Spencer challenges Sam Harris’s claim that bombing can eliminate ideas by examining WWII and ISIS, noting Germany’s post-war ideological collapse at Nuremberg—where leaders like Göring evaded blame via ignorance or duty—not through violence. He contrasts this with hypothetical ISIS trials, where fanatics might double down on their beliefs as "superior," proving true ideologues aren’t deterred by defeat. In the digital age, violence fails to erase ideas; only better arguments can counter them, exposing Harris’s logic as outdated and ineffective. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with the podcast Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
Today will be just me again, but the topic is, I hope, more engaging.
Just a reminder that the email address for any gripes, complaints, reminders of historical inconsistencies or inaccuracies, and carefully considered rebuttals to anything I say here is truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Before I get to the topic, I want to admit before I start that I will be skirting the edge of one of the podcast rules today in that usually I try to avoid mentions of Hitler and the Nazis.
The intent of this rule is to avoid the game of social exaggeration that leads to one side in an argument on the internet comparing the other side to Hitler and the Nazis.
I will be breaking the letter of this rule, but not really its spirit.
Today I'll be mentioning the Nazis because they are relevant to the topic, which is fanaticism.
First, a little bit of background on how this exact line of thought came to exist in my head.
Something on the order of five years ago, there was a quasi-political entity in the Middle East region known, at least in Canada, as ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
In some places, it was called ISIL, and in others, it was called Daesh.
Nowadays, they're referred to as simply the Islamic State, and they're no longer confined to merely one region in the world.
Regardless of the name, it is a collection of Islamic extremists who are, and were then, attempting to exert their political will over the people nearest to their part of the world through extremely violent means.
Around that time, I listened to an episode of a podcast that at the time was called Waking Up.
It has since changed its name, but otherwise, it still exists as an active and popular podcast created by a guy named Sam Harris.
He's a well-known intellectual who was nonetheless best known for being called a racist by Ben Affleck on Bill Maher.
Many people have widely varying opinions of Sam Harris, but to the best of my knowledge, none of them include a lack of intelligence or an unwillingness to be completely informed on the topics he addresses.
I think he has an excellent podcast, but I don't agree with everything he says, as this episode of my podcast will certainly show.
The particular episode of the Sam Harris podcast, to which I'm referring today, was called The Logic of Violence.
His guest was a former U.S. Marine.
They discussed several things in that episode, but one particular thing really stuck with me.
At one point in their discussion, the U.S. Marine said something to the effect of, people say you can't bomb an idea, but in fact, you can bomb an idea.
We bombed Nazism in World War II.
This notion was more or less completely unchallenged by Sam Harris in that moment.
For my part, it looked like a complete failure of opportunity at the time, and I still think so now.
First, facetiously, if being able to bomb an idea is itself an idea, then can you bomb the idea that you can bomb an idea?
How far down does that rabbit hole go?
Second, and more soberly, we absolutely bombed the Nazis in World War II, but in no way did we rid the world of Nazism.
One need only look at our world now and see clearly that Nazism is alive, and we should properly despair at the notion that more bombs would finish the job.
But more to the point, I want to share with everyone here the thing I thought about very shortly after I finished listening to that particular episode of the Sam Harris podcast.
It's a thought I've shared with a few individuals since, and it hasn't evolved, migrated, or otherwise become distorted since that day I first expressed it more than five years ago.
Let's see if I can do it justice now.
We bombed Germany in World War II, but we did not end Nazism.
The best we could do with bombs in World War II was to remove Nazis from having political support in a nation that was capable of mass-producing high-end weaponry.
The job of countering the ideas of Nazism began after the war.
You see, at the end of World War II, we did something very new and very different.
Instead of metaphorically whipping the nation that it lost, claiming its territory, pushing our language onto its people, extorting it of its wealth, and creating a new generation of potential enemies, we actually confronted the ideas that were maligning the German nation and its people.
We held a series of trials to openly discuss and confront the ideas of Nazism and the people who were in charge of implementing those ideas.
We gathered every member of the Nazi Party of Germany we could capture.
We investigated their activities over the course of the war.
We laid charges for enacting a war of aggression against peaceful nations and for planning and participating in genocide.
The highest-ranking member of the Nazi Party that was both captured and put on trial at Nuremberg was a man called Hermann Göring.
Many other very highly ranked and very influential members of the Nazi Party were present at Nuremberg, but we usually focus on Göring.
During the Nuremberg trials, many questions were asked of many Nazis about what they knew and when they knew it.
Many of the answers saw the defendants dissembling, providing overly complicated answers to simple questions so as to confuse the situation, claim ignorance about very particularly gruesome acts, and a lot of general claims of I was just doing my job or I was just doing what was expected of me.
These claims ring true from common soldiers, but they sound false coming from policymakers and leaders.
To believe them is to believe that people leading a nation don't have any power to influence the country they are meant to be leading.
At the Nuremberg trials in particular, I note the one thing that wasn't present, a true martyr.
Much as present-day fans of Hitler would like to rise up in his shadow and take private glee in quoting him and dog whistling to each other about his birthday, his initials, and his infamous 14 words, the real point that must be driven home to them is his complete lack of responsibility for his actions.
Regardless of whether he died in Berlin while the Soviets stormed the city or was secreted out so that he could live on, he did not raise his head in defiance to the forces that opposed him from that point forward.
And neither did Goring.
Neither did any of the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg.
To a man, not a single one said the thing that would have made this situation much, much worse for the world by trying to inflame passions that would live on long after them.
These words would have sounded something like this.
I led my people to the very best of my ability.
I made decisions for my nation that gave my people the best opportunity for future success.
If given the opportunity to do it all again, I would change nothing.
In fact, if anything, I would work even harder to achieve the same set of goals.
I stand here today to spit in the eye of those who would prevent that ultimate goal for humanity, for that outcome would be best not only for my people, but for all people.
Do your worst.
Those words would have made Hermann Göring, or Himmler, or Hitler, or any one of a long list of powerful and influential Nazis, Goebbels, Bormann, whoever, truly immortal.
It would have given modern-day followers of their malign set of ideas a central point to galvanize them.
It would have created something akin to a religious movement with its own set of true fanatics.
And though we consider the Nazis to be fanatical, the ones on trial at Nuremberg clearly were not.
The truth is that they were just sycophants looking for power like all the autocrats who came before them.
They happened to be in a world that valued people who supported a particular set of malignant ideas.
Their willingness to follow that set of ideas to their end is more indicative of their moral flexibility and the desire for power at any cost than of their dedication to a particular set of ideas.
If Hitler had instead claimed to be a Jew and that the Jews were actually supermen and everyone who wanted to properly advance in Nazi Germany had to show their true Jewish roots and get with his program of exterminating the gypsies and the Zilots of the established religions, Göring and the others would have been poring over their family trees looking for pictures of people with larger than average noses so that they could claim their rights to bask in the glow of the upper echelons of power.
Simply put, not really fanatics.
It might be worth noting that many of the highest ranking Nazis committed suicide before they could be hanged in judgment for their crimes.
Göring swallowed a cyanide tablet in his cell the night before he was meant to face hanging.
Himmler bit into a cyanide capsule on the day that he was captured.
Hitler's death has more speculation.
If you believe he died to Soviet mortar fire, requires you to believe the stories of the people occupying his bunker.
According to them, he deliberately waited outside his bunker for the shells to obliterate him.
None of his remains could be found, nor did anyone expect to find any.
If he had instead escaped and managed to survive, it would only serve to increase the magnitude of his cowardice.
But let's switch this up a little.
I started this by talking about ISIS.
Five years ago, ISIS's influence in the Western Iraq and Syria region was about to completely collapse and had been in decline for some time.
As of this moment, the Islamic State exists more as an idea whose virtual flag has been hoisted in a large number of disparate countries and regions throughout the world.
Let's say for a moment that it would have been possible to surround and isolate the leaders of ISIS, to separate them from the machinery of power and influence the way we did in Germany at the end of World War II, to capture them alive and then hold a new set of trials in the same way we did at Nuremberg.
We don't know what really would happen if we had managed to do this, because of course, it didn't really happen that way.
But think for yourselves what might have happened if it had.
Would we have had a line of Islamic State leaders and generals tripping over themselves for the opportunity to distance themselves from the most terrible and atrocious things we absolutely know that ISIS did?
Would we see them trying to claim that they didn't know about the beheadings of civilians and the genocide of Yazidis?
Would we see them claim a sense of duty as motivation for their actions rather than a hatred of anyone who wasn't willing to show their same level of religious conviction?
Or would we see one, at least one, maybe more, say something like this.
I led my people to the very best of my ability.
I made decisions for my nation that gave my people the best opportunity for future success.
If given the opportunity to do it all again, I would change nothing.
In fact, if anything, I would work even harder to achieve the same set of goals.
I stand here today to spit in the eye of those who would prevent that ultimate goal for humanity.
For that outcome would be the best not only for my people, but for all people.
Do your worst.
The followers of the Islamic State are truly fanatical.
They believe that the path they are on will lead to true salvation for their immortal souls, and they care nothing for the outcomes of themselves or anyone else here on earth.
The ideas they have pushed into the world have ignited the passions of would-be warlords and militaristic demagogues in well over a dozen other countries.
Bombing them in Syria may have prevented them from more atrocities in that space.
But the work to counter their ideas hasn't even really started, and I don't currently see a lot of effort being put into it.
Let's turn that context dial just one more notch.
We often look at things in other nations from our own perspective in what is generally referred to as the West.
So what of our own convictions?
What would have happened if ISIS had been able to overwhelm and overrun a nation that could be described as a Western democracy?
In this hypothetical scenario, they round up all of that nation's leaders and they decide to put them on trial for following the ideas and ideals upon which Western democracies are founded.
Picture it happening in whatever country you happen to live in now, no matter which one.
Picture your leaders sitting in a line on a bench, listening to absolutely accurate testimony about the nature of the voting system, how laws are written, decided, and judged, how women are allowed to vote and drive and wear almost anything they want, how the courts allow the accused to face their accuser and are protected from government overreach and vindictive prosecution.
Generally, how free the people are in that place.
Do you think the leaders of your nation would try to undermine the evidence of their involvement in your current political system?
Would they openly deny that they supported freedom as a concept that should be available to everyone?
Are they sycophants the same way that Goring was, merely following along with a set of ideas that would give them the most power?
Or would we see one of them, at least one, if not many of them, say something like this?
I led my people to the very best of my ability.
I made decisions for my nation that gave my people the best opportunity for future success.
If given the opportunity to do it all again, I would change nothing.
In fact, if anything, I would work even harder to achieve the same set of goals.
I stand here today to spit in the eye of those who would prevent that ultimate goal for humanity.
For that outcome would be the best not only for my people, but for all people.
Do your worst.
The minds of the fanatics are never changed by the prospect of death or the crushing reality of military defeat.
They chalk those losses up to the disadvantages they couldn't control and the lack of commitment from other people who might have helped them.
Don't get me wrong, their violence needs to be countered.
Their ability to propagate acts of terror needs to be removed.
But after all that work is done, the real work has to begin.
To say that you can end an idea with violence is to say that you could kill everyone who ever knew about the existence of that idea.
And let's not forget, you need to burn every scrap of paper that contains it.
In the context of the internet, this is already impossible.
Ideas are only properly countered by better ideas.
When ideas are bad, we need to point out why they're bad, not simply that they're bad.
Today, I'm pointing out that the idea to bomb ideas is itself a bad idea.