Stossel and Boaz hath disappointed me

[heavenlyboy34]

video of the presentation is here: http://libertarianchristians.com/2011/04/05/stossle-at-sfl/

A students asks, “True or false: slaughtering innocent people is never justified.” Stossel, without missing a beat, says that we “had to kill innocent people to end World War 2.” Really? Regulating aspirin? Oh no! That’s an attack on liberty! Incinerating a city full of civilians whose government is trying to surrender? Fully defensible. Fire-bombing Dresden just because it’s a German city? Fully defensible. But gee whiz, if nuking a city into oblivion isn’t wrong, is there any killing in war that is not justified?


Boaz counters the original question by saying that “slaughter” is a charged term and we need to rephrase the question. Even granting that Boaz’s first counter is true, that the question is loaded, his answer that follows is horrifying. Essentially, he argues that killing innocent people probably is justified if it leads to creating freer countries. “Self-defense and national independence are basically the only reasons” that killing innocents is justified. So he is implicitly affirming exactly what Stossel said. I don’t care that he said it “should not be undertaken lightly,” trying to justify deaths of innocent people is always taking an issue too lightly.

 

[Dreamofunity]

Yeah, I was disappointed to. I was there (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Kc0UOHABc I can be seen at 4:20 to the left of the screen), no one in our group was impressed with those statements and in general how the format was set up.

 

[Fox McCloud]

very very disappointing---this definitely makes me think Stossel leans towards utilitarianism than out and out libertarianism.

 

[LibertyEagle]

I'm not sure they are talking about the same thing at all. Stossel could be referring to the atomic bombs we dropped on Japan.

 

[Matt Collins]

Have you e-mailed David and John to ask them to further clarify their comments?

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Have you e-mailed David and John to ask them to further clarify their comments?

No. I generally don't email celebrities because they more than likely won't reply due to the sheer amount of email they get-most of it is screened out, as I understand. If I had their personal email addys I would.

 

[Matt Collins]

No. I generally don't email celebrities because they more than likely won't reply due to the sheer amount of email they get-most of it is screened out, as I understand. If I had their personal email addys I would.

Not in this business.

I am willing to bet that both of them will respond to your e-mails. I get responses to mine quite frequently and in fact I am fairly confident David reads RPF.

 

[Proph]

If this is the same thing they had on FBN a few weeks ago, I think I remember seeing this. When he said it, it sounded like he was being sarcastic or just playing the devil's advocate. The writer didn't post a video link, and sarcasm doesn't transfer over well in text. You're basically going solely on this guy's interpretation of what Stossel said.

 

[lester1/2jr]

I like Freedom Watch alot better than stossel and I'm not even a paleo.

 

[ClayTrainor]

If this is the same thing they had on FBN a few weeks ago, I think I remember seeing this. When he said it, it sounded like he was being sarcastic or just playing the devil's advocate. The writer didn't post a video link, and sarcasm doesn't transfer over well in text. You're basically going solely on this guy's interpretation of what Stossel said.

Here's the clip, if you want to see how it actually went down. Go to about 4:55



Stossel looked pretty sincere, not sarcastic. He received some boo's from the audience after he said it. I would've done the same had I been there. It was a sickening response, imo.

 

[Proph]

After looking at it again, he did look sincere, but I still think he said it to set up the person to his left (just like he asked him a pretty tough question at around 2:50). The guy asked a pretty black and white question with very little wiggle room. When he brings up WW2, it broadens the topic.

 

[robert68]

..

 

[SimpleName]

I don't get the heat against Stossel. What he said makes sense. We had to kill some "innocent" civilians to take out the Nazis. If you want to avoid harming every single citizen, you better bet on losing.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

I don't get the heat against Stossel. What he said makes sense. We had to kill some "innocent" civilians to take out the Nazis. If you want to avoid harming every single citizen, you better bet on losing.

The heat is because the war was unnecessary to begin with-killing citizens only compounds the evil. (firebombing civilian centers like Dresden and Hamburg may be impressive to war mongers, but is not necessary to win a war-especially an unnecessary one like WWII. It would be much like bombing LA or Minneapolis-not significant military targets, but large civilian casualties would result)

 

[SimpleName]

The heat is because the war was unnecessary to begin with-killing citizens only compounds the evil. (firebombing civilian centers like Dresden and Hamburg may be impressive to war mongers, but is not necessary to win a war-especially an unnecessary one like WWII. It would be much like bombing LA or Minneapolis-not significant military targets, but large civilian casualties would result)

Indeed. WWII would have been made necessary had we not done something at the time. How long do we let an anti-American megapower build before they actually come attack us here? How many civilians will be dead then?

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Ah, the WWII myths persist

Indeed. WWII would have been made necessary had we not done something at the time. How long do we let an anti-American megapower build before they actually come attack us here? How many civilians will be dead then?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan115.html

[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]What cause could justify such sacrifices? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson's principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland's rescue. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn't want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative "to stop Hitler" after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet's, or Fidel Castro's, was out to conquer the world? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]After Munich in 1938, Czechoslovakia did indeed crumble and come apart. Yet consider what became of its parts. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The Sudeten Germans were returned to German rule, as they wished. Poland had annexed the tiny disputed region of Teschen, where thousands of Poles lived. Hungary's ancestral lands in the south of Slovakia had been returned to her. The Slovaks had their full independence guaranteed by Germany. As for the Czechs, they came to Berlin for the same deal as the Slovaks, but Hitler insisted they accept a protectorate. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Now one may despise what was done, but how did this partition of Czechoslovakia manifest a Hitlerian drive for world conquest? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Comes the reply: If Britain had not given the war guarantee and gone to war, after Czechoslovakia would have come Poland's turn, then Russia's, then France's, then Britain's, then the United States. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]We would all be speaking German now. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]But if Hitler was out to conquer the world — Britain, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, India, Asia, Australia — why did he spend three years building that hugely expensive Siegfried Line to protect Germany from France? Why did he start the war with no surface fleet, no troop transports and only 29 oceangoing submarines? How do you conquer the world with a navy that can't get out of the Baltic Sea? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]If Hitler wanted the world, why did he not build strategic bombers, instead of two-engine Dorniers and Heinkels that could not even reach Britain from Germany? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Why did he let the British army go at Dunkirk?[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Why did he offer the British peace, twice, after Poland fell, and again after France fell?[/FONT]

[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser's fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, Miklos Horthy's Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso's Slovakia. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia? [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Winston Churchill was right when he called it "The Unnecessary War" — the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.[/FONT]