Transcription
At no point in history, I'm saying at no point in civilized history have humans up until today have had have been put in a situation where you inflict risks on others without paying the price. In other words, if you want to make the money, that's fine. You got to own your own risk. So that's how civilization has been structured since Habami. If an engineer puts a building, he can't walk away and let the building collapse and harm others without being, you know, responsible, having liability. Today you have a class of people who don't own their own risk. They inflict risk on others without paying the price.
So just imagine if on a highway you had drivers that bad drivers surviving accidents. So, but you know, it would be it would lead to a much higher rate of of casualties on the highway. Maybe even would lead to some kind of inverse selection over the long run where the bad drivers dominate. But in fact, bad drivers are more exposed or at least as exposed as good drivers and they tend to die when they inflict risk on others. So, they purged out of the system. They're filtered out of the system.
And when it comes to war, and I'm sure you're itching to talk about wararmongers and wars, wararmongers existed in history and have existed in history. But the condition was that the wararmonger takes more risks than others. The most important thing is we need to get smart about rejecting this wararmongering mentality. You know, I'm I visit Britain a lot of of the time. People stop me in the street. They're worried that Russia is going to invade the settlers. I mean this is just delusionary stuff which happens to be particularly lucrative for particular weapons manufacturers and dealers.
What happened in Minab with the 100 plus school children that were taken out by a tomahawk missile sent there by a combination of palunteers programs and anthropics cla you can say that this is uh an accident that actually happen in war. Yeah maybe. But only the other day the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodil he smiles so awkwardly in front of the camera and what he's saying is that this was not a big issue for them you know the death of these school children in the grander scheme of things it was rather minor and essentially is preparing us for far worse atrocities involving their technologies.
The the idea of skin games is actually very practical. My book is what society should we be designing and society closer to a federalism that we had in America where the job of the federal government is to to make sure nobody attacks the country not to just try to correct do regime change elsewhere or imagine enemies and keep creating enemies to keep uh the the the arms you know merchants in business. So the uh and the arms maker in business and we thought that Trump was going to correct that. I also spoke about interventionistas in in the book by saying they got to have a mental illness because everything they've done has failed. But because they're not punished, they're in an air conditioning office in Washington because they're not punished by their mistakes. Well, of course, someone else is paying the price. So they keep doing the same thing. and and I spoke about these all these neocons there got to be a mental illness to think that they're going to get it right next time. The state department people in general uh the the class of uh um uh bureaucrats here in France and Brussels and the UK um who effectively cause more uh trouble. They don't understand complex system and I explain how they don't understand that things are not linear in the real world that actions have consequences. you remove someone you may you know you may have uh uh uh adverse uh effects and and sec secondary effect will have their own secondary effect so it's get very complicated so there's things you shouldn't mess with quite understand that and what they also don't understand is the mechanism of peace is not done by talking at the top we're not the it's not the the congress of Vienna uh 200 years later the world is more complex peace is done at the bottom between people negotiating.
For a while now, the spectre of militarism has been haunting Europe and the United Kingdom, not to mention Japan, Australia, even Canada and Britain, the Labor government, the Social Democrats across the Europe, especially in Germany, the German Greens, let's not forget them, they're all hankering for more defense spending. And uh it seems to me that they are preparing their voters for social spending cuts in order to boost their military budget under the circumstances of serious fiscal stress. Now the purported reason for this rush to turn plows into tanks to sacrifice butter for more guns is the alleged new military threats from and here I'm quoting the various sources Russia, Iran and China. With the ample help of the media, it seems to me that majorities of European peoples uh peoples who have been stressed by economic hardship uh increasingly in the last 15 years or so, well, majorities have been cowed into acquiescing to a torrent of cash either being borrowed as in Germany or diverted from social spending to buy weapon systems and employ more soldiers. I consider this to be a sad, dangerous and insidious development that the rational people like us must challenge, debunk and yes reverse.
Now my first point is that the threat is grossly exaggerated. My second point is that military power can and should be improved without spending more on defense. That is by using existing budgets better without removing the pitiful support suffering people in Britain and in Europe are now receiving. And my third point is that uh military spending will not boost our economies. In other words, military genianism will not work in Europe unless of course we actively engineer a destructive unprovoked war. Uh it is utterly absurd bordering on derangement for Europeans to fear China a country that has not entered into war for 40 years and whose only real ambition is to sell us huge quantities of electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, robots, whatever. Now Iran, whatever you may think of the Islamic Republic since its inception in 1971, the has invaded no one even though the United States had it stood. You remember Saddam Hussein when he was a stoge of Washington? Well, he invaded Iran in 1980. Not to mention the most recent illegal war by Trump on Iran. Fearing Iran is another example of European self-imposed panic and irrationality.
Now, Russia, Russia is a much more interesting case because it's a country that has indeed demonstrated a readiness to invade the European country Ukraine against the letter and against the spirit of international law. There's no doubt about that. But nevertheless, Russia lacks the capacity to threaten Europe, including the Baltic states, whose insecurity is heightened by an escalating paroxism. That's how I see the political classes of the Baltic countries. There is this paroxism of anti-Russian fervor which in the end is not good even for their own security. Now of course I can hear already scream saying what are you going on about? Russia is about to take over Europe or at least the Baltic states. Well, you don't have to take my word for it that this is an exaggerated threat. General Alexis Ganovich, he's an American general. He's the top dog of the American military in NATO. uh he is the commander of NATO today. He said explicitly explicitly only the other day that Russia is not looking for a conflict. This is verbatim. He was asked about the possibility of a Russian attack on the Baltic states and he replied Russia understands that should they try something in the Baltic states they won't succeed because they know they won't succeed. That's him the general American general speaking. They won't take the risk on something like that. Okay.
Now that's the first point why it is an exaggerated threat. Second point, look, Europe is already paying an arm and a leg on defense. Between 2020 and 20 to25, Europe and Britain together spent around €2 trillion, about €2.4 trillion on defense. Now, if our militaries are resembles, it's not for lack of money. It is because we buy the wrong things and we have failed to cooperate across the continent. Turning for a moment to John Healey, the former defense minister who just resigned. He left for something like 5 billion that he needed. Did it not occur to him that the Ministry of Defense is wasting 12 billion every year on the Trident and so-called independent nuclear deterrent which is utterly useless.
First and foremost, it is not at all independent. The warheads are American. They have a kill switch that the White House can use to ensure that the British prime minister cannot use it, cannot cannot launch these weapons without the president's approval. So, you know, the United Kingdom spends 12 billion a year on effectively weapons that only benefit the United States when the United States wants them to be used. And don't get me going on the sheer hypocrisy of uh British politicians today claiming that they are planning to spend another 128 billion by 2032 on upgrading a trident. And they say that they need to do that because the United States can no longer be trusted. What? When that wall of money will be paid to the United States for United for American nukes, that won't work unless the White House authorizes their use.
And my third and last point, the madness of swapping butter for guns, social spending for military spending is underpaid by the desperate need to find at long last a growth model in the post 2008 Europe where growth, as we have seen, has disappeared, investment has disappeared, overwhelmed by the forces of stagnation. Especially now that in Trump's wake, the green transition and any green deal or green new deal has been ditched. Military Kenzianism is being lauded as a lastditch growth model. Now this is another paranoid delusion and it is founded on the presumption that the United Kingdom and the European Union can emulate American growth through the military-industrial complex. Now it can't unless we are prepared uh Britain and Europe to emulate what Americans do which is to have one war every one or two years. Already we know that military kising is not working. I'll refer uh our audience to a Financial Times report on the 12th of June in which and I quote Verbatim, "A storming rally in the European defense stocks has gone into reverse this year on concerns over how the continent will fund its military spending plans and as investors instead look to drone makers and companies more focused on modern high-tech warfare." So, the macroeconomic significance has just gone already. It's been admitted. So, we have these two illusions. first that Europe is facing a military threat, a clear and present danger. And second, that military can is going to help us grow again. They are not only wrong, they are detrimental to our mental health and they are also dangerous and capable even of conjuring up from the netherworld these apparitions that um are haunting their sleep and making them real.
So my whole idea here is the idea of court laws is people that own their own risk. If a corporation harms me, I should be able to sue that corporation, that entity. If now this is this idea is very foreign to what I call the class of IYI, intellectual idiots, we're call the bureaucrats because they think that they can teach us how to live and effectively they can inflict risk on us without bearing the consequences and only take credit for the good things. And they have the good intentions maybe but they don't know whether you know what the real effect is. And let me explain any system where people are judged by u appears rather than survival is a system that will blow up because it counters evolution. Academics give lip service to evolution. They want us to teach evolution at school and when it comes to themselves no they're selected by one another. So this is so bureaucrats in Washington are selected by other bureaucrats. So if you let restaurants, okay, be judged by by other restaurant owners, by peers rather than by their clients, you you see the quality of food would degrade. It' be like cafeteria food, I'm sure, in uh in uh in some Soviet small town. Okay. So but but but what happens in a system we live in is that people are so insulated from the consequences of their decision. You can't sue them. Okay. So and I took for example the Israeli Palestinian problem and I said that had we left had the rest of the world had left the Palestinians and the Israelis to negotiate and work things out they would have worked things out. The problem of all these people trying to help all these NOS's we don't know how they help. Mhm.
So the the the the way you do peace is and traditionally in that part of the world, the Levant and the Near East and the Middle East, all these three places, the the the the peace has always been obtained via commerce.
In the right. This is why you had communities. You had Armenians, you know, I grew up, you had Armenians, uh Christians, uh Marinite Christians, Greek Orthodox, Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim, and they all coexisted and and Jews all coexisted by doing business. Wonderful.
So, so the way you get peace is via business because there's something clean about money. All right? There's there's something clean about money because it's not zero sum. That's what people fail to