WEBVTT 00:00:01.340 --> 00:00:04.120 It is the 21st of August, 2026. 00:00:04.300 --> 00:00:05.400 I am Corey J. 00:00:05.400 --> 00:00:07.960 Moller, and this is At Any Cost. 00:00:07.960 --> 00:00:11.180 This is episode 39, a Q&A episode. 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:18.560 And I do not believe that I have any housekeeping, so I can get right into the questions this evening. 00:00:20.740 --> 00:00:22.400 All the levels look good on my side. 00:00:22.400 --> 00:00:35.180 I will just check very quickly before I actually get into the questions that YouTube has not disabled the comments like it did two weeks ago, which was a lovely feature on their part. 00:00:39.040 --> 00:00:46.880 Okay, it looks like comments should be working on YouTube and everywhere else, so I don't know how you'd let me know, but try to let me know in the chat if they're not. 00:00:47.600 --> 00:00:49.940 At any rate, the first question... 00:00:50.900 --> 00:00:57.340 I see the question about the intro and outro music for Lutheran Lectionary recordings. 00:00:57.360 --> 00:00:59.960 I don't remember off the top of my head, so I'll have to check that one. 00:00:59.960 --> 00:01:02.380 I will reply to that one after the show. 00:01:03.100 --> 00:01:16.940 But the first question for the actual stream is one that has been pending for a little while, and I've been putting it off because it's going to take a little longer to address, but it is very important considering the current state of things. 00:01:17.460 --> 00:01:19.960 And the question was originally about... 00:01:19.960 --> 00:01:23.040 Let me see if I can find the actual wording here. 00:01:23.600 --> 00:01:24.480 Question one. 00:01:24.860 --> 00:01:33.060 What role did the Opium Wars play in relations between the West and China, and how morally legitimate was the British involvement in them? 00:01:34.480 --> 00:01:40.160 I'm actually going to expand this one because I think it's a fair expansion, first. 00:01:40.160 --> 00:01:42.940 And second, it's not just the Opium Wars. 00:01:42.940 --> 00:01:47.560 You have to understand the Opium Wars and the Century of Humiliation, which is what they call it. 00:01:47.940 --> 00:01:50.480 So that kind of tells you some stuff to start off. 00:01:51.000 --> 00:02:02.160 But you have to understand that whole time period and the interaction of various players in order to understand the modern Chinese mindset with regard to the West. 00:02:02.680 --> 00:02:07.240 And there's a caveat, there's an asterisk there next to West, and I'll get into that as well. 00:02:08.300 --> 00:02:17.180 So the major events will be the First Opium War, the Second Opium War, and then the Century of Humiliation, which basically spans those. 00:02:17.740 --> 00:02:29.360 So, the Century of Humiliation is 1840 to 1949, the First Opium War is 1839 to 1842, and the Second Opium War is 1856 to 1860. 00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:46.140 And the historical background, basically, you have to start by understanding, of course, the period of colonization, the spread particularly of the British Empire and its trade, and at this point, the British own India. 00:02:46.580 --> 00:02:53.420 That's also important because, obviously, opium partly grown in India, particularly the opium that would wind up in Britain. 00:02:54.180 --> 00:03:06.140 But the way that this starts off is you have a huge demand in Britain and in the British Empire generally for tea, for porcelain, and for silk. 00:03:06.480 --> 00:03:11.800 Well, tea, porcelain, and silk are largely Chinese products. 00:03:11.900 --> 00:03:18.600 And so what happens, because this is also an era in which you're using gold and silver, right, as your currency? 00:03:18.940 --> 00:03:27.300 And so most of this trade was denominated in silver, so you had huge outflows of silver from the British Empire into China. 00:03:27.640 --> 00:03:35.280 The British obviously don't like this, because in a time of hard currency, how much currency you have is actually physically limited. 00:03:35.280 --> 00:03:41.560 They can't do anything really to generate more, except physically mine it somewhere and turn it into currency. 00:03:41.820 --> 00:03:43.680 So this is a problem for the British. 00:03:44.420 --> 00:03:52.920 The British decide to solve this by taking Indian, largely Indian opium, and shipping it into China. 00:03:53.500 --> 00:03:58.960 What actually happened was, it was so successful that the outflow of silver reversed. 00:03:59.200 --> 00:04:04.740 And so you actually had a positive inflow for the British and a negative outflow from the Chinese. 00:04:05.600 --> 00:04:12.780 Now, the Chinese, of course, objected for a number of reasons here, not just because they were losing all their silver, that was a huge part of it. 00:04:13.420 --> 00:04:28.300 A lot of this gets cast into moral and other terms, but at the end of the day, a lot of it was about really two things, sovereignty, which in the Asian sense also includes not losing face, and money, hard currency. 00:04:29.400 --> 00:04:36.240 But at any rate, a Chinese commissioner, my Chinese is not good, so if I mispronounce some names, it's just what it is. 00:04:36.240 --> 00:04:38.700 My Chinese isn't, I have very limited Chinese. 00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:40.980 So Lin Zexu objected to this. 00:04:40.980 --> 00:04:44.340 He destroyed about 20,000 chests of opium. 00:04:44.780 --> 00:04:47.240 This is a lot of money, this is a huge amount of opium. 00:04:47.620 --> 00:04:57.320 And technically speaking, under international law, that is an act of war, so the British were not entirely out of line in doing what they did, which was declare war. 00:04:57.700 --> 00:04:59.640 This was the start of the first opium war. 00:05:00.760 --> 00:05:12.580 The British won decisively, as is the case for basically every single conflict up until that 1949 demarcation of the end of the century of humiliation. 00:05:13.240 --> 00:05:17.420 Basically, the Western powers just trounced China in every single engagement. 00:05:18.100 --> 00:05:22.080 This leads to the Treaty of Nanjing, which is what seeded Hong Kong. 00:05:22.380 --> 00:05:27.900 So you can see how that set up what has happened in recent years that was in perpetuity. 00:05:28.300 --> 00:05:30.720 And then it opened five treaty ports. 00:05:31.080 --> 00:05:42.880 These were ports where Western powers is eventually expanded to additional nations, not just the British, but this was basically free trade ports, where the Western powers could trade with China on favorable terms. 00:05:42.880 --> 00:05:46.900 In fact, on most favored nation status, which is a technical sense. 00:05:47.160 --> 00:05:55.320 It just means that the nation that has MFN status is treated at least as well as whichever nation is treated best. 00:05:56.260 --> 00:06:00.580 This crops up all the time in, this is still a thing in modern international law. 00:06:00.960 --> 00:06:19.620 China also had to pay a large indemnity for the war, for the conflict, and British and other European citizens were granted what is called extra-territoriality, which means they're not subject to the law of the nation in which they're residing, in this case China, but to the laws of their home nation. 00:06:19.840 --> 00:06:26.740 So British subjects could only be subjected to criminal penalties, whatever it happened to be, under British law, not under Chinese law. 00:06:28.380 --> 00:06:35.600 This, of course, did not make the Chinese happy, and then we have the Second Opium War, which starts with the Chinese doing a similar thing. 00:06:35.660 --> 00:06:43.600 This time, they seize a vessel that is shipping opium, arrest the Chinese crew and some British, and refuse to return all of it. 00:06:43.920 --> 00:06:47.100 And they eventually return some, but not all of it. 00:06:47.180 --> 00:06:50.580 This leads to the Second Opium War. 00:06:51.200 --> 00:06:55.300 This is the casus belli, the sort of spark that starts it. 00:06:56.260 --> 00:06:57.720 Of course, China loses again. 00:06:58.160 --> 00:07:00.880 You have additional territory that is ceded. 00:07:01.020 --> 00:07:04.520 You have various other treaty provisions, similar to the first one. 00:07:05.080 --> 00:07:15.240 One of which is an imposition of not the modern sort of freedom of religion, but something akin to it in the same sort of family. 00:07:16.300 --> 00:07:28.420 Christians and others were allowed to evangelize and to practice their faith, which is something that had been suppressed here and there, not necessarily consistently, but had been suppressed by the Chinese. 00:07:29.020 --> 00:07:32.760 This plays into something later that's important, that's why it's noted here. 00:07:33.440 --> 00:07:37.120 Instead of all the provisions of the treaty, that one's important to bear in mind. 00:07:38.020 --> 00:07:45.120 So, subsequent to this, you have essentially what is the equivalent in Asia of the rush for Africa. 00:07:45.420 --> 00:07:58.920 You have the carving out of spheres of influence by various European powers, really about six or eight main players, and largely building railroads infrastructure in their spheres of influence over which they exercise not just control but ownership. 00:08:00.080 --> 00:08:02.140 China, of course, objects to this. 00:08:03.160 --> 00:08:06.540 This is part of what leads to what is called the Boxer Rebellion. 00:08:06.920 --> 00:08:15.360 This is a major rebellion of the Chinese, both against some of the Chinese domestically and against the European powers. 00:08:15.540 --> 00:08:20.640 You have eight European powers that come together and completely crush the Chinese. 00:08:21.440 --> 00:08:22.560 It's not even close. 00:08:23.840 --> 00:08:35.740 Jumping ahead a little bit, and I should note before we do that, the Boxer Rebellion, why I said the freedom of religion thing was important, the Boxer Rebellion was also a domestic anti-Christian pogrom. 00:08:36.040 --> 00:08:39.740 They killed probably 30,000 to 35,000 Chinese Christians. 00:08:40.180 --> 00:08:44.940 That was part of the argument for that particular rebellion. 00:08:44.940 --> 00:08:51.100 There were also some weird eschatological claims and things, but it was largely anti-Christian and anti-Western. 00:08:52.040 --> 00:08:55.100 Jumping ahead a little bit, you come to World War I. 00:08:55.580 --> 00:09:10.240 And the reason that World War I matters is that one of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles was that Shandong, the German sphere of influence in China, was transferred from Germany, as punishment of Germany, to the Japanese. 00:09:10.680 --> 00:09:17.420 This leads to obviously increasing, there was already plenty of it, but increasing hostility toward the Japanese. 00:09:17.960 --> 00:09:20.640 And this is that caveat I mentioned in the beginning. 00:09:21.020 --> 00:09:26.800 You have to recognize, when the Chinese speak of the West, they don't just mean, you know, white guys. 00:09:27.040 --> 00:09:28.360 They don't just mean Europeans. 00:09:28.400 --> 00:09:30.200 They include the Japanese in that. 00:09:30.520 --> 00:09:39.760 In their conception, Japan is part of this cabal that has suppressed and, you know, destroyed China. 00:09:39.760 --> 00:09:44.060 They even go as far as to say there's destruction of Chinese cultural heritage and things like that. 00:09:44.540 --> 00:09:45.660 They include Japan. 00:09:45.940 --> 00:09:50.700 So recognize that animosity is there, not just for us, but also for Japan. 00:09:52.120 --> 00:10:03.840 And then, of course, this is further exacerbated by the Chinese invasion and occupation initially of Manchuria and then of more of China in 1937, lasting until 1945. 00:10:04.340 --> 00:10:10.700 Then, of course, you have that four-year period before the Chinese take over the Chinese communists, which is the Nationalists versus the Communists. 00:10:10.700 --> 00:10:11.980 It's the Chinese Civil War. 00:10:12.640 --> 00:10:22.740 But to give you some numbers, so you can kind of place these things in perspective and understand the Chinese overplay and they overstate what has actually happened, what has happened historically. 00:10:23.120 --> 00:10:24.800 And I recognize there's a little bit of sun there. 00:10:24.800 --> 00:10:27.180 I need to put up a curtain at some point. 00:10:27.180 --> 00:10:32.540 But the first opium war, 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese die, right? 00:10:33.460 --> 00:10:43.160 Six hundred-ish British casualties, that's including only a handful, a handful of dozen died as a result of actual fighting. 00:10:43.600 --> 00:10:44.920 Disease got the rest. 00:10:45.120 --> 00:10:48.600 Pretty standard down through war, even up until modern times. 00:10:49.380 --> 00:10:52.660 The second opium war, 20,000 to 30,000 Chinese died. 00:10:53.040 --> 00:10:57.320 Several hundred British and the French were involved this time, so that's British and French casualties. 00:10:57.520 --> 00:11:00.620 So again, massively one-sided in terms of losses. 00:11:01.800 --> 00:11:02.880 Boxer Rebellion. 00:11:03.020 --> 00:11:07.860 A hundred thousand Chinese die, that's including the 30,000 to 35,000 Christians who were killed. 00:11:07.940 --> 00:11:12.660 So you could probably subtract that from the total because they weren't really fighting on the Chinese side. 00:11:13.880 --> 00:11:25.480 Here's where the numbers start to get important, because you have to understand how much they overemphasize the Western conflicts in their cost versus downplaying what happened in their own history. 00:11:25.820 --> 00:11:34.080 So the Taiping Rebellion, which was another domestic issue that China had, 20 to 30 million died in that. 00:11:35.160 --> 00:11:44.140 Some estimates are as high as 60 to 80 million, but it's at least around 25, 30, say, as a conservative estimate very supported by the historical facts. 00:11:44.880 --> 00:11:47.140 The Japanese invasion was 15 to 20 million. 00:11:47.140 --> 00:11:49.400 You can see why they are still angry about that. 00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:53.420 The Chinese Civil War was at least 5 million. 00:11:53.600 --> 00:11:55.840 That was the Nationalist versus the Communist. 00:11:55.840 --> 00:11:57.420 Could have been significantly more. 00:11:58.140 --> 00:12:00.440 The records aren't very good for obvious reasons. 00:12:00.500 --> 00:12:01.500 The Communist won. 00:12:01.960 --> 00:12:03.280 So hard to tell. 00:12:03.660 --> 00:12:07.800 Great Leap Forward, as best as we can tell, killed tens of millions. 00:12:07.800 --> 00:12:10.120 That was just a Communist domestic policy. 00:12:10.500 --> 00:12:14.060 And then the so-called Cultural Revolution killed several million as well. 00:12:15.120 --> 00:12:20.780 So, pick any of the actions domestically of the Chinese against themselves. 00:12:21.500 --> 00:12:28.740 More Chinese died in those than all of the Western actions combined, by an order of magnitude at least. 00:12:30.040 --> 00:12:36.180 But this leads into the modern Chinese view of the West. 00:12:36.320 --> 00:12:42.580 It has basically formed it, because this is the propaganda that is taught in all of their schools. 00:12:43.100 --> 00:12:46.320 All of the Chinese are raised on this as their education. 00:12:47.080 --> 00:12:53.800 And so, they view the West through this lens, because again, this is a mandatory part of Chinese education. 00:12:54.420 --> 00:13:13.960 So, when you, for instance, have Western powers criticizing human rights violations by the Chinese communists and things like that, it is always from the Chinese perspective, viewed as a continuation of this policy of the West of suppressing the Chinese, turning them into vassals, etc. 00:13:14.480 --> 00:13:21.620 It's never viewed as being genuine, it's always viewed as being mercenary, which is part of why it's not ever effective, right? 00:13:22.320 --> 00:13:29.200 They view it purely as something where the West is trying to, again, impose a new century of humiliation on China. 00:13:29.440 --> 00:13:33.860 That's always their concern, and I'll get into that near the end of my remarks on this. 00:13:35.440 --> 00:13:42.160 The Chinese are also taught that only the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, saved China. 00:13:42.600 --> 00:13:53.100 They're taught that the Chinese were stood up again, that they were again part of the great powers, as it were, due to the actions of the communists and nothing else. 00:13:53.840 --> 00:14:11.860 Some irony in this, of course, because the majority of the reason the Japanese were expelled from China is, one, they were losing against the United States in the Pacific Theater, and two, the nationalists in China were actually fighting against them and having some success. 00:14:12.120 --> 00:14:13.260 The communists weren't. 00:14:13.380 --> 00:14:17.640 So the communists claim credit for what the nationalists in China actually did. 00:14:19.680 --> 00:14:23.920 But their real concern is that past humiliation and not repeating that. 00:14:23.920 --> 00:14:27.800 That is, you know, losing face, big thing in Asian politics. 00:14:29.280 --> 00:14:32.200 There is a similarity here, you will notice. 00:14:32.420 --> 00:14:43.080 And perhaps you'll notice it even better if I point out that one of essentially, not necessarily word for word, their maxim, but a sort of mindset they have is never again. 00:14:44.160 --> 00:14:47.440 They believe that this should never again happen to them. 00:14:47.440 --> 00:14:49.420 And where have you heard that before, right? 00:14:50.240 --> 00:14:51.940 Well, with the Jews and the Holocaust. 00:14:52.140 --> 00:14:54.140 Very similar mindset going on here. 00:14:54.300 --> 00:15:06.740 You have this propagandized version of history that is then used as warrant to hate the West, and particularly also to hate Christians, incidentally, in both cases, and the slogan is never again. 00:15:06.760 --> 00:15:07.740 There's a similarity there. 00:15:07.740 --> 00:15:14.860 The Chinese have a little more historical warrant, certainly, than the Jews, but they still overemphasize it in a way that's certainly impermissible. 00:15:17.380 --> 00:15:26.640 Now, some criticisms of, some additional, I guess, criticisms of this view of the Chinese that they advance, they teach in their schools, their propaganda. 00:15:27.320 --> 00:15:30.560 One, there's no such thing as China, as a nation. 00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:32.360 China is an empire. 00:15:32.640 --> 00:15:37.220 China has 56 ethnic group, recognized ethnic groups. 00:15:37.220 --> 00:15:39.940 This is officially recognized by the Chinese Communist Party. 00:15:40.680 --> 00:15:42.240 One is the Han Chinese. 00:15:42.660 --> 00:15:43.860 One is the Manchu. 00:15:44.140 --> 00:15:51.560 The Manchu are important because they are actually the ethnicity that was largely the source of the Qing Dynasty. 00:15:51.560 --> 00:16:07.540 The Qing Dynasty, spelled with a Q, is the one that was in charge during both of the Opium Wars, the one that is sometimes blamed by the Chinese Communist Party for being weak, not modernizing fast enough, not responding quickly enough, etc. 00:16:08.680 --> 00:16:16.000 So they are sort of, they're an important player, but they're Manchu, they're not Han, right? 00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:25.820 The Chinese Communist Party is largely Han Chinese, although the Han Chinese are actually reproducing more slowly than all of these minority groups, ethnic groups in China. 00:16:25.820 --> 00:16:31.480 So they're slowly losing power, but that will also play into how they're going to behave domestically, of course. 00:16:33.000 --> 00:16:44.880 The disputed territories, one of the other reason the Qing Dynasty is important, the disputed territories, so Hong Kong in particular, Taiwan, certainly, these are areas that were actually conquered by the Qing. 00:16:45.080 --> 00:16:49.360 They were relatively recently conquered and became part of the Chinese Empire. 00:16:49.960 --> 00:16:55.360 There's some history there, it's complicated in some cases, but they're not Han Chinese, right? 00:16:55.360 --> 00:17:00.220 They're not like uppercase C Chinese, but the Chinese view them that way. 00:17:00.220 --> 00:17:07.160 This is a big part of their mentality, because they view, for instance, Taiwan is the outstanding one, right? 00:17:07.160 --> 00:17:09.940 They got Hong Kong back, Taiwan's outstanding. 00:17:10.520 --> 00:17:19.260 Every day that Taiwan remains not part of China, in their conception of it, is an assault on them. 00:17:19.260 --> 00:17:20.540 It's an affront to them. 00:17:20.540 --> 00:17:24.840 They're losing face, because they don't have this territory they view as being rightfully theirs. 00:17:25.360 --> 00:17:27.740 And so, they will eventually move to retake that. 00:17:27.840 --> 00:17:29.700 The question is how exactly they'll do it. 00:17:30.720 --> 00:17:43.660 Usually, the Chinese, in this case, are relatively rational actors, so if they can retake it through referenda and through political means, they would prefer to do that to war, but they could also take Taiwan in about a day, if they really wanted to. 00:17:47.900 --> 00:17:51.840 Another fact that is ignored in the historical narrative that's very important. 00:17:52.320 --> 00:17:58.360 China had been producing and consuming opium for over a century, before the British got involved. 00:17:58.920 --> 00:18:05.960 So in their propaganda, they basically say that the British introduced opium to the Chinese, which is just a lie. 00:18:05.960 --> 00:18:17.260 It's flat out wrong, because literally for a century, they had actually been importing a bunch of it from neighboring countries, and they had sort of the same problem that the British had with regard to tea. 00:18:17.540 --> 00:18:23.500 They hated how much they were spending on this, the outflow of capital, and so, in this case, hard currency. 00:18:23.640 --> 00:18:27.300 And so what they actually did was they started to produce it domestically. 00:18:27.640 --> 00:18:33.240 Their domestic production had actually exceeded their imports at the point where the British got involved. 00:18:33.700 --> 00:18:38.220 So did the British exacerbate an existing problem? 00:18:38.280 --> 00:18:39.280 Absolutely yes. 00:18:39.740 --> 00:18:42.020 Did they introduce the Chinese to opium? 00:18:42.180 --> 00:18:43.280 Absolutely no. 00:18:45.600 --> 00:18:51.280 And then beyond that, just I would emphasize again, the fact that the Japanese are viewed as part of the West. 00:18:51.280 --> 00:19:02.960 So that's not going to come naturally to your mind, perhaps, but bear that in mind when the topic of China comes up, because they think of sort of a solid anti-Chinese block, including Japan. 00:19:04.620 --> 00:19:15.320 But then to answer the other part of the question, sort of the outline of how we got to where we are, and how you have the Chinese view of the West in light of these things. 00:19:16.020 --> 00:19:23.320 But then the actual second part of the question asked by the questioner, was it moral for the British to be involved in this way? 00:19:23.920 --> 00:19:26.340 I think they exceeded their moral warrant. 00:19:26.920 --> 00:19:34.020 Was it fine to impose colonialism, and then to allow evangelization of Christianity and things like that? 00:19:34.080 --> 00:19:35.060 Yes, that's fine. 00:19:36.260 --> 00:19:41.300 Was it fine to balance your budget by getting more of the Chinese addicted to a hard drug? 00:19:41.760 --> 00:19:44.940 I think it's pretty easy to say no, they should not have done that. 00:19:45.280 --> 00:19:55.820 They should have found some other way to balance that trade imbalance with regard to tea, porcelain, and silk, instead of just getting a bunch more of the Chinese addicted to opium. 00:19:57.060 --> 00:20:14.280 Now, the Chinese, of course, blow this, again, vastly out of proportion, because they lie about numbers, they downplay their own internal politics, they downplay so many different things, many of which I went over, and then they really just... 00:20:14.780 --> 00:20:20.600 It's not even exaggerating, it's they just outright lie about what happened with regard to Western involvement in China. 00:20:21.020 --> 00:20:24.800 But it has become the founding myth of the CCP. 00:20:25.540 --> 00:20:31.600 The CCP makes claims about continuity with the Qing and previous dynasties, complete nonsense. 00:20:31.920 --> 00:20:35.740 It sort of claims to have the mandate of heaven. 00:20:36.580 --> 00:20:47.740 It's kind of squirrely with whether or not it has that, but the problem is the common people, particularly in the hinterlands, view the CCP as having the mandate of heaven and being tied to economic prosperity. 00:20:48.040 --> 00:20:58.000 And so that partially drives their psychology and their policies, because if they lose that prosperity, they will be perceived as having lost the mandate of heaven. 00:20:58.440 --> 00:21:04.880 And that always leads to rebellion in China's history, and usually tens of millions dead, depending on the era. 00:21:06.820 --> 00:21:21.460 But the reality is that the modern view of the West that's held by China is formed by the opium wars and the century of humiliation and the conception of the West as including Japan and being anti-China. 00:21:21.900 --> 00:21:23.700 And they're big complaints. 00:21:24.300 --> 00:21:26.900 In essence, they have four big complaints. 00:21:27.300 --> 00:21:31.820 And with what I just gave you, you can judge whether or not these are legitimate complaints. 00:21:32.160 --> 00:21:37.300 They argue that drugs and moral degradation were introduced to China by the West. 00:21:37.560 --> 00:21:45.180 They argue that the unequal treaties that were imposed on China were onerous and an insult. 00:21:45.640 --> 00:21:50.980 They argue territory that was rightfully Chinese was amputated by the West. 00:21:51.100 --> 00:21:56.540 So Hong Kong, Taiwan, Kowloon attached to Hong Kong, a couple other places. 00:21:57.240 --> 00:22:00.040 And they argue there was cultural destruction. 00:22:01.080 --> 00:22:05.380 Now, were some cultural relics destroyed in the course of the wars? 00:22:05.400 --> 00:22:05.920 Yes. 00:22:06.420 --> 00:22:12.840 The old, I think it was called the old Summer Palace, was destroyed during the Second Opium War, I believe it was. 00:22:13.340 --> 00:22:23.100 And there were some volumes of an encyclopedia that were destroyed in Beijing as a result of that city being conquered and occupied. 00:22:23.320 --> 00:22:25.460 So yes, were some things destroyed? 00:22:25.460 --> 00:22:26.920 Of course, it happens in war. 00:22:27.320 --> 00:22:31.920 Was there a deliberate program by the West to destroy Chinese culture? 00:22:32.180 --> 00:22:33.560 There's no evidence of that. 00:22:33.960 --> 00:22:36.720 So that's the Chinese mindset. 00:22:36.720 --> 00:22:40.160 The reality is not really identical to what they believe. 00:22:40.720 --> 00:22:44.100 But ultimately, that doesn't matter, because this is what they're taught. 00:22:44.300 --> 00:22:47.380 This is what they believe with regard to the West. 00:22:47.380 --> 00:22:49.720 Excuse me, and this is how they view the world. 00:22:49.820 --> 00:22:55.280 So if this is how they view the world, they're going to behave according to this world view. 00:22:55.880 --> 00:22:58.640 So were the British wrong to push opium? 00:22:58.820 --> 00:23:03.380 Yes, you should not push hard drugs because they're bad, right? 00:23:03.380 --> 00:23:06.460 As a Christian, you shouldn't want people to be addicted to hard drugs. 00:23:07.040 --> 00:23:13.000 But that's one of those means that you really probably should not use. 00:23:14.340 --> 00:23:19.180 If it's an active war, maybe there are some caveats there, but this was not an active war, right? 00:23:19.440 --> 00:23:21.120 This was a trade imbalance. 00:23:21.320 --> 00:23:23.120 They should have handled it in a different way. 00:23:23.960 --> 00:23:35.120 But that is what has set the stage for how China views the West, and how they view the world, and how they will continue to interact with us, because it's what they taught and what they actually believe it. 00:23:38.480 --> 00:23:53.600 And I guess I should have prefaced it by saying this is the sort of thing where you could teach an entire year of a graduate seminary on this era in Chinese history, and all of the intricacies and the intrigue and the involvement of the different European players. 00:23:53.600 --> 00:24:08.020 But that will at least give you an overview of it that gives you a functioning view of how this happened and an accurate one, so you can sort of gauge how China is behaving on the world stage and how people are behaving in relation to China. 00:24:08.520 --> 00:24:19.220 In fact, if you remember the core of my answer, you will be better informed on China than most of our politicians, which is another problem. 00:24:19.220 --> 00:24:30.200 But question two, the godly pursuit of this life or pursuits of this life. 00:24:30.540 --> 00:24:37.080 I wrestle to find the proper line between fighting to win here and now and being prepared to face the end of our race. 00:24:37.680 --> 00:24:41.760 Looking at Hitler's righteous cause, I struggle with why God allowed the wicked to win. 00:24:42.240 --> 00:24:51.340 If God moves us to a similar response, how should we hold the possibility of failing in our hearts without doubting God or defecting from this righteous cause? 00:24:53.120 --> 00:24:56.320 So, I would say, read Job. 00:24:56.320 --> 00:25:00.460 That is always going to be part of my answer when it comes to something like this. 00:25:00.880 --> 00:25:03.140 You can also read certain parts of history, right? 00:25:03.260 --> 00:25:06.440 North Africa used to be European that fell away. 00:25:06.440 --> 00:25:11.400 There were many Christians in the Middle East, and they were killed mostly by the Jews. 00:25:12.520 --> 00:25:17.340 Just because you are faithful and righteous does not mean that you will win in this life. 00:25:17.680 --> 00:25:23.220 That's not how it works, because we live in an evil and fallen world, and sometimes the wicked win. 00:25:24.000 --> 00:25:32.240 So, winning a war is not necessarily intimately linked to being faithful to God. 00:25:33.100 --> 00:25:41.540 Winning a war is a matter of being capable of winning a war, and we should bear these things in mind given where the country is currently headed and the West is currently headed. 00:25:41.960 --> 00:25:49.200 I do think that God will not let us fail, and I think that he can't, because he made promises to Japheth. 00:25:49.640 --> 00:25:51.860 We are the sons and daughters of Japheth. 00:25:52.120 --> 00:26:03.340 Those promises did not have a termination date, and so he can't let all of us pass away, unless this is the actual end times, in which case everything passes away. 00:26:03.780 --> 00:26:08.880 I don't think it necessarily is yet, and so God is bound by the things he has promised. 00:26:09.100 --> 00:26:11.200 And so I do believe that we will win. 00:26:11.560 --> 00:26:22.240 We're really fighting over the contours, the nature of that win, and I would prefer it to be the best win we can obtain, instead of just barely squeaking by. 00:26:23.300 --> 00:26:27.280 So I don't think that despair is ever the right mindset. 00:26:28.040 --> 00:26:30.700 Ultimately, Christians win regardless, right? 00:26:30.700 --> 00:26:37.840 I know that some people hate that answer, it's true, but I always add it with the caveat that we should still endeavor to win here in time as well. 00:26:38.560 --> 00:26:45.840 Because it is not the Christian approach to abandon the here and now just because we win ultimately in the eschaton, right? 00:26:46.020 --> 00:26:47.940 That's not an appropriate way to look at it. 00:26:48.560 --> 00:27:08.000 So, you know, live your everyday life, but also with the orientation toward where things are going, the reality of the times in which we live, and what will need to be done in the not-so-distant future in order to secure a victory that's worth having. 00:27:08.340 --> 00:27:20.120 I would also add that you should listen to the episode on normalcy bias from Stone Choir, because we really touch on this exact topic in that one. 00:27:20.120 --> 00:27:22.040 So I would say go and listen to that one again. 00:27:23.000 --> 00:27:24.180 I'll add that into the show notes. 00:27:24.180 --> 00:27:25.320 I made a note for myself. 00:27:29.760 --> 00:27:31.400 Question three. 00:27:33.400 --> 00:27:38.280 Genetic relation between random whites and a mixed couple with a mixed child. 00:27:39.020 --> 00:27:47.280 Could you explain how a white father with a child born from a marriage to a black woman is more genetically related to any random white man than his own child? 00:27:47.880 --> 00:27:53.760 Yes, the child is 50% his, but what else is creating this distance between him and his child? 00:27:55.420 --> 00:28:14.480 So the way that this works, without delving necessarily too deeply into genetics right now, is genetically speaking, a race is sort of a more or less fixed set of genetics, of inheritable characteristics. 00:28:14.600 --> 00:28:19.260 So genetics, your genome, your phenotype is the expression of that. 00:28:19.260 --> 00:28:25.480 And so whites are phenotypically white, because we have the genetics to produce the various things that make us fair-skinned. 00:28:27.020 --> 00:28:32.740 You share a huge chunk of your DNA with everyone else in your race. 00:28:32.960 --> 00:28:45.080 You share a huge chunk with everyone else who's a human being, but it is above and beyond that baseline, whatever 90% it is that you share with humanity generally, that you share with your race. 00:28:46.100 --> 00:29:00.000 If you then have a child with someone from another race, any random individual in your race will be more related to you because of that shared pool, as it were, of genetics that really is what is your race. 00:29:01.100 --> 00:29:06.540 Your child doesn't have that because he has it split between your race and your wife's race. 00:29:06.960 --> 00:29:13.180 That's why you will be more related to a random person from your own race than to your own child. 00:29:13.580 --> 00:29:17.620 Now, are you going to have 90-plus percent share with your child? 00:29:17.760 --> 00:29:24.720 Of course, because that's the case within a species, within the species of humanity, human beings, right? 00:29:26.180 --> 00:29:31.880 But we're not talking about the percentage of the 100, because that's irrelevant, right? 00:29:31.880 --> 00:29:36.920 Because if all of humanity, let's just say for the sake of argument, shares 90 percent, right? 00:29:37.580 --> 00:29:43.340 Well, the 90 percent isn't what differentiates me from every other member of my species. 00:29:43.740 --> 00:29:46.900 The 90 percent is shared, only the 10 percent matters. 00:29:47.180 --> 00:29:57.840 And so if you're talking about, say, a 2 or 3 percent difference between the races, that's huge, because you're talking about 2 or 3 percent of 10 percent, not of 100 percent. 00:29:58.060 --> 00:30:00.880 So you have to bear in mind what's being discussed, right? 00:30:01.080 --> 00:30:06.220 When you're talking about, say, cross species, then that percentage is going to be wider. 00:30:06.220 --> 00:30:12.500 But even then, you share a significant percentage of your DNA with dogs and cats and goats. 00:30:12.840 --> 00:30:14.240 We're all mammals, right? 00:30:14.540 --> 00:30:15.940 We share that DNA. 00:30:16.360 --> 00:30:21.780 So we wouldn't say that, you know, it's the 100 percent of the DNA that matters. 00:30:21.780 --> 00:30:29.260 It's that differentiating percentage of human versus goat, or in this case, the different races of men. 00:30:29.640 --> 00:30:42.260 So that's why you are going to be more closely related, genetically speaking, to a random member of your own race, then to your own child if you marry, particularly someone who is of a distant race like white versus black. 00:30:44.000 --> 00:30:57.120 Now, if you're talking about, say, English and Russian, much less of an issue, because already significantly more overlap in total, as opposed to between whites and blacks, which are about as distant as you can get. 00:30:57.720 --> 00:31:05.600 There's also a very good chart going around that shows the different human races mapped onto a graph. 00:31:05.900 --> 00:31:10.700 And so it will show you the distance between, say, whites and Africans, which is basically the biggest you can get. 00:31:10.900 --> 00:31:16.260 And then also where your child would fall if you married someone from that other race. 00:31:16.520 --> 00:31:18.760 And so that's the genetic distance. 00:31:19.040 --> 00:31:24.040 The little circle that is your race, everyone who's a member of your race is within that. 00:31:24.240 --> 00:31:29.280 So you're much closer to them than to your own child if you marry someone way over here. 00:31:29.880 --> 00:31:32.340 So maybe someone can find and share that image. 00:31:32.340 --> 00:31:36.660 I don't think that I have it saved, but there are plenty of ways you can generate this. 00:31:36.700 --> 00:31:42.820 FST is one of the standard measures of genetic distance between individuals or populations. 00:31:44.720 --> 00:31:54.120 But that's how you can be more distant from your own child genetically than from your neighbor, assuming your neighbor is as he should be your own race. 00:31:56.500 --> 00:31:57.840 Question four. 00:31:58.800 --> 00:32:01.940 I currently reside in a state that has poor demographics. 00:32:02.040 --> 00:32:11.360 I find having to deal with these people on a daily basis to be very tiresome, and I can't help but feel as though the poor demographics made it more difficult for me to find a suitable wife. 00:32:11.720 --> 00:32:12.980 That's definitely true. 00:32:13.580 --> 00:32:15.280 Would you recommend moving to Tennessee? 00:32:15.460 --> 00:32:16.740 Do you enjoy living there? 00:32:16.740 --> 00:32:24.420 A part of me wants to move to the Midwest, the land of my ancestors, but the particular state from which my family hails has very high taxes. 00:32:26.540 --> 00:32:36.880 So we definitely address this in a number of episodes of Stone Choir, and the general rule is that it's best to stay around family, where your family has lived for a long time. 00:32:37.740 --> 00:32:54.220 But, that being said, there are times where wisdom dictates you should move, because there are so many problems where you are, and it's trending so rapidly in the wrong direction, that you can do nothing about it except leave. 00:32:55.100 --> 00:32:59.320 Maybe it can be fixed in the future, but that is a greater undertaking than an individual. 00:32:59.320 --> 00:33:02.460 So wisdom sometimes will say you need to move. 00:33:03.200 --> 00:33:12.940 If you're in a particular state, I don't know which state you reside, but I can guess which Midwest states, given the high tax issue, although they're all not particularly low tax these days. 00:33:14.320 --> 00:33:29.020 I would say move where you have family or some connections so you can get back on your feet quickly, you have a job, you have a way to provide yourself, you have a community around you, and go from there. 00:33:29.720 --> 00:33:41.320 Things are going to change a lot in the next 10, 15, 20 years, so you're not really planning for the next 500 years right now, you're planning to survive what's coming. 00:33:42.160 --> 00:33:53.820 And in that sense, move to somewhere that has decent demographics, and again, has those networks that can support you with regard to job prospects and things like that. 00:33:54.580 --> 00:33:55.480 Tennessee is great. 00:33:55.980 --> 00:33:56.640 I like it here. 00:33:56.640 --> 00:34:02.260 I've got family, been living in the hills here for hundreds of years, so it made sense in my case. 00:34:02.700 --> 00:34:15.040 But I'm not going to say you, no, you can't move to some part of the country if you don't have close cousins, because ultimately, all Americans, and by Americans, of course, I mean racial Americans, are your cousins. 00:34:15.960 --> 00:34:24.680 It's better to live close to close family, but by all means, if opportunity presents itself, moving somewhere like Tennessee makes perfect sense for some people. 00:34:26.560 --> 00:34:27.980 Just be ready for the humidity. 00:34:29.040 --> 00:34:31.920 And also, I had a bear walk through my front yard two nights ago. 00:34:32.060 --> 00:34:34.120 So, as long as you're fine with those things. 00:34:38.740 --> 00:34:40.800 Question five. 00:34:42.180 --> 00:34:52.920 I was talking to a pastor about slavery slash genocide, basically racism by proxy, and it became clear to me that one of us had a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of morality. 00:34:53.620 --> 00:35:05.940 My understanding was basically that something was either inherently good or inherently evil, and the fact that God cannot or will not sin basically meant that he could or would not do something that was inherently evil. 00:35:06.700 --> 00:35:18.500 His belief seemed to be that nothing was really inherently good or evil, and that anything God does is basically automatically cleansed for him and made to be not evil, but that it doesn't make it not evil for us. 00:35:18.860 --> 00:35:22.760 Are you able to explain the proper understanding of how this actually functions? 00:35:23.160 --> 00:35:24.500 That argument from... 00:35:24.500 --> 00:35:29.780 argument, I should put in quotations, that argument from your pastor comes up all the time. 00:35:29.780 --> 00:35:45.340 I don't know who started it, what the source is, but it's not only wrong, it's blasphemous, because the nature of morality is that morality flows from God's nature, because God is his nature, right? 00:35:45.340 --> 00:35:57.860 God is what we would call attributes, what are known philosophically and theologically as the transcendentals, goodness, beauty, truth, unity, and being, if we want to use the fourth and the fifth, we don't really need those ones here, we just really need goodness, right? 00:35:58.000 --> 00:35:58.700 And truth. 00:36:00.160 --> 00:36:13.700 So, something is good if it aligns with God's nature, if it is oriented toward its proper end, which is an end that God has set for it, in accordance with its nature, its nature being a good thing created by God. 00:36:14.820 --> 00:36:18.780 But without, I guess, delving into some of that stuff, it gets a little complicated. 00:36:19.300 --> 00:36:25.580 You really just have to understand that core reality, is that morality flows from God's nature. 00:36:25.920 --> 00:36:27.560 God's nature is unchanging. 00:36:27.740 --> 00:36:30.300 So, that which is good will always be good. 00:36:30.500 --> 00:36:33.020 That which is evil will always be evil. 00:36:33.480 --> 00:36:36.800 It's not good by virtue of God having done it. 00:36:37.100 --> 00:36:40.340 It is that God is good and would never do something evil. 00:36:40.340 --> 00:36:45.900 We're speaking in human terms, of course, because it's not would or could. 00:36:45.900 --> 00:36:48.720 It's that it's incoherent to say that God would sin. 00:36:50.980 --> 00:36:57.580 We don't have the human terms for it, so the best we can say is wouldn't or couldn't, or whatever it happens to be, won't. 00:36:58.040 --> 00:37:02.760 Whatever terms we use, we're approximating the reality instead of saying it exactly. 00:37:03.220 --> 00:37:15.220 Because again, the best way that I've explained it, and the best way I've found to explain it, is that just because you can string some words together and it sounds like a sentence doesn't mean it is. 00:37:15.880 --> 00:37:19.320 So, you know, the purple canoe sleeps briefly. 00:37:20.420 --> 00:37:21.520 That's not, right? 00:37:21.520 --> 00:37:22.760 That sounds like a sentence. 00:37:23.020 --> 00:37:24.040 But it's not. 00:37:24.400 --> 00:37:31.620 And so, God does not sin is a true statement, but in that case, it understates it. 00:37:31.980 --> 00:37:37.320 Saying God will not sin is also kind of true, but it's incoherent. 00:37:38.700 --> 00:37:42.380 The real incoherent one is when you get into God cannot, right? 00:37:42.600 --> 00:37:44.560 Because God can do all things. 00:37:44.900 --> 00:37:54.580 But the sentence, God cannot sin is technically true in a certain sense, but it's also incoherent because you're saying God who can do all things cannot do something. 00:37:54.880 --> 00:38:00.080 It's not so much cannot as it is nonsense to say that God would sin. 00:38:00.340 --> 00:38:01.760 God is goodness. 00:38:02.240 --> 00:38:05.200 God is the very ground of that which is good. 00:38:05.360 --> 00:38:13.220 You can't have something that is good if it is not aligned toward God, aligned toward the ends for which God has created it. 00:38:13.520 --> 00:38:15.780 That's the very definition of that which is good. 00:38:16.560 --> 00:38:34.940 So, your pastor is using a pastor, so maybe not your pastor, but this pastor was using a mercenary sense of it, where I understand part of why they try to do it, because then they can say, well, genocide was fine because God commanded it, but otherwise it's evil, right? 00:38:35.480 --> 00:38:36.300 That's their goal. 00:38:36.380 --> 00:38:39.480 Slavery was fine because God commanded it, but otherwise it's evil. 00:38:40.580 --> 00:38:46.060 It's a mercenary attempt to explain away the Old Testament instead of believing the Old Testament is God's truth. 00:38:46.240 --> 00:38:50.340 So, ultimately, what they're actually doing is denying that objective morality exists. 00:38:50.520 --> 00:38:54.420 This is sort of a command theory of morality. 00:38:54.420 --> 00:38:56.080 God can say anything he wants. 00:38:56.080 --> 00:39:03.900 So, under this sort of interpretation, this is a way you can actually argue with someone who advances this, thou shalt not kill. 00:39:04.140 --> 00:39:09.840 God tomorrow, under this man's conception, could say, thou shalt kill, and now it's moral. 00:39:10.140 --> 00:39:12.740 Notably, we mean murder when we say kill in the sense, right? 00:39:14.240 --> 00:39:15.200 Would that be moral? 00:39:15.980 --> 00:39:18.200 The answer is no, and God wouldn't do it. 00:39:18.240 --> 00:39:19.660 But that's what this man is saying. 00:39:19.660 --> 00:39:25.360 So, you're basically a reduction to absurdity is what you're arguing against here, to defeat his point. 00:39:26.020 --> 00:39:30.420 But the whole reason they're doing it is to dismiss the Old Testament and the parts that make them uncomfortable. 00:39:30.840 --> 00:39:33.300 And they're blaspheming God. 00:39:33.300 --> 00:39:36.280 They're saying God changed or God could change. 00:39:36.700 --> 00:39:40.300 They're saying God isn't God, and they're saying morality isn't real. 00:39:41.400 --> 00:39:51.980 And that is exactly the sort of thing that leads to men not being men, men deciding they're women, or they're children, or they're a dog, or a goat, or whatever it happens to be. 00:39:52.380 --> 00:39:55.760 It's the same sort of nonsense saying that truth doesn't exist. 00:39:55.900 --> 00:40:03.480 It's merely a declaration that is true, in a sense, because of the declaration for some bounded period of time. 00:40:04.280 --> 00:40:07.660 So, yes, you were arguing correctly, and this pastor was absolutely wrong. 00:40:09.540 --> 00:40:10.700 But it is a common... 00:40:11.640 --> 00:40:13.280 I don't even want to call it an error. 00:40:13.860 --> 00:40:15.280 It is a common evil. 00:40:15.280 --> 00:40:19.020 It is a common wickedness that someone started. 00:40:21.780 --> 00:40:23.100 Question 6. 00:40:24.880 --> 00:40:26.260 Make a note for myself here. 00:40:27.880 --> 00:40:32.340 What is your take on Charlie Kirk's death and Candice's theory? 00:40:32.380 --> 00:40:37.860 I can answer the first part of that, but not the second, because I don't pay any attention to Candice Owens. 00:40:38.740 --> 00:40:43.420 So I don't know what she has been saying or not been saying. 00:40:43.420 --> 00:40:46.260 But I was very clear very early on. 00:40:46.260 --> 00:40:55.200 I don't know exactly the timeline, how long it was before I said something after his murder, his assassination. 00:40:55.580 --> 00:40:57.480 But I said bluntly that it was Israel. 00:40:57.640 --> 00:40:58.660 The Jews murdered him. 00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:05.040 And that was made very obvious by the fact that Netanyahu was bragging about it almost immediately. 00:41:05.280 --> 00:41:07.480 And I highlighted that in a post on X. 00:41:07.480 --> 00:41:11.280 So I'm sure someone can find that and add that to the show notes. 00:41:11.880 --> 00:41:17.680 But if you understand how Jews brag and how they behave publicly, he was absolutely bragging about having done it. 00:41:18.280 --> 00:41:22.260