The Future of Gun Control & the History of the Constitution (vs. Woody Holton & Robert G. Parkinson)

i open by reading a hilarious comment from the audience manon gowenko a longtime viewer and commenter says quote he's really excited for this topic his stance used to be until he realized that what he truly wants is for him to be able to have guns and for everyone else not to be able to have it um be uh be sensitive to those rights that you would uh preach only as a private privilege for a few and not for the many if you don't think a right would be used well and appropriately by your worst enemies then perhaps should not be a right and this comes up a great deal obviously in talking about uh freedom of speech if you don't really believe freedom of speech can and should be had in practice by your by your worst enemies because we are living through a period of time when the history of the constitution of the united states of america is being rewritten it's being understood in a completely different way um some of these books i recommend more than others some of them are better written than others if you just click on the description of this video many of my viewers never do you will find links to two books that we're going to discuss at some length uh i'm going to make reference to woody halton again just a book i frequently advertise and mention in terms of what the new school of thought is and looking back and reinterpreting this united states of america and this guy robert parkinson let's make sure i'm getting his name right uh who has written 13 clocks so that is one book i cannot hold up for you on camera because i've been reading it as a kindle ebook on my cell phone but it's the cover of that book appears in the thumbnail of this video for a reason and those are the two books mentioned in the description for a reason so partly this is going to be a discussion about new perspectives on new understandings of the history of the american constitution it is partly going to be a critique of those two authors of uh parkinson and woody holton because i have a different uh perspective different emphasis different direction to take in this video and partly as you have all guessed again there's a lot of information just in the title and thumbnail for this video this is probably going to be a response to the renewed debate about the right to bear arms about legislation to regulate or delimit americans right to own and use guns which is a great illustration of the more profound and fundamental questions i want to raise here about law itself about democracy itself and indeed um about the concept of progress now i open this video with some hesitation by talking about the most impalpable and abstract aspect of the debate which is the idea of progress our whole concept of what a revolution is our concept of what a constitution is at this moment is poisoned by our presuppositions about progress we are trained from an early age to think about political progress as if it were in some sense equivalent to scientific progress so let's just reflect on this for a moment in the progress of science we are told there are things that in the past were unknown then they become known and everything in our society changes to reflect what's now established as known which has real demonstrable palpable consequences so there was a time when nobody understood the nature of tooth decay and going to the dentist was unbelievably painful and terrifying and expensive right and our whole society for untold centuries lived in fear of tooth decay it's not too much to say that they lived in fear of the dentist again whether that was in terms of what it would cost you or just the physical pain you would go through when having teeth pulled out of your head then there were these scientific discoveries including the understanding of fluoride and its efficacy and preventing tooth decay and then we started to have ever more coercive laws and educational policies of teaching every child that they should use fluoride of adding fluoride to the drinking water all these other things that remain controversial it is every time i go to buy toothpaste i'm amazed at how many brands still to this day advertise that they're fluoride free for that you know hippie uh market for the people who don't believe in fluoride people who believe hysterical conspiracy theories about fluoride right so this is an idea of irreversible universal objectively real progress now i'm already hinting at the extent to which it is not so universal as we might like to believe because when i go to buy toothpaste whether or not one should buy toothpaste that has fluoride and it remains controversial believe it or not whether or not there should be fluoride in the drinking water uh remains controversial too and i've heard both both sides of that argument by the way that um to what extent that science and to what extent that's pseudoscience remains controversial but for the purpose of this video just pointing out we all of us anyone who speaks any modern language not just modern western language if you grew up speaking chinese if you grew up speaking japanese to an astonishing extent throughout the whole world globally you were raised with a notion of unidirectional unidirectional progress progress that moves in one direction as science goes from unknown to known as things go from suspicions and apprehensions and superstitions they're dragged into the realm of facts then we adapt our culture changes our laws change our policies change in response to that that progress and something subtle but important here in this model government is not creating progress government is not creating change government is lagging behind scientific change right some scientists somewhere perhaps in a university right discovers something and then government and democracy follows along afterward imperfectly legislating behind that's also a very important and in my opinion false assumption as opposed to looking at progress as something that is innovated nowhere other than in the halls of power in government and really taking seriously the role of government as innovator not as responding to and lagging behind uh okay the history of prostitution in france at any given moment in that story it was very easy to speak of progress it was very easy to pretend this was the superstitious notion in the dark ages these were the superstitious unscientific attitudes of the medieval world and then something became known that formerly was unknown and resulted in new laws a new constitution if you like changes when i say constitution i don't just mean a written constitution but this slightly more nebulous sense of of how our society operates at all time on the basis of things written and unwritten things known and unknown that france made a transition from prostitution being illegal to prostitution being legal if you don't know this spend some time with the wikipedia article guess what france made the transition back again okay they tried having a society with legal prostitution they didn't like the consequences and then they tried something else and i'm slightly simplifying the history if you go through it decade by decade and century by century you'll see at different times it shifted back and forth but to simplify you can indeed say of france that the pendulum swung out in one direction and then it swung back again right next door germany has a totally different history with prostitution on the other side of the world the history of prostitution in japan the history of prostitution in taiwan the history of prostitution in south korea okay there is no progress there were only revisions there are only constitutional amendments if you like the reason why i prefer the term revision to amendment is that built into the concept of amendment is that you are mending something there is a rip in the fabric or there is an there's an imperfection in the constitution that you mend right i'm just talking about revisions people have an idea they write it down on a piece of paper and in this respect a written constitution is no different from a bar room napkin right they try it for a while they see how it works it's not working and they have to try something different [Laughter] a little bit of technical assistance from melissa here sitting off camera um so part of my interest in the current controversies in reevaluating and analyzing the history of the american revolution of freshman new engle the writing of the constitution of fresh from a new angle part of it yes is in challenging myths and misconceptions about the american constitution i am concerned though that what i see happening right now in the year 2022 is one set of myths being discarded and people's eagerness to embrace and entrench a new set of myths frankly a new set of lies um just within the last several months you will have heard this from a cacophony of voices innumerable people across the united states america stood up to proclaim that the right to have an abortion is enshrined in the constitution innumerable voices complain that they are taking away our constitutional rights um to have an abortion and many innumerable people talking about the right to privacy in the constitution there is no right to have an abortion in the constitution there is no right to privacy in the constitution now a few months before that i remember likewise in discussions about twitter um at certain points it's been said about youtube and facebook they are taking away our constitutional right to freedom of speech there's absolutely nothing in your constitution i mean even if you look at the history of newspapers in the united states of america you might be horrified and terrified to see the extent to which all of this has been in the kind of gray area or wild west situation of making things up as they as they go all go along by the way simple question from the audience freda is asking what history the united states would you recommend i am recommending exactly the two books that are in the description of this video so this video even though it is partly a critique of those two books it is also an advertisement of those two books and i'll just say the nature of critique in this field um both books are are concise they they have to work within limits woody holton has only so many pages here and likewise uh 13 clocks um parkinson wrote a much longer book and then 13 clocks is an attempt to make a more uh concise and popular uh version summarizing his research the formula is much more one of the ways in which critique works is where i'm pointing these people and saying the problem is because you focused on this you omitted or diminished the significance of that where it's not that i'm pointing the finger at them and saying that they're factually wrong but those differences of emphasis really do matter so i've already hinted at the fact that we're going to be dealing with with gun control here the big breakthrough that's happening i mean it sounds very 2022 and again this raises questions of how now people are creating new myths about um the constitution and history of the american revolution one of the big breakthroughs is just for historians to admit to themselves genocide really matters yeah we have here's a great title at least surviving genocide by uh by jeffrey hossler um do you like that one okay i'm surprised yes sir i i intentionally didn't show that on camera yeah you said in the field was well written so we have with quite a few books here melissa was just mentioning some others that are off camera but yeah i quote that in my own book but yeah that's not one i recommend just due to quality of writing yeah um all right so this may sound rather shallow and stupid if you just say well genocide of indigenous people really matters um the enslavement of black people really matters and it might be very easy to dismiss that and say okay well the education i was given in high school textbooks and perhaps in university lectures i understand that perhaps de-emphasized or omitted the significance of of of those things but then nevertheless now if you're going to give them new emphasis a new place of prominence uh in your retelling of the history you might think that that doesn't really change much of anything it profoundly changes it totally changes our understanding of what happened in the american revolution it totally changes our understanding of for example the provision of the right to bear arms the idea that every every man or every gentleman would carry a gun in the united states of america at the end of that that revolutionary period those revolutionary wars so now look sorry just returning to this issue of one myth replacing another one set of lies replacing another um just as it is possible like a kind of mass hysteria it's possible for millions of people to convince themselves that the constitution um promises you the right to have an abortion or promises your right to privacy whether there isn't one word about that the office of the constitution nothing like this even occurred to them it was unimaginable to them that this is what they were writing into the constitution well on a scale of hundreds of millions of people americans have convinced themselves that this is precisely what the the constitution guarantees them in the same way all my life i have heard left of center people and perhaps some moderate centrists insisting that the constitutional right to bear arms only pertains to um members of the military and especially the local state state level armed forces and they they lean on the fact that it contains this sentence about a well-armed militia that so this is the claim this is the myth it's contending to become a dominant myth in our understanding or reinterpretation of the of the constitution the claim is that we all made a terrible mistake in thinking that an ordinary private citizen would be able to own and carry arms that in fact the framers of the constitution the office of the constitution that all they had intended was for the state to have a well-armed militia that for the state would have its own uh military or however you want to think of this its own gender arms um [Music] and that was all that the the constitution was providing for now that is outrageously laughably false and we're left in this situation today where it's sort of one one myth against another and as in the same way that americans just want to contend with one interpretation versus another in relation to um uh abortion rights we have one fiction versus another one myth versus another one set of lies versus another about the constitution on the ownership of guns instead of simply accepting that if you want to change something in the constitution the same way the people of taiwan change their laws about prostitution back and forth the same way the people of france change their laws about prostitution back and forth you just have to accept that this is a change this is either a revision or an amendment or you can tear up your constitution and write a new one so that it says what you what you want to say and again i really think the most profound and abstract and abstruse thing to accept here or reflect on is that there is no progress it isn't the case that there was something the founding fathers didn't know that there was something unknown in 1776 like the nature of tooth decay that now is known people in 1776 understood how guns worked okay they understood how deadly and dangerous guns were we'll talk about this a little bit later right that was that was really fully profoundly understood and i think you you really can't imagine how in those years uh let's just say the 1760s 1770s 1780s just how much experience with violence these men had just how much blood they had in their hands uh just as one example i mean i'll mention benjamin franklin too i've been reading this detailed biography of governor morris so if you don't know who governor moore says he's one of the most fascinating figures in the american revolutionary period american constitution and so on and so forth one of the most fascinating and one of the most important and one of the most forgotten even for someone like myself who has read about the history of massacres under communism in china in russia and several theaters someone is familiar with the violence of the french revolution to read in detail about governor morris really getting blood on his hands in the american revolution really killing people really um looting and pillaging from their political enemies stealing from tories however you want to put it the the street level violence in new york city and governor morris's own role in it that was shocking to me that was horrifying to me these men knew violence and they knew what it was before the american revolution and they certainly knew a lot more about it by the end of the american revolution nobody could know more the significance of gun ownership than the authors of the american constitution and some of these guys you think of as as men of peace um someone like benjamin franklin he had a lot of blood on his hands he had a lot of very direct experience with violence with military affairs and this was really a period of history in which violence to a much greater extent than this today it was the domain of amateurs where they didn't have a professional uh police force they didn't have a professional military or they they kind of sort of did sometimes that's why you talk about these terms like militia and minutemen there's a great term what is a minute man what does that mean these were farmers and cobblers and you know some of them aristocrats like governor morris these are just ordinary men with ordinary jobs who would snatch up their guns and run out at a minute's notice and participate in in violence where the line between professional and amateur was blurred or dotted or or didn't exist now sorry i want to say this also um i have here it's less and less impressive than holding up a book i suppose i have here printed it on paper it gives you a sense of how few pages these things are um the constitution of the state of new york from april 20th 1777 and the constitution of new hampshire which managed to be written uh january 1776 and that's the first state to actually write a constitution of that in that period now so if you've if you think it's humanly impossible to do that kind of primary source research you could download these and and print them out um the notion of progress it's really invidious it's really distorting even in just looking at a single stage of political development here i'm going to try to explain you several stages of development in the revolutionary period in the year 1776 and in the year 1777 when these men wrote these uh constitutions what they were doing even at the level of propaganda discourse by which i just mean the shallowest most public most overt level of what they were doing politically was not progressive it was not taking a step forward it was conservative it was taking a step back and this stage of the american revolution it really can be understood as a conservative revolution in the following terms boston was an incredibly important place politically in this period of time i mean today we only think of new york and los angeles chicago and distant third or something you know uh in this period of time you cannot exaggerate the importance of boston and the state of massachusetts in american political discourse okay the people of massachusetts the people of the city of boston they had a constitution both in fact and in propaganda in their claims of a propaganda at the time right so as they articulated their own political position they had a constitution they had a system of government that was dear to them and precious to them and that had been taken away by the king of england in what were called the intolerable acts now this second point i'm going to come back to you later they had a map of what north america was supposed to be so you know what we now call the 13 colonies etc etc you get into a lot of anachronisms even just to describe the geography as opposed to using the actual terms they use the time you know but anyway the map of north america these colonies that would later become separated into the united states and canada et cetera et cetera right they had a clear sense of what the political order was and what the geographic order was overnight with the intolerable acts as as they are called from the british perspective they were the tolerable acts but anyway to use a propaganda term the king of england with one stroke of the pen had taken away their constitution had taken away their system of government whether you think of that as a democracy as a republic or as a kind of mixture of the three right that was the original claim was that this was a mixture of aristocracy democracy and uh monarchy you know the hybrid polity something that goes all the way back to cicero and that's a type of rationalization of the british parliamentary system that very much um was shall we say set in stone it was very much iterated defined examined and redefined very clearly in the period of the english civil war so since the english civil war everyone is aware this is what cicero said this is what the king of england said this is what um the revolution of that time said i.e the revolution that tore down the king of england and put oliver cromwell in power and then this was this was the hybrid discourse this was the kind of um reconciliation uh at the end of oliver cromwell's right after the death of cromwell when england reverted to having a monarch but of course from their perspective they maintained or sustained the advantages of republican government that had been you know briefly but violently um introduced into the history of england at this time okay so that kind of hybrid republican ideology the people of boston people of massachusetts as a whole right their claim was that they already had a constitution that they wanted to go back to and that the king of england had taken this away from them and had appointed a governor as a kind of dictator sweeping aside this uh tradition whatever so this is very very clear if you read the constitution of new hampshire 72 primary the constitution of new hampshire 1776 constitution of the state of new york uh 1777. this is not presenting you with a new system of government this is defending and perpetuating their old system of government what both of these constitutions say again and again is we are going to go back to the system of government we already had as a colony before this confrontation with the king before the intolerable acts however you want to put it right now again i am not saying so so by the way um there's a very different sense in which woody halton's work invites us to reevaluate the american revolution and the writing of the constitution as a kind of counter-revolution as a kind of elitist revolution from above instead of being a grassroots democratic revolution from below there are serious questions here and i've made other youtube videos uh talking about that right but by the way uh the writing of the constitution this is several chapters later uh in the history of the american revolution right and certainly sorry i don't want to misrepresent woody holton but i think one romanticized view that is going to result from this new period of scholarship research re-evaluation of history one romanticized view is going to be to imagine that the earlier phase of the revolution was grassroots and pro-democracy and then the later phase of writing the constitution was instead elitist top-down was this kind of aristocratic uh counter-revolution conservative counter-revolution well again i'm not attributing that view to woody holton i think that's going to be probably the mainstream response to his work into this whole generation of new scholars uh frankly um working in the same field in the same direction along with him well i've already stated something far more disturbing to you it's something that overturns the assumptions about progress which is that the very first phase already in 1776 1777 actually what you're talking about shouldn't be understood as progress shouldn't be understood as an experiment with a new system of government if you just read the primary source documents if you just read the constitution which is partly a work of propaganda right but it's partly an actual blueprint for how government will operate right like it can only only so much of this can be propaganda to some extent it has to describe the norms the laws and bylaws we're going to say the assumptions whereby government is working is going to operate and this is telling you very clearly no new ideas no new discovery we haven't discovered penicillin we haven't discovered fluoride we haven't discovered a cure for smallpox we haven't discovered the the scientific nature of malaria malaria it's remarkably late in our history that we figure what malaria actually is by the way um we have a long history of struggling with the symptoms of malaria not knowing what it is there's no scientific breakthrough there's no new discovery this these state constitutions before the federal constitution these are written by men who are saying loud and clear they were happy with the system of government they had before and they want to go back to it now in order to do that they had to fight a revolutionary war against the king of england but what these are telling you very clearly is that they are going to go back to a system where they have the same constitution they have before they have the whole same legal system they have before the same courts the same laws they have a governor the same way they did before before they had a colonial governor now they have a colonial governor again right they're going to have exactly the same norms and standards and practices in operating whether you want to call it a parliament or a congress or what have you this is telling you very clearly no innovation no new ideas and i don't mean to be insulting but you can read these and really say no revolution right that this is a kind of anti-revolution or counter now sorry just to be fair i want to make this clear if i had been alive at that time i can completely understand that i also would want to fight against the intolerable acts of king george i mean i totally get it i am not saying in some simplistic way this is a phony revolution therefore it it shouldn't have happened at all i really can't appreciate what was intolerable about the intelligence and why these people rose on them this brings us to the next important point and yes all of this is linked to gun ownership and gun control so again i wish i could hold up the book in front of you but um 13 clocks by parkinson all right what parkinson uh demonstrates very very well is this there is a transition in the year 1775. so every year here really matters guys 1774 is not 1775 and 1775 is not 1776. with each passing year the political context profoundly changes in what would become the united states of america all right and the objectives people are working towards and the enemies they're working against completely change so let's just let's just go back one more year in 1773 america is basically basically divided between tories and whigs all right and the tory versus wig discourse i would say hasn't fundamentally changed since the end of the english civil war so again i've already alluded to this but it is very important to understand the american constitution you have a new a new normal is established there's a there's a loaded political phrase at the end of the english civil war a new normal is established new fundamental assumptions about politics new fundamental assumptions about religion and the the profoundest assumption of all was that england was not going to imitate ancient rome england was not going to imitate ancient greece that england already had accomplished cicero's ideal of having a hybrid form of government that incorporated the best elements of democracy along with the best elements of monarchy and aristocracy now what a convenient propaganda claim right obviously plenty of people at that time could have said what do you mean you have the best elements of democracy we have no democracy at all or we have only a tiny amount of democracy uh england had a deeply dysfunctional uh system of elections and uh very very basic assumptions um so again so i'll give you just one example i'm not going to launch into a critique of how the british system problem worked at that time the name john wilkes is very important to know to understand the spirit of history and unfortunately most americans they if you say john wilkes they think of john wilkes booth these are two completely different historical figures from different periods of time john wilkes is not john wilkes booth muhammad is not muhammad ali i was once in the classroom a history classroom and there was a girl who was insisting that muhammad ali and muhammad were the same person it was deeply embarrassing for the the teacher and for everyone else in the class and we were kept in trouble no no that's muhammad that's not muhammad ali those are two different people anyway yeah [Laughter] very good looking girl too i've never googled her to find out what what happened her but i sadly i think she was one of those women who was too good-looking for her own benefit and probably her parents and her teachers everything she said you'll be fine you can be a model and no one was saying to her look kid keep it straight your centuries straight here anyway yeah muhammad is not muhammad ali john wilkes is not uh john moore's booth so i just say the life of john wilkes and the political changes he managed to make in the british house of parliament just in the few years immediately before the american revolution he has a long career but it culminates just before the american revolution that shows that most of our assumptions about how parliament was supposed to operate were completely untrue in england in that period for example this might seem ridiculous to you the right of a journalist to quote something that was said in parliament before this time before john wilkes challenged it the assumption was that all negotiations and discussions within parliament were secret no one was allowed to publish them in the newspaper no one was allowed to quote them no one in the public was allowed to criticize them so it was a secret meeting of advisers to the king or cronies to the king so again like you might assume that in this period say the century leading up to the american revolution that england had already a robust well-functioning system of democracy and no these were precisely the years when in england the nature and function of parliament was being most intensely uh debated challenged and ultimately revised they did they did make changes you know john wilkes won basically and the idea of of how this hybrid democracy would function uh in the british isles this was changing just at this time and that's very much part of the whig versus tory discourse as i say carried on both in england and in north america throughout this period so my point is this in 1773 you have the whigs you have the so-called sons of freedom sons of liberty these groups now you have these different groups of enthusiasts and you have the tories debating a set of political questions that have been familiar for many decades right doesn't mean they're boring if i'd been alive at that time i'm sure i would have been totally engrossed in those debates what changes i'm sorry i can't hold up the book i should hold up my my cell phone what changes according to this book uh what changes um according to 13 clocks and i think the book really does prove this in a in a powerful way i'll mention his sources and how he proves it is that there is a shift from tory versus wig to everyone versus the slaves everyone versus the indigenous people where political discourse fundamentally changes in terms of us versus them in the united states of america in 1775 it is no longer a question of for example to what extent do you support john wilkes and his reform parliament to what extent are you enthusiastic about some of the new models of democracy and republics in the world notably corsica corsica is a big deal in this period it's very important it's prefiguring and inspiring the american revolution so all that's going on in in this discourse and i think what parkinson proves in 13 clocks is that there was this profound shift where the us versus them became white people versus non-white people that this became a race war and that that completely uh preempted uh silenced the ideological and political debates that have been going on before that was so powerful and so important so all-consuming and throughout all of the 13 colonies not just in the deep south not just in virginia now so this comes back to one of the light motifs of this this video very often the differences between historians and the difference between politicians if you like in discussing politics uh something in the present tense or discussing it in retrospective history very often the difference between two sides is a difference in emphasis i mean to say that we have de-emphasized slavery and genocide in genocide against the indigenous people in the retelling and understanding of the american revolution is an understatement i mean the extent to which propaganda the way this history is taught in high schools universities and seemingly respectful the the the extent to which we have been deceiving ourselves and lying to ourselves is impossible to exaggerate and when we shift the emphasis to recognizing the importance of what can only be called race war a war between races right it's not just a difference in emphasis it's not about being woke or you know sensitive or progressive or or what have you it's not just a difference in sentiment this really does substantively change the the facts uh it changes it changes the selection of facts we're interpreting it changes our interpretation of the facts it changes our our understanding and then our opinions what we're going to conclude moving forward but what happened needs to happen next in the united states of america now i've mentioned it very briefly but again when you understand this i'll say a few words about it it is completely ridiculous to say that a nation that had just at that time been in an intense armed struggle against the indigenous people against rebellious black slaves against the british military right and against the very nebulous and hard to define enemy within being the tories being the united empire loyalists being the people who remained true to the king of england right that was a neighbor to neighbor street to street cutthroat fight people really had bloodlines to say that those people did not understand the meaning of the right to parts and that's the mainstream left-wing discourse right now just like it's the mainstream left-wing discourse that these guys were pro-abortion or even conceived of the american constitution as as legalizing abortion or legalizing gay marriage that you can interpret this into a text where this was in no way intended or hinted at in a vague statement about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness just just ridiculous right now my claim here is not to say to you oh well you know these men knew the correct way to design a functioning society whereas the japanese just have no clue all right the japanese went through a period of unbelievable violence world war ii have you heard of it the level of violence the people of japan had endured in case you don't know for from japan's perspective world war ii is a lot longer than anywhere else in the world because it includes what we call in english the sino-japanese war right japan basically had been in a continuous state of imperialist warfare from before the beginning of world war one until the end of world war ii it never stopped it was one battle after another and it's it's not just china we say the sino-japanese war um you know i've written specifically about the wars uh between japan and russia at this time because russia goes all the way east to sackland island and pushing that border back and forth you know how much of sakhalin was going to be japanese how much was going to be russia the the the eastern coast of siberia and so on and by the way japan also had war with the germans in this period and so on um the control of qingdao you know okay so japan went through a period of unbelievable violence now it's a slight simplification to say they came out of that with the attitude that they would become a gun-free society and indeed a society without an army right but you can say the japanese approach to gun control right at the end of world war ii it's completely fundamentally different from the approach of the united states of america right and within europe there are also contrasting approaches you can contrast switzerland to germany congress switzerland to france uh switzerland england right and you can ask who in the world either um as an ideal or in practice they're they're achieving a gun free society a society without guns with as few guns as as possible right but again it would be ridiculous to say the japanese didn't know what they were doing when they basically banned gun ownership and decided to not have a military blah blah blah to only have self-defer defense forces i'm not gonna get into all the hypocrisy is entailed by the japanese constitution which is still still their constitution of this day this post-world war ii uh constitution written under american dominion shall we say if if not outright written by americans um you know so japan has its own history on this issue taiwan has its own history thailand there are countries all around the world and of course most americans they're engaging with this issue it's very much impoverished by the fact that they're not even willing to look at canada next door they're not willing to consider a contrasting history that's absolutely adjacent to them baby if you want to jump in you can yeah oh yeah yes no no no i mean it's true i mean i've been presuming to talk about wealthy countries here rather than poverty stricken and third world countries so this is my knowledge i used to live in cambodia as well as studying the history on paper but to my knowledge cambodia is a small country everyone knows each other you know to some extent the government isn't that far moving people but you know there was an incident when a school kid and i forget how young this kid was but i remember being a young kid like i don't it wasn't of someone who was 18 and in school i don't know if he was 11 or 8 but it was a young kid was really angry at another kid and he went to his father's car and so this was a wealthy family in cambodia i forget that they might have had a limousine driver to pick the kid up from school kind of thing and he went and he got a gun out of the car door and he pointed it at the other kid you know after after school this this kind of situation and you know again just it's little kids who lose their temper but you know he knows he's a rich kid and he knows my father has a gun or he knows his his his father has a limousine driver who has a gun whatever exactly the situation was and that was a breaking point in cambodian politics where they're like whoa you know this is the reality of the society we've got here and then the question of how this would change um but yeah many societies the reality they live with is that rich people have guns and poor people have none and uh that was certainly what america was reacting against i mean this was a unitarian universalist notion that everyone's gonna have a gun and that this this would be a wonderful thing so by the way i have mentioned this before but if you just look at the constitution of the state of maine the many of the founding fathers were still alive when the constitution of maine was written and thomas jefferson participated in writing the constitutional statement somebody's saying it's very much part of the same tradition the same generation the same values the same assumptions about the meaning of words the constitutional state of maine is is really consonant with i mean it reflects the same assumptions it's writing the federal constitution for united states america against some of the same people involved again it wasn't an attempt at innovation i mean it's also worth saying it wasn't trying to be new and different it was just carrying on the same tradition and the constitutional state of maine from memory i believe the wording is it simply says um every man has the right to bear arms to own guns don't firearms and absolutely nobody will ever question it close in scale it's also very intimate violence um i can say more about this but i mean this book that i can 13 o'clock it really shows you uh there were white people who were fighting against their own former servants like black people who slept in the same house with them where the black people slept downstairs and the white people commit kind of violence this kind of race war there were owners of farms of estates whatever you want to say where suddenly the white people were in a state of war against their farm workers which is something they had certainly um been terrified of for many years leading up to this it wasn't a possibility they had never imagined however what they had never imagined was that their slaves would be armed by the king of england to fight against them and masculine that was beyond their worst nightmares they had been prepared for and afraid of a slave uprising a slave rebellion but this was a slave uprising of slave rebellion armed by encouraged by funded by the king of england himself just saying this is violence that's not only enormous in scale but it's door-to-door violence it's within your house it's on your city block your farm your forest you know it was violence everywhere now again japan at the end of world war ii had just lived through a period of tremendous violence there isn't some kind of simple cause and effect relationship where the experience of violence results in a resolution like the american constitution or the constitution of the state of maine so on and so forth right you could have that experience of violence instead become a society that's very controlling of uh munitions armaments uh etc but i'm just saying you have to respect and take seriously this was the american response right their response to the experience of race war in this period because there what i mean sorry you can go back to christopher columbus in the 1490s um there were many different discrete periods where you're talking about genocidal war and wars of whites against blacks and slave uprisings so and so forth obviously immediately prior to the american revolution uh you can look at the island of haiti you know i'm sorry the revolution of haiti kind of goes on forever that's both before and after and during i mean haiti things are dropped for more than a century there it's a long long history babe you want your bit yeah yeah yeah part of the reason why i was mentioning the bernard baylen book the barbarous years is because he does talk about these violent these interactions between the colonists and the native people so i i just think that's also uh important to read that history where uh in the 1600s yes there were just constantly conflicts going on and this did inform you know the writing of these constitutions that they are aware yeah this is always a threat this is always something that they're terrified of uh and that's part of the reason why it's been written into the constitution um right well what i would say with that so she's shouting out again a book uh called by called the barbarous years by uh by bailin uh and that author bernard balan he was really famous for his work as a young man he kind of had hit books that were very influential and this is him writing as as an old man at the end of his career that he writes the barber series the world as woody holton presents or represents it the world is woody holden perhaps misrepresents it he very much presents to us the conclusion that the period of the american revolutionary war was the final period in which the indigenous people were a serious armed threat where they really had the chance to fight and win against the white man to simplify against eric collins now so look again i'm not saying that's that's untrue but um what i would emphasize is this for the white people who were alive at that time and who were writing the american constitution they did not know it was the the final period for them that situation which again is so in this period of time my point is i mean if you're talking about california in the 19th century it's totally different i'll show you about hawaii like it was not the case that white people in hawaii were afraid centuries later right it wasn't the case that there was this kind of ongoing armed conflict where white people thought they were going to be murdered in their sleep by the indigenous people but yeah i mean in talking about bernard balen's the barbarous years leading up to the american revolution and the writing of constitution there is this long period where the indigenous people from the perspective of the white colonists they have the numbers they have the armaments and they have the level of organization to really be a serious threat to really end their colonies to wipe them out and where the the white people again including benjamin franklin benjamin franklin literally went on the warpath of hunting and killing indigenous people he was directly involved with that he was pulling triggers and marching with uh with minutemen whatever you want to say marching with armed volunteers to go out and fight against the indigenous people so i mean again it just makes it very palpable this wasn't something they studied in a university classroom on a chalkboard ben franklin had blood on his hands he knew the smell of gunpowder he knew what it was to go out and fight the indigenous people i'm not glorifying it i'm saying this was their physical reality so yeah i just say it's very easy to look back at that anachronistically and say okay well this was the final period in which the indigenous people were a threat and then after that we get into a long period of history with white people completely dominate the continent militarily economically and uh you know politically where there really aren't two voices in the dialogue but it's true to say i mean on the one hand yeah we just need to emphasize that the genocide have been going on since columbus yeah but then i think the other thing i'd say is that this was also a long period where the genocide had had real negotiations where there were two sides negotiating peace treaties and so is that the emphasis you bring to it or no one well yes that's what um and i just want to say uh the reason why i'm mentioning that that book is because um in surviving genocide i don't feel like there's as much emphasis on these bloody conflicts like these you know just uh these conflicts that were going on um as and also just in what i uh was taught in my education you know um i was told you know how horrific that the genocide was in in the united states but not so much about the native response that they also were armed and that they also were a threat but that up to this period there were very much two sides to the conflict that they are fighting back and there's the prospect of them of them winning i don't know if it was in 13 o'clock um but just in exchange for a weapon the native people agreed to fight in the counter-revolutionary oh yeah yeah right so just so it is um uh anyway yeah look um sorry i don't know i don't want to get to the the history of that who were the indigenous people and what motivated them and and what were they what were they fighting for um you know for the purposes of this video i want to say this um probably your high school textbooks about world war ii your high school textbooks about the holocaust about a very different genocide probably your high school textbooks included some explanation of some reflection of the extent to which germans whether this is sane or insane germans blamed the jews for having let them down in world war one now i think this is a very minor part of the history of of nazi ideology but there is truth to us again this is an issue where the dispute is about emphasis not about facts all of the accounts of the nazi period world war ii genocide period that i read whether in high school or university the accounts that were given to me as opposed to the research i did apparently they always emphasized this that the germans had a feeling that they could have won in world war one if they weren't let down by their own side by kind of the peace protesters on their own side and the feeling that the jewish population as this more cosmopolitan pro peace that there would have been some number of jewish people marched in anti-war protests and so on that this was part of what let their side down in world war one now i've by the way i've made other youtube videos talking about the history of of nazi ideology i think that is ep i think that is a tiny part of the history of of nazi ideology and anti-semitism in germany i think it's ridiculous to give that the emphasis that textbooks regularly do but nevertheless even if it is a p rather than a cantaloupe um in its size and significance in this history you can see the way that we're construing history there is to try to um convey a psychological motive whereby the german people whether this be rational irrational whether this be sane or inside insane felt that they were getting revenge against an ethnic minority among them who had been on the other side in world war one that's that's how we're constraining us now again i've stated appeal i disagree with this interpretation but i understand how it makes a coherent and compelling narrative out of the inter-war years the wars in between uh world war one and world war ii so sorry if if your textbooks didn't teach it to you this way that's fine um i have a video that has a cult in the title the occult origins of nazi ideology and that really gives you a sense of just how insane the nazis were and i i think in writing a rational history kind of by definition we're diminishing the irrational aspects of history we're rationalizing history whether we want to or not so that's anyway you can watch a separate video on that you can think about what i've said with that if you want to i'm mentioning this here as a kind of allegory to clarify what i'm trying to say about the american revolution how much more intense was the racism at that time in 1776 right like can you imagine the intensity of the racism given that what had just happened was that the king of england had armed the black slaves and the indigenous people the native people had armed them to fight against the white colonists right can you imagine a scenario in which during world war one it's it's in incomprehensible what if during world war one the king of germany i realized there wasn't a king of germany at this time this is an acronym in various ways but just imagine hypothetically if the king of germany had armed the jews to fight against the germans within his own country it's surreal it's incomprehensible how much more intense would the anti-semitism have been how much more intense would the genocide have been in response to that right so the point is this whatever state americans were at in 1773 and even 1774 in their discourse on race their discourse on the abolition of slavery right this was profoundly changed the moment guns were being put in the hands of african-american people enslaved people guns were being put in the hands by the king of england right to fight against white americans now the issue with indigenous people native people in some ways it's different but in some ways it's worse everyone was prepared for the possibility of a slave uprising as i said before nobody was prepared for the king of england himself employing the slaves as his minions in fighting against the white colonists that was worse than the worst nightmare that the slave owning class of society could have or any of the white people who lived in what had what had been you know what in some ways an integrated society just people were living in communities where the blacksmith was was ethnically black and again you have to remember not all black people were slaves there were also freed men there were black people who were not slaves who owned different kinds of small businesses their political rights were drastically worse than a white person but there were liberated black people uh who were also an important part of society and indeed that even comes up in these slave rebellions they're very often led by a free black leading enslaved blacks to rebel and get their own freedom and so on you know so just say the significance of the free blacks within uh racially bifurcated slave societies is also uh very important anyway so that's that side of the equation the indigenous people had been employed in one war after another as mercenaries by all of the european powers so that was what everyone was accustomed to right so everyone was accustomed to the idea that when there was a war with spain the spanish monarchy would try to arm recruit and even kind of bribe indigenous people with some kind of promise or some kind of payment and what melissa was mentioning as soon as the payment was the guns themselves was just giving them rifles giving them guns because these were they were valuable and useful objects but there might be no no payment other than the armaments saying hey look we will give you these guns if you agree to fight against uh the british uh colonists everyone was accustomed to the idea that the french would arm indigenous people to fight against the english the spanish would arm indigenous people the fight against the english and the french zone and so forth what was shocking and horrifying about this is this time the target is us if you were living in a place like boston or a place like new york still to this day new york is walking distance from montreal i mean it's a long walk but i know we think of these things as far apart think about an army that just has to march from montreal to new york city before new york state is even closer the border interstate these things are not far off okay the very familiar pattern of the indigenous people being used as mercenaries now was being used against the white colonists so again to say this is a difference merely an emphasis in the interpretation of history right obviously we're completely lying about we're completely misrepresenting history when we diminish this okay so this is what i want to say this is now my critique this is the portion we're going to criticize both woody holton and 13 clocks by by parkinson and it's a further difference in emphasis and again making the very significant caveat these men they they've tried to be concise they're not telling the entire history of everything from alpha to omega and again some of the many of the other books i have in this stack are so enormous yeah yeah right yeah um anyway uh yeah so what is this the framers coup which i don't recommend there's over 800 pages you know so partly concision is is part of the problem i understand and then we're going to come back to this question of gun ownership and the amendment of the american constitution if you have a moment now hit the thumbs up button uh sorry i was i meant to say at the very beginning of this video if you guys have something to say if you have a question ask about the regulation of munitions in the united states america the regulation of gun ownership think about it now and kind of ask because i'm going to enter into this critique of the history of the revolution i'm writing the constitution and then i'm going to return to the discussion of gun ownership so you don't have to type it right now but rub the sticks together and come up with an intelligent question i will return to that and again you can ask it down and i'll scroll up or you can you can ask it when the when the time comes uh toward the end of this this portion of the video that's that's a critique um i think it's really easy to lose sight of the importance of the intolerable acts with this new emphasis with the the the focus the analytical framework brought to the history and they are two very different authors by the way by woody holton and by uh parkinson now again partly this is just chronological the intolerable acts they matter they're tremendously important but for a short period of time and i'm saying this because i find convincing the argument in 13 clocks that after a certain point the race war completely takes over and dominates the american mind the american imagination um and again the the disputes that used to exist of tori against whig the philosophical debates that very much were written rooted in oliver cromwell's period of dictatorship and republicanism in england all of that feeds into the background we can't quite say it's forgotten um but frankly the parlor room discussion of the ideal constitution that john adams very much engages in for hundreds and hundreds of pages right that really doesn't matter anymore with this turning point in 1775 what utterly matters what's totally animating everyone again not just in virginia even in the the far north is this race war discourse war against enslaved black americans war against indigenous people okay here's my problem with that we have to take seriously what was it about the intolerable acts that really was intolerable that lit the fuse for this war and i feel informed and shaped the successive stages of the civil war revolution and writing of the constitution now i am a very eccentric political philosopher in that if you make a list of what was supposedly intolerable about the intolerable acts 8 out of 10 points on that list i think are [ __ ] and you know [ __ ] can be an important part of history [ __ ] like propaganda matters too and you can examine it and analyze it but a lot of this stuff you have to say was just [ __ ] it was just propaganda so i'll give you a great example did you know that there was a popular theory among the nazis that they were direct descendants of atlantis atlantis and lemuria this guy like you can look into just how crazy it was [ __ ] hate to break this to you the german people are not the descendants of ancient atlantis or something you know like you can look at some things in politics that maybe they matter they matter to what extent but they would japanese politics is actually really really surreal that way uh too by the way i'm sorry if you look at the history of japan just really crazy including sorry it was very very popular the belief in japan that jesus christ visited japan the the historical jesus went oh yeah yeah that's that's a thick book in the library okay i want to get to japanese christian literature about uh you know the buddha sorry but it's true i was going to say both both jesus christ physically going to japan and the buddha physically going to japan and that that kind of mythos so once there can be completely a historical notions that are complete [ __ ] that may be important at one period of time sometimes [ __ ] matters when i'm looking at the intolerable acts my fundamental point is maybe eight out of ten are tolerable and we are just looking at very insincere propaganda from the whigs from the sons of freedom sons of liberty trying to put together a rationalization for you know a a rebellion that would ensue but for very different reasons this is my take on this so again some of those issues some of those questions they were very familiar for decades they weren't new they weren't sudden they weren't unexpected and they've been rehearsed at least since the english civil war blah blah blah okay but when you're looking at the intolerable acts what is new what is different and i feel all i feel every single book i've ever read about the american revolution every single book i've read about the constitution completely misses the significance of this okay what was new what was different what was intolerable was the quebec act every single version of the history i've ever encountered including in high school takes the position that at this time there was a regrettable sort of racism against catholics that you know the protestants were just kind of bigoted so really for no good reason at all uh people were hostile toward the idea of the king of england recognizing um the catholic church within quebec it creeps in in this way as a footnote to a footnote of the history of the revolution what i have to say is you are dead wrong like the depth of misinterpretation misrepresentation misconception there we have to really take seriously and the quebec act and what it meant to anyone alive in the 13 colonies at that time right it's astonishing it's breathtaking it's intolerable it's enough alone to make you get up and take arms and fight against the king of england to fight against the king whom you had been loyal to just six months before or just three months before like before we were just having this kind of endless decades-long debating party about what is the ideal constitution and again john adams is an example of this and so on you have these guys who are kind of sitting around saying well we have the legacy of oliver cromwell there was certainly a huge fashion for reading um historians of ancient rome athens became more popular later a lot of the interest was in rome there was a lot of interest in sparta in this period yeah rome and sparta not athens for whatever strange reason you know oh let's sit around and kind of reflect on what is the ideal constitution what is the role of democracy that was that was going on okay what the quebec act pardon me what the quebec act showed on an enormous scale i'm going to try to describe this was the same thing that the abrogation of the constitution of of massachusetts the replacement of the the system of government in boston showed on a tiny scale with one stroke of the pen the king of england had wiped out and overturned everything that englishmen in america had been fighting for not just in the seven years war what some people still call the french indian war but everything they've been fighting for going back to oliver cromwell and the english revolution okay so the quebec act suddenly radically redraws the map of north america and again i've only ever seen this admitted as a kind of funny footnote to history it's like oh yeah you know isn't it a funny thing you know actually at this time at the same time these exciting important things were happening in america like at the same time the boston tea party happened like that's where all the emphasis is is this you know the boston tea party is treated as being of such tremendous significance the king of england drew a new map of the continent that indescribably expanded the territory of quebec and his guys you can look it up on wikipedia what this was what the how what the quebec i would all of a sudden extends the territory of quebec all the way west to the the part of north america that's dominated by spain still the spanish north america it's not just the ohio valley it's the whole uh great lakes area all coasts of all sorts we've got seven great lakes right all five sorry all five of the great lakes every coast north south east and west this is completely gobbled up by quebec and what does it do with the government of quebec it wipes out the the progress i mean i'm critical of the concept of progress but the progress people were committed to this idea that we'd made progress toward a hybrid system of government of parliaments yes there's some role for the aristocrat some role for the king but you have parliaments you have democracy you have transparency of accountability the the progress that so many people had fought and died for to have separation of church and state i will say for the one thousandth time they did not have perfect separation of church and state they had extremely imperfect separation of church and state but if you were comparing the dark ages to what england had after oliver cromwell after the english civil war it was a huge step forward and it made life possible for the puritans it made life possible for the quakers it made life possible for the um what was the word the non-consenting denominations that a special term for this i'm sorry but anyway for um unconventional dissident forms of christianity to exist which was exactly what had been so intensely persecuted throughout the dark ages no the amount of religious freedom even for catholics even for jews let alone for africans african slaves the amount of religious freedom for indigenous people you know like there's there are tremendous hypocrisies here but from the perspective of someone alive at that time they would say what have we been fighting for all these centuries just to have the king of england reverse all of it with one stroke of the pen to totally redraw the map of north america it changed what had been known as the free state line the land that was allotted for the indigenous people it massively expanded quebec and what was the new system of government created in this quebec i mean we can't even call it quebec but this this massive expansion of quebec to be a huge part of the continent it was going to be absolutely zero democracy there was going to be one governor assigned as a dictator by the king of england and he was going to work with the catholic church who would again be allowed to collect tithes they would return to the the the system of religion that had existed since the dark ages all right now there's there's an even darker part of this history which certainly matters this year canada a great deal the enormity of quebec and this all being a return to dictatorship out of the dark ages what was north of quebec was even worse that was so-called rupert's land that was going to be corporate rule again no democracy the king of england works with the hudson bay company works with a for-profit corporation to make as much money as possible exploiting the indigenous people exploiting the natural resources no again sorry what happened to um the hybrid system of government that again even if you think it's only five percent democracy whether it's five percent or fifty percent it's a matter of opinion right what happened to the parliamentary system of government we fought so hard for and that again in some ways is old news because the english civil war feels a long time ago but in some ways it's brand new we all just lived through the drama of john wilkes we all just lived through the struggle for the reform and you know improvement of democracy in england that were form of this was really the golden era of the idea of freedom of the press the idea of public participation and democracy the idea that we now completely take for granted of what um uh what a parliament is supposed to be so on and so forth right so of all the intolerable acts the most intolerable of all was um the quebec act and there was a vision for the future of north america there which was again it was so horrifying it was so shocking that i can say if i were alive at that time i would suddenly want to take up arms against the king of england and and fight and this is a stage as they say prior to the race war discourse taking over the war against blacks the war against indigenous people um so on and so forth uh and it's interesting because this the significance of the quebec act i feel like it was forgotten by the old version of of history and i i i think it is still being forgotten by the new version of history the new analysis the new approach to the history that's being retold now by people like woody holton and parkerson and 13 clocks so uh you say a little bit more about 13 clocks now so we have someone who's obviously incredibly stupid in the audience um and i think he's trying to get himself uh so shout out to iowa x in the audience iowa x says quote armed slaves were ineffective at best and a minor footnote in the american revolution close quote i don't think you've read one book on this topic i don't think you've read one wikipedia article on this topic you don't know what you're talking about and the book you need to read it's not that long a book i forget if it's 200 pages 250 pages the book you need to read is 13 clocks all right that is the book and the link is in the description so i'm sorry you are factually wrong and the idea that armed slaves were a minor footnote in the american revolution that may be a lie your school teachers told you and maybe a lie you you read in a textbook like in a seemingly respectable textbook and it may be a lie you made up in your own mind like i don't know where you got that from all right that is utterly untrue now i'm going to mention this briefly so i'm saying this partly to promote 13 clocks and i'm saying this partly as a critique of 13 o'clock um the main source 13 clocks works from are the newspapers throughout the 13 colonies throughout the the new world uh i don't know if he included you know newspapers from saint montreal it's mostly about you know what would become the united states american that's that's all does he did he include newspapers from say jamaica i've seen a few quotes from jamaica in the book because they just say before america achieves independence the 13 colonies are very much part of one one uh empire with places like kingston jamaica and montreal and so on and so forth you know but anyway he read every page of every newspaper for a period of something like 15 years leading up to the american revolution now he says this himself in interviews in case that sounds like an enormous amount of reading part of his research was to track this the reality was like one newspaper in philadelphia would publish a certain article and then it would be reprinted verbatim a few weeks later or a month later in virginia in uh in boston so on and so forth so if he was looking at say 25 newspapers it wouldn't be that time consuming because absolutely the same article would appear again and again so he would have read it once and then when he started he'd actually check to see if there were changes sometimes there were changes right like sometimes uh something he points out is oh the newspaper in philadelphia took exactly the same article but they put this part in italics and they added just one sentence about how terrible so he actually notices the changes too so this gives you anyway just say this is a really robust empirical basis for the conclusions he's drawing now i'm about to to criticize it um but the sense of fear of having the slaves rise up the slaves being armed in your town in your village that is recorded very well by those local newspapers and it's not just in the deep south it's not just in uh south carolina et cetera in the carolinas or whatever example you want to use a place that a place that stereotypically has has a lot of uh slavery now you know so to give an example uh in virginia the royally appointed governor so the king's governor the governor who's working for the king of england he set out a proclamation and you can read the primary source text now you can read the actual wording he uses he put out a proclamation that declares all of the slaves free and then invites them if they're able-bodied to come and be armed and fight for the king the wording is intentional all right now by the way this is my own observation this is actually not in 13 clocks and it's not in woody holden's book also he does not say as one of the emperors of rome would say he doesn't say if you sign up and join the army and fight for five years then as a reward we will give you freedom it is not this kind of contractual phrasing it declares all of the negroes free it declares all black slaves free and then there's a comma and able-bodied black slaves are invited to join in the king's struggle against the revolution okay this was the most terrifying the most transformative proclamation the governor of virginia could have possibly made and i think 13 o'clock does a very good job of contextualizing it that he was just in he he was in a desperate position and desperate situation he was sleeping on a boat every night i assumed during the daytime they got out and walked around on land a bit but he was operating his government from a small boat on the coast of virginia because there was no city where he was safe sleeping at night because of the fear that these american revolutionaries would burn his house down would capture him so on and so forth so he was he was in a very real state of peril yes the slave uprisings mattered right they had a galvanizing terrifying effect on the white colonists of north america and i can say we can't say coast to coast in this period from north to south all right now yes by the way the worst case scenario for that kind of slave revolution they already knew about from the history of haiti they knew how far it could go they knew what slaves were capable of to what extent the slaves knew that is another question okay but this was not a slave rebellion these were slaves being offered freedom in exchange for killing white people with the full legal support financial support of the king of england that's something very different from just a slave uprising or slave rebellion it's slaves being encouraged to rebel and rise up right while being a mercenary for the king of england being assured you'll you will be given impunity you will not be put on trial it's not like if you engage now in uh murder raping and looting that later you'll fear going to prison the king of england is telling you that he's going to give you impunity he's going to give you armaments he's going to give you guns to rise up now 13 clocks is an interesting book in many different ways one of the things this book draws attention to again and again is the total um hypocrisy of the white colonist side who are simultaneously preaching a revolution in the name of freedom preaching a revolution so that they themselves will not be slaves they're talking about their own liberty and at the same time like sometimes in the same newspaper but someone's in the same article in the same paragraph they're pointing the finger at the slaves and saying how terrible it is that they're fighting for their liberty they're fighting for their freedom now i want to make a very quick contrast here who the hell would fight a war because of the boston tea party who is going to fight a war because they don't want to pay taxes on t and what do the taxes pay for they pay for the british navy which makes it possible to export tea from india to boston like it is very obvious why americans need to pay taxes on tea especially on things that are imported and exported across this globe spanning empire that the british have created it costs a lot of money and yet taxes on t make sense americans should pay taxes on t to fight because you don't want to pay taxes on t this is a really thin pretext for revolution the black people of america the slaves of america they were fighting for their freedom they were fighting for their survival they were fighting for something very real and very palpable what they were fighting for their passion their purpose there's no comparison between what motivated what fueled um you know the uh the slaves in the in the american revolution all right so um do you want to say something yeah i just want to say as an american yes it was my experience learning about the american revolution that most of the emphasis was on the boston tea party most of the emphasis was on the independence of the american colonies from england yeah so it's just i think this 13 clocks book and this live stream is extremely important for americans to hear because i do think it puts things in a very different context when you see it as slaves fighting for their liberty that this was on offer you know that this was what they could potentially have gotten from fighting for the counter-revolutionary forces that that was the most terrifying thing of all not not being under the dominion of the king of england but you know the this fear that there would be this uprising of you know and just this wasn't emphasized you know of course uh in my textbooks and in you know classroom lectures they did talk about slavery the you know evils of slavery but just you know thinking of what society was like at that time just the constant tension constant you know fear that was going on yeah i do think that's i it's just a very stupid comment from that yeah no i understand but what he's reflecting is the propaganda that most of us were raised with i mean his way of putting it he said the slave uprisings were a minor footnote well you were probably taught the revolution in haiti was a minor footnote too like you probably thought the haitian revolution didn't matter i would maybe taught all kinds of things as opposed to saying no this really mattered this really influenced the history of the world um you know i would say too there's a relatively long history um in these colonies and in europe generally also of offering freedom to the slaves on the other side who will fight for your side so it wouldn't have been inconceivable to them that uh you know for example when the british tried to conquer haiti which they did they tried they failed you know um you know that in trying to conquer a place like that that the british would say okay we will give freedom to the slaves that fight on our side against the french or in some other context against the spanish but this was uniquely horrifying it was inconceivable that for example the governor of virginia and he wasn't the only one that throughout the 13 colonies that the british empire the king himself would offer freedom to the slaves in order to fight against white englishmen people who had been in that was what was so uniquely horrifying and terrifying about that yeah but yeah i know but however it's true i mean even at the best of times this was a society of armed slave owners who literally had to watch the powder keg they had to watch where the gunpowder was stored to prevent it being taken by the slaves to prevent slaves capturing munitions capturing gunpowder and being able to raise up their own flag and rebellion and fight for their own freedom and by the way that's a discourse in terms of all these guys who grew up with ancient roman literature whether that's from plutarch or polybius or whatever polybius plugin is both greek and roman in effect anyway another story but whether ancient greece or ancient rome but especially with ancient rome you know the the idea of slave rebellion and of of class struggle you know between the patrician class and the poor the plebs and the slaves and so on that was something they were also completely prepared for by their neoclassical education the idea that the slaves are at any given time trying to rise up and tear your society down that's absolute that's written into the predominantly latin texts but to some extent greek texts that at that time were worshipped and it really is especially plutarch it's plutarch's lives is probably the most popular the most widely read and enjoyed of those texts and that's that's rehearsed there again and again that idea that the lower orders of society are trying to tear down the patrician class the aristocrats the privilege the wealthy however you want to think of this and again you see that that's very much what consumes uh john adams and the other people who are in the kind of constitutional debating society in the years yeah i don't want to get too off topic but i will just say the part of what is discussed in woody holton's book is about the financial aspect yes right and the fact that um you know it just you know it's putting the pieces together for me and i really do appreciate this um not only the book but your discussion on this because when i was younger i just kind of took it as a fact that it was like oh well these acts were intolerable the stamp act and you know this kind of thing but uh right you know they were left in a much worse financial situation after the revolutionary war that's right um for decades that followed so i you know and yes the amount of funds were required for this war you know it's it's just it seems right well i'd say that too i think as with uh rationalizations for the reasons for for world war ii for what the nazis did in that in that period well actually this is even more true of world war one but anyway people often want to impose a rational economic motive on history and there has been a lot of that in the understanding of american revolution and then later the writing american constitution and yes that's one of the most important contributions of woody holton is to say no economically this does not make sense and and here's the reality of what was going on economically instead yeah that that's a very very powerful revelation from from woody holton but likewise i'm saying something different here this is not really the period hold and talks about it's not it's not his interest i'm saying when you're looking at 1774 1775 this period when these tremendous changes are happening you can't make sense out of this economic in this way as you've said it's not the case there's some kind of dry calculation of oh well look how much we're spending on taxes when we buy tea we'll get a better deal if we if we registerly rebel against the king and again keep in mind this is the same king you were fighting with shoulder to shoulder this is the british crown you fought for king and country against the french in the seven years war i mean everyone okay not everyone alive some people were born so real you know but the vast majority of men who were old enough to engage in political debates including benjamin franklin and so on all of them remembered the seven years war they remember fighting with the king of england against the french and as people say against the french and indians um now you were fighting with the french the american revolutionaries entered into an alliance with the french with the king of france against england right so do you understand the type of treason the type of betrayal the type of reversal within one man's lifetime i mean like again within benjamin franklin's life and were generally any of these people if you weren't a teenager right at that moment you know some people were but anyone who was middle-aged let alone elderly or something at these political events unfolded the the the depth of that treason the depth of that betrayal to fight against the king of england in an alliance with the french and also they eventually they're in alliance with the spanish to work with the spanish monarchy and the french market against the king of england what moves you to that level of commitment my answer is it's not the tax antique it's not like that's that when you look at the intolerable acts it's the quebec act that's really intolerable and then as i say i i do think this is this important clarification that after the period where the intolerable acts matter then we move into this period of race war so and so forth yeah great yeah yeah um there there are many so i'm going to again enter into this a little bit of a critique of 13 clocks um there are many elements of the book that are touching to me and one of them again again recognizing this that in history there is no progress if you guys have a second hit the thumbs up by the way we have 37 people in the audience be great if we have 37 thumbs up helps people discover the video later and so on it will help people join the conversation right now in theory um okay i'll enter into the critique first i would say it's a little bit emotionally touching to me for example when 13 clocks reflects on the fact that the anti-slavery movement the abolitionist movement it came and went in popularity you know like i mean it's so obvious anyone who reads history in enough detail but like you want to believe that it's like a scientific discovery that's like discovering the light bulb that it's like discovering penicillin it's like discovering fluoride or something and it's not you know like oh yeah for a couple of years here everyone thought they were about to abolish slavery and there was this really clear sense of purpose and then you know it went out of style for 20 years and then you know then it came in fashion later and then 30 years after that like when you really are reading primary source history that the interest in the abolition of slavery comes and goes right and i feel that you do get a sense i mean emotionally as well as factually uh that just a few years before the american revolution say 1773 there was tremendous enthusiasm for the abolition of the slave trade and for greater equality between uh blacks and whites put it that way that there was and by the way some participants in the american revolution were were part of that tendency the main one i want to mention is benjamin rush so benjamin rush is is forgotten today so is governor morris so are all these people but there were some people benjamin rush he was a medical man he was a medical doctor of of his time and he completely [Music] committed to the position that black people and white people were biologically equal that they were equal in intelligence and that the physical differences were trivial like they differed in their complexion but like this was not he that was really he was really ahead of his time on that and you know but by contrast take a look at what thomas jefferson's attitudes were towards black people want to really be horrified you know this is a terrible book about a terrible this is a terrible book written by a terrible person about a terrible person i do not recommend this book but for various reasons it's a it's a hilarious example of to hold up here um anyway so there were there were some people involved in the in the american revolution who were ahead of their time but there were a whole lot who were behind the time and it is not the case that there was an unambiguous unidirectional progress uh towards abolition i'm glad to see oliver is in the audience um i meant to tell melissa to note down the time when i switch between topics here i will when this video is over some of the next few days i will add a table of contents so that people can find this video and i'm going to send this video to woody holt and i'm going to send it to the author 13 clocks to parkinson i'll try to i'll invite them to see the video because those guys they don't have a whole lot of youtube videos and podcasts discussing their work i hope they hope they appreciate hearing the discussion but i can imagine also they might want to just click on the timestamp oh this is the part where he criticizes me okay all right so look i've i've mentioned the strength of the empirical basis for the approach in in 13 clocks and actually melissa very efficiently mentioned the strength of woody holden's approach also which is economic so to speak obviously it's both politics and economics but this is really a new revelation of the approach to to the economics of the period that woody holton uh brings to and i've made other youtube videos discussing that in depth in the past um there is a reciprocal weakness with either of these men and i think i can ask anyone in the current generation pushing the interpretation of uh american revolution constitutional direction with any of this current uh generation of new authors how often do you see quoted the perspective of the king of england himself now i am not saying this because i support the king of england or sympathize with his perspective but like you've done all this work with the primary sources getting the voices of the people who were actually there in the massacre you know what i mean people who are there with their their muskets like you're getting really first-person perspective on this history on the american side but that's not the only side and i've said in earlier videos a big part of this shift in our understanding of what happened is just the digitization of archives that before it was very difficult physically to go through and read all these texts now increasingly through the internetization of all things the things being scanned and computerized it's become much easier to find what you want to read and to survey and look through a huge pile of documents back when i was a scholar of buddhism i did that all the time you know i did work with paper but you have a huge corpus of text from ancient buddhism and people say like how many times is slavery mentioned or something you could go through and look at just look at the parts about slavery so our ability to do that is is increasing worldwide okay well guess what the archives of private letters between founding fathers in america the archives of newspapers published in the revolutionary period america right those aren't the only archives that matter what about the archives in england and i mean it's going to include things like some of the british governors who maybe later wrote their autobiography you know like i mean some of the participants on the british side it's probably not going to be from the king himself that you get a sense of what the what the what the king is saying some noble lords and ladies some aristocrats who were close to the star chamber close to the the highest levels of british government um maybe in their letters maybe in their autobiographies there's something written down letting you know what the king's reasoning was right and some of those people might be critical of it and some of them might be making excuses for it and rationalizing all right this is remarkably absent from all these sources and i have more to say what about the french perspective what about the spanish perspective what even about the portuguese perspective now i'm influenced here a little bit by my research on the history of asia but i'll tell you something in any given century if you want to know what's happening in india very often the best source you have is sri lanka there are people in sri lanka writing about what's happening in india with a detached perspective right and if you want to know what's happening in sri lanka i mean the amount of textual evidence is not i mean it's not as much as you have for europe in the same period what's happening in sri lanka is revealed by written records in myanmar by written records in thailand and cambodia and so on right like you get incontrovertible evidence about what's really going on in these places politically from a rival empire or a rival kingdom that is keeping an eye on it so my point is even the portuguese colonial archives i mean portugal is not there on the spot fighting to conquer new york they're not involved to that extent but you better believe the portuguese had people at every single harbor there were entrepos of trade right portugal is trying to hold on to brazil and this its own very strange map of the world they've got boats going everywhere and portugal is asking themselves the same tough questions i mean again you know spain is really involved you know what portugal isn't well and portugal has to keep its eye on spain right no my point is not to say like the spanish perspective is going to be correct whereas the american perspective is incorrect but you're actually going to get important evidence of what happened and why from the spanish perspective from the french perspective even from the portuguese perspective and yes from within england itself and this has been neglected to a tremendous extent now i will say further i don't know if there were any written records you can go to now for the indigenous people's perspective if you guys don't know this about me i had in my hands every single book ever published in korea or ojibwe i believe at that time i have touched every book that's published in those languages going all the way back to the christian colonial period now if you think about the geography of my life that's not that surprising that within canada i was able to go to university library collections each of which had basically tried to collect every book ever published in those languages and there are there are oral traditions there are memories of what happened in those wars that get that get written down there may be nothing like there may be nothing to work from but it certainly would be worth checking would certainly interesting to know if there is i mean again whether it's the cree the ojibwe the iroquois or down south you know totally different ethnic groups and languages of indigenous people now is there an indigenous perspective that is knowable you know that's recorded anywhere or can be recalled anywhere that would also i mean ideally we'd get that perspective and again i'm not saying this to to insult these guys and again they only have so many pages to write up with the history to what extent is the perspective of the slaves noble now this is what i would say about that i think the easiest way to get the perspective of the liberated slaves will be the the black men who fought in the united states of america and who subsequently escaped either to canada or to the british isles or whatever that was common that there were blacks who fought against the revolution and fought in the counter-revolutionary war and one way or another ended up being resettled someone was just back in england proper they were evacuated to england but sometimes to some other british colony um when the war ended and as you know england basically lost or england quit fighting or what have you so um some of those people they may have had their their perspective uh written down and just to give you a sense who these guys were so benjamin rush was also involved with this sort of thing when he was in england before he came over to north america but um johnson so is it samuel johnson the author of the dictionary i'm just giving this first thing wrong samuel johnson you know um samuel johnson mostly famous for writing a dictionary english language he was really involved with the trials in england that were testing and contesting the legality of slavery he was really interested in the morality and legality of slavery he was anti-slave anti-slavery activist and he met and talked to black people who were in england at that time and who often were former slaves or they had somehow been produced by the gray area between slave and servant you know like well they weren't exactly a slave but they were a servant to someone and then they ended up in england and so on so again the the black perspective it may be written down nowhere but it may be written down by blacks who subsequently spoke to white british authors about their experience including a guy like samuel johnson because there were white british people who were really interested in that who were interested in the abolition of slavery and they would have been interested in black people who from the british perspective were returning heroes you know they had been heroically fighting for the king against the revolution and now one way or another will we settle elsewhere so this is this is my my criticism the the first criticism is i think that the significance of the quebec act has been massively underappreciated for a variety of reasons including a strange sense of political correctness in dealing with catholicism itself and not taking seriously that what's going on uh is yes it's partly a war against the slaves it's partly a war against the indigenous people it's also a war against catholics it is absolutely i mean in large part for americans at this time this is them defending this sphere of um protestant post-english revolution religious pluralism you know freedom and liberty as they talk about this is these are the terms they use they talk about freedom of conscience liberty that there is this realm of liberty that was created partly by the english civil war by cromwell et cetera et cetera england's unique history of protestantism and again the existence of puritans the existence of quakers so and so forth that's all part and parcel of that peculiar social system so they are fighting for the defense of that more secular sphere but also it's obviously a more protestant sphere against the aggrandizement the massive expansion of catholic power on the north american continent so the change to the map expanding quebec and making quebec into a dictatorship where there's no democracy all there's no parliament et cetera et cetera and basically we're giving up this whole english legal uh tradition to hand over to the rule of one government and the the power of the catholic church to collect tithes and so on and so forth that is something they're fighting against and they're they're already galvanized by that they're already fighting against that before um the discourse about the race war takes over it's completely understandable that neither the authors that i'm mentioning woody holton and this particular book 13 o'clock it's completely understandable that they don't deal with it or that they just barely mention it but this this is a shaping and influencing factor for the american revolution in the writing constitution to an extent that i in my opinion i think nobody has really reckoned with yet you can think of the american revolution as a war against the king of england you can i mean it's it's completely paradoxical to think of it as a war against the english because the people fighting it consider themselves english too well but in that sense you can think of it as an english civil war you can think of it as a war against the indians war against the indigenous people you can think of it as a war against the slaves but to a significant extent it is a war against quebec and it is a war against catholicism and in the primary source documents in english they very often use canadian when they mean canadian they often say canadian where what they mean is french-speaking catholic canadians that those are the enemy and it is very interesting that already in like 1775 the primary sources think of themselves as american in contrast to canadian that the primary sources are complaining and again canadian here i think really means francophone canadian it means catholic francophone canadian that they think of themselves as englishmen fighting against the canadians and their indians i.e the canadians and the allied tribal people who are fighting with them whether you think of that as mercenaries or or what have you which by the way is very much uh military and strategic reality it's very much just literally true that the pro uh royalist forces the king's men that they raised up an army of um indigenous people in the area that is now called canada and they marched south to fight against the american revolution now the the history of how and why that happened is is very interesting this would be much longer video if we think into that and you know what it was the indigenous people were fighting for what it was they thought they were fighting for and how it was they thought they would be rewarded when the the war was over i think that is much more complex than what the interests of the black slaves were at this time okay so this is the context now guys if you want to make an intelligent comment or ask an intelligent question now is the time this is the context that produced the historically unique resolution set in stone in the constitution has constitution they didn't actually chisel in the stone [Laughter] these are the historical circumstances that produce the unique resolution that every gentleman should own and carry a gun that gentlemen should be armed right now it is really worthwhile to stop and reflect when they thought that every man should have a gun having come out of this violent history what did they think about women having guns what did they think about black people having guns what did they think about first nations people american indians having guns now you know many people just insert a kind of cynical racist or anti-racist uh commentary here the reality at that time from their perspective was what do you mean all the indigenous people have guns that we've just been at war with like it wasn't a question of arming or disarming the indigenous people they were very much in a state of ongoing genocidal race war against the indigenous people that had become more intense during the american revolutionary period when for the first time the indigenous people were armed by the king of england to fight against them like this this yes there had been race war before but it's not that it did the put it this way the period of the american revolution of writing the constitution was not a period of optimism about having a pluralistic multi-racial multi-ethnic uh society it was a period when that genocidal race war had only been increased in intensity and deepened in its in its significance right when the sense of us versus them so nobody i mean this is this is the center was nobody was questioning what do you mean whether or not the native people should have the right to have guns they all have guns they were just given guns by the king of england again at least in in terms of the mythos at the time this was the belief um there was no question of that and indeed part of the justification for why all the white people should be heavily armed all the time was this perpetual fear a fear that would soon enough disappear but they didn't know that i said this is really the final period when the indigenous people are really a major military concern then we go into a long period where it's totally asymmetrical and hopeless where it's just the white people massacring and displacing them and driving them to extinction again and again but up to and including this period many of these battles it seems that the the the odds are pretty even for the two sizes sometimes the native people want sometimes the white people and sometimes the white people only win because of the native people who are their allies who are their mercenaries they're fighting for them that a lot of the battles are decided in this way that was their experience of of war um so these are the historical circumstances that produced a unique experiment in the history of the world now okay we could insert here a long digression on what the european attitude towards guns was but i am going to assert as my thesis in europe they had a very simple idea of aristocracy okay an aristocrat was a man who carried a sword an aristocrat was a man who had military training who was willing at any time to stop everything he was doing and devote all of his time attention energy and money to fighting on behalf of the king it's part of the definition of being an aristocrat in the dark ages right there's the aristocrats were not on vacation you know they were they again for most of history there isn't really a sense of a professional army there was in the sense of being a soldier as something separate from the career of being a civilian right like aristocrats were people who spent their time breeding and training horses during peace time there were men who would wear a sword at all times and ride a horse and carry so that they would maintain military training and so forth and even though they might be wealthy whenever there was a war they were expecting to just take all their horses and give them to the king's army and often they were reluctant that's part of the reason why they would dispute do we really have to fight this war so and so forth that was the the model of a military organization that emerged from the dark ages in europe right now if you go back to rome and athens it's a very different organization of what is what is an army and indeed what is an aristocrat right now co-evil with these assumptions right is the importance of the dual the importance of honor so an aristocrat is someone who carries a sword and who is willing to kill anyone at any time with no legal repercussions to fight a duel over a point of honor now as you may know this cultural tradition made the transition from swords to guns with no substantive changes right now it's horrifying in many different ways european society did not have any concept of the police in the spirit of a professional police force as i say there's a limited extent to which the idea of a professional soldier career i can't say it doesn't exist at all but this is much more the realm of amateurs it's much more you know the realm of being a gentleman being an aristocrat and devoting your life to military affairs and so on and so forth but wars come and go there are periods of time when every able-bodied man is pushed into the army there period of time when this is this is not the case but you know the career soldier their conception of this is somewhat uh different from ours you know an aristocrat was in part a career farmer but also someone he was living and preparation for so the idea of law and order the idea of social order right for centuries in europe this revolved around the notion of men with swords and this transforms into men with guns carried on their person who are willing at any time to stand up take off their glove and throw it to the ground and say sir you dishonor me and fight to the death all right now most of you have probably only seen this in comedy it was deadly serious and it was still deadly serious in the united states at this time and in countries where there was more upward mobility where anyone could kind of claim to be an aristocrat where someone could get some money and vacuum on them start living like an aristocrat there were more people participating in the culture of the duel right now in this period and indeed even after the american revolution you can go through the court records dueling was simply legal murder it was simply completely accepted that human beings would settle their disputes amongst each other this way by fighting to the death and you know again there isn't this sense that police officers have the exclusive right to use armed force that only police officers should carry and use guns and that a police officer is a professional who has a certain kind of education a certain kind of career all of that is absent right this is the notion that men of honor carry swords carry guns and they will stand up and fight because for example another man said that your sister is a [ __ ] all right so the the idea of law enforcement is much more all pervasive right and the idea that you're living a life of honor all the time this is the cultural framework out of which you know american gun ideology emerged now again aristocrats one reason to carry a sword or carry gun might be the possibility that you will be robbed by your own peasants you will be robbed by your own household servants um even in the absence of outright slavery when we get into slave-owning aristocrats you can imagine one reason to carry a gun carry a sword the same reason that you carry a whip and the same reason why the slaves are wearing chains was so that physically you had an advantage over people who might want to rob you might want to kill you who surrounded you who you worked with closely day after day this wasn't a remote uh social problem this was the context out of which the american constitution emerged you will look in vain for a single word about policing about the relationship of police to the public in the american constitution that concept really did not exist yet the concept was some people have guns and some people don't some people have honor and some people don't and that was how society was supposed to govern itself with a tremendously high rate of constant internecine violence now sorry this is uh to be a bit edgy okay so i mean you know actually from a 21st century perspective you could call this anarchy with this kind of anarchist society armed anders okay so the front page of the new york times today the number quoted is that 1 500 have died in these types of shootings between the year 2009 and 2022. okay um before dueling was made illegal and it's a very different timeline in england in france in the united states of america like whichever western society you want to look at how many men lost their lives in duels year after year and the whole population the planet was lower like what percentage of the best and brightest in society were being killed by duels year after year after year yes sometimes it could be for a good reason but as you know that's why there's so much comedy about it it could indeed be for a very petty reason indeed um there was a body count there was a price to men being able to carry guns from the first invention of of the gun right but again in terms of the emergence of police i'm sorry this is a profound and important topic um in england i will say this and so by the way oh have you ever heard of police officers in ancient athens huh huh what does aristotle say about police officers about education training for police how about police officers in ancient rome my thesis would be that in england the first emergence of something like a police officer was the turnstile so we still have this word uh turn style in english sorry sorcery i misspoke turnpike sorry misspoke you can see i get them mixed up uh the idea of a turnpike by a highway so turn pike it's an etymologically very clear word in our language there was a time when all roads in england were privately owned so quite likely some aristocrat built a road and would charge you money to travel on a road when the state of urban planning and transportation was really poor and there would be a kind of soldier and again this is not really a soldier it's not really an army but there was an armed man with a pike who would have to stand guard at the entrance to the road constantly right people could only use this road who paid a certain amount of money or who maybe had a contract an agreement with whoever was to own the road like you could imagine there might be businesses regular users and they booked at a conversation look we're going to pay you 100 bucks now so you don't have to pay 10 cents every time we use it but there were these complex arrangements and you had to have men with arms it was a pike traditionally who would stand guard at the entrance to the road and it is indescribable what misery it was to live in the dark ages in england when there were no public roads when all roads were private when it was a privilege you had to pay for to use a road so this is to my mind the creation of armed men standing on guard at all times um you know in my book no more manifestos a lot of the evidence of how society works is implicit uh in primary source and history in my book no more manifestos i mention an attempted assassination of one of the prime ministers of of england and uh sorry the assassin succeeds i should say so was the assassination of one of the prime ministers of england and what happens there are no police he is people set hands upon him and he is dragged off to the ends the ends of justice you know the reality of you know when you're reading this implicitly at this time what was a police officer what was a court you know like what was a jury indeed you know what was a trial what was a lawyer you know how did this work in any given century it's very easy to read ancient medieval or even renaissance or whatever you want to say to read sources from earlier centuries and to impose onto them our assumptions about how policing works or how how men carrying arms just armed people the standing guard or whatever created or sustained justice law and order it's very very easy to to assume these things and in so doing we are massively diminishing the significance of aristocrats in society the fact that actually even including marital disputes that people would actually go to an aristocrat and say my lord they would ask for intercession they would ask for justice they would ask this from aristocrats that aristocrats did sit on a kind of throne even it was just for their own little village that there was a you know doing justice and resolving disputes and so on that very often this wasn't a professional criminal justice system that instead these these ideas emerged out of you know an aristocratic uh system of of uh in the dark ages okay um i'm just gonna pause to read some of these if most of you want to comment oliver says quote the ephibia was an ancient greek institution which aristotle describes in athenian politics so i assume you mean the the yeah the politea of the athenians whatever the constitution of athens um in which all male youth had military training for a couple of years and were guards in athens right so oliver i've i've talked about that a lot i think both in writing and in um and in youtube videos that was the system of education that they had and the system of required military service however after they had completed that education right they are just citizens right so that's the emphasis i put on it that this is the origin of government education in the athenian imagination and a lot of what's going on in um political philosophy at that time is people including plato their imaginations running wild about how we could improve society by reforming and improving the system of education because they saw what a dramatic effect that system of education had just in contrasting athens to other cities within within greece that this was the making of an athenian and a citizen and a participant in democracy however people were not divided whereby some are policed and some are citizens whereby some are lawyers some are bureaucrats etcetera and some ordinary citizens that distinction didn't exist you know um instead it is actually very difficult for people now to imagine the implications of the type of equality that existed amongst citizens in athens anyone could do justice at the peril of their own life anyone could stand up and speak in their senate that the panics it's not called the senate anyone could stand up and speak and debate what should happen uh in an ongoing war for example or what should happen with the sewage treatment they did have to worry about that these kinds of things these kinds of local uh questions anyone could at the peril of their life you know so the distinction we have between senator and citizen didn't exist between uh policemen and citizens didn't exist between lawyers and citizens so there is a radical important kind of equality there even if of course we recognize it was a slave society it was an unequal society and numerous other ways including obviously uh economic inequality nevertheless this is this is really important to um to recognize so babe do you want to if anyone has anything tremendously intelligent to say from my perspective this video is soon going to come to an end as i basically bring back these conclusions to the question of legislation of guns and what is possible next in 21st century american society uh yeah so let's just say that that's also an interesting question oliver says quote when reading aristotle's politics i was looking for his view on leaders of slave rebellions that's that's what i was looking for in aristotle when i was your age i think a couple years younger than you are now but when i was first reading aristotle the slavery was the number one issue i wanted to see as his perspective on anyway i continue quoting oliver quote whether they count as free people on the wrong side since he is pro-slavery close quote yeah aristotle has an anguished position on slavery i would say he is aware of the self-contradiction he is led into by it um but his conclusion is that some people by nature should be slaves and some people by nature should be free and he thinks it is a great crime or a great shame it's it's very immoral for someone who ought to be free to instead be a slave but he doesn't see anything wrong with people who are by nature or slavish uh to be slaves that is the that is the conclusion he comes to and this is wildly inconsistent with what he says about political equality um throughout the rest of his work and you know his own life experience as someone who owned slaves and worked with slaves himself and so on uh dallas comes into this but yeah aristotle ultimately um cannot take the final step that his own political philosophy obliges him to take uh oliver has certainly heard me say this before you know it's inevitable and inexorable that aristotle rejects the leadership of alexander the great which is tremendously dangerous for him that he rejects a basically monarchical or dictatorial system of government and that he instead preaches for his own kind of moderate democracy using modern terms here he rejects the extreme democracy of athens but he wants a kind of moderate democracy now i can get into different videos exactly what that means um but his version of moderate democracy some of the cities immediately some of the cities that are walking distance from athens had it so there was a model of democracy that already existed in the real world that was known within greece but it wasn't what athens had specifically um that was his position on on democracy so yeah aristotle really was bold enough and was gutsy enough to reject what was at that time the ascendant political model the rule of alexander the great and his own family was directly connected to alexandria great he personally was connected to alexander the great so he did the right thing at the risk of his own life there but he wasn't able to take the step and really recognize the type of political equality that must unite slaves with the rest of humanity that this is this is uh absurd and ridiculous so say this way he's bold enough to say it's ridiculous to raise up alexander to be something superhuman to treat a king or addicted or any great leader to treat a king or leader as if his his or her political rights are better than the rest of humanity but what he's not willing to do is to recognize that it's equally absurd to treat the slaves as sub-human or as if free people are super human relative to the slaves and have two different sets of of of political rights that way and i think his his explanation himself is very human and pathetic frankly he doesn't have anything intellectually associated to say or philosophically profound to say on that and uh you know with the exception of benjamin rush you will be very disappointed by what the founding fathers of the united states of america have to say about this the the continuum of stupidity and the shallowness of the excuses going from aristotle and ancient athens to uh thomas jefferson you know in the 1770s 80s and 90s you know it's it's truly pathetic um yeah so uh you know when i was a young man i i really couldn't stand reading aristotle for that reason it was just infuriating to me um but you know i got older and i gained the detachment to appreciate what aristotle is doing right while being aware of what he's doing wrong and in a sense that's what we're doing in this whole conversation in relation to the american revolution we're willing to reflect on what they did right in relation with it so just come back to something again i'm happy to see your comments or questions and by the way guys hit the thumbs up button if you if you have a chance now um if you're if your hands are not dripping wet from washing the dishes okay put the dishes down towel and then hit the thumbs up button we should have as many thumbs up as we have people or more um i said earlier that the united states these unique political conditions that include race war you know racialized slavery and that race war race war against the edition bill that this produced the unique experiment in human history of having every able bodied man carry a gun and i contrasted this to the aristocratic history of europe and the assumptions about swords and the assumptions about guns that were that were built into that that you know produced a very strange patchwork of societies in europe within the same century let's say as the as the american revolution it wasn't the case that there was one principle in europe about gun ownership in this time it's a mess and there's a lot of violence there are a lot of people dying every year in duels and in petty squad bobbles and very stereotypically in this very good you can even read shakespeare's romeo and juliet people would kill each other because their sister lost their virginity with someone from your household and you know this this kind of thing i mean and those are the things that led to not just a duel between two men but again as romeo and juliet depicts gangs of armed men representing one household fighting against gangs of our men from another household very very high levels of violence this way and there are no police to report to in as much as there are courts it is a court in the medieval aristocrat think about the meaning of the word court it's a court where the judge is quote unquote my lord ruling over a a court of courtiers the courtiers of the courts i'm sorry but you know the king's court that says it this has a certain meaning in english that we forget we're talking about a court of law um just point out though the history of china tremendously violent at no point did the history of china produce the conclusion americans came to again circa 1776 circus 1789 when i went up for the conclusion you know the history of china did not produce the conclusion that every man should be a gentleman every man should be an aristocrat everyone every man should carry a sword and a gun all the time the history of india never produced this conclusion these are societies with many millions of people and now over a billion people each these are not trivial footnotes in this world now again frankly you can include very small societies you can include cambodia you can include laos we can get into polynesian islands and so on but how violence is supposed to be controlled who has a monopoly on munitions on armaments on the use of force right there's a sense in which every society in every century of the history of the world has had to ask and answer these questions whether implicitly or or explicitly right who gets to carry guns who gets to carry swords depending on the on the historical period and you know japan you may not know this but it's it's very much represented in their in their fiction you know there was a period in japan where the emperor forbid anyone to have metal swords and where men still fought each other using wooden swords but where all the swords were basically taken in and kept in warehouses like obviously the army could still use swords in time of war but this was really a shocking kind of gun control um of its of its era there have been different societies at different times that did have the centralization and exclusive control of who gets to use them who gets to use a steel sword and who doesn't who gets to use explosive guns uh so on and so forth and who doesn't so it's a question everyone has had to ask and everyone said to answer now i've opened this video by saying i don't believe in progress and in the contrary i think it's tremendously important to attack and overturn the notion of progress that shapes how we think about law how we think about democracy how we think about politics at one time the people of france decided to completely legalize prostitution all right at another time they decided that was a mistake and they would totally criminalize prostitution they would try to get rid of it they would try to limit and and diminish it now i believe germany is currently in a transitional period this way it's a little bit different from one province to the next in germany but germany embraced the idea that sex work is just work i mean again the netherlands uh another very dramatic history this way and then you get to see the consequences of legalizing prostitution okay the history of thailand the history of taiwan the history of south korea at one time people make one decision and then they make another and they write it down on a piece of paper no different from a napkin you know we are ruled by these conceptions or misconceptions for a time and then simply we change our minds and we have to want to rip up that piece of paper and start again if you think the constitution can't change if you think the constitution is a scientific discovery like uh sir isaac newton discovering gravity i'm not going to digress into a critique of that notion but obviously a simplification of the history of science say that or you know the discovery that the earth is a sphere rather than flatters like which is a very complex history too or copernicus uh you know whatever whatever discovery all right it's not the case that there was some scientific discovery when the american constitution was written the american constitution represents a very strange set of compromises short-term compromises short-term solutions to short-term crises that's something that woody holton's approach is really strong on giving you a sense of what the short-term crises were that we're responding to and unquestioned deep-seated uh cultural assumptions bigotry and prejudice that go back for centuries you know this was put together in in one document one time people can decide that they should write an amendment to the constitution to make alcohol illegal and they did the people of america made alcohol illegal and then they got to see the consequences of that and they changed their minds and they wrote another amendment to the constitution that ended the period of prohibition that ended the period in which alcohol this is a huge fundamental change inside so what is progress does progress mean that there is a single arrow pointing in a single direction whereby in the medieval past people thought sobriety was important people thought being obstinate and refusing uh drugs and alcohol and then we have emerged out of the dark ages into an era of increasing enlightenment where our increasingly liberal modern scientific attitudes instead embrace everyone getting drunk all the time everyone's smoking marijuana all the time everyone using recreational drugs whether it be cocaine heroin that is it the fact there is a single direction to progress right whereby we go from prohibitionism to embracing the profligate decriminalized use of drugs a lot of people want you to believe that and a lot of people implicitly without challenging it that that's what they believe or assume they don't want to think hey you know what we've just tried different strategies they've just been revisions they've just been aimless staggering ignorant decisions made at different times of different people and maybe in the dark ages they were right about some things and maybe we were wrong about them right now my classic example of this many people do think of this in terms of progress in one direction is inbreeding because marriage the catholic church in the dark ages really forbid people from marrying their own cousins from having children with their own cousins guess what the catholic church was right a whole lot of people still to this day have made separate youtube videos talking about it and i've i've seen clips of people saying this on the news a whole lot of people will prevent you with a pardon me a whole lot of people will present you with the story that we had a bigoted ignorant attitude towards marrying your cousin in the past we're in everybody and then the progress of science and enlightenment has led us to this more liberal society today where we reject that and that progress is getting rid of these uh misconceptions from the dark ages no it's not okay no it's not guess what the catholic church wasn't wrong about everything okay guess what the catholic church was right about inbreeding they were right about making it illegal to marry your cousin to have children with your cousin can't be wrong about everything you know and and indeed there are many countries in the world where up to a certain date marrying your cousin was illegal and then they liberalized it they they they removed that law they made it legal to marry your own cousin or they need to take a step back again they need to revert to what the law was before and i mean there is a sense in which everything i have to say about democracy is saying we should go back to what something they got right in ancient athens you know not everything there were a lot of things they were wrong about ancient athens but saying hey the same way the catholic church just happened to be right about this one thing that happened to be correct about in breeding and cousin marriage in athens there are some things they were right about and we still need to learn that lesson in a sense revert to them we're not talking about progress we're talking about regress from a regressive it doesn't have no straightforward there is neither progress nor regress they're just human beings that get [Laughter] that come up with different strategies to solve different social problems at different at different points in time you saw me won't jump in a bit at what point okay so so melissa has asked me a question that's reasonably uh reasonably profound i'm glad by all means if you have something intelligent to say say it if you have an intelligent question ask ask it but melissa gets to preempt your questions okay um melissa has asked at what point does something become a problem that democracy must address or that the government must address you can you can put it that way right so you know the headline again here is 1 500 dead bodies from 2009 to 2022. um all right you know i think that the tremendous power of journalists during the 20th century lulled the people into [Music] a presupposition that there's some kind of objectively real threshold whereby a problem becomes so pressing becomes so overwhelming that the government must address it and that that it does take off a layer here it was cold this morning when we got started um like uh it was very easy for americans to imagine that there was just some kind of objectively real tipping point at which massacres carried out in vietnam were so bad or so problematic that the whole vietnam war became immoral and had to be opposed you know this is one example it was very easy because of the the power of the press to imagine that the status of black people had gotten worse and worse and that the violence of repressing civil rights protesters the god of wars wars and then objectively the government had to do something i had to address it and in every period this is false you know the period you're complaining about sorry the you being hypothetical the period of the civil rights activists blacks in america had better conditions than they'd ever had before you know if anything it's it's the opposite it's that their conditions had gotten better not worse and you know again i'm not belittling it the sense that there was a short-term crisis that needed to be addressed this is totally a creation of the press now the the milai massacre in vietnam that is what i'm alluding to and saying this about the american war in vietnam and the distortion of all american political discourse about what the hell they were doing in vietnam anyway there's what was there to be one that was to be lost it was american foreign policy in asia and in anti-communism and around the world right it's totally this kind of is created by the press um uh obviously by the way i'm not saying the melee massacre didn't happen the military did happen but this was turned into a kind of crisis that needed to be addressed and likewise you know what at the beginning of the vietnam war the so-called gulf of tonkin incident this is very much created by and for the press the idea that suddenly there was a crisis in vietnam that america had to intervene to address which is also again it's untrue in many different levels what happened with the gulf of tonkinson the reality is that from the day the french removed their military intelligence service the american military american intelligence took over the same offices the american army american government everyone put it took over the administration of vietnam as a colony absolutely on the the day the same day the french left that america was in a kind of pseudo-colonial position in vietnam long before the gulf of tonkin incident long before the beginning of the vietnam war um [Music] anyway this has to do with the unique circumstances of the french humiliation in both vietnam and and laos at that time and what happened and by the way it has everything to do with opium also and the french military being involved in the french it was french intelligence friendship military intelligence being involved in selling and transporting opium to make money to support the french empire uh over there so i've just mentioned a whole bunch of things that 99.9 of people don't know and frankly none of this is secret but most americans have no idea that the origins of the vietnam war have a lot to do with the french empire's involvement in dope smuggling whatever you want to say uh opium innovation bowl it does and you know america's position in vietnam emerged out of this um as well as by the way you know america's situation in vietnam had a lot to do with very sincere anti-communism wanting to make the world safer democracy in that period was no joke and america was in a very difficult self-contradictory position on that so anyway america getting more deeply committed to military action and an expanding scope of military action in vietnam cambodian laos that then unfolds gradually i would say but certainly long before the gulf of tonsen my point is to say this the power of newspapers in the 20th century was such that they seem to present the public with these very clear objectively real tipping points and turning points in history now the gulf of talking incident has happened now the milite massacre has happened and by the way just before the assassination of martin luther king there were several black um sanitation workers black guys employed in handling garbage garbage men in effect who were killed in memphis and that that's actually why martin luther king went to memphis at that time so i just say there were actually a couple of killings just before uh martin luther king was killed it was very easy to take these killings and to take you know specific photographs of police um using hoses to hose down uh protesters and so on and to present this as some kind of sudden turning point in the history of civil rights so just i think this is an illusion that the newspapers have created and it's a news it's an illusion that politicians have to some extent willingly participated in and i i'm saying the 20th century repeatedly i don't even think the 19th century was like that i think this is you could get specific about when exactly does this begin and when exactly does it end um but this kind of power the press had in shaping you know political discourse now you know i'm a nihilist i don't believe in any of these ideals how how is this more important so 1 500 people die in more than 10 years how is that more important than the future of afghanistan nobody in america cares about democracy in afghanistan anymore nobody cares about human rights or women rights and again what can i tell you democracy is like a faucet turns off and sometimes it's running hot sometimes it's often gone you know um how is this more important than circumcision and we could say male circumcision or female circumcision i like to say both because i think morally they are tantamount sorry how many million boys are losing 60 of the nerve endings in their penis every year what percentage of american men have this and again oh yeah yeah what percentage have even worse uh side effects as a result what percentage of women globally or what percentage of women in afghanistan are permanently physically sexually disabled we've been watching documentary in africa muslim africa and women who are disabled forever that's that's a crisis you know that's neither more nor less of a crisis than what happens to appear on the on the front page of the the newspaper and sorry look i mean obviously i could go on with many examples but you know if you just look at the list of bernie sanders electoral issues i'm sorry what percentage of people are bankrupted for life by the university education system in america what percentage of people are bankrupted for life because of health insurance costs prescription drug costs these are not minor problems in america these are unbelievably major problems that leave america in its in its shadow the crisis in education everyone put it you know these these questions um and you know there is no rock bottom it's not the case that you're going to reach some objectively real tipping point and and again i'm sorry to say this but the milai massacre was not an objectively real tipping point compare the melaye massacre to massacres the americans did in south korea in the in the korean war or whatever you want to have him you know war involves massacres i'm not uh i'm not in i'm not pro massacre i'm not i'm not justifying the military but you know like the idea that there's some unique turning point like this well that is an illusion created by the press by the way there were atrocities committed during world war ii on all sides the british committed atrocities the americans can do sorry how does the meli massacre compare to what the british empire had been doing in malaysia formerly known as malaya right then what the british empire was doing in north africa what the british empire even did in cyprus and this is the post-world war ii period i'm not talking about ancient history of these examples there were a lot of massacres in the dying days of the british empire at the end of world war ii and those those years right after that you know let alone getting into british india and so on and so forth you know there were a lot of masters to go around but this this this creation of the sense of a crisis and that it's now the government has to act it's now that the the public has to rise up i think that's really a 20th century uh 20th century phenomenon so what do you say right right right right right okay right right okay so this this is i've introduced this without explaining it very well but you know um every so often climate change is on the front page of the newspaper every so often overpopulation globally in relation to ecology is on the front page of the newspaper well the problem isn't really the number of bipeds the problem is the total number of mammals that yes the world is overpopulated but we have billions of cows billions of pigs billions of sheep at least tens of millions of dogs that it's the biomass of the mammals in total not necessarily humans that's the problem so if you change the ratio of humans to cows and humans to pigs by having those humans convert to veganism to a shocking extent that's the problem solved it solves global warming solves ecology cells over population so on and so forth uh so so two things one the point is that this is something like circumcision this is something like democracy in afghanistan or what have you it's simply not in the newspapers it's simply not thought of as as a major crisis to be solved at this moment that we're at a crossroads where it must be addressed now but the other point is as i say there is no rock bottom there is no point at which you say oh well animal agriculture is so bad uh the ecological consequences of our diet are so bad that now we have to legislate now we have to turn things around now we have to change um there is no point at which gun violence is so bad that it hits rock bottom and it's it's never gonna happen there is no uh rock bottom um sorry but you know what's rock bottom for democracy in hong kong what's rock bottom for democracy and myanmar there is no rock bottom guys things can get worse and worse and keep getting worse under communism you might think oh well once people start starving to death then they're going to question this and start asking new questions about economics and coming to new conclusions about economics and politics and demand nope nope like a million people can die and five million people can die and 10 million people can die and there's still no rock bottom right um we could say this about freedom of speech and so on and so forth so yeah it's a comforting thought to imagine that there's a kind of biological equilibrium to politics whereby a problem reaches a certain threshold point at which it it must be addressed and again whether you're thinking of ecology um communism or what what have you no no um you know and and the 20th century certainly was a unique century yeah i'll put it this way um yeah sure i will just use it as an example that you've used before mothers against drunk driving yes i whether it was how it was explained to me when i was young um it did seem to me that there was just this point where there were so many incidents of drunk drivers killing people right at some point they enacted these gun laws right but is that really right yeah the truth behind what happened yeah yeah um another example of that is the concept of having a minimum age of consent for sexuality the concept of statutory rape being invented um you know and again no the reality is it's like a speed limit i mean human beings you know right but right that's right there's no there's no point at which so many people are dying in traffic accidents that you lower the speed limit human beings just have a meeting and i would prefer if we had democracy i would prefer if all of us voted in a referendum say look from now on 80 miles per hour is the speed limit like whatever the maximum speed limit is 80 miles per hour we can't have people going 120 miles per hour anymore or whatever it is no i mean it is it is just something written down on a on a piece of paper and as you know i mean you know the definition of statutory rape the the age of consent in one place it can be 18 and another place it can be 16 in some places it's 14 and so on there's no simple biological reality there's no scientific discovery in the truest sense of the word convention this is what it is we convene and we make a decision as human beings okay this is the number we're going to write down whether that's a speed limit or major consent this is what we're going to live by and if we're wrong we might have to go back and revise the decision we've made we have to try again with a different assumption that that is indeed why constitutions can never be set in stone and and they aren't i mean in reality they're they're not it's a good it's a good digression i mean it's a digression from an aggression um you know okay here are some other interesting comments here um [Music] anyway guys if you have something intelligent to say say it i am gonna go back and reread this stuff so about gun control about legislation of of gun control and limiting uh gun violence um all of the technology that fits into this cellular phone i mean i have the i have the rubber wrapper on this it's unbelievable how slender cell phones are now when i was a boy i did envision this technological transformation happening i was following what was happening in technology i did think that this was inevitable but i imagined it being more like a brick i did think i did think we would all be carrying around with us portable computers that incorporated telephones and cameras and things computers and word processors and email and at that time the fax machine you know i thought yeah the equivalent of the fax machine is going to be miniaturized and made portable this way so and so forth but i knew what circuit boards looked like i knew circuit boards were becoming more and more powerful but i never thought circuit boards would be so tiny as this that i can place it between my thumb and forefinger like that um i did assume it would be bigger even though i did it was partly because of the science fiction i was reading you know it was something i reflected on partly because of the science i was i thought we were moving towards a society where everyone had this kind of camp video camera and computer with them at all times all of the technology that fits into this tiny cell phone can be fit into the handle of a gun all of it it is possible for every firearm in the united states of america to take an image take the photograph from a forward-facing camera and to take a photograph from a backward-facing camera of the shooter and the person being shot and to send it over the internet to the police station instantly every single time you pull the trigger it is possible for a gun to record your location with gps a global positioning system the same way that every cell phone records your location with every text message so some of you may have followed this in the news some of you may not have i have covered on my channel at least one case where there's evidence presented in court of exactly where the person's car was because they were text messaging while driving and you get a map with a series of dots saying yeah at exactly this moment she was driving her car at this intersection at this moment she was at this stoplight at this moment she was on the freeway because it's someone engaged in this conversation that is on the record for the government recording her precise location and what she was doing moment by moment with the cell phone okay having all of the technology that is within a cell phone built into every firearm is attainable it's easily attainable there was a time when i was a boy imagine if someone had said to you when i was a boy i were talking about more than 30 years ago oh it'll be possible in the future to have a fingerprint detector that instantly reads your fingerprint and confirms that you're the owner of the gun that might have sounded ridiculous or impracticable 30 years ago now every single one of you is familiar with just how streamlined that process would be just how instantly you can verify your identity um with facial recognition right a lot of you have phones that scan your face with fingerprint recognition right so if you allow government regulation of gun ownership we could be in a situation where when someone is mugged they pull out their gun and point it at the mugger and without even pulling the trigger that gun is already taking photographs and uploading them to the internet i've been sending them to the police the gun is already recording your exact location the direction the gun is pointed in who it's being pointed at and it's even photographing it could be recording audio too you could have a microphone in there just as well as we have it's recording exactly what happened to all parties moment by moment for the historical record and in a sense if you're defending yourself against a mugger that could be a reason not to pull the trigger because as soon as you got the gun out you can say look you know when this goes to court you've already been had like it's over so like you should not attack me you should put down your weapon or you should because look when the cops go over this footage they're gonna know exactly what happened and who you are in your face and where we were and what happened so just just give up just wait for the cops to come don't ruin your life don't put yourself in jail longer and don't get shot right so it may seem paradoxical you should have fewer shootings that way you could have a database in the same way that today we are recording the location of every single voice message every single text message every single email sent from a cell phone every single bullet that's fired in the united states america that's far fewer what do you think there were more of in america today text messages or bullets being fired and yeah a lot of that things in that database it would just be okay at this time in this location someone was firing a bullet in the middle of the forest they were killing a deer a lot of it's going to be information that's not legally useful or interesting but then everyone involved would know that from the minute it doesn't even have to be when they pull the trigger it can be when their hand is on the gun right it can be before even if it's only a few moments before they pull the trigger their location is recorded their identity is look reported right who it is they're pointing the gun at is recording you can even have a rear-facing camera recording that you're the one holding the gun that today is easily attainable in the united states of america and guys guns are expensive i mean do you think this would even increase the price of firearms by 40 i don't i i think this would be invisible i think you might be talking about twenty dollars into the pricing because you can buy a cell phone for forty dollars most of the cost is the screen you know obviously we're not gonna have a we're not talking about having a full color screen on your gun so you can watch movies so you can watch youtube videos on your gun right so there are a lot of features of the phone that are not going to be there it's going to be cheaper than a phone anyways right but i'm saying the other elements of cellular phone technology cellular phone networks and so on those can be seamlessly invisibly integrated into even a handgun of course there's plenty of room in a shotgun right so we're not on the cusp of a new technology that could change gun violence for several decades that technology has existed wouldn't you like to know what happened in each and every gun battle in america's conquest of iraq america's conquest of afghanistan the ukrainian war against russia right now with the same level of specificity this could be the end of war crimes as we know it imagine a man who's aware of this in time of war this is one of the most common crimes in in modern warfare imagine a man raping a woman at gunpoint sorry guys this is real talk we're talking about the real world here and he's aware that this is being photographed his precise location that it's his fingerprint on the gun he's aware that his army commanders are going to know this that the police noticed that the people who write the history books are going to know this that this could never be secret that even if he kills her after the rape so she can't tell anyone else which is also common in war in case you didn't know that his crime exactly what he did exactly what he said can be a microphone recording his voice in the content too that that will be recorded for posterity how would soldiers behave differently even with the stress of the battlefront right even with the stress of being in a war zone if they know who they shoot what they say and what they do is being recorded and that if they die their heroism will be recorded for their own parents to see for their own children and grandchildren to see perhaps right and that if they behave dishonorably what they do in war will be there for their parents to see for their grandchildren as well as journalists politicians military commanders we have reached the point where the medieval fantasy of an omniscient god can be a technological reality built into the steel housing of every handgun and this isn't new most of you are too young to remember a time before this technology existed i'm just barely old enough to remember the rise of the cellular phone the idea of mandating it is new okay because most people in positions of power do not want cell phone cameras and cell phone recordings of what goes on inside guantanamo bay when prison guards just within the normal prisons of new york city rikers island whatever example you want when prison guards brutalize and intimidate and beat inmates when prison guards shoot inmates people in positions of power are quite comfortable with the ambiguity of relying on the word of the one and only witness to the event who most often is the man who pulled the trigger that when police shoot people there are people in positions of power who are very comfortable with the only version of events being the police officers version and i'm not comfortable with that we are progressing toward a society in which the professor standing at the front of the university has a camera recording everything he said whether it's built into his hat or his eyeglasses or or what have you and where every single student in the crowd has a camera of some kind recording what happens and this will result in a higher standard of behavior a higher standard of deontology if you like for the professors and for the students alike right uh when i grew up there were these cases of he said she said about professors sleeping with students or professors flirting with students professors saying politically incorrect things in class sometimes professors saying racist things in class okay well that's over we're entering into an era when even the most trivial controversy of this kind of a politically incorrect professor this kind of thing where your opinion doesn't matter because we can all consult what's on the tape quite possibly from 40 different angles from the perspective of 40 different students each and every one of them has a recording device so what is the future of gun violence in america is it a future of anonymity and impunity that's that's what military gun violence has presumed that's what police gun violence has presumed again there are a lot of other people with guns like prison guards right anonymity impunity no accountability and the elderly people who are currently in power i'm sorry but politics is dominated by geriatrics people over 80 the honey politics within the republican party within the democrat party it's old people it's people joe biden's age and older who dominate politics in most western democracies today they're real comfortable with that all right and there's a new generation coming up that's saying whoa whoa whoa whoa when there's even a minor dispute between a taxi driver and his passenger it's all on tape like we're get we're used to this you know sometimes the taxi driver punched the customer and but they say yeah yeah but i punched the customer for a reason you have to see it in context we are accustomed to seeing footage of um diners at mcdonald's freaking out and assaulting the staff at mcdonald's they grab a bunch of plastic spoons and throw them at the person they're you know we know exactly what they did we know exactly what they said within the halls of power this may be different where you are but in taiwan every time members of parliament punch each other it's on camera and they do they fight you know they beat they get into you know fisticuffs in parliament there were kind of little riots within their house of parliament where they really they really uh yeah yeah some i mean where you live your house of parliament you're you know i would assume most of the world every you know uh every little thing that's said and done inside your house of prominence okay so you think the battlefront just doesn't matter you think what soldiers do in times of war is less important is less significant than whether or not this taxi driver made a racist remark that justified the passenger in the taxi punching the driver or you know whether or not they're two different versions where the taxi driver says the passenger refused to pay money and the passenger says no the taxi driver ripped me off and stole my money all of these petty disputes right we don't rely on witness testimony anymore we rely on the god-like omniscience of portable recording devices that are in every home they're in every pocket and they can be on your hat or glasses or pin to your lapel they're one of the major responses to police brutality within the last five years has been to demand that every police officer wear a camera at all times and then there's a separate question which is constitutional who gets to control that footage is that footage immediately uploaded to youtube where everyone can see it is it somewhere you know where freedom of information act requests where everyone can see every minute of every on duty police officer's life that if you're on duty with a gun anyone can access that or as often happens is the footage only released after being censored after being edited that it's controlled and that sometimes conveniently police department should say they lost the footage the footage isn't available so if you follow these kinds of things in politics you are aware these are these are issues the existence and presence of the so-called body cam that's the term the body cam oh oh so only police officers are going to wear a body cam huh not not soldiers in time of war does that matter more or less again taxi drivers okay what about the mayor the mayor has no body cam it's all just he said she said [ __ ] for the mayor what about your member of parliament like what about really important political events secrecy anonymity impunity or accountability transparency now again i used the example of a university professor for a reason you know i i realize it may seem like a stretch we're talking about gun violence now you're talking about a university professor preaching from the pulpit to his students okay i have known so many university professors who would be ashamed to watch the film of their own behavior back again they'd be so ashamed just to hear the words out of their own mouth i've known university professors who showed up drunk to give their lectures there are university professors who show up under the influence of other drugs but there are also just university professors who have a short fuse who lose their temper there are professors who preach ridiculous extreme political ideologies extreme political views right and without even someone else to criticize them i i'm just talking to people i've known right i could sit down with some of these people and just play the tape did you did you realize you said that like did you this will bring about a change on the part of the behavior of the university professor now guys students are not angels you know i wonder what impact you would have if you started really invigilating the behavior of students or it's like look not only is it we know you cheated on the test it's a real issue and i've really seen it cheating on tests and exams but like where someone some authority figure is sitting down with a student saying look this is what you did during that one hour lecture you played video games city like we know we have videotape evidence that you sat and played video games you weren't paying attention you're not taking notes you're not doing this but you know maybe that you were sleeping whatever i mean i've been in the room where every other student behind aside from myself the extent to which they're in no way participating in their own education or they're not doing what academia demands of them and you can have rules you can enforce this you can enforce higher standards of of excellence and failure so yes sam walsh mentions um car dash cams so this is a camera on the dashboard of a car cars now increasingly have have cameras built in yeah i mean i'm just barely old enough to remember when that was new you know um but for my generation i mean if you were just five years younger than me you didn't see that change i remember reading a story in the newspaper and it was very moving and it was from a black guy describing the racism of the police this was in toronto in canada and them grabbing him and throwing them in the hood of the car and this stuff you know but what happened at that time was that you found that many many of the people who at that time because they weren't aware of the dashboard cameras themselves like because it was that new many of the people who claimed the police were racist and claimed they were corrupt and claimed misconduct the dash cam footage proved that the person making that complaint was either deeply dishonest or insane or both i saw a lot of that just at that time right when it was really new that actually people have become accustomed to being able to make up stories about police misconduct now some of the police misconduct was real but so many people were lying before the advent of the of the dash cam right so this is another real this is another real change right so um yeah this is an answer waiting for someone to ask the question as soon as we allow the regulation of guns this is the answer not just in the united states in switzerland in taiwan in japan in communist china the answer already exists the answer is there and the answer is irrefutable some things are so trivial they should not be recorded by hidden cameras or i'm not saying hidden cameras miniature cameras portable cameras right if you put your kid into a daycare center do you want the daycare center to have cameras on all the time let's say one kid in a million dies in a horrible accident while they're at a daycare center right let's say some something terrible happens to just one kid in a million at a daycare center do you want it record if something goes wrong if your kid is somehow hurt or harmed do you want to have according to that we accept that pilots in airplanes have no privacy there is a black box recorder in every cockpit every single word that the pilot says is recorded every decision every button he or she presses while flying the plane why because it matters we have an united unspoken standard that some things matter so they must be recorded however inconvenient or embarrassing again there's a further question that requires legislation requires an amendment to the constitution i think in every country in the world what happens to that footage does everyone get to hear it like is there an access is there a process where when the plane crashes if my my ex-wife dies in the plane crash or something i want to know exactly what went wrong with the the pilot can i access the recordings can anyone or is it only released when some government agency or some private corporation has had the opportunity to censor it to decide whether or not it'll be employed these are these are big momentous questions right something as seemingly trivial as dropping your kid off at daycare something that obviously involves life and death decisions like flying an airplane when you pull the trigger of a gun how can that possibly be less significant a decision than pressing send on a text message of course your location should be recorded of course a digital photograph should be taken of course it should be uploaded to a database your pinpoint location on a map and these other details should be immortalized they should be available to the authorities to the police i would say they should be available to journalists or to anyone who's interested your own relatives your own cousin is wondering what happened in that shooting and you're involved you were involved with they should be able to get the objective truth right and we have already decided that we're willing to sacrifice our so-called privacy privacy a concept that's not in the constitution that's not legally financed just a cultural notion of privacy we have decided that we're willing to give up that privacy every time we send an email from a cellular phone every time we send a text message of course we should give up the idea of impunity anonymity privacy when we pull the trigger of a gun of course there are not two sides to that debate there is one answer and it's the same answer for switzerland for taiwan for thailand as it is for the united states of america it is an answer waiting for someone being willing to ask the question