 Thank you very much to young Americans for Liberty for inviting me to speak tonight. My name is Janani Stomir of The Second. And today I'll be presenting my personal human opposition to war. I consider war to be the greatest enemy of human progress. So my current view, which will seem a rather extreme view to many, war is not acceptable by any parties, against any parties, for any stated or actual justification. And I will say that has not always been my view. And indeed, I was fortunate enough never to have personally experienced the horrors of war, unlike Professor Woody, who spoke to you earlier tonight. And I hope that as few people as possible get to personally experience the horrors of war in the future. But that was not always the position that I have. Indeed, when the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were starting, I supported them. I supported them for many years, even when they began to get bogged down and seem interminable. And I thought I had moral reasons for supporting those occupations. I thought that they were primarily undertaken in self-defense. I thought that they were directed against evil regimes or evil organizations like al-Qaeda. I thought that, as a result, the occupations could improve people's lives by reforming the governments and sometimes even the customs and societal structures in those areas. And I thought, of course, that the entities against whom these occupations were directed were moral monsters like the Taliban in Afghanistan or Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And it is true from a standpoint of individual rights, those entities, those organizations, have committed a lot of atrocities. They have violated the lives of many innocent people. And from the standpoint of morality, I would agree they have no right to commit those atrocities. Those regimes had no right to exist. They have no right to exist. But in terms of considering what to do about it, war is perhaps the worst possible response. And I realized that in retrospect, I realized that my initial expectations regarding how the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would turn out were completely mistaken. I expected both of those wars to be very brief, very effective, and to result in minimal casualties, at least on the American side. I sought to extrapolate from the exponentially declining record of American casualties in prior wars. If you try to draw a curve between, say, the casualties in World War II, the casualties in Vietnam, the casualties in the First Persian Gulf War, I thought circa late 2002, well, if the United States tried to topple Saddam Hussein again, there would be approximately 10 casualties. And of course, that didn't turn out to be that way, not even close. And that's not to say the American military wasn't terrifyingly effective in its combat roles. The United States has by far the most powerful military in the world. But despite military successes on the battlefield, these occupations would not end year after year. So in the face of that seeming empirical refutation of my original position, my initial interpretation was, well, from a moral standpoint, the occupations were still proper, but they were mismanaged. And with better leaders, with better specific decisions, perhaps they could have been done right. They could have been concluded successfully. And yet, I think the greater conceptual realization that I came to over time is some kinds of government initiatives are bound to fail based on their fundamental premises, irrespective of their particular attributes. The very pursuit of undertakings like war is self-defeating. And I will emphasize, this is not an attack on one particular political party or the other. As Professor Woody pointed out, both Republican presidents and Democratic presidents have entangled the US in numerous foreign occupations. The Second Iraq War was begun by a Republican president, but essentially continued throughout the tenure of a Democratic president. And now another Republican president has inherited it. And I don't think he's going to wind it down. And furthermore, from at least some standpoints, you could say there were strong moral reasons to oppose the Taliban, to oppose al-Qaeda, to oppose Saddam Hussein. And there was a great deal of organization. There was a great deal of tactical and strategic brilliance on the part of US military command. And in spite of all that, the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan failed miserably. And some people might say, well, Saddam Hussein is out of power, at least that's good. The Taliban is not in charge in Afghanistan, at least that's good. But if those occupations didn't fail, why are they still continuing? Why is the United States continuing to embroil its personnel, its resources, and its very political stability in perpetuating these conflicts? So as with many fundamental shifts in worldview, they don't occur overnight. They occur as responses to an accumulation of evidence. And one large factor in eventually tipping the scales and shifting my position was the 2008 presidential campaign of Ron Paul. And I was a college student at the time. I was attracted to Ron Paul's campaign for a variety of reasons. I liked his economic policy. I liked his support of domestic individual civil liberties. I liked his general air nutrition and civility and intellectualism. And I didn't always see eye to eye on him. And I supported him in spite of his views on foreign policy. But I tried to give those views a fair hearing because I was impressed by the overall presentation of Ron Paul's ideas. So I tried to engage those views and try to understand his arguments and subject them to an empirical test. I thought, well, perhaps those occupations with some justification should be given a chance to be successfully concluded, kind of the peace with honor viewpoint. So my empirical test was, certainly by early 2009, there would have been more than enough time for those occupations to have been successfully concluded if there was ever a chance for them to be successfully concluded. So my empirical test was if they didn't successfully wind down by early 2009, then it would be time to cut our losses and admit failure and withdraw instead of just sending in more good money after bad and wasting more infinitely valuable human lives. However, as you know, US troops are still in Afghanistan and Iraq. So clearly, by that empirical test, those occupations also failed miserably. And then in late 2009, I saw the collateral murder video that was released by WikiLeaks through the large information leak that was made possible by Chelsea Men. And that video really shook me because it dispelled any illusions I had about American moral exceptionalism in war. That's not to say that the American military is uniquely horrible in some way. It's just that there could no longer be any pretense that the American military was immune from committing the kinds of atrocities that have been ubiquitously committed by all armies throughout human history. And that's not to say most soldiers are evil people or ill-intentioned people, quite the contrary. But you are going to have those bad apples. You are going to have people who not only kill innocents and regret it or try to justify it as unfortunate but necessary collateral damage. You are going to have some people who gleefully rejoice at the murder of innocents. And when you have a war, that behavior is going to be enabled. And in some respects, it's going to be unstoppable. And that is a type of moral transgression that I could never bring myself to tolerate. So that brings up a key question in this entire discussion, the question of intention versus reality. What does war actually accomplish as opposed to what it is desired that war accomplished? Common justifications for wars are manyfold. They include retaliation against aggression, deposition of evil regimes, justified claim to a territory or resources or a perceived justified claim, or retribution for past wrongs, whether real or subjectively perceived. Yet, for all of those abstract justifications that some people can articulate, the actual consequences of war are concrete suffering. And indeed, in practice, wars are fought among innocent young people to fulfill the geopolitical fantasies of a small group of deluded old people, certainly not the vast majority of old people who are just as powerless as the young people, but a few who are in the political elite who have the ability to send hundreds of thousands or millions of young people to their deaths. And the tragic part of it is the combatants in a war, on opposite sides, might have been good friends in any other context. There's no reason why a random young person from the United States shouldn't be friend of random young person from Syria, or Afghanistan, or Iraq. And it's a sheer tragedy that war forces them to shoot at one another. And also, civilians on both sides of a war suffer. Even if they avoid the most direct consequences like a war destroying their neighborhoods, or depriving them of their relatives, they still have to sacrifice resources that rightfully should belong to them. We will be bearing the economic burdens of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations for decades to come. And war is an immense hindrance to the material progress of human civilization. All of those roads and bridges that get destroyed, all of those habitable buildings that are no longer habitable factories that can no longer produce goods for human beings to enjoy. What art is not created because of a war, what scientific research is not conducted because a war is underway. How far back in time would you like to be taken because a war destroys your immediate surroundings? It could be 50 years, it could be 100 years or more. An entire city is leveled to the ground and people in that area have to start over, rebuilding that city. That could take decades or centuries for that area to return to its former prominence and vibrancy. So the innocent suffer most in war. In the meantime, the politicians are seldom themselves adversely affected. Often they're even benefited as in a time of crisis they impostors, the champions of the people rally them to their side, say that they are advancing some great cause or protecting some great ideal. Wars ostensibly are a response to transgressions by national leaders like Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad. But in practice, they aren't the very people whom those leaders also oppress. Think about ordinary Iraqi civilians or ordinary Syrian civilians. They probably suffered as much from the US occupations and US military interventions as they did from the tyrannies of Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad. And I think a fairer way, a more justified way if two national leaders have a problem with one another is to have them fight it out personally or if they fear an imbalance of physical strength, well, perhaps Donald Trump shouldn't be in the same ring with Bashar al-Assad. I don't think that would end very well. They could designate champions to essentially contest whatever issues are at stake and leave the ordinary civilian population out of it. I think from a standpoint of moral justice, there should be ways for oppressive regimes to get their comeuppance, but war is a terrible way of achieving that. I even think economic sanctions are a terrible way of achieving that because they again aren't the ordinary people who also suffer from those regimes. So eliminating evil regimes is not a question of war. It's not a matter among peoples or countries. Probably the best way is to facilitate general civilizational progress, economic and philosophical progress that leaves the people in those areas to themselves to post those regimes. And furthermore, I would say it's any person's right to defend their own lives and their own property if some Syrian individual whose family had been murdered by Bashar al-Assad decided to assassinate him, I wouldn't terribly mind, but it is not the job of the U.S. government or the U.S. military to undertake that type of effort. Desiderius Erasmus was a great late 15th century, early 16th century Renaissance humanist philosopher and he wrote an excellent essay that I would recommend to you called Anti-Polymus or the Plea of Reason, Religion and Humanity Against War. I'd like to read an excerpt from this essay though. I do encourage you to locate it online. It's freely available and it is quite affecting prose. Erasmus wrote, pieces at once the mother and the nurse of all that is good for man. War, on a sudden and at once stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals. Peace shines upon human affairs like the vernal sun. The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom. The cattle are fed upon a thousand hills. New buildings arise, riches flow, pleasures smile. Humanity and charity increase. Arts and manufacturers feel the genial warmth of encouragement and the gains of the poor are more plentiful. But no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower than what a deluge of miseries and misfortunes sees us inundates and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action. The flocks are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husbandment butchered, villas and villages burnt, cities and states that have been ages rising to their flourishing state subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war. So much easier is the task of doing harm than of doing good, of destroying, than of building up. And when I read these words, I think not much has changed conceptually about the harms of war. Perhaps the technology of war is even more destructive today on an even more massive scale. But what Erasmus wrote about is universally true about war. It's true about every war. And if you think about how much easier it is to destroy than to build up, think of Aleppo and Syria, which for millennia was a cultural center, a center of arts, a center of commerce. And now it's a smoldering ruin because of war. There are no good sides in a war. There are no good sides in the conflict in Syria. And I would caution anyone against the temptation to try to abstractly justify a war because war is concrete suffering. And it's concrete suffering that can be illustrated in concrete figures. Even as far back as March 2013, the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University estimated the cost of the Iraq War up to that point to be $1.7 trillion. They also estimated that by 2053, if you consider all of the ongoing costs, including the costs, for instance, of medical care rehabilitation for the veterans that were affected, those costs would rise to $6 trillion. Now, on the other hand, in Mountain View, California, there is a bio gerontologist named Aubrey DeGray who has an initiative called SENSE, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Cinescence. And he has essentially identified the seven principal causes of damage to human cells that accumulates over time with biological age. He has stated publicly that if he were to receive between $30 to $100 million of funding per year for the next 20 years, he would have about a 50% probability of achieving what is called longevity escape velocity, where in the future, because of medical advances, life expectancies will advance by more than one year with each year that passes. So for, let's take that $100 million estimate, the upper end of his range, multiplied by 20 years, you have $2 billion, $2 billion to have a 50% chance of achieving potentially indefinite lifespans versus $6 trillion, which is what the United States is going to incur in terms of the costs of the Iraq war. For one 3,000 of the costs of a single war, we could be extending human lifespans indefinitely rather than needlessly destroying human lives. That is the absurdity of war, and that is the absurdity of the misdirection of resources that war implies. And there are so many other better priorities, biomedical research of all sorts, curing diseases, enabling better prosthetics, space colonization. The cost of that would be in the many billions of dollars rather than millions of dollars, but still a lot lower than the Iraq war ended up costing. Domestic infrastructure, in many areas of the country we do have failing roads and bridges. Wouldn't it be better to fix that, to provide something useful for people to employ in their day to day lives rather than destroying infrastructure far away? Autonomous and electric vehicles, developing more of those could save tens of thousands of lives per year in the United States alone, that are lost due to human error causing automobile crashes. And electric vehicles, as Professor Woody pointed out, could reduce the United States dependence on foreign oil and might reduce the incentive to engage in future foreign occupations. 3D printing technologies, which could create a wide array of goods from everyday consumer goods from say a tabletop 3D printer to even entire houses. There are startups in various countries now that are experimenting and have successfully been able to create prototypes of 3D printed housing. Why not invest in building up rather than destroying? I would say the best policy solution going forward would be to institute major cuts to defense spending, use the resulting savings to pay off the national debt. After that, tax rates could be lowered dramatically. All those resources that are being wasted in a war right now could be returned to the people who could use it to catalyze economic and technological progress. And I'll also note with regard to Syria in particular, because this is a looming conflict. We do not know how exactly President Trump is going to react when he pursues the next provocation from any of the many sides in that conflict. There are no good sides. It's true Bashar al-Assad is a murderer, irrespective of whether he is responsible for one particular chemical attack or conventional attack. He has the blood of a lot of innocent civilians on his hands. But the same can be said of the al-Nusra Front, which is an al-Qaeda affiliated group, certainly of ISIS, and of the so-called Free Syrian Army, which is somewhere between a myth and an agglomeration of ragtag warlord groups that appropriate that label in order to get funding from the United States and other Western governments. But look up the Free Syrian Army on Wikipedia, because there's a nice section there about atrocities committed by that group or in the name of that group. For instance, on March 20, 2012, Human Rights Watch issued an open letter to the Syrian opposition, including the Free Syrian Army, accusing them of carrying out kidnappings, torture, and executions, and calling on them to halt these unlawful practices. The FSA has been accused of summarily executing numerous prisoners, whom it claimed to be government soldiers, a rebel commander in Damascus had said that over the months, his unit had executed perhaps 150 people, whom his military council found to be informers. That's some due process for you. Also, the Dawood battalion operating in the Jabal al-Zawiyah area has reportedly used captured soldiers in proxy bombings. This involved tying the captured soldier into a car, loaded with explosives, and forcing him to drive to an army checkpoint where the explosives would be remotely detonated. So in essence, the United States and other Western governments have been funding these military groups that use involuntary suicide bombers to accomplish their political objectives. And this is being done at great geopolitical risk, at risk of escalating tensions with Russia, because the Putin regime, for whatever reasons, might allied itself with different sides. Such an escalation of tensions is dangerous from the standpoint of the survival of human civilization because a misunderstanding in a moment of mutual suspicion and heightened conflict could lead to nuclear war. It has happened many times during the Cold War that humankind was on the brink of a nuclear confrontation. And it was only because cooler heads were able to prevail and make a decision to draw back from the brink of that that we are still alive today. And I wonder, though, in the future, will there be cooler heads to make that decision or will a different decision be made? So with that being said, I will be open for questions. One interesting question that I'd be happy to take if anybody wants to ask me this is, what about the extreme case if our country is invaded by a foreign army, if like in that video you saw, there are foreign troops in Texas? Is war justified then? But I'll leave it to you to decide how you want to approach this subject and what you would like to inquire about. Yes? Yes, so I'm going to take a sort of, so do you think World War II would be just a ballroom because those two countries didn't have the capability to take over essentially the entire world? Okay, so. And those were clearly evil regimes. I killed millions of people. Absolutely, they were clearly evil regimes. I would say they were the product of prior ill-fated interventionist decisions as well. Wanted to think about what might have happened had Woodrow Wilson kept his promise to keep the U.S. out of World War I and then perhaps World War I would have drawn to a stalemate. There would have been no treaty of Versailles. There would have been some more equitable settlement. Perhaps there wouldn't have been the kinds of grounds for resentment in Germany that got Hitler into power. But suffice it to say, from any given standpoint we have to make a decision based on how history has turned out up to that time. And I would say in the extreme case if there's an invasion by a foreign army if there are literally troops marching down the streets pillaging, taking lives, destroying property. Self-defense is a right. If somebody shows up at your doorstep and says we want to take everything that belongs to you you do have the moral right to defend yourself. I just question whether it should be done through a centralized organization that forces people to die on command. And there could be a resistance that doesn't rise to the level of war. The government of the occupied country could target the leaders. I would have no problem with the occupied United States the government let's say organizing a team of commandos to try to infiltrate Adolf Hitler's compound and assassinate him. In fact, there were several failed assassination attempts on Hitler's life among the German high command. So it was clearly at least a conceivable tactic to deploy. And furthermore, even in the case of an invasion the rank and file troops are typically just following orders. There are a few sadists among them and if they do try to interfere with your life of course you'd have the right to fight back. However, the real problem wears a suit or a uniform and sits in a palace somewhere. So my suggestion is keep civilians out of inter-governmental squabbles altogether. Even if you're organizing a resistance leave the resistance to the professionals. People would have the right to band together in self defense. But it wouldn't be this concept of a war between nations or between peoples. One of the greatest tragedies of modernity is this concept of total war. The idea that it's not just King X versus King Y trying to battle it out for territory or prestige or whatnot. It's the German people versus the French people and somehow their patriotism, their pride, their national identity are entangled in this. And they don't have to be. There's this kind of downward spiral where people try to use escalating means in order to win at all costs. So in a sense I'm advocating a return to more of a code of rules based engagement to kind of restraint where you could have two champions have a stylized fight and in our age it might even be an electronic combat of some sort and all sides agree this resolves the geopolitical crisis. We will go no further. We will actually ask the demands of the winning side. Now can there be enough restraint and enough recognition that that is a more optimal outcome than using any means necessary? That's an open question but I think that's why we're having these discussions. And I would say also an important consideration is only very few people can actually fight well. Most of us are quite terrible at it and armies turn people into cannon fodder in essence. They turn people into disposable ponds that go somewhere on the battlefield on demand and might have to be sacrificed for a kind of larger tactical or strategic purpose. That's not right even if you're in your own country defending what you perceive to be your homeland or your community. Why should you be in a position where you're risking your very well-being if you value your life? Of course you should try to preserve that mission value but not at the cost of itself. So that would be my answer. It's not a clear cut answer in the sense that I'm not going to tell you how to defeat Hitler if he were to invade this country. But I think if we figured that out we wouldn't be having that discussion. But my broader answer is there are better ways and worse ways of doing that. So what I asked Woody was how do you get people to kind of understand this threat abroad when it's not here. But it is here in a way because we've actually had to give up many civil liberties due to the war in the Middle East and always through wars we've had in history. So I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, kind of shed some light on liberties that we have lost and how would the government become more involved in our lives because of the war? I remember what it was like to fly on an airplane before September 11th, 2001. I remember that it was a relatively unobtrusive experience from the standpoint of, yeah, you went through a metal detector, somebody would put your bags through an X-ray machine. Generally, there was nothing else and no questions asked, no scrutiny of you as a potential criminal or terrorist, which is from a statistical standpoint, quite ridiculous to screen everybody when a small minority of people are even remotely inclined toward such criminal acts. And I also remember an era before mass surveillance of everybody's communications, before the chilling effect that that has had when essentially if you digest the disclosures that Edward Snowden made in 2013, every email you send, everything you type into most search engines, every social media post you make, you should really structure it with a little inkling in the back of your head that the NSA could be somehow processing it, maybe not directly looking at what you wrote, but feeding it through some sort of algorithm and if it generates the wrong frequency of keywords that is somehow associated with the keywords used by nefarious individuals, you might be flagged for further scrutiny. That can have a chilling effect. That can have a chilling effect on what you choose to do with your life on what you choose to disclose to other people. And I would say the mentality that exists is very disproportionate in terms of it's focus on the real risk. So you are a lot lightlier to die in an automobile accident and far lightlier to die of say cancer or heart disease or if you live long enough, Alzheimer's disease, then you are of a terrorist attack. You're a lightlier to die of a lightning strike or falling out of your bed in the morning than you are of a terrorist attack. Yet because of all of this incessant focus on the crimes of a small number of people, I would say the damage those crimes have done to the mindset of Americans and how they approach everyday life has been even out of proportion with the damage that those crimes have done to actual American lives. When people say essentially we cannot sacrifice our liberties or else the terrorists have won, that is essentially what I believe has happened, unfortunately, to America's civic culture. There's a kind of fortress mentality now in essence that anybody potentially could be a terrorist unless we subject them to extreme betting and let's say taking the situation of Syrian refugees. If there is even the remotest probability that one out of 100,000 Syrian refugees could do something nefarious if we allow them into the country, we should just ban them. We should prevent them from entering the United States altogether even if they've been vetted for months, even if they've already obtained visas in many cases, even if they've just assisted American troops in overseas conflicts. And that type of truly paranoid mentality makes no sense to me, but I would say the climate of war abroad creates this ideal of perpetual war footage. And I don't know when it's going to proceed, but I think it's time to start working on individual minds to shift away from that mentality. Yes. I was going to say I brought up Chelsea Manning, and so did you, I don't think everybody knows what that was, so I don't have you on to elaborate on. So Chelsea Manning used to be Bradley Manning at the time and she was a private in essentially US intelligence services. She had contact with information, classified information, including video footage about Afghanistan and Iraq in particular. And a lot of the major WikiLeaks releases, circa late 2009 and 2010, were from Bradley and later Chelsea Manning. And it was interesting because Chelsea Manning had a conversation, an online chat with a hacker named Adrienne Lamo, and she essentially was saying, well, how would you feel if you knew about all of these horrible atrocities and you couldn't say anything? What would you do? And in the course of that conversation, she confessed that she was the leaker to WikiLeaks. And Adrienne Lamo ended up essentially being a mole for the US government, so essentially they had her confession, she was from the United States, she was court-martialed, and she was essentially sentenced to indefinite detention until Obama pardoned her shortly before leaving the office. And the collateral murder video that I'm referring to was a particular incident during the latter years of the Iraq occupation, I think it happened circa 2007, where essentially there were American pilots overlooking a scene where there were several journalists and they were carrying cameras with them and they thought, ah, there are some militants, let's kill them, let's shoot them, and they were laughing about it. And then a van came by to try to help these people as they were struggling. And that van essentially had a father who was taking his children to school. They shot at that van too, and they were gleeful about it, and they killed and injured many people in that van. So that video, it was a direct display of how let's say not every soldier on the battlefield even when fighting for an ostensibly just cause is going to have complete restraint and complete righteous motives. I really did think for awhile that American troops were bound by strict rules of engagement and those rules of engagement were you don't intentionally kill civilians, at least not without knowing exactly what it is you're doing, exactly who the targets are, and saying that you regret the collateral damage. Of course that was a rather naive view of mine at the time, but I think the collateral murder video really drove home the point that there is no such thing as American exceptionalism before. If I just like to comment, you guys can all watch that video on YouTube at any time, and no explanation really does it justice until you see it with your own eyes, the kind of carelessness they used to murder innocent civilians, and I mean, careless, and then remorseless. And even if they were hurting soldiers, they acted like they were just squashing bugs, and it was, it's really disturbing. I think everybody should watch it just to kind of understand that. Thank you. Certainly. Yes. I just wanted to make an opinion about intervention in regards to humanitarian crises, and the one in particular I'm thinking of is the Ugandan genocide, and famously they had a lack of intervention, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Well, I wonder to what extent military intervention in particular could have prevented those deaths, I mean, admittedly, it's a very tragic crisis, and there are circumstances when ethnic or nationalist hatreds escalate to the point where there's just this widespread slaughter and chaos. I'm not sure what having a few troops on the ground could have done to thwart that. If you had 10 people with guns, they might have been overwhelmed. If you had 100,000 people with guns, they might have been doing the overwhelming, and in the chaos of it all, you might have crushed many innocent people as well as perhaps the potential or actual perpetrators of the violence. So again, these occupations bring unintended consequences. And one could give examples of particular circumstances in which soldiers occupying the foreign country have done some good, like saved some civilians from gunfire by insurgents, or even on a macro scale toppled the dictator. I just don't think on balance that ever justifies the loss of innocent lives and the completely counterproductive consequences that set back human civilization. Now, I'm all for humanitarian assistance, peaceful humanitarian assistance. It's just there are many better ways of doing it than sending in men with guns. Now, one very libertarian policy would be open borders. If people want to flee from those kinds of genocides, those kinds of oppressive regimes, let them in, especially if they want to live peacefully. They specifically want to escape that type of horror. There should be some sympathy with that. If they're thinking the way we're thinking, they want to be here. They want to be productive. They want to contribute to our way of life. That's a great deal. Yes. Specific things. First of all, the open borders would mean that all wars are where things are to be taken, which would mean that countries with assets would be ground zero, which wouldn't be so good for us. That's what's going to end up with. The Second World War is a terrible example of anything without a whole lot of research, because what people who were there and people who lived through it and people who were around shortly after that, what they knew of it, which admittedly was missed an awful lot of the story, is completely different than what we've been brainwashed ever since. Even all the documentation we have of photographs and all that and mislabeled different victims where there were creative processes that started completely after the war supposedly ended. And again, they were different victims. It's worth studying, because the parallels between Central Europe and America today are beyond terrifying. We spent more than an hour and a half saying the war was bad. And this was an international conclusion that everybody agreed at least since the end of the First World War, as a matter of fact, war was outlawed since then. But what's happened since then is basically now we have a world where the people who want war have to stage false flags to get it. They have to stage false flags to get everything all the social controls they want from the countries. The, as a matter of fact, the world cannot be governed by the people who are governing it now without false flags. The first time that it was obvious that, no, it could never be ruled that way again, was at the World Trade Conference in Seattle in 1999. This was staged in a middle of a country where the middle class, at that point, had already been overwhelmingly just disemboweled. And people were unhappy about that. They had 40,000 protesters who shut down the whole city. And the delegates couldn't get in the building. It was totally ungovernable from the point of view of the ruling elite. And shortly after that, we had 9-11 to take away the freedom to protest. So there was this necessity to intimidate, to intimidate the population. It became the first pillar of necessity of false flags. The second pillar of necessity of false flags is to defend the capital dollar at all costs. You can see the consequences of that. The third absolute pillar of a necessity for to govern the world by false flags is this concept of the increasing burden of government and democracy, in order to corral public opinion to ever greater costs and burdens and pretexts for governing everything. And pretexts, basically, it's a lie that came out of law enforcement that, OK, you're questioning someone. You want to get information out of them. You want to give them a hard time. You just want to intimidate them. So you make up a story of how they did something terrible. And then you challenge them with it. First, you say they're lying. And if the proofs are not lying, then you say that they're off. Or first you say they're doing something criminal. And if the proofs are not doing something criminal, then they must be lying. And if they're not lying, they must be crazy. And basically, pretty much all our societies run that way right now. There are only, we talk about old people sending young people to war. But you think about all the older people you know, older people, the people. From where we were to begin with, the older you get, the more reticent you tend to be towards your own. There's a small group of people who are basically at war with the rest of humanity. They're born into it. It's a large part of it. It's just absolutely hatred. And we're serving our purposes. But again, the only way that we can serve our purposes is through false pretexts. So the idea is not discovering a war is bad. The idea is discovering how do we get around the false plagues. Well, you mentioned many points. I'll respond to a few of them. I'll take the brief ones first. Open borders doesn't mean letting in criminals or militant groups. It's letting in anybody who is peaceful. And it doesn't preclude domestic law enforcement life. Today, a police officer can arrest you if you commit theft or if you commit murder or if you commit a white collar crime. That would apply to any immigrant who comes into this country for any reason with any security system or no security system at all at the border. With regard to World War II, I agree that there was a lot of propaganda at that time within the Allied countries as well. In fact, Franklin Roosevelt had to institute policies to suppress domestic dissent modeled after the propaganda initiatives of Woodrow Wilson, whom he greatly admired. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I. And he wanted to emulate that propaganda apparatus even during times of peace during a new deal. And he certainly deployed that in World War II as well. I do think Hitler was a lot worse than Roosevelt. And I do think that somebody would have had a right of self-defense against Hitler. Now, my family comes from Belarus. Belarus is formerly a Soviet country. It was on the front lines of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. And essentially a quarter of the population was destroyed by Hitler's invasion. But the impression high command had essentially a cannon fodder-oriented strategy. Send waves and waves of people at the German army and get them mowed down. But enough of them will make it and enough of them will overwhelm the Germans. And as a result of this recklessness, this absolute recklessness, they probably sacrificed more of their own people than Hitler could have deliberately intended to kill. So if I were in that position, if I were a resident of Belarus or Western Russia in 1941 or 1942, my choice would have been to flee to Siberia then if I could have found a way to escape the very severe retribution that the Stalinist regime had in place for alleged deserters or even people who wavered Stalin actually deployed men with machine guns at the back of the lines of Russian troops that were sent forward to attack the German positions. Just in a frontal attack, but if the troops fled, they'd be mowed down by the machine guns from the rear. So that's a really terrible place to be. That's not you standing up for your homeland and somehow fighting off an aggressor and a justified war. That's you being coerced to die in command. So that's one reason why I don't think that resistance strategy is effective at all. Now what you said with regard to false flags, there have been some of them in US history that are sinking of the USS Maine. At least, I think it happened as an accident based on all of the historical evidence but the framing of the Spanish government that led to the Spanish-American War of 1898 was a deliberate, you could say, false flag attempt. A lot of the time, these kinds of events are just convenient justifications. In my view, the September 11th terrorist attacks were definitely real terrorist acts perpetrated by al-Qaeda. There's no question about that. Were they a convenient justification for certain policies that would have been implemented anyway if there were another sufficiently, let's say, momentous event to justify them? Probably. But I would also say governments don't have as tight of a control as any theory of a top-down conspiracy would imply. We've seen in the recent election, there is, let's say, no better connected political establishment than the one that backed Hillary Clinton for president and yet she lost. She lost despite having an overwhelming fundraising advantage over Donald Trump and I am by no means a fan or supporter of Trump either because I think Trump plays on some of the worst tendencies in the American public but it shows that an elite group of politicians doesn't really have as much control as they think they do. They have certain levers they can push but the world is a lot more complex than that and that gives us an opening. It gives us an opening with the ordinary tools that we have as ordinary people to try to change public opinion and with that try to change policy and sometimes you have genuinely decent people in power. Eisenhower is a good example. I don't agree with all of his policies but I think he was of a sober mind with regard to war probably because he saw it in great detail and he understood what war entailed and he tried to warn the American people against it. So, all right. Just so you know, we're going a bit over so that we can maybe do two more and then I want to hear from people about this book and then you'll take questions after. Yeah, absolutely. There was a question in the back. Did you still have a question? I was just, yeah, you. Yeah, it was over the answer with, I was afraid to our civil liberties as well is that it's justifiable by all these politicians in power that, hey, there's this terrorist attack happening and obviously our civil liberties must be sacrificed for the greater good and again, I was just gonna say like that and then all the time it's back to, what's it saying that you always say, good intentions leave? Oh yeah, the road to hell is paid off. Right. So that was just basically what I was gonna add. I certainly agree with that now. You had a question. So open borders, wouldn't that not be such a good thing? So I mean, you're letting people in for safety but what about the people who can't afford to come over? So shouldn't we help them over in their country to make it a safer place for them instead of accepting them into the United States? Well, I would say in many cases it is difficult if not impossible to achieve some sort of universal abstract conception of justice. Ideally we'd want all people to have clean drinking water yet. There's a large fraction, already a minority but a large fraction of the world's population that doesn't have access to that and there's a lot of historical path dependency that has to go into that but I'm very skeptical of attempts to centrally re-engineer that. Now it's one thing to say if you know of a particular family in Syria or in Sudan or in the Congo that needs help and you want to send your resources to help them or sponsor an aid organization that wants to do that or even sponsor their arrival in the United States for whatever reason maybe they have skills and maybe you're an employer who wants to hire them. That's one way to exercise that kind of benevolence but it needs to be done on a case-by-case basis by the people who know as the great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek would put it the circumstances of time and place because if you try to impose an overarching centralized framework on that there are bound to be unintended consequences and some people's lives may be ruined. Again, if you're focused on something particular if you think that deploying 100,000 man strong army is going to help family X from Syria escape being slaughtered you might be right but what about families YZ, A, B, C, D, E and F what will happen to that? So I think with that kind of caution in mind more targeted efforts by individuals or voluntary groups to help other individuals. Yes, you had a question. What would you say, sorry, what responsibility do you think mass media bears for this current crisis that we're involved in? I would say mass media often, let's say, are lazy and they can regurgitate talking points from anybody with an agenda and it could be a situation where even they want to seem impartial so they say, well, side X says this but side Y says something different and there could be an overwhelming weight of evidence in favor of one side or the other or neither side but there's this perception oh, we need to give equal time to everybody so you could envision a situation where the proponents of foreign intervention X bring up this whole host of reasons and then there are some who oppose it and we see that coverage say in the wake of the Second Gulf War where the media were saying, well, Colin Powell just gave this speech before the United Nations where he laid out the case that the regime is now saying has all these weapons of mass destruction and some people disagree, there are protests in the streets they say no blood for oil, et cetera but there's this temptation to just regurgitate rather than critically about it rather than say, okay, this is what the evidence actually suggests in this although Colin Powell made this case there are reasons to be skeptical if the media had done that I think we might be in a different place right now with regard to the Iraq occupation I was wondering because America, majority of America is a philosophy on foreign policy was isolationism I was wondering whether the change from isolationism to a more interventionist foreign policy was in part due to presidents or leaders lacking the experiences of actually being in the war I mean you have earlier in American history in 19th century, those people like Washington, Andrew Jackson and Tyler who actually had experiences fighting for the United States and they do their atrocities more but then you get into early 20th century where you have as many presidents who were experienced or do their atrocities quite well into 20th century you have people who absolutely don't experience it more so I want to give you an opinion about that It's interesting that you bring that up because there's at least a strong correlation with regard to the claim that you're trying to make even some of the earlier wars in American history say the groundwork for the war of 1812 even though it happened during the term of James Madison was most likely laid by of all people Thomas Jefferson really should have known better especially when he imposed his embargo of 1807 which essentially prohibited the United States from trading with the rest of the world talked about extreme protectionism by which any subsequent trade policy pales in comparison. Some of the most cataclysmic wars in American history were indeed fought during the 10 years of civilian president, Saber Ham Lincoln was an attorney. Franklin Roosevelt was a career politician in essence but upper class elite New Yorker Lyndon Johnson was also a career politician. On the other hand, yes you can think of military generals who became presidents who generally didn't wage destructive wars. Dwight Eisenhower ended the Korean War for instance and there are many other, the Ulysses Grant didn't start any wars. Zachary Taylor didn't start any wars though he was a hero of the Mexican War. So there's a correlation, I don't think that's a necessity though for an individual to have direct experience in war in order to understand that war is a war. As the great French 19th century classical economist Frederick Bastia wrote there are two great teachers in life, experience and foresight and one would hope to have the benefit of the latter because the former is a lot harsher. So I would say probably the ex-military presidents learned a lot from their experience but we would hope that in the future especially if we achieve our goal of making wars a lot less frequent those future presidents will have the benefit of foresight as well as the lessons of history. I want to make one quick comment. The, you studied a lot of stuff going on and humanitarian issues and they're recommendable and I know you absolutely mean really well and all that, you're still scratching the surface and because of that if I was to refute all the things you said in response just to explain what it was would take days or weeks but you said one thing that got real close to reality and I just wanted to respond to that and that was when you were talking about the bad lines going through Belarus. The Soviet army always with two armies. There was the Slavic people which include basically the population of Belarus which is the front line army and there's a behind the line army and the people who actually ran the Soviet were not Slavs. The, every, from their point of view, from the point of view of Stalin and his command all the civilian population including women and children were in the same category as the front line army and he fought the war accordingly. The scary thing is those same people were making those decisions and running things that way we're also key decision makers in the Nazi government and the other European governments that were at war and the same group is in control of our government now leading to over and over again in one form or another the same results. Well, I would disagree that they're the same group that they're affiliated in some ways. I'd say there's a dynamic of power whereby the worst tend to rise to the top especially in more authoritarian structures, instructors that involve greater regimentation, a greater degree of government power over the economy and over individual lives and it's essentially a vicious form of competition where the more brutal you are, the fewer scruples you have, the more readily you eliminate your rivals, the likelier it is that you rise to the top. That's why in every major revolution, the revolution might start with idealists who genuinely want a better world and want to overthrow a suboptimal regime replace it with something more just but in completely let's say disturbing the conventional restraints that exist in that society, the rules of engagement by which you can say I'll designate a champion, you designate a champion, they'll fight it out or they'll talk it out and that will be the solution to our problems. If those norms are eroded, you get this progressive increase in the lengths to which people are willing to go, the amount of violence they're willing to increase until the worst of the worst gets to the top and that's your Hitler or your Stalin. I don't think we're there yet in the United States for all of the absurdities and sometimes the horrific suggestions that Donald Trump has made, I don't think he's nearly at that level yet and there are still a lot of civil institutions of American society as well as other branches of government that can keep him in check and ourselves, we can still speak out and we public opinion are also a societal norm that can prevent the erosion of other norms so that would be my response to you. Let's give a round of applause. Thank you so much for coming in, for all of our skaters, Woody's not here right now, but Andrew's still here, so one more for you. This is mostly Young Americans for Liberty here.