Dave Smith: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, we should also say that there’s some degree of truth that the battle is not just militaristic, it’s also cultural. And then many of those parts of the world don’t want other people’s values forced onto them. Right. But the way that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and every right wing host in America, and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and everybody, what they were saying is that they hate that we are free, whereas it was much closer to saying they don’t like us imposing on them. Even like all the hardcore neocons, Brett Stevens, The New York Times, he wrote this piece on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, so 2023 to cheer lead the war in Iraq. And he goes through the whole piece, and there’s not one mention of the million people who died in the war. He literally just goes, the piece is just, measure life under Saddam Hussein verse life, were under the Shiite parliamentary system that they have now. Which one’s better? And he’s arguing this one’s better, therefore it was worth it. But there’s no mention. It’s like, “Okay, but what about the 20 plus million people who were displaced? What about the million people who were killed? What about all the millions of people who were injured? What about the tens of thousands of our soldiers who have blown their brains out in the aftermath of the thing?” So many times it is true with government policy in general, people talk about the end result that they want, but you’re like, “Yeah, but what about the process by which you get there and how much hatred, could you…” It’s, not that hard for me to put myself in other people’s shoes, and I have two little kids and a wife, and if anybody were to ever try to argue to me that they have to be the eggs that get broken to make some bigger omelet. Like, “It is okay, we’re ultimately going to impose something on your society that’s better than what you have right there. It sure does suck that your wife and kids got to be the one who get taken out.” I mean, as I’m just saying this to myself, and this is not real. This is just a thought experiment I’m making up. I’m already pretty close to being a terrorist. My next thought is kind of like, “Well, okay, well, I hope you’re going to like it when you watch your family die in front of you.” Hopefully, even if that happened to me, I wouldn’t go kill that guy’s family. Maybe I’d just go after him or something. But I could understand, and I think most people who have kids could understand going to a level of the most evil dark place you could imagine if anyone ever threatened or actually did something to your kids. Yeah, we’ll have to remember the thing that’s difficult to measure that you just mentioned, which is the hate that’s created by every bomb that’s dropped.…

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