TheAgitator.com
Stuff I Learned from the 2004 Preview Issue of Entertainment Weekly
Saturday, January 31st, 2004Stop snickering. I’m allowed a guilty pleasure, aren’t I?
1) The ridiculously talented (see Ghost World) Steve Buscemi will have a recurring role in the upcoming season of The Sopranos. This is good news.
2) Vanilla Ice has a pet kangaroo. Recently, it beat him up.
3) Critic Ken Tucker says of Dennis Miller and his new CNBC talkshow:
Since he’s abandoned his garbled Ayn Rand-style philosophy to become a shrieking pro-war hawk, Miller’s swooping descent from HBO the home of Squawk Box should be a thrilling kamikaze ride.
Never let facts get in the way of good snark. Let’s let slide the redundancy of the phrase “pro-war hawk” and instead focus on Tucker’s invocation of Rand. If you’re going to cite Rand, you really ought to have read her. Miller may have abandoned Rand in that he’s recently taken it upon himself to be President Bush’s self-appointed polyp inspector on all matters, domestic and foreign, but one need not abandon an objectivist philosophy to be a “shrieking pro-war hawk.” That’s because Ayn Rand was, in fact, a shrieking pro-war hawk. In fact, I’d guess that were she alive today, Rand’s only criticism of President Bush’s overseas advetures woud be that he’s had three years, and only managed to invade two nations of savages, and that in both cases, he didn’t kill nearly enough of them.
Rand was right about a lot of things. Foreign policy wasn’t one of them.
While I agree with your assessment that Rand would be a “shrieking pro-war hawk” if she were still with us, I wouldn’t so readily accept that her position was wrong-headed. As near as I can tell, Objectivists have still not accepted the peacenik position of the Libertarian Party, and they have a sound argument. If we don’t protect our hard-won liberty from those who would take it from us, we will surely lose it. Like altruism, the turn-the-other-cheek philosophy that we inherited from Christianity will surely cost us our freedom unless we can shake loose of it.
Radley, Don’t think you’re being fair to Rand, either. Don’t project the shrieking pro-war views of some of her followers on to her. She was a much more subtle and unpredictable thinker about the events of the day than you might expect (or than some of her followers would lead you to expect), and I’m not certain that I can predict her opinion about the Iraq war. I’m sure Chris Sciabarra has written something interesting about this.
“If we don’t protect our hard-won liberty from those who would take it from us, we will surely lose it.”
Ah, but Rand surely wouldn’t approve of a war against a nation which is not a threat, even if it liberates the people from a tyrant.
But she wouldn’t necessarily oppose it either. She had a rather sensible discussion of “outlaw nations” in one of her essyas, I can’t remember which. She basically said that nations that don’t respect basic human rights forfeit a sovereign’s normal right to complain when another takes over; instead it becomes the right (but not the duty) of any free people to liberate the oppressed.
From the PLAYBOY Interview with AYN RAND:
PLAYBOY: What about force in foreign policy? You said that any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany during World War II…
RAND: Certainly.
PLAYBOY: …And that any free nation today has the moral rightâthough not the dutyâto invade Soviet Russia, Cuba, or any other “slave pen.” Correct?
RAND: Correct. A dictatorshipâa country that violates the rights ofits own citizensâis an outlaw and can claim no rights.
“Miller may have abandoned Rand in that he’s recently taken it upon himself to be President Bush’s self-appointed polyp inspector on all matters, domestic and foreign. . . ”
Poor guy, doesn’t he know Sean Hannity already has that job?
I distinctly remember Rand appearing on the Johnny Carson show and stating there was no moral justification for the Vietnam war. Doesn’t sound like a shrieking war hawk to me.
Larry, Rand is making a logical mistake in the Playboy essay. I think all she intends is the last statement: that dictatorships have no right not to be invaded, which is of course true. But this does not imply a right by free nations to invade dictatorships.
Will,
Doesn’t Rand’s agreement with the first question say that free nations have the right to freely invade dictatorships? I think if you browse the objectivist websitesâeither the Objectivist Center or the Rand Instituteâyou will find that is precisely the foreign policy position they have adopted. It may be couched in conditions like the following, but the moral legitimacy is clear:
“a free country is justified in pursuing war only as a means to reduce the threat of harm to its citizens, to its legitimate government functions, to its commerce abroad, and to its allies.”âfrom William Thomas of the Objectivist Center
(http://ios.org/articles/wthomas_what-warrants-war.asp
Rand’s position on invading other countries is difficult to determine if you’ve read a lot of her work. She said that anybody could overthrow a dictator for reasons stated above. She also said in many more places the government should be completely separate from business and that taxation was a violation of individual rights. Saddam Hussein had no rights. The problem is that if the same standards are applied to George Bush, he has no rights either because he has taken the lives of thousands of innocents while both Bin Laden and Saddam still live.
In addition the Iraq war is financed with stolen property which is then shoveled into the pockets of private corporations, but human rights violations in Rand’s eyes.
Having violated human rights, and gone to war based on lies and fraud, Bush has made himself and our country vulnerable to attack.
Rand’s views about war are conflicted and often contradictory. In my view, it was one area were she needed to do more thinking.
TBC, do you honestly believe that load of bollocks you just wrote? Are you actually saying that President Bush is as bad as Saddam? What particular lies are refering to? It is a lie that Saddam was a vicious dictator? Is it a lie that he used WMDs, mass execution and torture on his own people? Is it a lie that he gave money to the families of Pelestinian suicide bombers?
I spent about a year trying to understand the tension between Randians and Libertarians. I thought I had it figured out. It seemed to me the tension stemmed from an irrational fear of the politicization of the Objectivist philosophy, disguised as distaste for license. Then 9/11 happened, and while there may be some truth to my subjective assessment, the more pointed answer is that Objectivists are “shrieking pro-war hawks” and Libertarians aren’t.
I think it is important to realize that Rand’s views will often seem contradictory if examined out of context.
When she speaks of how a free society may act against a dictatorship, she is talking about an Objectivist society. And objectivist society would not have the same moral conflict that Bush has, that being that he is a semi-dictator himself (or the US government rather).
Frankly, the pacifist foreign policy position of both the Libertarian Party and the CATO Institute is not only disappointing, but is contradicted by their demand for full Second Amendment rights at home. Is the right of self defense so limited, or are they just more interested in preserving duck hunting than protecting this country, its interests and its allies abroad, from harm?
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