The Dougout

From: Diversity Lane

Update: As the above cartoon illustrates, multiculturalism is now officially a suicide pact. Below is a short interview with a Jihad supporter who attends the same Killeen mosque as did Hasan, courtesy of the BBC. Apparently this is Duane Reasoner Jr., an eighteen year old convert to Islam and protege of Hasan. According to Stars and Stripes, "Hasan had taken 18-year-old Reasoner under his wing, mentoring him in his new faith." The FBI should keep close tabs on this one. But given that the Justice Department is now run by those who despise this "nation of cowards," that is not very likely.



Here is the transcript: Islamic Community of Greater Killeen the day after the killings at Fort Hood.

Duane: I'm not going to condemn him for what he did. I don't know why he did it. I will not, absolutely not, condemn him for what he had done though. If he had done it for selfish reasons I still will not condemn him. He's my brother in the end. I will never condemn him.

Gavin Lee: There might be a lot of people shocked to hear you say that.

Duane: Well, that's the way it is. I don't speak for the community here but me personally I will not condemn him.

Gavin Lee: What are your thoughts towards those that were victims in this?

Duane: They were, in the end, they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims. I honestly have no pity for them. It's just like the majority of the people that will hear this, after five or six minutes they'll be shocked, after that they'll forget about them and go on their day [emphasis added].

The last sentence of this traitor's statement is completely true, and not just of the American people but also of the government whose purpose is to defend them from such monsters. Active traitors and enemies being allowed to operate on American soil and on American military bases is just another part of the "diverse" mosaic of American society according to Hasan's apologists in the media, military, academia, and government. This is the message being sent load and clear from both Washington and that spawning ground of the multicultural Western suicide pact: academia.

With each act of Jihad terror that goes unanswered and unacknowledged, the Islamists become bolder and more arrogant, while freedom's friends become more despondent. The Jihadist war upon civilization will only increase in ferocity, unless and until real Americans start fighting back. And fighting back is going to require a moral certitude that upholds the superiority of our way of life and our right to do whatever is necessary to defend it from the 7th century barbarians both without and within the gates.

Lifted from Infidel Bloggers Alliance:

He called for Infidels to be killed.

He was disciplined, by the Army, for proselytizing his Islamic beliefs.

He handed out Krayons on the morning of his planned massacre.

He yelled Allah Akbar before killing 12 and wounding 31 people.

But, officials still can't figure out what might have motivated his behavior:

"The motive behind the shootings was not immediately clear," officials said.

I didn't add the "stupid" to this post's title. The media and relevant government officials are not stupid. Which just leaves dishonest and maliciously evil.

Update: As usual Ralph Peters is a rare voice of reason and moral clarity in our degenerate, corrupt age:

What cowards we are. Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting.

When the terrorist posts anti-American hate-speech on the Web; apparently praises suicide bombers and uses his own name; loudly criticizes US policies; argues (as a psychiatrist, no less) with his military patients over the worth of their sacrifices; refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; lists his nationality as "Palestinian" in a Muslim spouse-matching program, and parades around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit — well, it only seems fair to call this terrorist an "Islamist terrorist."

But the president won’t. Despite his promise to get to all the facts. Because there’s no such thing as "Islamist terrorism" in ObamaWorld.

And the Army won’t. Because its senior leaders are so sick with political correctness that pandering to America-haters is safer than calling terrorism "terrorism."

Now 12 soldiers and a security guard lie dead. 31 soldiers were wounded, 28 of them seriously. If heads don’t roll in this maggot’s chain of command, the Army will have shamed itself beyond moral redemption.

Muslim terrorist wannabes are busted again and again. And we’re assured that "Islam’s a religion of peace."

I guarantee you that the Obama administration’s non-response to the Ft. Hood attack will mock the memory of our dead.

Last June, Private William Long was murdered at an Arkansas recruiting station by a Moslem convert engaging in Jihad. In other words, an American soldier was killed on American soil in what can only be characterized as an act of war. As most people reading this probably already know, today twelve American soldiers were murdered and thirty-one wounded by a coordinated attack at Fort Hood. One of the attackers is a Major Malik Nadal Hasan. As of now, there are conflicting reports on whether Hasan was a convert to Islam or was born into it.

President Ozero has been quoted mouthing platitudes. According to some reports, the FBI is already ruling out terrorism as a motive. It should be obvious to the non-Political Correct that this attack is the result of Islamic Jihad. Watch the Obamao Administration evade and stick its head in the sand as it did when Private Long was murdered. The media has reported a series of arrests in America involving different Jihad terror cells in the last few months. Last December five Moslems were convicted of plotting to attack Fort Dix. It was only a question of time before one slipped through.

In its politically correct fecklessness, the U.S. government is allowing enemy fifth-columnists to operate on American soil. This stems from the government's refusal to identify the enemy. In 1979, Iran declared Jihad on America. Since that time the Jihad has been expanding and growing in both reach and virulence. Operating out of a Mosque, a terrorist cell brought the Jihad to America with its attack upon the World Trade Center in 1993. Hundreds of radical Mosques, funded by the Saudi Entity, are still allowed to freely function in the U.S.

These attacks on American soldiers on American soil by Moslem converts are obviously the product of a carefully planned strategy. Yesterday five British soldiers in Afghanistan were killed by a police officer who also was a Taliban operative. How hard will it be for Jihadists to infiltrate America's military and defense establishment? Not very.

Last September there was an Iftar ceremony conducted at the Pentagon. It was a star studded event. Ozero's "Muslims Affairs Director" Dalia Mogahed was in attendence. This was just before she travelled to England in order to discourse on the joys of Sharia Law for women. Also attending the festivities was Nihad Awad. He was representing CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas funding case. Those who deny the existence of Jihad are now in charge of protecting America from its practitioners. Expect more of these terror attacks on American soil.

This clown speaking in the video below is not going to keep American safe. He doesn't even really care about that part of his job. Before deigning to comment on the massacre at Fort Hood, he states:

I want to thank my Cabinet members and senior administration officials who participated today. I hear that Dr. Joe Medicine Crow (ph) was around, and so I want to give a shout out to that Congressional Medal of Honor winner [Good Lord. First, nobody wins the Medal of Honor. Second, Medicine Crow did not receive the MoH. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ozero. He did receive the Bronze Star during WWII. It's just too much to expect Ozero to know the difference. What an ignorant tool.] It’s good to see you.

Ozero then continued talking about this tribal conference and assuring all concerned that taxpayer largess is on the way.



Earlier today at the conference, Ozero began his speech with his favorite topic: America the evil.

OBAMA: We know the history that we share. It's a history marked by violence and disease and deprivation. Treaties were violated. Promises were broken. You were told your lands, your religion, your cultures, your languages were not yours to keep.

And that's a history that we've got to acknowledge if we are to move forward.

"[W]e've got to acknowledge[!?]" Newsflash Ozero, whole university departments and academic careers have been based on that history. Countless movies have been made and books on the same topic are too numerous to count. The only people not aware of it must be living in the caves of Pluto.

Watch the video; it is extremely revealing. Ozero mouths the words, but there is no passion, energy. He is only animated while discussing how Americans will be made to pay for their past sins, real and imagined. This guy has no interest in national security or the national interest. In order to have such an interest, he would first have to consider America worth defending.

Here is an interview of Michelle Malkin by Sean Hannity. This video includes many new, disturbing videos of schoolchildren being indoctrinated by Obamatons. These eleven new videos that have been posted at Big Hollywood are yet more evidence (as if more were required) of the left's agenda to turn K thru Ph.D. education into indoctrination. They are not stupid. They know the majority of the American people reject their agenda. So many year ago, they went with the nuclear option: to dissolve the people and create another.

Conservatives have conceded reason to the enemies of liberty and capitalism.



As John Lewis has observed in a recent article "Obama's Atomic Bomb: The Ideological Clarity of the Democratic Agenda," it is Republican cowardice that has made the Progressive agenda a reality in America:

The protests and the polls are clear: Americans have, by and large, rejected the radical leftist agenda. But the issue is not yet closed. The Democrats have one last resource—one secret weapon—with which they can save their plans while avoiding political suicide in the next election. That weapon is the Republicans.

If the Republicans compromise—if they accept federally-mandated health insurance in the guise of a “co-op” or the like, or a cap-and-trade bill that is marginally less draconian than the Democratic version—they will have once again capitulated to their opponents, abandoned liberty, and ruined the opportunity to redirect this nation toward its founding moral principle: individual rights, protected under a constitution in a free republic.

Let's hope the Stupid Party finds its reason before it's too late for America.

As the opening credits roll for one of the most popular television shows in American history, the two main characters sing the theme song: “Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again. Didn’t need no welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight.” Even as this song rang out across American television screens for the first time on 12 January 1971, the interpretation of Hoover’s politics by the historical profession was changing. For the generation that grew up during the Great Depression (including Archie and Edith Bunker) Herbert Hoover personified the philosophy of laissez-faire and rugged individualism. Richard Hofstadter in The American Political Tradition, characterized Hoover as “the last presidential spokesman of the hallowed doctrines of laissez-faire liberalism, and his departure from Washington marked the decline of a great tradition.”[1] Writing in 1955, Arthur Ekirch hedged on Hofstadter’s interpretation. Ekirch argues that Hoover modified traditional laissez-faire ideology in order to develop business associations that would enhance trade and prosperity. Hoover defended this modification of liberalism by stating, “[w]e are passing from a period of extremely individualistic action into a period of associational activities.”[2] Hoover was positing the notion that free competition had to be curtailed in order to increase efficiency in the marketplace.

During his tenure as Commerce Secretary from 1921 thru 1928, Herbert Hoover promoted what he called the “associative state.” What Hoover meant by the associative state is difficult to pin down. Ellis Hawley defined it as a form of planning based on business associations that would cooperate in order to “rationalize” industry. These business cartels would be supervised by government. Hoover, known as the “Great Engineer,” was trying to institute some type of technocracy where the economy would be guided by disinterested experts.[3] Although the exact nature of Hoover’s economic views is still debated by historians, it is clear that Hoover favored government intervention in business activity. That he advocated “non-coercive” government encouragement for industry wide cartels does not change the fact that he was proposing a major shift in the relationship between the federal government, business and the public. The proper understanding of Hoover’s associative state is important for a more accurate interpretation of his response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression. Maury Klein, the dean of American business historians, asserted that Hoover, “determined to become the most active president ever in dealing with a financial or economic crisis. In that goal he succeeded.”[4] That Hoover’s policies to get the country out of the Great Depression failed is obvious. However, the nature of those policies has not always been fully comprehended.

Hoover’s decision to respond to the Crash—and the Depression that followed—with unprecedented federal vigor was presaged by his actions and policies of the previous decade. Hoover’s recommendations for getting the country out of the postwar recession of 1920-1921 are illustrative of his Progressive politics. His proposals included government action to provide public works projects, government spending to “stimulate” the economy, and business agreement to increase investment for inventory and maintenance. The President’s Conference on Unemployment, convened by Hoover in September 1921, called for unprecedented government intervention in order to end the recession. The conferees also packaged public work projects with their goal of preventing a drop in wage rates:

The important steps, in the view of the dominant leaders, were to urge the necessity of government planning to combat depressions and to bolster the idea of public works as a depression remedy. The conference very strongly and repeatedly praised the expansion of public works in a depression and urged coordinated plans by all levels of government…These standard recommendations featured public works and emergency public relief, at the usual hours and wage rates—the wage rates of the boom period were supposed to be maintained.[5] [Emphasis in original]

Clearly, the conference’s proposals were based, at least in part, on Hoover’s associative state ideas. The economy quickly recovered from the postwar recession. Although there was an increase in state and local bond issues during the recession and an increase in federal grants to the states, President Harding was the last president whose response to recession was largely the traditional hands-off approach.

In the rhetoric that he used to sell the associative state to business and the public, Hoover promised that it would be “built on service and efficiency rather than coercion and politics.”[6] Hoover’s efforts to force the steel industry to accede to labor’s demands regarding working hours revealed the statist iron fist within the associative velvet glove. In May 1922, Hoover persuaded President Harding to convene a conference of steel producers. The controversy in the steel industry had been ongoing since 1919 when the union struck U.S. Steel for refusing to engage in collective bargaining. The strike’s failure ignited a press war on the subject. At the May 1922 meeting both Harding and Hoover insisted that the industry adopt the eight hour day. U.S. Steel chairman Elbert Gary and Charles Schwab of Bethlehem Steel refused to make this concession. In the ensuing controversy, both Harding and Hoover put the considerable weight of their offices behind the campaign to force the steel industry’s capitulation to union demands.[7] The extent to which the administration would go in order to get its way provided business with a lesson on the nature of associating with government bureaucrats. Hoover’s attempt to finesse a distinction between his associative state and the corporate state was a failure. The coercive nature of government meant that its “suggestions” or “guidance” would mutate into demands or orders once business refused to go along with the plan. Hoover citing the Federal Radio Commission and the Air Commerce Act of 1926 as examples of business/government cooperation illustrate that in any such association government would take the lead in policy direction.[8]

Perhaps President Hoover’s most destructive policy was his determination to maintain the wage rates of the boom years. In his State of the Union address to Congress on 3 December 1929, Hoover declared,

It was recalled that past storms of similar character had resulted in retrenchment of construction, reduction of wages, and laying off of workers…I have, therefore, instituted systematic, voluntary measures of cooperation with the business institutions and with State and municipal authorities to make certain that fundamental businesses of the country shall continue as usual, that wages and therefore consuming power shall not be reduced, and that a special effort shall be made to expand construction work in order to assist in equalizing other deficits in employment.[9]

This quote should make clear that Hoover’s policy for combating recession had not changed since 1921. In their famous book The Road to Plenty, William Foster and Waddill Catchings argued that consumer demand is the cause of economic prosperity. Anticipating John Maynard Keynes’s demand-side economics, Foster and Catchings theorized that the key problem in mature industrial economies was under-consumption. Rejecting Say’s Law, which states that purchasing power is the result of production and that supply and demand would always find equilibrium in a free market, Foster and Catchings instead held that government must subsidize consumption. Without government financial injections, decreased consumer demand would result in business retrenchment and recession. Alan Brinkley has noted that Hoover adopted Foster and Catchings’ view during the 1920s as a justification for public works projects.[10] Hoover also concluded that high wages were the cause of prosperity and full employment.[11]

Hoover made the maintenance of wage rates central to his economic policy while president. As he stated in his memoirs, “[f]or the first time in the history of depression, dividends, profits, and the cost of living have been reduced before wages have suffered.”[12] The fruits of Hoover’s interventionist policies were that upon leaving office in January 1933 unemployment was 25%. Those who remained employed would enjoy increased purchasing power and the Depression would drag on for another decade.

Just as Hoover was no supporter of laissez-faire and sound economics, his support of rugged individualism was predicated on redefining the term. When it came to the meaning of “individualism,” consistency was not Hoover’s hobgoblin. Hoover held that the absence of class and class consciousness was a key element in American individualism. Therefore, Hoover opposed Wilson’s First Industrial Conference held in 1919 because it would “stimulate class consciousness in a country where there should be no classes.”[13] Of course, only a few years later Hoover would be forcefully arguing for industry wide “associations.”

In a February 1920 speech, Hoover stated, “[t]he whole impulse to the maximum functioning of our productive machine lies in the self-interest of its members. It will never function on the basis of altruism.”[14] This simple truth alone was sufficient to doom Hoover’s associative scheme. While Progressive reformers were hostile to the pursuit of economic self-interest, they were still having great difficulty in detaching it from the conceptual framework of individual rights. Hoover must have sensed this fundamental contradiction, because a few months after his February speech he told the graduating class of Swarthmore that, “[d]uring the war we found successful solution to a great crisis in our national life through the mobilization of a vast sense of national service and willingness to sacrifice.”[15] On some level Hoover must have known that in order for his plan of “cooperation” to work eventually “coercion and politics” would have to be employed. It was at that point that he balked.

Hoover was not a total or consistent interventionist. He became a vocal opponent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration (NRA). Hoover attacked the NRA as “sheer fascism.” He believed that Roosevelt’s program sacrificed liberty for economic security. Hoover felt that the economic cartels created by the NRA would result in an illiberal, centralized state run for the benefit of corporate insiders.[16] The irony is obvious. An NRA like approach was the only way of making the “associative state” actually work. Whether he ever admitted it to himself or not, Hoover’s policies helped pave the way for the New Deal and the modern welfare state.

[1] Quoted in Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism (New York: Longman’s, Green and Company, 1955), 269.
[2] Ibid., 258-9.
[3] Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921-1928,” Journal of American History 61 (June 1974), 116-8.
[4] Maury Klein, Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 242.
[5] Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Auburn, AL. The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000), 192-3. This work was originally published in 1963.
[6] Hawley, 118.
[7] Rothbard, 200-3.
[8] Hawley, 127-8.
[9] Herbert Hoover, State of the Union Address, 3 December 1929. Online: http://stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/texts/19291203.html (1 October 2009).
[10] Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 77.
[11] Rothbard, 204-5.
[12] Quoted in Rothbard, 321.
[13] Gary Dean Best, The Politics of American Individualism: Herbert Hoover in Transition, 1918-1921 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 92.
[14] Ibid., 92.
[15] Ibid. 94.
[16] Ekirch, 282-3.

The nation's top law enforcement official, AG Eric "Nation of Cowards" Holder leans on those guilty of thoughcrime to kill an ad not to the liking of Ozero and his union minions/overseers:

"President Obama isn’t taking kindly to a television ad that criticizes his opposition to a popular scholarship program for poor children, and his administration wants the ad pulled.

"Former D.C. Councilmember Kevin Chavous of D.C. Children First said October 16 that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had recently approached him and told him to kill the ad.

"The 30-second ad, which has been airing on FOX News, CNN, MSNBC, and News Channel 8 to viewers in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, urges the president to reauthorize the federally-funded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that provides vouchers of up to $7,500 for D.C. students to attend private schools.

"The ad features Chavous and a young boy–one of 216 students whose scholarships were rescinded by the Department of Education earlier this year when the agency announced no new students would be allowed into the program. The ad also includes an excerpt taken from one of Obama’s campaign statements.

"“I saw [Holder] at an event,” said Chavous. “He did ask me in front of others to pull the ad. My response was, ‘No, and I tell you what, if the president does the right thing, not only will we pull it but we will celebrate him.’ ”

Back in 1961 Gore Vidal typed a review of Ayn Rand's For the New Intellectual. The review was published in Esquire Magazine, which has made it available online. Vidal's main complaint against Rand (and this guy is chock-full of complaints) is her rejection of Christian ethics and defense of rational self-interest. As he rattles on,

To reject that Christ is to embark on dangerous waters indeed. For to justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil... Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.

Well, well, he has really set me straight on how to practice the golden rule. Certainly, I can take Vidal at his word. He knows what's right and what's wrong. Clearly, we have here a man who considers himself above the herd. A herd in desperate need of Gore Vidal's moral acuity and judgment.

On the matter of Rand's popularity, the 84 year old Vidal must be concerned about the renewed interest in Rand and her works. While his books appeal to a small segment of readers, Rand's decades old novels continue to sell in record numbers.

Still America's moral arbiter presses on. In an interview posted today on The Atlantic's website, Vidal again demonstrates why he is the literary Left's moral compass. Upon being asked to comment on the arrest of Roman Polanski for raping a 13 year old girl, Vidal replied thus:

I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?...The media can’t get anything straight. Plus, there’s usually an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing going on with the press – lots of crazy things. The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko – that’s what people were calling him – well, the story is totally different now from what it was then.

Okay, thanks for the moral clarity Gore. Thanks for sharing your moral sewer where 13 year old girls not wearing communion dresses are "asking for it." Gore continues his unhinged rant by stating that Polanski was targeted for prosecution for not subscribing to American values such as "lying and cheating." It's difficult to know which is sadder, Vidal or the liberal media and intelligentsia's ("American literary and cultural icon") patronizing of such a repulsive creature.

Thomas Sowell's latest column "Dismantling America" provides an all too brief recapitulation on what Ozero means by "change." This is evident by examining Ozero's current agenda, what he has written, those he associates with, his hostility to free speech and a free press, and the creatures he appoints:

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans to a captive audience of children.

Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn’t know what such people were like, when he had associated with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government — people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, and resent America’s influence in the world.

Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question — and the biggest question for this generation.

Wake up America, and get busy fighting the Obamanation. Otherwise, America as a free, prosperous country will cease to exist.

During the Battle of Midway Island (June 4-5, 1942) legendary director John Ford was on the island with a 16mm color movie camera. Here is the result:



The film is nearly twenty minutes long and received an Oscar for best documentary. This was one of six Oscars Ford would acquire during his long career.

While filming the Japanese air-raid on 4 June 1942, a nearby bomb explosion knocked out Ford. When he regained consciousness, he picked up his camera and resumed shooting.

Leo Grin, at Big Hollywood, has the back story.

Guest Commentary by Edward Cline:

Two biographies of Ayn Rand have burst upon the literary scene, both written by non-Objectivists, Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday), and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press). I have not read either book, but will in time. I have read the first chapter of the Burns book on Amazon Books. It is a literate account of Rand’s early life in Russia, and contains details of her life heretofore unknown to me, but that appraisal in no way can be extended to the rest of her biography, not until I have read it. Of the two books, however, going by their reception in the press and the literary establishment, the Heller book is the least significant, because it is less intellectual and more biographical. Moreover, both books provide Rand’s detractors with a limitless salad bar of details of Rand’s life. This is not the fault of the authors, of course, regardless of the merits or demerits of their books.

Burns, an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia, focuses on Rand’s intellectual development from her years in Russia up to her death in 1982. Heller, a magazine writer and editor for Esquire and Redbook, apparently dwells on the “story” of Rand in terms of her social and personal life and political positions. It is the latter book from which “libertarian” reviewers have filled their plates from the salad bar. They have all proclaimed their fealty to Rand’s ideas, but at the same time have tried to diminish those ideas by deeming them as strictly “libertarian” and merely part of an evolutionary process of the development of libertarianism.

The most offensive instance of this kind of treatment of Rand -- praise so qualified that it ceases to be praise at all -- using Heller’s biography as a vehicle to not-so-subtly slander Rand, is Stephen Cox’s review of the book in the October issue of Liberty magazine. His review, “Ayn’s World,” can be taken as the apotheosis of all libertarian reviews, because it is long, commits the same offenses, and is as thorough a job of “debunking“ Rand short of a Whittaker Chambers/William F. Buckley Jr. effort.

The first offense, and there are many offenses in his article, is that he continually refers to Rand as a “libertarian” or a “radical libertarian.” Well, she was not a libertarian. She stated this so many times it would be almost pointless to repeat them here. Nevertheless, here is what she wrote:

For the record, I shall repeat what I have said many times before: I do not join or endorse any political group or movement. More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with, and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called “hippies of the right,” who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs.

Moreover, she added,

Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to “do something.” By “ideological” (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g.,the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies.

Dr. Harry Binswanger seconds Rand’s position:

The “libertarians” . . . plagiarize Ayn Rand’s principle that no man may initiate the use of physical force, and treat it as a mystically revealed, out-of-context absolute . . .

In the philosophical battle for a free society, the one crucial connection to be upheld is that between capitalism and reason. The religious conservatives are seeking to tie capitalism to mysticism; the “libertarians” are tying capitalism to the whim-worshipping subjectivism and chaos of anarchy. To cooperate with either group is to betray capitalism, reason, and one’s own future.

A “mystically revealed” absolute is a deserved opprobrium. To libertarians, that “absolute” is just floating out there in space, ready to be recognized and picked out of the air, and incorporated into an alleged political philosophy. How did it get there? Why is it there? What is its cause? No rational answers are forthcoming, or will be, for libertarians eschew a rational metaphysics. This is no better or defensible a means of validating the concept of political freedom than attributing freedom to God’s wishes or plan, as the religious conservatives do. From a political philosophy standpoint, it is equally appropriate that Rand links in substance libertarians with the religious conservatives. Libertarians -- “radical” or not -- do not subscribe to a philosophy of freedom, but instead to what one could call a cosmology absent an inexplicable “first cause.”

But Cox will have none of that. He states early on in the review, feigning a preemptive, parenthetical tiredness with the distinction Rand made between libertarians and herself (and, implicitly, between herself and himself):

(I know, she repudiated the name “libertarian,” but she did so for reasons that do her no credit for objective self-description. Instead of calling herself a libertarian, she said she was an individualist and a “radical for capitalism” — in short, a libertarian.)

Translation: Well, I don’t feel like making the distinction she made. She argued for freedom, ergo, she was a libertarian. That’s how I’m going to perceive her, mainly because it will allow me to take cheap shots at her and permit me to “humanize“ her. After all, she made a lot of mistakes, was not a nice person, and didn’t consistently live her philosophy. So, there.

It is difficult to decide which is the cheapest shot Cox takes against Rand. Bear in mind that while these shots are woven into his discussion of Heller’s biography, they are easy to detect. For example:

Rand often denied that she wrote propaganda, or even that she intended to teach her audience anything. (I believe the first claim was true; the second, transparently false.) She said that she wrote for her own pleasure, to create the kind of characters she would want to meet, in the kind of world that such characters would inhabit and deal with in their own way. Whatever her motivation, she did create a literary world in which radical libertarian ideas were embodied and found an interesting home — an intense and serious world, a world full of ideas and characters and exciting action, a world in which libertarians, self-proclaimed or only implicit, could feel that they too were at home.

It is an instance of gratuitous graciousness of Cox to concede that Rand did not write propaganda. But then he accuses her of lying, that she did indeed write to teach her audience. Again, Rand often stated that she did not write her novels to “teach” anyone anything, but for her own selfish pleasure of recreating a world in which she would want to live. (See her essay, “The Goal of My Writing” in The Romantic Manifesto.) If she had written from a motive of “service” -- to teach her audience -- her novels would have been markedly different and likely as bad as other novels written for a pedagogical purpose, such as two novels cited by Cox as literary precursors of Atlas Shrugged, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Henry Hazlitt’s Time Will Run Back. (Cox could have cited novels that are better literarily, such as H.G. Wells’s 1933 Things to Come, or Jack London’s 1908 The Iron Heel. As dystopian novels, these would have better served as comparisons to Atlas Shrugged -- if one regards Rand‘s novel as a purely political/economic tract, which would be the libertarian way, and wrong.)

I shall skip over other remarks Cox makes about Rand, as they are of the same insouciant tone. His praise alternates with his back-stabbing. He does get around to discussing Heller’s book, and repeats some of her own estimates of Rand, touching, for example, on how he wished she had taken Albert Jay Nock, that wistful, ineffectual individualist of the 1930’s, more seriously. In fact, Cox repeats the libertarian mantra that Rand was not a true original thinker, but that she inherited and profited from the intellectual labors of her pro-freedom predecessors and contemporaries, but refused, in some narcissistic hubris, to acknowledge it. Cox missed a chance to quote Nock, who ends his essay, “Isaiah’s Job,“ with:

If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewusstsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.

No, as is evident in Journals of Ayn Rand and Letters of Ayn Rand, and in her other writings, she never forgot how she came by any idea, nor why she agreed with or dismissed another’s idea. Cox asserts in his review that Rand acknowledged only Aristotle as the sole influence in her intellectual development. Wrong. She acknowledged John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, and other pro-reason thinkers from the past. She admired such contemporaries as H.L. Mencken. She was not interested, however, in addressing and consoling a “Remnant,” an idea she would have considered futile, self-defeating, and essentially malevolent because it surrendered one’s life and the world to the mindless.

After making some smarmy remarks on how long it took Rand to write and complete The Fountainhead, Cox takes makes this verbose crack about how and why she completed Atlas Shrugged:

After “The Fountainhead,” she started planning the novel that would be known as “Atlas Shrugged.” She supposed that she would finish it posthaste. It took her 14 years. For what reason? She put out the rumor that she spent the last few of those years getting the right tone for the endless speech about philosophy that she intrudes on the final movement of the book. The true reason, as it seems to me, is that she had come to regard “Atlas” as a philosophical Bible and was anxious to ensure that everything in the Speech would represent her ultimate, unassailable statement of reality. The result was a 60-page literary disaster — a ridiculously long prose essay, its tone arrogant, inappropriate, and repellent to the last degree, in which she repeated everything she had already made obvious in the rest of the novel. Years working on the “tone”? I don’t think so. Rand’s attitude toward this manifest literary failure is a mystery of the creative process. How could she have thought she was doing the right thing?

So, not only does Cox imply again that Rand was a liar, but states that Galt’s speech in the novel was a “literary disaster.” That also was the consensus of most mainstream book reviewers of Atlas when it appeared. What Cox fails to appreciate is that Rand was a rule-breaker in literature, and that there was no rule anyway that proscribed speeches of any length, and that without that speech, there would have been no “libertarian” movement for him to abscond to after cherry-picking the philosophy explicated in that speech.

Cox continues later on in his review about Rand’s alleged intellectual ingratitude:

There have been important writers — Hemingway is a good example — who were not
intellectuals, and who read fairly little. Rand is the only example I can identify of an important writer, and a brilliant intellectual to boot, who in her mature period retained practically no curiosity about current or classic works of literature, philosophy, or history. She had studied some kind of history at Leningrad University, but where are the accounts of her enjoying any work on the subject, outside of Paterson’s “The God of the Machine” (1943)? After that book, and some works by Ludwig von Mises, the great economic theorist, she appears to have ceased learning much from either theory or history. It was as if she were making good on her claim not to have been influenced by other people. It was as if individualism meant making everything up on one’s own.

Enough said. There is much, much more that is offensive in Cox’s review, which, as I wrote earlier, served as a vehicle through which to launch his not-so-subtly buried digs at Ayn Rand. One wonders what he would have written if, by some chance, a scholar had uncovered the complete life of Aristotle and published it as Heller has published it: when and where he was born, the professions of his parents, his foibles, loves, hates and hobbies, his relationships with Alexander the Great, his friends, students and enemies, and how he went off the deep end of rationality after publishing the Nichomachean Ethics and became a cave-dwelling recluse -- and devoting minimal attention to what Aristotle bequeathed to the world.

Someday, if Western civilization survives the double onslaught of statism and Islam, another book will appear with the same title, only it will describe the phoenix of reason and the world Ayn Rand helped to make possible. Libertarianism, as an ideology, will merit perhaps only a footnote.