Kieran Lawrence looks at autonomous weapons and the effect they could have on modern warfare
Continuing a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Angela Merkel
Ben Bland examines the fallout from the Iowa caucuses and looks forward to the New Hampshire primaries.
In the first of a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Nicholas Sarkozy
The oppressed of the world must unite! Strikes are needed against those looters and parasites who wish to steal from the workers! However those workers are millionaire bankers and the super-rich one percent while the looters and the parasites are everyone else in the world.
Furthermore the Bolshevik dream of an equal society where everyone enjoyed the blessings of industrial production was an abomination, the only redeeming feature of Lenin’s gang was their eagerness to crush the masses like the worms they are.
Now imagine you are in the desert, a man dying of thirst crawls up to you. Through parched lips he begs you for the bottle of water, the one that you bought but don’t really need. You decline, asking what right he has to the hard won fruits of your labour. Welcome to the moral abortion that is the world of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.
Ayn Rand, a Soviet émigré to the United States wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Based around the characters Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, who are wealthy industrialists disgusted by a world in which government “looters” tax and regulate them and “moochers” propagate the idea that the rich should provide for the less well off. Well the rich in Rand’s universe don’t stand of any of this and set about sinking ships full of foreign aid and crashing trains before the two main characters flee to the mountains to join a global strike by the productive rich against a world which dares not appreciate them sufficiently leaving society to certain failure. The leader of the strike, John Galt, then takes to the airwaves and in a forty page long speech, denounces altruism in all its forms and calls for rational self-interest to be the sole motivation force in man. Galt is, in fact, rather unsubtly expressing Rand’s own philosophy - “Objectivism”.
Ayn Rand’s work claims to be a defence of individual rights and liberties but it isn’t. She could easily have written a book about that. Instead she wrote a book much less than that, an evil book, a book which calls selfishness a virtue upon whose altar the lives of millions must be sacrificed. She denies human nature, with its inbuilt altruism and empathy as much as Marx’s vision of Communism did.
Pretty bad as it is so far Rand did not stop there; despite being an atheist and supposedly claiming to champion free thought she claimed unsurprisingly that “Objectivism” was somehow “objective” as well as deeming homosexuality morally wrong. The bizarreness does not stop there, ranging from Rand pronouncing what art was objectively better than others and demanding her followers to comply with her tastes to her claiming that sex, rather than being an animal instinct, is in fact a expression of shared philosophical values.
If you would allow me to breach Godwin’s Law for a moment, I have to say Objectivism most reminds me of a quote attributed to Heinrich Himmler: “What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me...Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany... We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary... but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them”. Kindness as a vice? Ruthless self-interest combined with the denial of sadism? All you have to do here is replace Germany with the individual Objectivist while the Russians and Czechs become everyone else in the world.
Of course Objectivists would object to that claiming that Ayn Rand’s philosophy was most of all about human freedom and the restraint of coercive force. I don’t buy it for a second though. How could concentrating power in the hands of a tiny elite who have such unrestrained contempt for the public not lead to a humanitarian disaster? I can’t imagine committed Objectivists passing up the chance to liquidate the “moochers” and “looters” if they ever had the chance. It’s the vicious hatred of the Twentieth Century de-collectivised from racial or class lines. It turns the old joke of “I’m not prejudiced, I hate everyone” into a political philosophy.
In reality Rand’s vision would mean ultimate freedom for a lucky few and degradation and powerlessness for the rest. In other words Ayn Rand is not the fiscal right, hard right nor even the far right but the sociopathic right. Strangely enough one problem with Objectivism is that it is not quite evil enough to be logically consistent. How does it make sense to claim that allowing millions to die through inaction or earning money without regard of human suffering is not only just not morally wrong but positively the right thing to do while also claiming that shoplifting is still wrong? Isn’t restraining yourself from harming someone when it is in your own self-interest a subtle form of altruism? The shying away from endorsing Nietzschean will to power betrays Ayn Rand’s dogma as a morality designed to glorify a system of privilege, or in other words something much less than objective.
But why bother to stare into the moral and intellectual void of Objectivism?
Well firstly many on the American right such as Senator Rand Paul, Alan Greenspan, who ran America’s central banking system for almost twenty years and even Angelina Jolie idolise her. Secondly, Hollywood has finally come round to making Rand’s “magnum opus” Atlas Shrugged into a film of which a trailer and a clip of are available on youtube.
As you can see the characters are pathetic caricatures and the dialogue is such that they may as well scream authorial comment through the fourth wall for ninety minutes. Thus the film is as flawed as the book itself to the extent that even the reviews from Conservative critics and Ayn Rand fanatics all briefly mourn the film’s abysmal artistic quality before rushing to praise its abysmal ideals. Ayn, or to give her her real name Alisa, the all-conquering ubermensch that she was ,supposedly cried every day while the punishing views of Atlas Shrugged the book came out, Lord knows how she would react to the reviews to Atlas Shrugged the film. Won’t it be delightful poetic justice if the Rand fanboys and girls fail to rescue the film and the ultimate tribute to dog-eat-dog capitalism is a financial failure.
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