Not Enough Democracy: Afghanistan & Why We Lost the War.

this is august 19 2021 and i'm making
this video unexpectedly from a perspective because quite a few people wrote in to me expressing frankly that they felt some kind of way emotionally about it that they were reflecting on it intellectually that one way or another they were thinking about what the war in afghanistan meant looking back at the last 20 years and now looking ahead at the next 20 years also and i do kind of feel like it's my job even if it's only to share in your suffering to come on and offer somewhat more profound and useful reflections than what you can get from jimmy dore i have some degree of sympathy for people like jimmy dore but it's inevitable that i also feel some very real contempt for them and it's almost needless to say at a time like this you're gonna get absolutely nothing meaningful out of cnn fox news what you can get out of the mainstream media um in some ways they're kind of choking on their own past propaganda and wondering what what's the new propaganda message now how is it that they can present you know defeat as as victory and so on there's a mixture of very powerful confusing self-contradictory messages being put out when you think about it must be really hard to be a kid right now what if you're eight years old or 12 years old trying to understand this and if you're eight years old or 12 years old this war has been happening your whole life that's what happens before you were born that's right by the way i don't mean an eight or twelve-year-old in afghanistan that's an interesting question too how do you see this if you're 12 years old in afghanistan how do you see if you're eight years old or 12 years old in syria you know there were places around the world but even if you're just a kid growing up in you know the swamp in florida in the united states of america you know if you're a child right now it's probably much much more confusing than it would be for someone uh my own age so on and so forth so you know i'm happy to have the questions for the audience i'm happy once in a while they distract me so william mcgee and you were asking me if i saw the film footage of the tower the taliban celebrating their victory riding around on bumper cars if you watched my youtube channel not only have i seen that footage i've edited and presented it on my youtube channel come on how can you ask me if i've seen it it's on it's on about right now i'm sorry i don't mind this is part of the joy of live streaming i suppose doing a pre-recorded videos i get to respond to this of course i've seen it but yeah that's a particularly surreal moment of the taliban you know uh what what do you want them to do they don't drink alcohol they don't sleep with prostitutes they don't do the things other armies do when they celebrate a victory some of them go to amusement parks and they uh they ride on the bumper cars apparently apparently that's not the taliban celebrate their victory what are they going to do say more prayers say more prayers than usual it's anyway it's nice we're opening the video uh you know with this kind of affable relaxed way obviously it's a tremendously serious center so let me ask you two hypothetical questions just to situate this topic in all its due seriousness and as i said at the beginning i'm making this video now because quite a few people wrote to me asking me to make a video of this kind and for me at age 42 i know where they're coming from this was 20 years of my life it's 20 years of your life anyone is over 20. it's been 20 years of your life that have gone into this war in afghanistan even it's just been sitting back engaging in analysis and commentary on it it's been a huge part of all our lives so the first question i want you to ask yourself is what if this is the most significant political event of your lifetime i think anyone here would say what a tremendously depressing thought what if the way the united states of america bungled the war in afghanistan is the single most important thing in my century in the century in which i happen to be alive i think anyone who stops and reflects on it would now feel like whoa if that's true i should have paid much more attention to it i should have been much more involved i should have taken much more responsibility because this really matters and of course it matters of course it does i feel bad for kids if you're 12 years old or 15 years old you might not remember but you know there was a time when extraordinary rendition changed the way america was seen all around the world when the use of torture changed the way america was seen all around the world and you know in florida in the okapinoki swamp in florida you may have forgotten that let me tell you something in afghanistan they haven't forgotten in iraq they haven't forgotten in iran they haven't forgotten in syria like all around the world everyone else remembers the extent to which america morally discredited itself in this war even though there was tremendous sympathy support in the united states of america say from 2001 to 2003 the very beginning phase right after the september 11th text there was there was an almost unanimous feeling in the western world within america and western europe and so on that america was in a morally righteous position to wage war in afghanistan because of the terrorist attack on the twin towers in new york city and still love anyway i think i have to start by asking what if this is it what if for our generation this was our world war ii right what if this was the important war that your grandchildren are going to ask you well what did you do during the war grand dad what did you you know what if this was the momentous definitive occasion for our generation to change the history of the world and one we bungled it and two no offense but you didn't pay very much attention now what does that mean let's let's flesh that out what is what is not paying very much attention mean can any of you name a war hero from the the afghan war it's 20 year war it's where you are can you name a general or a commander you know on the american side presumably you know the italians were there the british were there all these armies there can you name a general or a commander who did something heroic can you describe to me one battle from this war no i i can describe to you battles from the war between napoleon and the emperor of russia between napoleon and the russian czar right i can there are all kinds of chapters of history i can describe riveting battles i can tell you about heroic people you know sorry from you search your memory some of you will know about particular battles in the american civil war from the american revolutionary war particular heroes particular events right i have a lot of them fresh in my mind because of reading can you can you describe to me a single battle came a single commander a single leader who did anything heroic in the war can you know can you break down for me the political decisions or the strategic decisions that were made by any of the presidents united states whether it's george w bush obama or obviously relatively briefly donald trump that that mattered that decided that determined the outcome or the fate of this war and there probably are other wars you could say that about depending on who you are you might be able to say this about world war one or world war ii or there's some other one the napoleonic wars there's some other war that you've taken this level of of interest in your life well you lived through it homie you had 20 years how many when you look at the map of afghanistan how many of the places can you even pronounce you know we don't pronounce abu ghraib right sorry so it's not of course it's part of the same conflict though the abu ghraib person we all learned about the names of prisons in cuba camp x-ray in cuba and so on we learned about these terrible things connected to the uh you know the american military effort but you know sure there is a sense in which none of us paid enough attention none of us were involved and why this comes back to the title of this video because we know we couldn't make a difference we know we live in a society that is very fundamentally not democratic that what what we know and what we feel in our house we have no opportunity whatsoever to make a difference so i i said i was just going with two questions but i might as well kind of close off this this topic as we'll say a few more a few more words about this every so often people people uh okay sorry frieda i've got to tell you you know you did wrong so frieda says it's mostly bombing so nothing really i totally disagree so i i don't know if you guys have i've watched documentary films you know that are really showing combat on the ground face-to-face man-to-man combat and it's tremendously dramatic i remember seeing um documentary footage of a guy this particular example was on youtube and he was coming around the corner at the taliban and a sniper hit him and penetrated his water flask so i think you can imagine water flies down to the often i think the two layers of aluminum could be steel i think it's aluminum and the bullet penetrated the metal but didn't penetrate his flesh so there's a sniper from the afghan side in combat so you saw this either the film footage this is real life footage is not a it's not a movie so you just kind of see the scuffle and then afterwards see the guy saying look like that's how close that was you know he could he could have died at that moment um no no no no there are there are tremendously dramatic uh face-to-face knife to knife gun to gun combat stories every day of that of that war and again quite a lot of it was uploaded to obscure places on youtube some of it was added together and put into documentary films um [Music] i'm sorry i could i could sit here for a minute and remember the names of the films i've seen the reason i can't remember is that they're spread it over 20 years i'm sorry you know uh no no no so you know it was a real war [Music] i know it sounds ridiculous but i mean i remember one comment i actually do remember who said this remember one political analyst who was shocked by seeing some of the footage from afghanistan and that this political analyst said look when i'm looking at this footage it seems like nothing has changed since world war ii because it was it's men on foot with rifles you know like it was that kind of footage and the the guy who was answering was was a bit more of a military expert i wouldn't really it was some with some military experience and you said of course it's combat like what what do you think's changed you know yeah i kind of i kind of relate to both sides of that you know what i mean like i understand like on the one hand people think well we're living in the 21st century now we have computers and cell phones so combat is different and the other guy who's been there he has some real world's most like no it's men in boots with rifles running around in alleyways shooting each other you know what i mean and the bullets go in a straight line and you know it's it hasn't changed that much the guns have become a little bit more accurate you know the guns fire a little bit faster you know what i mean there are some little changes like that but no i mean there's there's this sense in which you know damn things change so no you know another thing that's funny coming out of this particular observation is that of course there are a lot of complaints in the left wing that we've all been bathing in propaganda no no we haven't been we've all been living in a state of total indifference and ignorance to the war in afghanistan because again if if there were effective propaganda you would know you would have been hearing every week the names of the heroes and the names of the fallen and the names of the battles and what was happening from town to town and from army based army base so the the estimate i managed to find was that the united states built 550 bases in afghanistan uh 550 at tremendous cost and now all 550 of those bases have either been destroyed by the americans themselves we don't know many of them were or they've been taken over by the afghanistan so those were you know reinforced concrete bulletproof bomb proof bases meant to last forever and it didn't last um all right so i was opening with with two questions first question what if this turns out to be the most important political event of your lives and i'm saying this to you honestly i think it's very likely i think it's very likely you can trivialize this you can joke about i think it's very likely that this will be the most important political event of our lives strategically economically and you know culturally because this was the question for the 21st century is what is the future of religion going to be in the 22nd that's why again the title of this video is about democracy because there was a really hard question for for western democracy to ask itself here and george w bush came up with the wrong answer i sure wish there had been some other country whether it was england or italy or france i mean i wish there had been some other western democracy they came with the right answer but none of them even tried i mean george w bush didn't have a whole lot of competition plus when it wasn't as if something much more intelligent approach to war in the middle east came out of europe or canada or south america or anywhere else but you know this is a this is possibly the most important question of our times now if i'm wrong it would only be because an even bigger war now begins with china i doubt it's incredibly unlikely you know like sure if if a war breaks out with china that cost two trillion dollars then we'd be able to look back at the war in afghanistan with its puny one trillion one one trillion dollar total and say like well you know that was that really wasn't such a big war it's true you could now have a war trying to have such immense scale that becomes clear the most important question of our century is about communism versus democracy right but as of this moment looking back at the last 20 years and looking for the next twenty years it is really fair to say this was the most important political event of your lives it's one of the most important economic events just just the amount of money was spent on this right and there's this tremendous cultural question that i'm asking again again on my channel and then most of us in western democracy are very very comfortable with us so the second question i wanted to ask you in terms of um giving us a sense the seriousness and and meaning and directions channel is would you sign up to fight for the future of democracy in afghanistan now today now it's it's very difficult to imagine a parallel universe in which we had leaders who actually celebrated heroism instead of cowardice that's what we've got what we're living through right now is the apotheosis of cowardice now let's be real all that anyone is saying whether it is the present united states the prime minister of canada the leaders of france england germany all that they're saying is oh we should evacuate as many refugees as possible 20 000 refugees 80 000 refugees we should we should run and run and run we should retreat and retreat and retreat the only person i've heard with any backbone was the vice president of afghanistan you probably already know that the president of afghanistan has run away apparently with a very large amount of money i don't know if it's in a physical suitcase or what but he somehow transferred a huge amount of money with him but you know the president ran away and the vice president stayed in afghanistan and said that he is now assuming the role of president which apparently is the legal procedure um you know apparently that is normal and he said he would rather die with a bullet in his front than a bullet in his back the war is not over and that he is going to fight to the death for his freedom gee there sure is a lack of any verbiage of that kind from the united states of america or anyone else imagine if they had been saying that not just for the last two months but for the last 20 years they were saying to the afghan people look this is your fight this is your future this is your freedom you know like there will be no refugees there will be no refuge we are not going to airlift out any of the translators you are going to stay here and you are going to fight to the death for the future of your country and that's what you're signing up for you know that could have been the message for 20 years leading up to this point it's not so i digress to deal with this that we're living through a period of time where we're just all celebrating cowardice and calling it human rights that's not what human rights about okay um [Music] okay if i were to ask you if there were a call for volunteers if we didn't have spineless cowards for political leaders and let me just digress on that for a moment if we didn't have every single one of these countries a system of election whereby you only get one leader you don't get to elect a separate military leader it would make sense not just to elect a leader for the military but multiple we should have had elections for who was going to lead the war in afghanistan like so if you talk about the american army i don't know there's a separate division of the american army just for africa it's called africom like africa command but like america has a division of the army dealing with colombia dealing with you know dealing with east asia with with japan based in okinawa it's a huge world-spanning army as you probably know but you could you could elect one man to be the head of the military within the united states you know domestically and one for overseas contingency operations like afghanistan no no no you're allowed to like one guy who do you who do you elect barack obama man of war can you imagine barack obama wearing a bandolier and being on the front lines and saying there will be no refugees it's better to die with a bullet in the front of your chest than a bullet in the back so guess what guys we're in it for life we're in it forget we're in it together this is your country that you have to fight and die for that would have been a very different message for the eight years obama was in power the eight years in which obama raised the cost of the war in afghanistan from 14 billion a year to over 100 billion a year and yet made the us military less effective very real question for democracy i don't think anyone in the united states of america has access to the information to know why i don't i do not think there are things i've done a lot of reading of this over the years i could mention some little isolated piece of information i don't think there is enough transparency in real democracy for anyone to give you an analysis of how the budget went from 14 billion a year to over 100 billion it was like 105 i mean it wasn't way over it was just slightly over a hundred billion but over a hundred billion dollars a year and yet became less effective obviously there were terrible strategic decisions made both politically and just strategic in the sense of military uh strategy narrow narrowly defined you know barack obama was obviously the wrong man to elect to win this war in some other parallel universe george w bush could have been a tremendously competent person to win the war his father was the head of the cia in case you hadn't heard it's certainly possible that george w bush could have grown up with a deep understanding of cia black ops strategic and military considerations but george w bush was the wrong man to lead this war we're probably gonna have to come back to that later in this issue he was the wrong man ethically he was the wrong man religiously like he was the wrong man culturally there's his level of sophistication it's wrong man linguistically do any of these guys speak a second language how many languages does barack obama speak have you ever i've never even heard him speak spanish george w bush could speak a little spanish i've heard him speak spanish i've never heard barack obama speak any other language but you know i just say you can imagine the type of man who would have been necessary to lead the united states to victory in afghanistan and it's not george w bush and it's not barack obama and it's of course i mean donald trump of course it's not donald trump but also by the time donald trump was in power he was just looking for the exit door he wasn't trying to win he was playing to lose and trying to lose under his preferred conditions that was all that was going on at that stage um so the question i'm asking here this is question number two of two is would you join the army today and fight for the future of afghanistan i i'm going to tell you my honest answer and some of you i think will just never thought of this before right the real question is what afghanistan are you fighting for the future of if if you tell me that you're going to fight a war to get rid of an orthodox muslim tyranny and replace it with a government that is 95 as orthodox islamic and deeply corrupt and just barely democratic but i don't know if you guys have googled this i have i've read all this i've read about this i've read a lot of united nations reports on what was going on in afghanistan yeah you know look up when the last time they had mayoral elections in afghanistan was and when they had elections at all and how many people actually got to vote in the elections in afghanistan give you nightmares and then they had a kind of fig leaf symbolic commitment to democracy there was barely any democracy so to fight against the taliban to replace it with an american client state that is 95 percent as muslim and it's only 10 more democratic that doesn't really interest me so much for me to fight and kill and possibly die in the name of the government of like hamid karzai are you are you joking like that's that's what you want me to fight for that's what you want me to create to try to create a republic in afghanistan where once the war is over if you actually went where i would never go on vacation why would never take my own kids on vacation like it would be in because oh no no this is a horrible muslim fundamentalist place you would never that that really doesn't appeal to many people that doesn't drum up a lot of support um as i have this memory i think it was from 2002 now i know september 11th 2001 i'll tell you on that political issue throughout the whole year of 2002 it felt like september 11th had been five five minutes ago i've been five weeks ago you know what i mean like time stood still and like you could talk to people 2002 even early 2003 and it seemed like september 11 happened yesterday i remember i talked to a stripper in 2002. uh this is in i won't say where she was a white canadian stripper okay and uh i could google her maybe she's maybe she's not only fans maybe she's a web we're about this conversation and when you talk to strippers i got respect i got respect for strippers i got respect for sex workers i got respect for some people you know but when you talk to strippers one of the things is their job in our culture they often have to chit chat with clients and sometimes they kind of switch into saying something that they've said to like 50 clients before like it gets a good result like like within conversation so it's not special to strippers probably if you talk to a therapist it's like that too like every zombie your therapist does what a hairstyle yeah melissa give the example of hairstyles yeah uh you know you talk to a hairstylist and they kind of chitchat with people every day and there's something but remember i talked to the stripper and the war in afghanistan came up and she said in this like smug self-congratulatory way she said by the time this war is over you won't be able to find a single copy of the koran on this earth i mean she and you know you can imagine i was already a long time ago it was already this kind of sophisticated cynical person about politics and you know like i'm i'm kind of trying to ask polite questions but it's like you really think this is a war to destroy islam like you really think that's what america is even trying to do like let alone what's what's going to happen like what the og like you know and she did i mean she she thought obviously she had no access to information aside from the news or maybe she was in the talk radio or something you know um oh that's interesting sorry it's good it's a nice distraction but someone in the audience says obama claims he used to be fluent in bahasa indonesia i don't i don't believe him unless he can show receipts i really doubt obama can speak can speak that language easy language to learn one of the easiest languages in asia or in the world if you don't aren't a native speaker of the of the family but still yeah yeah i know i know but um anyway yeah it was funny talking to someone who from her perspective really actually thought that this was a war but i mean well right no no but here's what we're gonna ask is do you think of this as a war between christendom and islam or do you think of this as a war between atheism as an islam yeah i mean okay okay secularism what do we mean by secular we mean atheism i mean come come on can we just be honest about it like [Music] all right now you know if we could be honest about it you know would you join the army would you fight to create a genuinely secular genuinely atheist democratic republic in afghanistan oh now i'm interested now you're talking to me about something that's worth fighting for and worth dying for and maybe you could recruit people from all over the world you know i'm certainly within central asia even maybe you'd then have a cause that would really divide things along very clear lines now a significant percentage of um [Music] people in afghanistan would be highly motivated to support the taliban if you made that clear if you said look this isn't a muslim republic like 95 as muslim as the taliban that happens to be the client of the american government this is really truly an american-style secular atheist democracy there would be people who instead of being wishy-washy about which side they want to support would then adamantly decide that they want to support the taliban and fight against that and you know what i say good all right progress requires disambiguation so make clear choices progress requires clear lines of demarcation and instead what we've had is is one lie after another so just just very briefly i don't think anyone is going to find this controversial the war started with a very different premise and that premise was revenge right so people were recruited at the start of the war say 2001 to 2003 and not just americans italians belarusians you know across europe across the nato alliance and around the world people were recruited to support the american side for the sake of revenge and you could definitely make an argument that within a year or two certainly by 2003 they had accomplished okay you had your revenge you bombed and killed a bunch of people mostly random people mostly innocent people it's war right and now you can pack up and go home and i think that's why the budget was so low in the first several years of the george w bush period revenge is cheap now i think that it's a great mistake to describe what happened next as nation building this is a ponderously vague phrase what happened next it's it's classically quintessentially american right the british don't think this way the italians don't think this way the germans don't think this way what the americans did was to conflate conquest with charity no other country in the world can conflate conquest with charity because they know what it is to be conquered germans know what it is to be conquered italians know what it is to be conquered oh you say the french won world war ii no they lost twice france was conquered twice in world war ii all these other countries have a sense of the real significance of conquest of the power and the powerlessness and the opportunity to change things forever that ensues for a short time after that after that conquest right americans invaded haiti and they told themselves it was a charity and they believed it and they still believe it to this day just over 100 years ago not ancient history but over 100 years ago the americans invaded the philippines and they told themselves it was a charity and they believed it and they still believe it to this day when the americans fought in the korean war they told themselves it was a charity they didn't even want to refer to it as a war they called it a police action they invented the term peacekeeping and police action they were so resolute in creating this illusion that the korean war was not a war that they had the japanese police fight in the war alongside them and that was only a few months after the japanese had signed their commitment that they would never have an army and would never participate in any war ever again at the end of world war ii japan made that commitment because the united states forced them to they become a pacifist nation oh yeah but but but you can still fight in in korea because it's not a war it's it's charity still to this day it's possible it's possible this has changed in the last five years or something but to my knowledge still to this day if you go to the american library of congress the most important library in in washington dc you will never see the vietnam war categorized as or referred to as a war the vietnam war we still pretend was not a war it was a police action or it was a conflict okay um back on september 12 2001. the idea of a war with afghanistan was incredibly popular in the united states incredibly popular with the american people incredibly popular with senators and congressmen they would have they would if you had a referendum if you had direct democracy americans would have gladly voted to start that war they didn't they didn't declare war at all the war in afghanistan followed the same pattern the war in afghanistan was not a war americans didn't admit to themselves it was a war it started off as revenge and then what it morphed into the cultural trope that took over is this incredibly powerful cross current in the american imagination that it's not a war at all that it's not conquest that it's a charity now i'm going to argue against myself most youtubers don't do this most youtubers present the argument of this and it seems strong then you just let it stand there unchallenged i challenge my own ideas i argue against my myself and in that sense you get to see the limits of what it is i'm doing here you get to see that it's true but it's only true up to a point all right i had a friend i might as well say who this was but i had a friend who was a very old german man i've mentioned it before he was a small child during world war ii but most of his memories were of the aftermath of world of tanks he did have childhood memories of world war ii but then he was really paying attention uh immediately after world war tv was old enough to understand what was going on politically and so on as the rubble was being cleared away so to speak and um i remember he said to me passionately this is a guy who's been to vietnam many times he said to me passionately that the americans could have won the war in vietnam if only they had been willing to engage in more brutality if only they'd been willing to really kill people who were their enemies and who had wronged them you know that the the americans that were too humanitarian in their in their approach to her and this was my way of talking at the time the way i talked to people was changed a bit and i sat there and said what about you he is confused i said what about your mother and your father and you you were our enemies when we conquered you how were you treated everyone knows everyone knows the germans were treated better than the vietnamese i mean when you think about it this is a crucial part of this american misconception that conquest is charity because the minute you conquer the germans you start to be behaving like you're there to save them they're there to rebuild the german economy west german east germany was conquered by the soviet you're there to make it into a showcase for how great cop capitalism and democracy can be this contrast between east germany and west germany exactly the same pattern in north korea versus south korea the minute you conquer you don't want revenge you don't want to massacre them you don't even really want to put anyone in prison and a puny percentage of the members of the nazi party were put on trial at nuremberg a merely symbolic number of people were put on trial and executed but i was saying to this guy seriously i said look what do you think the people of vietnam ever did to us that we would want to massacre them now think about what you did to us literally you and your mother and your father and you explained to me why we didn't kill you or why we didn't permanently occupy your country why we didn't loot and pillage i mean you could make it into a province you could make it into a territory the united states make it you know you could colonize it in that sense we could force you all to speak english it could have been the end of the german language could forcibly assimilate you that said we could we could do all kinds of terrible things to you you know we could have changed germany forever we paid the price in blood nobody has ever done to us anything as terrible as what the germans did and nobody has ever done to kind of the fabric of human morality as terrible anything as terrible as the german i admit joseph stalin it's close contact mao zedong it's nevertheless nevertheless there is something uniquely you know mind-blowingly atrocious about the atrocities of of the nazis and adolf hitler so you know you want to talk to me about revenge you want to talk to me bro brutality i'm sorry what did we do to you and now you tell me how you want us to treat others how do you expect us to treat the vietnamese or the people of afghanistan or the people of iraq all those wars were more ongoing at that time now i think this is worth talking about primarily because nobody in america thinks it through nobody mentates it and if you want the weirdest one of all look at the the reconciliation process that happened in italy all right italy continued to be completely full of fascists it was completely dominated by fascists and nobody cared like nobody in america was interested in like enforcing some kind of systemic reform on italy it was just like well war is over and by the way the number of years that went by between when combat ceased and the working out of the final peace treaty so you had an armistice and then later you had the treaty all these years went by and there were these weird negotiations and you know guess what the italians didn't change an italian government you know why okay we killed all these people and our own people died and there's a cost of untold billions of dollars okay why don't we have a beach in italy why isn't part of italy a colony of canada forever you know why sir let's go back to 18th century 19th century rules oh i'm sorry why shouldn't the borders of the netherlands be expanded permanently to take a piece of germany that's the way we used to settle wars would be to divide up germany and france gets part and the netherlands gets part and the united states gets pardoned canada gets all the contributing armies but including adjacent armies would divide up the land of the conquered enemy nation that started the war that's how we used to do things yeah we used to also reduce people to slavery i mean that was how we used to get even at the end of war slavery serfdom you know you become a second-class citizen in your own country and be forced to speak someone else's language you could have a part of germany where everyone's forced to speak dutch another part where everyone's forced to speak french and so on that's how wars used to end america changed that forever in this totally bizarre unexamined way now in the 20th century i just went nobody else was playing by america's rules nobody else had this misconception of humanitarian warfare conquest is charity nobody else did so you know if you look at the way russia fought wars and obviously you have the tsarist period and then you have the communist period but in the communist period the way foreign policy works it's exactly the same where wars are fought fundamentally to move the border like that's you know it's basically what it is russia has a war with poland russia has a war with finland you know there are all these crummy soviet wars russia has wars you know what you can look at have any of you ever looked at a map of where russia's border with japan is the closest country to japan the closest foreign country is russia because russia kept all of the land they marched over they they own several islands of japan including the enormous sackland island which has priceless oil and gas reserves priceless billions and billions and billions of trillions of dollars worth of gasoline even if there's nothing else good about sacko and island and its neighboring islands oh gee why at the end of world war ii the russians kept part of japan in both world war one and world war ii russia's borders expanded permanently and think they were the bad guys remember why why didn't america's borders expand why didn't canada's why didn't england what about france i mean france kind of lost twice man you could make it well how about you know the netherlands or anyone else who fought against the nazis they weren't rewarded you see on a really deep level the unspoken unwritten rules of war changed and they didn't make sense anymore after america conquered afghanistan what was supposed to happen next on a deep unexamined level in the mind of an idiot like george w bush it was the same answer as for south korea it was the same answer as for south vietnam it was the same answer as for the philippines as for haiti as for germany as for italy as for japan the idea was just like japan at the end of world war ii again the part conquered by russia permanently became part of russia it still is today it wasn't just during the soviet period not just during the congress but still today it's part of russia and they kicked out all the japanese people it's inhabited by white blonde russian people i'm not joking it's really i mean nobody calls it genocide i mean it's a small scale dude sacklin island is enormous compared to the rest of japan i'm just saying it's not a small island it's anyway it's like fifty percent of the landmass japan or sometimes it's slightly exaggeration still it's huge just look at them size of sackland island versus the size of hokkaido you know it's huge and that's and there were no japanese people there anymore all right you know they extirpated the japanese population and replaced them with russians that's that's what happened america didn't do that to japan right america played this very strange game that they also played in italy in germany and so on which is that they presided over the writing of a new constitution and then they pretended that they could step back and say okay you guys take it from here and that america would then play this charitable role of building universities and building hospitals and helping industry get back on street and exporting tobacco and all this other all this other crap so i'm just yeah so if someone watches this video 200 years from now in the future they'd be like this why is this guy saying this all this stuff is obvious it's not obvious to us okay right now in 2021 this is not obvious to anyone and it wasn't obvious to george w bush and it wasn't obvious to barack obama you know there was that old anti-war song from the 1970s the vietnam war era you know uh one two three four what the hell are we fighting for nobody knows nobody knows anymore and i ask these two questions to start what one what if this is the most important political event in your lifetime two would you sign up would you fight would you be willing to fight and the question for what what the hell are we fighting for you know you gotta have an answer for that you have to have an answer at the at the beginning of the war of course in the middle of the end of the war you still but you have to have a clear answer for that and for the united states of america it never was to create freedom of speech in afghanistan such as you have in las vegas you couldn't george w bush would never be able to do this you could have had someone who stepped forward and said look we are going to fight this war and when we're done guess what we support atheism we support a secular government we support afghanistan having a society where pornography and rock and roll music and gambling and prostitution and neon signs are all legal we are going to make the city of kabul into the the taliban's worst nightmare not something just five percent different not moderate islam supported by church there's nothing moderate about islam in afghanistan know that we'll actually create an outpost for democracy for secularism for atheism for human rights think about what that word really means it's ridiculous you know we're going to create something worth fighting for and then you get to ask who's with us and you get to find out who's against us right you say we're going to actually create we're gonna create universities that aren't universities of moderate islam but universities that are really in this sense shockingly challengingly democratic and then start to think about what that does and you know what hey you know again i'm just saying it it's so easy to demonize colonialism it's so easy right what i have to say to you is what the united states has done in the last 20 years is worse than colonialism any of us i'm sorry i i know i know you people haven't done the reading i've done i mean like i'm not saying this consult you but like i don't know if when you think about colonialism you're thinking what i'm thinking okay all right what the united states did in afghanistan last 20 years it is worse than colonialism and i i can prove it very simply to you how many of you know a white person who learned and became fluent in any of the languages of afghanistan can you go to a university in texas or in ottawa i mean include canada or in vancouver that is teaching any of the languages of afghanistan all right as bad as colonialism might be it involves people going to that country and learning the language and getting married and having kids who are half afghan and half american or whatever the combination may be half black half afghans have black people going over there and really living with them and really learning their language and really changing their culture and where they also have some kind of positive relationship with us maybe maybe we start having more afghan restaurants i don't know there's something positive they can bring i i like afghan flatbread i'm vegan but the flatbread and i just mentioned if you if you can get it vegan you know what i'm saying um [Music] you know i i completely understand why colonialism has the bad reputation it does i am living in a country built on genocide don't get me wrong but in the same way that i am morally opposed to aristocracy but i end up having to kind of defend aristocracy to explain to people what it really was and how it worked you know uh because aristocrats were not just parasites they weren't vampires they weren't evil they played this incredibly important positive role in our society and we destroyed them and we destroyed everything they'd accomplished and the whole society they created there's really a tragedy there and if you have real human sympathy and empathy and you really do research and engage in analysis you can understand you you can understand that really the world was coming to an end for them as we the next generation arguing for democracy and meritocracy and republican ideals we destroyed their world you know to to create our own i completely understand the way in which you know colonialism now seems laughably outmoded it's laughable in the same way aristocracy is right it just we can't think of colonialism as anything but a hated relic from the past but it's still worth questioning what if we have what if we have a system or a lack of a system what if we've done something that's actually worse than colonials what if when we compare it to what actually would be accomplished in 20 years of overt colonialism you know what if that would be something better than what it is we've got now okay guys i'm got a nice quote from that song too you know um all right guys i'm going to take a minute to read what's in the what's in the comment section melissa you want to you want to chime in i was just going to say i i know i said at the beginning this i'm making this partly because i got a bunch of emotionally overwrought emails from people you know i i'm emotionally overwrought about it too i made it live stream back on august 13th about it it means a lot to me emotionally i mean it's not it's not just politics it's not just theory you know or what have you you know we have 31 people in the audience guys if you want to take a moment to hit the thumbs up button if you change your mind later you can change it thumbs down i'm just now going to take a minute to pay more attention to your counseling let's do something i'm really glad but i know you have not mentioned terrorism um right so this is actually a good example most of raising something i didn't say because i don't think in those terms so melissa raised an interesting point she said that um i haven't used the word terrorism once there's 50 minutes into the stream and she said it was indeed originally kind of propagandized as and promoted the public has pardoned me the war on terrorism and then she's asking um to what extent are we actually safer from terrorism and of course of course we're not of course instead it's it's justified terrorism and expanded terrorism and increased funding for terrorism and within that part of the world you know it created the whole phenomenon of isis sort of isis was the most amazing blossoming of both muslim fundamentalism and and terrorism imaginable and that was i mean it was unanticipated and unprecedented out of the ashes of the american conquest of iraq you know um the isis phenomenon emerged um and was for a short time it was tremendously successful and then even more money had to be spent on american uh uh aggression against it so look you know okay why do i not talk about terrorism um you know okay i think that the terrorism optic or categorization it exactly serves this this same end of a lighting i'm going to use some could use some great scrap boards here alighting obviating and obfuscating three great words alighting obviating and obfuscating the question of whether or not we are fighting a war for atheism right so you know if you really believe this is a war against terrorism and i think george w bush personally did believe that george w bush was a profoundly christian person i'm not saying because i have any respect for it but he was a he was a devout christian extremist frankly all right and what he said again and he he really believed was he was only fighting a war against terrorism he wasn't fighting a war against islam he wasn't fighting a war for atheism he wasn't fighting a war for a secular society he didn't even want that within the united states of america so just just to give one illustration we could talk for an hour about the religious conscience of george w bush but you know he removed the division between church and state that that formerly so so so i have to finish that sentence it's more of a sense but um prior to george w bush um if you had a soup kitchen so a soup kitchen is an american convention where you are giving soup and food to poor people homeless people that's called a soup kitchen but if you had a if you had a church run charity giving away food to homeless people and you also uh preached the bible or preached salvation or something you had to physically separate them and you also had to legally separate them you couldn't you couldn't have them together and you actually saw that in action in the united states of america you know the separation church and state at that level of how charities were run so it's not even church and state but the separation of religion from these from these other functions um that that was necessary down the line so he actually removed that where for the first time you could integrate those into one service now in other countries around the world in canada there isn't that there isn't that requirement services and everything and you know when i was living in cambodia and laos and so on it was a big deal he removed the separation of church and state in another significant thing which is that he he made it illegal for the government the united states to support any kind of charity work development work any any kind of program anywhere in the world related to abortion um as i recall i'm sorry i forget the precise word i think it was also anti-condom i think it was about like they wouldn't do anything related to [Music] pregnancy like it was defined in some way like that so it was it was meant to be abortion but it really got rid of things related to birth control pills and things like that too you know some christian fundamentalists in america they think birth control pills are also a form of abortion in there they're morally opposed to them for that reason so i'm just giving these as examples they said to which george washed personally he was he was devoutly christian and he was trying to do he was trying to christianize the united states and american politics whether or not he succeeded it's up to you and i remember when when he left office and obama came back in power everyone in like cambodia and laos and that kind of charity was like finally now we can go back to doing abortion and and uh condom related stuff you know and birth control phil stuff you know like there was this really weird period role that was um uh religiously charged so you know the idea that it is possible to fight a war on terrorism as opposed to a war against islam or a war for atheism right you know this this is a delusion right now you know um this this is a profoundly related question okay did the united states fight a war against fascism in world war ii well at the end of world war ii what did they actually do to get rid of the fascists in italy all those guys were still alive i'm sorry so what percentage of italian fascists were put in prison or given a trial absolutely minuscule you know nothing changed within germany too bureaucrats and mayors they had worked in the nazi regime in italy too if you were actually fighting a war against fascism right the final outcomes of that war and what you would really do yeah i'm not i'm not necessarily saying you'd have to kill all those people but you would have to do something to actually eliminate fascism and the americans didn't the americans again it's this really strange delusion of what what is victory what is conquest and then what is charity you know the idea was that they just show up they sign a piece of paper with the italians declaring the start of a new era in history and then they presume that because of the guiding light of america's morally superior example the italians will just sort themselves out and fascism will disappear now you know the only thing i'd say is japan was a success story maybe japan is the only example in the world where this american method works take a look at haiti take a look at the philippines let me take take a look at american interventions everywhere but even i know sorry i know it's not a military intervention well okay then i won't let's not okay i won't include non-military intervention but you know um well take a look at cambodia take a look at former yugoslavia i mean any of these things the american idea of what winning the war means and what what the outcomes were so you know i i do think i do think the idea of a war on terrorism is really a dangerous idea you know um there are intelligent people everywhere there are free thinkers everywhere there are homosexuals everywhere homosexuals matter a lot more than what you'll hear right now on the nightly news it's all the [ __ ] about oh but what about the women in afghanistan who want to become career you know want to have a career and want to go to university and stuff what what do you think happens to the homosexuals in afghanistan i haven't heard that mentioned once not once in any of the news coverage not once homosexual homosexuals and lesbians whatever treating it as the broadest the broadest possible ever how about transgender people it's all it's so fashionable to say we care about transgender and cross-dressing people what if you're transgender or cross-dressing in afghanistan in 2021 huh how's that going to work under under taliban dominion for some reason no interested in asking these questions you know if you think nobody in afghanistan in the last 20 years has been questioning why should you have an islamic society at all you're wrong now i'd also mention that in the last 20 years the population of afghanistan almost doubled so the percentage of people in afghanistan alive today who were alive 30 years ago is incredibly small it's a young population who mostly grew up in the conditions of this war and the conditions of this this american mission and i'm sorry i may have mentioned it too briefly but it's because i feel everyone already knows it you also know that america really discredited itself morally ethically and so on in terms of use of torture in terms of the the actual ways and means um employed in the war but yeah look there is no such thing as a war on terrorism there's a war against islam and there's a war positively to create democracy to create secular atheist societies to create more highly educated societies create more modern societies to create societies that are integrated into uh neighboring states and cultures in the modern world and you know i'll just say um [Music] i have a lot to say okay i'll read i'll read the comments all right good so guys i'm just reading this in order but i'm catching up pretty quickly uh there's a sincere comment here from henry gann so henry says quote the hubris of america is that the world wants to be just like us um i don't think that is the hubris of the united states of america okay and let's let's get real okay everyone wants to vote everyone wants to be able to complain that the government is corrupt and to have their complaint matter and have their complaint make a difference i'm going to take a further step here if you're familiar with plato and socrates this will make more sense to you okay everyone wants that even if they don't think they do you can reveal it through pretty quick you know um socratic method so egypt is profoundly culturally alien from england france canada profoundly i think people underestimate just how culturally different the egyptians are from us okay egyptians want to vote egyptians want to be able to control their government and hold it accountable if they want to be able to complain and have their complaints matter whether that's about corruption or otherwise they do not want to be powerless before a small class of of multi-millionaires you know there are rich people there are poor people in egypt there are also some incredibly rich people they want to have a government that is by the poor for the poor of the poor and that represents the interests of the masses the rep represents the people as a whole against the money delete and against the elite within government itself you know elite elite people were they do want that okay and you can talk to some egyptians who don't think they do you can talk to egyptians who will tell you that as a matter of religious conviction they feel that they shouldn't have any role in government at all they should just leave it all up to god it's a very common belief in that part of the muslim world i just mentioned in egypt specifically in its and its neighbors you can imagine what a convenient religious belief that is to have one of total passivity towards politics because you say it's it's up to god to decide this thing but if you sit down and talk to those people about you know socratic method about real life situations and they will have been through some of them okay what if your son disappears and then you find out that he's been beaten and interrogated and after being beaten and tortured he's confessed to a crime and the crime happened in a different town and you can prove from the records on his phone like text messages he sent and maybe he uploaded some photos to instagram that he wasn't in that town he was in another town but he's been beaten and he's already confessed and if you say this to people it probably hasn't happened to their own son they know people you know their cousin they know somebody or they whether it's in the newspaper or their friend's friend don't know horrifying terrible stories like this about how awful the quality of government and policing is in egypt how deep corruption was this this kind of thing you can come with all kinds of examples there are two businesses and one of them's connected through corruption to a military official and one of them isn't and then you know but bad things happen to people so you know if you sit down and talk to them even someone who tells you is a matter of religious conviction that they don't want democracy if you can explain to them what democracy is in that way when they understand it they will understand that they do want democracy because the alternative is to live in fear how does this thing you know sorry laos laos is a communist country everyone lives in fear china communist china in many ways a wonderful place to live but let me tell you something people live in fear and i've said this before on the channel so saying it very briefly when you really get to know china foreigners won't understand this at first if you're an american you just arrive what you realize is the higher up the socioeconomic pyramid people are the more afraid they are the more they live in fear people in china who are university professors live in fear of the government all the time it's really it's really scary you know so you know i understand what you're saying here you said quote the hubris of america is thinking that you know the rest of the world wants to be like us okay democracy is not a haircut not everyone wants to have an american haircut democracy is not a tattoo not everyone wants to have american tattoos okay everyone wants to have democracy everyone even if they don't think they do all right and you know a huge part of politics is making decisions on other people's behalf for their good for their benefit like if you don't believe that some people get to make decisions for others because it's in everyone's best interest or it's because it's in their best interest then you don't believe in politics you know politics is centrally and integrally and inextricably about coercion so i had a little i had a little slip up there didn't integrally politics is about coercion now in the absence of democracy politics is only about coercion when you have democracy it's also about participation and consultation that's about a lot of other things not just all right okay so look um someone called uh paco miera xvida says so i'm going to read your old comment paco if i may call you paco uh quote talk about reagan funding reactionary terrorists like hekmiatar or abandoning masood after omar muhammad again ascendancy over afghanistan the cia betrayal of abdul haq or how u.s foreign policy hit okay paco okay now i'm asking you two very simple questions right and one of them is are you willing to sign up and fight for democracy yourself like in the context of these discussions i hate to tell you but like there is a sense in which the moral record of the united states or england you think i like the british empire i'm living in a country built on british empire genocide but it is almost irrelevant to this question now looking forward the sense in which it's relevant is it gives us a sense of their biases their limited confidence and capabilities and attitudes going the past does the past does matter in that way but you know however however much you may want to fault or impugn the character the united states of america you know the united states did commit atrocities during world war ii the united states did commit atrocities in what we could now call the korean war the war between north korea and south korea okay would you prefer to live in north korea or south korea would you be willing to fight for the future of democracy in south korea i would i'd fight for south korea why just because it's a secular democracy no other reason you know i don't have to like korean food or something i don't have to change my haircut you know i mean i it doesn't have to be any other reason than that the the difference between south korea and north korea is worth fighting for something i've been saying again again in this video in slightly different words is the tragedy of the war george w bush designed and created was that the difference between the american supported side in afghanistan and the taliban wasn't worth fighting for it was to slight a difference there was the taliban there was another government that was 95 the same as the taliban right so i could say north afghanistan versus south afghanistan to simplify or something right um the difference between urban afghanistan and rural afghanistan wasn't worth fighting for the difference between north and south korea is worth fighting for i have read detailed accounts of massacres of innocent civilians by the americans in korea north and south korea i have you you may or may not have you can take the time to do it you know i'm i'm aware of that but these are the decisions we have to make right now i i do think there's a much more important nuanced difficult decision to make about democracy itself democracy in america democracy in canada which is what i'm getting at with the title this video but in a really simple sense i think people like you paco have to face up the fact that no matter how many massacres the americans carried out in korea north korea is still wrong and south korea is still right because that is how important democracy really is all right i remember reading a dedicated article um talking about the position india was in shortly after world war ii it was difficult it got more difficult and i now know more about this today than i did at the time but it was saying you know india was in this position where they were being asked to become an ally of the united states of america and at that time america was so racist that like political leaders from india couldn't even go and visit america and walk around like a normal person you know they were they were treated as black and they were treated with even more hostility because they didn't understand the social cues like you know they didn't understand oh no this is a whites only restaurant they didn't understand oh no you can't walk in here at all or oh no you have to take off your hat and meekly ask them to make lunch in the kitchen and a brown paper bag for you to take out but you can't actually walk into the restaurant there were all these weird barriers and social cues for just how intensely racist the united states of america was and there were these very difficult debates in india where people these are people within the government elite within the military we're basically saying look like in a lot of ways the united states of america is evil it's evil and it's built on slavery and it's still unbelievably racist today and the race is against us and we're not natural allies but this democracy thing is so important that we must be in an alliance with america against russia against china etc it was a very difficult argument to make and it was a very very shaky relationship between the united states and india and in 1971 it broke down and america and india became enemies in 1971 but there's a period between india's independence and 1971 were this very full match so again my point is there and you can just imagine viscerally personally what it would be like to be a brown skinned person from india or possibly a dark black skin person i mean their variation in their complexion and to go and visit america in the year 1955 or something you know and to be treated that way and where you can stand on the bus and whether or not you can take a taxi and you know where you can sit and where you can eat and whether or not you can swim in the hotel swimming pool all the miserable racist forms of oppression and oh no oh you need to see a dentist while you're here or a medical oh no you can't go to that that you have to go to the black people's like the reality of what it was like being in the united states of america if you were from india you were an ally it was unbelievably evil and unbelievably demoralizing and of course beyond that even when there wasn't formal racism there was all the informal racism and people in india had to really say wow this is our ally this is democracy so i mean what america represents today it's something much more positive than in 1955 you know and you know this does not mean that i have infinite patience for massacres committed by the united states of america in the name of democracy nor torture but my complaint there is simply fundamentally that we don't have enough democracy that what we need is more democracy not less in order to have armies and foreign policy that makes sense democratically that's transparent and accountable and adaptable uh democratically okay um sorry so i'm reading ahead in the comments now guys all right looks like there are a lot of quality comments here okay so again i'll read this from from paco again so paco says quote afghanistan is where u.s foreign policy revealed itself as self-serving close quote paco are you 12 years old what do you mean u.s foreign policy revealed itself as self-serving u.s foreign policy is self-serving who else do you think they're serving you think they're serving saudi arabia like who do you think they're working for the american government works for itself and once in a while it works for the american people i'm sorry i mean this just makes me think you're 12 years old what do you what do you think yeah this is not a secret you know american foreign policy is supposed to serve america's self-interest this ain't something new that just came out of nowhere okay so william again i you know i uh i i sympathized the comment but i totally disagree with that so you'll see but it's a well intentioned coming from williams says the taliban wasn't smart enough to give up their radicalism and accept the charity that would have been given to them he then says we helped uh rebuild japan after the atom bomb and the fire bombing of tokyo et cetera so so william the sense in which i sympathize with you is you you've correctly understood part of what i was saying earlier and saying america was trying to repeat the same pattern that you saw in the conquest of japan and the writing of a new constitution for japan and so on and then japan really japan really in a profound meaningful sense ceasing to be a fascist country that the total moral regeneration of japan you could say within 20 years it is i think unique in the history of the world i think it didn't happen in italy i think it didn't happen in greece i mean you can look at a lot of countries after world war ii and you can say they changed a lot less after world war ii than they should have and you could talk about what happened in west germany you know too to what extent you have a veneer of democracy painted over fascism and just real live fascists there to live there now i think i think 50 years later germany has changed a lot um by the way that's kind of kind of another story but i say immediately you're talking about the 10 or 20 years after um okay so william i think that the mistake you're making here is just you're accepting the propaganda narrative that this was something other than a war on islam it was a war on islam it still is a war on islam and it's a war for atheism and the problem is that none of the western democracies that exist today actually identify as atheists none of them can say that and none of them have their own constitutions written that way right the relationship between church and state in the united in america in england in france in germany none of these countries can claim to represent atheism or even secularism and they that wasn't that wasn't effectively what they were fighting for but when you accept that as the primary basic premise of what was going on in this war then of course of course what do you mean the taliban can't compromise for them this isn't just life and death this is about their immortal soul you know they are they are fighting and they are dying and imagining they're going to heaven forever and they'll they will do anything for the future of that illusion you know so there there is no negotiating with the taliban this is the hard limit of democracy these are the people who can never participate in elections and can never negotiate and can never compromise that's why we're at war with the taliban and you know the same is going to be true with hamas i know so i was laughing the other day because a natural vegan a vegan youtuber made this ridiculous video where she was claiming that buying a certain brand of hummus was preventing negotiations that would bring bring peace to the israeli-palestine conflict i was like i was laughing a lot and say oh yeah right negotiations with who negotiations with hamas there would have been these great negotiations of the mess you know it's just it's just ridiculous so by the way guys we've got uh 38 people in the audience now we only have 17 thumbs up i mean you know you guys have been enjoying this for over an hour so if you hit the thumbs up button it'll it'll help the channel and help more people discover the video i mean if you hate the video you've been listening for more than an hour so thank you um but it would kind of make sense to hit the thumbs up button as i said before if i say something that really shocks you you can you can send me an email you know you can talk to me now you can talk to me now in the comment section but it's something something more serious you want to discuss with me about you can send me an email you can contact me through patreon and you can change your mind later and undo uh hitting the thumbs up button uh but yeah i think at this point it's reasonable for me to for me to ask okay so right frida is making an interesting point i say this kind of thing to melissa all the time so frida many people on the left try to misrepresent the current era of american imperialism as if it were traditional colonialism and it's not it can never the analysis never makes sense it's it doesn't operate at a profit at all they don't even recoup their losses in the slightest so i'm going to read frida's comments a second but you guys may not know this the british empire in india operated at a profit they insisted that the people of india pay enough taxes to finance their own conquest and occupation how perverse is that so people of india had to pay taxes to pay the british army to conquer and occupy them now that's colonialism right now there's another sense in which you can have colonialism i'm going to read the thing from freda where like the one country conquers another and then just takes all the diamonds takes all the gold you know it's it's extractive colonialism where it's operating at a profit that way but nothing like that happens in the current epoch of american imperialism it's it's all it's all done on this charitable basis it's money losing to an unbelievable set and frida said quote uh and i don't think the u.s has really exploited afghan resources have they opium uh afghanistan's most valuable export is opium uh continuing quote colonialism in latin america also included education and religious indoctrination aside from the exploitation of minds yeah that's great so yeah i mean you know i'm i'm making exactly that that kind of contrast um that you know i'm willing to say colonialism was bad but actually what we've done in afghanistan the last 20 years is worse and you can take a look back at the videos i made about china and xinjiang and where i'm able to say very comfortable in those videos well if you think what china is doing in xinjiang is bad what america has been doing in afghanistan is much worse it really is and worse in principle worse in practice and worse than its outcomes because guess what what china did in xinjiang actually works and that's because the chinese are willing to admit to themselves what it is they're trying to accomplish they're trying to create a secular future for senja not not what the americans created in the government of hamad karzai and so on yeah well so so brett anderson says this is i'm again i'm saying this i'm trying to get you to sympathize with all sides of this equation brad anderson says quote i'll pronounce your name probably brett anderson says quote i always saw this as colonialism so many white folks always seem to see themselves as the good guys when they go on to other countries with guns it's weird we shoot you because we want you to be free close quote okay brett but what about when white people go to other countries and learn the language and get married and raise kids and work on a farm and with time produce a new hybrid culture right that's the contrast with colonialism right is where you actually you actually have a meaningful engagement the americans in this whole thing they just behaved like mercenaries they were all there temporarily it was temporary for 20 years and again um even even we don't the extent to which sanskrit was taught in universities in england the extent of which england became a place where people learned the languages of india so that they could go and rule india's and it wasn't for charitable reasons people studied sanskrit and arabic and other other indian and middle eastern languages precisely because they wanted to get a job in the colonial administration um but you know uh colonialism may be bad but what we have been doing is worse and it is definitely worse in its outcomes now i just want to say very briefly because you said white folks not just white people engage in colonialism you know there is a parallel history that's easy to imagine that the united states of america could have conquered afghanistan as they did and set up 550 army bases as they did and they could have invited in hundreds of thousands of people from northern india to colonize afghanistan they said okay we're going to protect you and people from india could come and intermarry with and live permanently with and participate in gradually transforming the culture of afghanistan and integrating it into the modern world and integrating it into a more cosmopolitan world you know the united states could have involved many other countries and nationalities in terms of colonialism in the old-fashioned sense of it sure there's no reason to presume it would be white people and in the history of the world generally all kinds of non-white people also conquer and colonize other people so there isn't there isn't a single dimension in that equation and someone else got the hummus reference so there you go ah provocative quote from nacho nacho says quote do we go to the left where there's nothing right or go to the right where there's nothing left i have never heard that before yeah for all i know that's on a hallmark card i if that's a political slogan that is one i've never heard before henry gann says um you could do a 24-hour stream and still not cover all the mistakes made in this war laughing at the stupidity crying at the tragedy yeah okay guys i'm happy to i'm happy to wrap it up there um i'm gonna return to my original question what if this was the single most important political event of your lifetime you know looking back now what difference could you have made what difference should you have made i think all of us feel that the tragedy of our own ignorance our own indifference towards this our own relative detachment from these political events as they unfolded happen precisely because of our own certainty that our involvement our even just our knowledge our lobbying could never make any difference now you know i'm willing to imagine in a science fiction universe you could have a society with too much democracy you know i can imagine that there is nothing like that on this earth today i i cannot think of any society that exists in the 21st century where you can say there is too much democracy babe could you grab me xenophon it's at the right hand side of the the right-hand shelf thanks babe you know i just want to say you know okay ancient athens was not paradise insert a whole bunch of cynical comments about you know slavery in athens blah blah blah you know the level of democracy within the military in this period of ancient greece the role of elections the role of the lower ranks being able to question the higher ranks because they elected them because they vote for them they follow their orders but they also vote for them the role of democracy within an army and in this case it's an army in a foreign war it's an army overseas so to speak it's an army far off in persia the level of democracy that was taken for granted in a hierarchical military unit where if you misbehaved you could be whipped you could be beaten with rods you could be killed ultimately like if you if you did something bad if you fell asleep when you were on watch duty or something you could be beaten you could be with you you could be outright killed by your commander but you elected him you elected the person in charge of your battalion of your unit you know um you know in this war everything worth knowing was secret you know and the greater tragedy is even if you could have known more because probably all of us feel we could have oh i could have done more research i could have done more reading you know that if you had known more you couldn't have done more and it's not just a lack of democracy in the united states of america you know i'm sorry again it's 20 years ago it's so easy to forget what about extraordinary rendition what about torture what about the rules of engagement what about shooting innocent civilians and children there were all these things that meant so much to me they meant a lot to me 2001 2002 2003 like right at the beginning of the conflict i cared passionately what about the ethical questions about the use of drones and drone strikes what about the ethical questions about the use of depleted uranium bullets and depleted uranium armor is there a million really serious ethical questions but sure i mean one of the simplest torture interrogation what about the ecological questions what about even strategic questions that none of us were a part of you know i remember at one point this is part of why barack obama's military budget was was so great barack obama was using a type of missile i'm not going to quote the brand name because i might get it wrong but i remember reading this detailed article he was using a type of medium-range missile and depending on the conditions of it being fired it could cost 1 million dollars per launch so the most expensive way to launch it was from a submarine but they very frequently did launch them from submarines i could get into the details why it was like if you launched it from land it was only half a million dollars if you launched it from a submarine it was a million dollars but this is like the per missile price but the attitude of barack obama and everyone today is quoting this number 2 500 americans died 2 500 americans died well you had leaders who didn't know war and didn't care about war guys like barack obama guys like george w bush you had guys who didn't know islam and didn't care about cultural change didn't care about really having a plan for the next 100 years how are you going to change the fate of central asia forever how are you going to change the fate of the world forever by saying this is democracy this is islamic fascism you have to make a choice now who's with me let's fight for it because you're going to spend a trillion dollars either way so you're going to waste a trillion dollars you're going to spend a trillion dollars and make a permanent difference on planet earth forever but you get a guy like barack obama whose whole mentality was to have as few people as possible on the ground as few boots on the ground as possible as few american lives lost and then willing to spend one million dollars on a single missile strike you know this extensive use you know he massively expanded the role of of drone strikes and everything else and you know you know what that makes you it makes you a coward and even if you win those battles if you win them with anonymous faceless drone strikes and missiles that drop out of the sky you know what you lose you lose the respect of the people you know it's goddamn hard to win the respect of people and you got to learn their language you got to live with them you got to eat their food and you got to marry their daughters and you have to send your women to get married to their sons conceptually in america that's somehow harder somehow like white man foreign woman is easier to deal with than white woman marrying an afghan man and you've got to commit all the way not to supporting a homophobic muslim fundamentalist government that's five percent more democratic than the taliban you have to commit to saying oh no no you're going to have gay rights here whether you like it or not and and you get to say as barack obama would be easier for barack obama to say than for a idiot like george w bush you get to stand there and say hey guess what 10 of you were gay whether you know it or not whether you admit it or not well i know i know there were no gay rights protests in afghanistan there weren't any in 2001 there weren't any in 2005 there weren't any in 2010 i know there aren't going to be gay rights protests you aren't going to rise up and demand gay rights but i know there are 10 percent of you who will benefit from this and i am going to fight for your rights even if you won't and i'm going to present you with the future of afghanistan where gay people get to openly be gay and they can even watch i don't know a soap opera about gay people on tv or something or this level of modern liberal cultural you know uh assumptions you know where you you really represent that and really pursue that and then you back that up with boots on the ground you know um you know imagine if anyone back in 2001 let's say december of 2001. if someone had sat there and said look with 20 years and 1 trillion dollars how much do you think we can accomplish for the future of afghanistan how much do you think we can accomplish for the future of central asia how much do you think we can accomplish for the future of atheism for the future of secularism changing the muslim world forever taking what was the most extreme islamic dictatorship in the world what was more extreme than saudi arabia right of course more extreme than egypt or other examples and turning that around so that it becomes an outpost for democracy and and atheism and open homosexuality and feminism and women's equality in education you know um [Music] so on and so forth you know you know george w bush's failure ultimately was a failure of vision you know and it's too late i'm so sick of hearing this phrase learning the lessons of history learning the lessons of the vietnam wars all right okay guys so now it's 2021 right it's too late right it's too late for us to make that difference it's it's too late for us to have that vision for the last 20 years but it's not too late for us to have that vision for the next 20 years it's not too late for us to start thinking seriously about the next century now i try not to quote my own book too much i'm writing a book and it's not finished but you know there's very various parts of the book that are really passionate and hopeful in contrast to some of the incredibly bleak and hopeless material about american politics you know one of the things i say at one point in the book i just say to the reader directly you know um look at china now and think about how different it is from china 100 years ago we can be that different again in the next 100 years we can change our own society we can change our own culture we can change our own politics we can make much more progress in the next hundred years than the communist dictatorship of china made in the last hundred years and i know i'm all alone on this guys i know that nobody else sees it that way the furthest left-wing person is profoundly conservative compared to me because when they look at american culture they think nothing can change the most left-wing person in france lives with this same kind of hopelessness and the same kind of resignationism because they think nothing can change now you know when you look at afghanistan and again 20 years ago nobody looked at it and said how much how much change is possible with one trillion dollars in 20 years oh a lot of changes possible a tremendous profound fundamental cultural social political change as possible that would have made the world a better place and one of the reasons why we didn't accomplish that was that that was not even what george w bush was trying to accomplish that wasn't what barack obama was trying to accomplish you know there was something better possible and you know we we bungled it and you and i and everyone in this audience we all have blood on our hands all of us are responsible there there was no amendment to the constitution about torture it never happened oh we cared so much about it 2001 2005 and then we just forgot there was no amendment to the constitution about extraordinary rendition there was there were all these profound fundamental moral problems none of which resulted in new legislation we didn't change we didn't adapt we didn't learn the lessons of history as it was happening and we haven't learned lessons of history you know now that it's over you know i want to make a different point about afghanistan when you look at where afghanistan is today and where when you look at where we are now i want to say to you that we can make even more progress than that in the next hundred years in the next hundred years ahead we can be more different from the people we are now then we are different from afghanistan all right the darkness of the dark ages can finally come to an end in paris and london and new york we can have a future that is really genuinely secular that is really authentically atheist that is really profoundly directly democratic we can have all those things but it's going to start with admitting to ourselves that we ain't got it that we want wanted and that we'll have to make terrible sacrifices to make any change at all [Music]