly zone in, it could include the loss of U.S. aircraft, which would require the U.S. to insert personnel recovery forces.
It may also fail to reduce the violence or shift the momentum because the regime relies overwhelmingly on surface firing, mortars, artillery, and missiles, so controlling Syrian airspace doesn't do much to change the balance of power.
Anthony Kozman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies says, can you do damage with cruise missiles?
Yes. And just ask all the people who've received it before.
Can you stop them from having chemical weapons capability?
I would think the answer would be no.
Should you limit yourself to just a kind of incremental retaliation?
That doesn't serve any strategic purpose.
It doesn't protect the Syrian people.
It doesn't push Assad out.
What is the endgame? I mean, let's say the America starts lobbing weapons in and nothing happens.
Do they say, well, we tried our best and go home?
There's no endgame.
There's no obvious long-term objective that is achievable.
I keep getting these deja vus during these presentations.
Going in without a plan or an endgame.
Afghanistan, Iranistan, I can't remember.
I feel like we've been here before.
A year ago, Obama made the red line comment, but American officials already believe that Assad had used chemical weapons on similar scales over the past year.
George Friedman of the global intelligence firm Stafford wrote recently, quote, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya have driven home the principle that deposing one regime means living with an imperfect successor.
In those cases, changing the regime wound up rapidly entangling the United States in civil wars, the outcomes of which have not been worth the price.
Now, what if cruise missiles accidentally hit Russian soldiers or military advisors, which are known to be stationed in Syria?
Could that cause the problem, conceivably?
Come on, let's get to the meat of the matter, people.
This has nothing to do with protecting the Syrian population.
I mean, Assad has already credibly murdered over 100,000 of those and driven a million-plus into exile, where they mingle with the Exiled refugees of the other American adventure in the region in Iraq.
So, follow the money.
Who benefits? Follow the money.
It's not that complicated in politics.
Senators voting Wednesday to authorize a Syria strike received on average.
Those who voted to authorize the strike against Syria received on average 83% more campaign financing from defense contractors than lawmakers voting against the war.
I'm going to say this again. Senators who voted recently to authorize a Syrian strike, strike against Syria, received on average 83% more campaign financing from defense contractors than lawmakers voting against the war.
You know, the word defense is just one of these Orwellian words.
America has peaceful neighbors to the north, peaceful and friendly neighbors to the north and south, gigantic oceans to the east and west.
Since 1812 has never been threatened by foreign power.
What defense could they possibly be thinking of?
700 military bases around the world, still occupying Japan, still occupying Korea, still occupying Germany to a small degree.
This has nothing to do with defense.
Political action committees and employees from defense and intelligence firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, Honeywell International, and others ponied up over a million dollars to the 17 members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who voted yes or no on the authorization.
Let's look at this little graph.
Sorry for those in the podcast.
Yes votes got 83% more money from defense contractors.
That's the old P.J. Rock quote when...
Politicians have the power to buy and sell things.
The first things to be bought and sold will be politicians.
It's a minor thing here, but it's not unimportant.
One of the major recipients of the defense sector campaign contributions was Senator John Kerry, who was confirmed Secretary of State on Jan 29, 2013.
So he gets a lot of money from defense contractors, and now he seems relatively pro-war.
Recently, he went to the Middle East and praised a $2.1 billion Raytheon deal in Oman.
And, oh, somebody owns Raytheon stock.
Berry, Derry, Ferry, Larry, rhymes with that.
Man, oh man, I'm just in a fog of war today.
On January 8th, 2013, Kerry pledged to sell stocks that would be considered a conflict of interest.
This included his Raytheon stock.
Ah, but according to Legistorm.com, Kerry's most recent statement does not list Raytheon shares as having been sold.
By the way, while we were all talking about this stuff, Congress excluded themselves from conflict of interest laws when it came to buying and selling stocks again and insider trading.
That applies to Wall Street, although it never really does, but now it doesn't even legally apply to Congress.
Just while you were being distracted by Benghazi, IRS, NAS, all that sort of stuff.
The U.S. taxpayer gives, has forcibly extracted and sent over, $50 billion in foreign aid a year.
Most of it goes into the pockets of defense contractors, who in return fund both political parties in America through aggressive lobbying efforts.
I've got a podcast called The Round Trip of the Foreign Aid Dollar.
It's given to governments, and those governments then have to buy contracts from American companies.
Just another form of welfare for the rich.
Okay, so what could happen?
Let's say that these tomahawk missiles go up and they come down.
Strikes are going to kill civilians.
It's almost certain. And America doesn't almost get these things right.
They blew up a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
They blew up a Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
Missiles malfunction. And of course, if I were Assad, knowing that there's this...
Weapons-lobbing monster floating off the shore, you're going to take that into account when you pull this kind of stuff forward, right?
So, you're going to move civilians to stuff that may, from the air, look like any kind of chemicals manufacturing plant, and you're going to say, maybe the Russians should go there, too, to provoke this kind of stuff.
Now, historically, and almost universally, when rebels begin to win...
Any kind of conflict in civil wars, civilian casualties rise enormously because, of course, the desperate regime begins to target civilians in the hopes of randomly striking the rebels.
So that's not good.
And Assad knows that only 30% of Americans currently support the strikes.
So if they're successful, he might just use more chemical weapons, knowing that the American population is against it.
You know this pottery barn rule they talked about with Iraq?
Kind of an insult to pottery barn.
You know, they say, well, if you break it, you've bought it.
If you invade it, you own it.
Of course, in break stuff in the pottery barn, they just say, no problem.
They sweep it up and they write it off.
A shrinkage, a lost inventory.
So once America goes into Syria, what's going to happen?
Well, reporters are going to go there.
There's going to be a huge amount of intention, visibility, and America is now going to be held accountable for what happens afterwards, which is why it's so difficult to get out of these kinds of escalations after that.
Reprisals. Well, we'll get to this in a sec, but the leaders of Iran have already threatened attacks against American tourists, American embassies, and Obama's direct family.
They're talking about raping one of his daughters.
Now, let's say that America, the miracle occurs, they lob Tom Hawk weapons in, and Assad trips, has an aneurysm, and all of his family have heart attacks, and the whole regime falls down.
Well, so there are all these chemical weapons, where are they going to go?
Well, they're going to end up in the hands of the rebels.
I mean, the rebels may not know where they are, but a lot of Assad's regime leaders know where they are, and they're going to want money, and they're going to want protection, they're going to want to get out of the country, so they're going to tell these people where they are.
So it's a great way of getting weapons from Assad, who's not expressed any prior hostility to the United States in particular, into the hands of Al-Qaeda, who may have.
And of course, if Assad falls, what's going to replace him?
Remember, Assyria is one of these truly mongrel mutant Franken nations that was basically pieced together randomly by the imperial powers, England, in 1922.
And it doesn't fall along religious or ethnic or cultural lines, and therefore there's going to be a massive civil war where everyone tries to grab power, particularly those who would love to see Sharia law imposed on the hands of thieves and the bodies of women and so on.
There's this lovely little joy outfit called the al-Nusra Front, which claims to have allegiance to al-Qaeda.
They could win. They're pretty powerful.
They could win the resulting power struggle or at least have a major role in the coalition.
The US has officially designated al-Nusra a terrorist organization.
They're very prominent among the rebel groups.
So, funding terrorists to overthrow a secular regime not hostile to the US? Foreign policy can be a little confusing, if you have any kind of, say, principles.
So John Kerry accidentally told the truth when he first talked about escalation.
He said, In the event Syria imploded, for instance, or in the event that there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of al-Nusra or someone else, and it was clearly in the interest of our allies and all of us, the British, the French, and others, to prevent those weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of the worst elements, I don't want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to a president of the United States to secure our country.
In other words, boots on the ground going in full-on invasion.
Escalation. I'm telling you, this deja vu is just crippling this presentation.
I really apologize for it.
I do try to concentrate, but I just feel I'm on this tiny little merry-go-round, seeing the same view over and over and over again.
Has this ever happened before?
Let's mull about it. Korea.
Not just the maker of really revolting soup dinners, but a place which America had some involvement in before.
So very briefly, at the end of World War II, Soviet Union and the U.S. occupied previously undivided Korea and To expel the defeated Japanese who had ruled the entire peninsula for decades.
So there was this temporary demarcation separating the Russian and US forces along the 38th parallel.
It was not intended to create two separate countries, but as the Cold War deepened, both the US and the Soviets said that the reunification of the North and South should be carried out according to their own ideological biases or preferences.
The US supported an extremely repressive ruler in the South, and the two sides increasingly clashed across the parallel for several years.
And, of course, the Russians said that it was the Americans who went over the border, and the Americans said it was the Russians who went over the border.
It does seem to be that most of the Russian attacks on the US were retaliatory, but it's not perfectly confirmed.
Anyway, without getting into a lot of detail, a brutal war developed.
I mean, okay, it launched Alan Alda's career, but it also had some negative consequences.
The brutal war that developed was fought in defense of the Singapore regime and not for the benefit of an undivided peninsula benefiting all Koreans.
It continued ruthlessly until an armistice ending the hot water was signed on July 27, 1953.
But to this date, there's still been no peace treaty signed, even though talks technically continue at Panmunjom on the northern side of the DMZ. Officially, the U.S. is still at war with North Korea.
Earlier suppressed reports of atrocities committed by U.S. ground and air forces were reaffirmed in 1999 about the Korean War by eyewitness accounts of Korean survivors and American military veterans who had been ordered to kill large numbers of civilians, as well as declassified U.S. Air Force documents.
In one case, some 2,000 Korean civilians were forced into an open mountain area near Yongdong and slaughtered from the air.
In other cases, hundreds of civilian refugees were blown up as they fled across detonated bridges or machine-gunned as they sought protection under viaducts.
The stories of the Nazi warplanes gunning refugees and so on were widely disseminated in the 1940s, particularly in the invasion of France in May of 1940.
But this is all, I mean, there's no good guys in a war.
I mean, everybody devolves into satanic monstrosities.
All the major Korean cities, of which there are about five dozen, were totally destroyed in the north by U.S. air power.
And the death and destruction of the Korean War, especially in the northern part, was truly astounding.
It is now believed that more than four million, I mean, just, this is staggering.
This is like one-tenth the entire death count of the Second World War concentrated in a tiny little country.
More than four million people died in the war, perhaps as many as three million of whom were from the north.
Of a population at the time of about 9 million.
So 4 million people died of about 9 million.
This would be about the equivalent of 150, 160, 170 million Americans being killed.
Vietnam. Officially started with this called the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was actually so they said, well, the Vietnamese fired on American warships that were patrolling international waters and posing no threat to anyone.
Because, of course, if there were, you know, hundreds of Chinese warships a couple of miles off the U.S. coast, it would not be considered threatening by anyone.
These were, in fact, two events.
In the first event, the destroyer Maddox was attacked inside the territorial waters of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam while on a De Soto patrol, which is basically where they point all the electronics...
It was on a hostile electronic warfare mission.
It was well within the territorial waters, and it was fired upon.
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or the DRV, confirmed the event.
The second event, with Maddox and the other destroyer, Turner Joy, was a delusion based on faulty radar and sonar reports and crew hysteria.
There was no real attack.
It was pretty much confirmed right afterwards, but it was still used as a pretext.
DRV did not confirm and in fact denied this event.
The U.S. provoked the DRV. Oh, by the by, there's this kind of myth that, you know, Kennedy, the golden boy, was not responsible for escalation in Vietnam.
It's not true. Every president since Truman escalated the war in Vietnam.
John F. Kennedy greatly expanded the U.S. role and left the men in place who guided Lyndon Baines Johnson.
McNamara, Rusk, and Robert F. Kennedy were all active planners in the escalation.
LBJ was following JFK's policy and listening to JFK's advisors.
You know, just because you bang Monroe does not make you a peacenik.
The only weapons that were not used in Vietnam by the U.S. were nerve gases and nuclear weapons.
Everything else was on the table and used.
They used napalm, they used Asian orange, tear gas, bullets of course, shells bombs, anti-personnel bombs, computer-guided weapons, etc.
It was a massive testing ground for all of the joystick-based sociopaths who run the military.
The war in Vietnam, they included many of the weapons tests of many of the devices used in the Persian Gulf War.
Ah, war crimes in Vietnam.
I love how they separate the word war from crimes.
Crimes are much less important than war.
It's sort of like saying serial killer, handicapped parking violator.
Of course, the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional, not declared by Congress.
Every U.S. president claims that they have the right to go and invade and bomb whoever they want, and if that ever proves unpopular, they will attempt to shift the blame to Congress by having a resolution passed, which is, of course, what's happening now.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964, which served as a legal basis for the war, was based on fraud and not given a thorough debate.
Based on fraud, not given a thorough debate.
God, I really feel like I've given this presentation.
Have we done this before? The international law status of the American invasion of Vietnam was exactly the same as the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, which was, of course, completely evil.
The UN, the Pope, and most of the world's population asked the U.S. to stop the slaughter.
You know, with all respect to one or two, O Stone, we do see a lot of American deaths in films about Vietnam.
The Hague and Geneva Conventions have specific rules for warfare, which the U.S. systematically violated.
B-52 raids, carpet bombing, were not surgical strikes.
Large numbers of civilians were killed by the massive American firepower.
And, of course, individual units did murder civilians intentionally.
Lieutenant Calley and his My Lai massacre was the most famous of these.
You can look those up if you like.
Free fire zones were essentially murder zones.
And, um, the, um, the CIA set up specific assassination squads to kill, uh, insurgents, uh, and they killed tens of thousands of these, just murdered them.
Of course, where do they get the intelligence?
From people who owed people money, from people who had grudges, from people who hated people, from people whose, some guy had had an affair with their wife, and they say, oh, he's an insurgent, then go kill him.
I mean, they're just, the, the, the American military, like all military, basically, but American military in particular, uh, is like Just some kill robot that people just point at, and it goes and kills stuff.
Of course, 58,000 American soldiers died of accidents, wounds, or disease in the war, and nobody knows how many Vietnamese, Lothians, and Cambodians died.
It is estimated that about 4 million were killed during the war.
Years. No Vietnamese attacks against the U.S. civilian population ever took place.
This is the story that's being sold to you now.
Obama and other people are saying, well, you see, these chemical weapons could be used against American civilians.
They had the same story.
I remember Condoleezza Rice, she-devil of evil, she said, we wouldn't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud, you see, if Saddam Hussein lights up an American city with a nuke, you see, we've got to get him over here, otherwise they're going to get us over here.
We've got to get him over there or they'll get us over here.
The corollary, of course, is that if you kill them over here, they'll want to come kill you.
If you kill them over there, they'll want to come kill you over here.
Oh, let's just do one more, shall we?
Iran, 1953. This American obsession with Iran goes back more than half a century.
Coup 53 of Iran was the CIA's first successful overthrow of a foreign government, of a democratically elected foreign government.
This, of course, has happened many, many times.
There have been over 140 U.S. military interventions since 1800.
140. I think of which only three were declared as wars.
And this is a constant theme in the US. I mean, say we're going to bring democracy to X country, and it usually begins, as it did in Guatemala, with the overthrow of a democratically elected government.
So, Britain occupied Iran in World War II to protect its supply route to its ally, the Soviet Union, and to prevent the Iranian oil from falling into the hands of the Nazis.
They ousted the Shah's father.
They regarded him as unmanageable.
It retained control over Iran's oil after the war through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
In 1951, Iran's parliament voted to nationalize the oil industry.
So the British government was stealing it from the Iranian people, and so Iran thought that the government would steal it for the Iranian people, which, you know, how well are the people in Saudi Arabia doing, given that the Saudi Arabian government runs the oil?
Not well. I mean, it's just a bunch of thieves looking to grab control of resources.
It's never for the people. The legislature is backing the law, elected its leading advocate, Dr.
Mossadegh, as prime minister.
Britain responded with threats and sanctions.
Alan Dulles, the director of Central Intelligence, approved a million dollars on April 4th to be used in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh, the history says.
Quote, the aim was to bring to power a government which would reach an equitable oil settlement, enabling Iran to become economically sound and financially solvent, and which would vigorously prosecute the dangerously strong Communist Party.
So within days, agency officials identified a high-ranking officer, General Falzlola Zahedi, as the man to spearhead a coup.
A Shah General Zahedi combination, supported by CIA local assets and financial backing, would have had a good chance of overthrowing Mossadegh, officials wrote, particularly if this combination should be able to get the largest mobs in the streets and if a sizable portion of the Tehran garrison refused to carry out Mossadegh's orders.
Young CIA agents used suitcases full of cash to destabilize the regime.
Suitcases full of cash?
Ah, déjà vu, déjà vu.
They bought newspaper editors, bought hoodlums, organized rallies in different cities, and created a fake Communist Party.
With which to scare the U.S. government into further supporting the coup.
Now, after the first coup failed, Washington sent a telegram to Kermit Roosevelt Jr., possibly one of the most evil members of the Sesame Street gang.
He was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, telling him to stop.
Okay, we lost. We stopped.
He says, oh, man, I never heard that.
I never got the message. He continued the operation.
Four days later, a second coup was successful.
This led to 27 years of oppression under the Shah, followed by the 1979 revolution, which was hijacked by the Mullahs, and created a highly repressive theocracy, which continues to this day.
So, the fact that the Middle Eastern people have a bit of a problem with Western powers, and Iran has a problem with America in particular, not hard to understand.
So what's going to result from Syria?
Well, the U.S. has intercepted an order from Iran to militants in Iraq to attack the U.S. Embassy and other American interests in Baghdad in the event of a strike on Syria.
There is an escalating and expanding array of reprisal threats across the region.
The Commander-in-Chief of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps said last week that an attack on Syria would lead to the destruction of Israel.
The State Department issued a new alert on Thursday.
Warning against non-essential travel to Iraq and citing terrorist activity at levels unseen since 2008.
Ooh, it's only four or five years.
A former Iranian official has warned of mass abductions and brutal killings of American citizens around the world and the rape and killing of one of Obama's daughters should the United States attack Syria.
He said, hopefully Obama will be pig-headed enough to attack Syria, and then we will see the loss of U.S. interests through terrorist attacks, he threatened.
In just 21 hours after the attack on Syria, a family member of every U.S. minister, department secretary, U.S. ambassadors, U.S. military commanders around the world will be abducted, and then 18 hours later, videos of their amputation would be spread around the world.
I've done this before. The Chief Commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Mohammed Ali Jafari, says, America's vision in its ability for a limited strike in Syria is an illusion.
The reactions will be beyond Syria's borders, and those who participate with America in this matter will soon witness threats on their national security.
And the head of the Ammar Strategic Base previously stated that Syria is the 35th province of Iran, and a strategic province for us.
If we lose Syria, we won't be able to hold Tehran.
So there are lots of dominoes that are going to happen here.
And the escalation potential is truly staggering and possibly global.
So why, why, why, why, why, why is this all happening?
Well, the U.S. economy, like all late empire economies, is propped up by the military-industrial complex.
The U.S. economy literally is propped up by guns and scuds and foreign bodies and domestic bodies as well.
U.S. military spending is almost $4,000.
Per head. Per year.
It's monstrous. More than 40% of the total U.S. federal government debt, $5.6 trillion, is due to the excessive military stimulus spending over the past 20 years.
America had a baseline of military spending, about 1.5 to 2% of its economy, with the exception of First and Second World War.
And that has really ramped up over the past 20 years and has provided massive stimulus to the economy.
So here's an example. If we look at sort of 1800 to 1940 in the Cold War, then it began to dip down.
Now it's dipping back up. This is huge, right?
So you've got the Civil War, First World War, Second World War, and then it just became perpetual war for perpetual peace.
The Iraq War increased the threat of terrorism.
This is well known. The Iraq War was based on the false linkage of Saddam Hussein and 9-11, and knowingly false claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Top British officials, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and many others say that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were planned before 9-11.
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that there were, of course, at one time only about 100 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, with 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at an estimated yearly cost of $30 billion.
It means that for every one al-Qaeda fighter, the U.S. committed 1,000 troops and $300 million a year.
And, of course, right after 9-11, the Taliban offered to turn over Bin Laden to the U.S. All the U.S. had to do was provide some proof that he was involved.
The U.S., of course, could have easily killed Bin Laden in 2001 and again in 2007, but chose not to, even though that would have saved the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars in costs throughout the Afghanistan war.
Why? What could possibly make sense of all of this?
Wars always cause recessions, and particularly if there's not a quick victory drags on, wars always put the nation waging war into a recession and hurt its recovery.
Sometimes, like with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the maintenance, of course, of the Eastern Bloc countries, it will cause an economy to collapse, thus liberalizing the country to some degree.
Okay, so what is going on in the American economy?
Well, public sector spending, and mainly defense spending, has accounted for almost all of the new U.S. job creation over the past ten years.
You understand? This economy is an illusion propped up by murder.
Ten-year U.S. job growth vanishes.
This has changed in private sector jobs over previous decades.
It has completely collapsed.
And this is partly because it's grown so much in the public sector.
The public sector feeds off the private sector and then the private sector gets addicted to public sector funding, which we'll get to.
Health, education and government, you know, thousands of jobs, millions of jobs have been created by the government, which means temporarily and at the expense of the rest of the economy, which has shrunk.
So there's this massive tidal wave.
It's really the Red Sea moving with blood and body parts over to the military-industrial complex at the expense of the free market or what's left of it.
Over the past nine years, non-industrial production in the U.S. has declined by some 19%.
By contrast, military manufacturing is now 123% greater than it was in 2000.
It has more than doubled while the rest of the manufacturing sector has been shrinking.
And let's look at the death of trade here.
So this is durable goods shipments from 2000 to 2009.
As you can see, the military has grown enormously and non-military has collapsed.
And this has gotten even worse.
And you can see more of the figures over there on the right.
So, the military-industrial complex is a form of Keynesian stimulus.
Keynesian stimulus is when the government simply prints, spends, borrows, creates money in order to stimulate economic activity, which stimulates economic activity in the same way that cocaine stimulates happiness, right?
It ruins your health and causes a crash.
So Keynesian stimulus creates an economic dependence of the private sector on the public sector, as I mentioned.
In a democracy, this creates an incentive for the dependent private sector to lobby politically so as to maintain the stimulus, which becomes like an addictive drug, a necessary prop for economic survival.
Keynesian stimulus spending on the military creates a larger military and a momentum to actually deploy that military.
See, what happens is if there's no enemies, then people say, well, why do we have this huge military?
And therefore they want to defund the military and maybe get tax reductions or actually have the private sector start to create some sustainable, customer-oriented, economically productive jobs.
So in order to maintain this economic stimulus and in order to maintain political power by creating private sector companies dependent upon public sector spending, Continual enemies need to be created.
Haven't you ever noticed this? That when one enemy goes down and another enemy comes up and there's perpetual war, this is to keep the money flowing to the military-industrial complex.
And to keep the American economy propped up with the illusion of progress.
I did a presentation, There Will Be No Economic Recovery, Prepare Yourself Accordingly, which is pushing half a million views.
I hope you'll check it out. The U.S. economy, why are we so interested in zombie movies?
Well, zombies are things that move after they're dead.
Everything that's going on in the U.S. economy almost is movement after the death.
The death occurred several years ago, a decade or two ago, frankly.
And everything that's after that is simply dead.
You know, if you lose your job and start running up your credit cards, it still looks like you're doing okay.
But you're digging yourself a crater, and the crater's too deep to get out.
Now, the military economy is nearly three times as large proportionally to the rest of the economy as it was at the beginning of the Bush administration.
And most of the job creation, as we've seen, has been in the public sector.
But because the job creation has been financed with loans from China and private banks, trillions in unnecessary interest charges have been incurred by the US. You get public sector spending, you create goods which get destroyed, you create waste, and you go into debt to do it, which means that you're eating your seed crop.
You're like some farmer getting fat over the winter by having nothing left to plant in the spring.
This eating of the future, this destruction of human and financial capital, this eating up of the boomer's savings, this everybody dipping into their savings and their 401k plans, their retirement plans, deferral of paying for retirement, this is all the way of eating the future to sustain The illusion of economic growth in the present.
And this is catastrophic and throughout the entire US economy.
So... Naturally, we are in this Orwellian hell where the American economy is so dependent on military spending that we need to continually invent new enemies to attack.
This is what it's all about. The invention of enemies is continual throughout.
When one goes down, another one has to come up.
When Russia goes down, then we need the war on terror.
When the war on terror becomes problematic, Then we need Libya, and we need Syria, and we need Hezbollah.
I mean, all of these groups.
There will always be people out there in the world doing bad things.
And the idea that America is the world's policeman is the most grim joke in history.
America has policemen, you see, and those policemen patrol cities like New Orleans and Chicago and Washington, where they have complete power, complete control.
They can pretty much arrest on site.
They can plant drugs. They can do whatever they want.
They stop and frisk. America has almost complete control over those cities and it can even remotely slow or stop even the growth in the murder rates in those cities.
So, the idea that America can be the world's policeman when it can't even effectively control its own cities is completely ludicrous.
It is literally like me saying, well, I can't open the door of this cab, but as soon as I have this, you know, as soon as I open, as soon as someone opens it for me, I'm going to go in and win the world's weightlifting championship.
I mean, I don't quite have the strength, my noodle arms, to open this cab door, but once I go in, I mean, you would laugh at me.
And this is the idea that America can be the world's policeman when it cannot effectively police itself at home.
It's just ridiculous and pathetic.
And so, unfortunately, you give the government this kind of power.
You get the government.
The U.S. government is one of the largest arms sellers in the world.
It complains about a dangerous world while going around arming everyone in their own universe.
It's like some security company coming and saying, I will protect you from violence while arming the mafia around you.
You'd get that this would be a trap and a very evil one at that.
So there is no particularly quick solution to it other than knowledge, other than facts.
Don't be distracted.
There's just another hand puppet held up to scare you into submitting even more of your tax dollars and freedoms to an increasingly fascistic and destructive state.
Don't believe the hype.
It's not going to solve the problem, but at least you won't be contributing to it.
And you won't have in your head and heart the guilt that people who supported the Iraq war have deep down.
I mean, deep down, if you supported the Iraq war, you know that you enthusiastically cheered for the murder of about a million people and the fleeing of over a million more.
And as the reports say, the genetic destruction of virtually an entire population in particular areas.
You did that.
They wouldn't have been able to go without you cheering.
That blood, those deformed babies, the cancers, the leukemias, the white death, the depleted uranium, the white phosphorus still sticking to the bodies of people thrown into deep coffins, that's on you.
That's on you. We may not be able to change the military-industrial complex directly or decisively or in the short term, but cheering, This indiscriminate slaughter and US foreign policy has resulted in the deaths of over 25 million people since the end of the Second World War.
Cheering on this kind of slaughter is going to stick to you, to your soul, to your conscience.
We may not be able to stop it directly, but let us not at least let the military-industrial complex Hang the human bones around our neck and have us dance and cheer in happiness and patriotism, gratitude and excitement and enthusiasm.
Let us at least reject participation in these slaughters and save our souls thereby.
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