Here are just a few words used to describe Ayn Rand in a BBC2 Newsnight piece on Atlas Shrugged: a mad woman,fanatic,strange,mean,her novel contains 'Aryan youths with sharp cheek bones', an obssessive,vile,'dehuman',lacking in humanity.Her novel is cult-like suitable only for 14 year old children,her characters lack humanity,are without doubt.And so on. What does this tell us? Some of these comments were from Andrew Roberts who was supposed to be sympathetic. He explained that he was taken by Atlas but that was 20 years ago,presumably when he was 'idealistic' -something he now sees as an insult.
I think what all this shows is that people cannot deal with Rand and her message so their way of coping with her uncompromising reality and unbreached rationality is to resort to ad hominem and gross misrepresentation.How could anybody wade through one thousand pages of Atlas and come away thinking that Rand was a Fascist? Rosy Boycot for one,who made the Aryan slur.And here is the interesting thing.The word fascist is almost always used by people for whom it most aptly applies: liberals who beleive in big government and the all powerful State.What we have here is a classic case of projection.
To a liberal a book with the message that people should treat one another as free agents,basing their relationship on voluntary trade rather than State enforced coercion would be seen as 'vile'.In their inverted moral universe human sacrifice is the order of the day, 'need' is the highest value and independence and individuality is an evil that the State should work night and day to eradicate.In such a twisted universe that the liberal inhabits and wants to foist on the rest of us,any book which draws a picture of another world where people treat one another as non serfs and free men would represent a threat to everything they stand for.Every impulse to destroy values and human endeavour is threatened by such a book.It must be destroyed,its author ridiculed,slandered,calumnised,misrepresented and character assasinated.That is what the Newsnight prog set out to do,a demolition job on the truth and it was done with surgical albeit demonic precision.
1 comment:
If Rand were alive today, she would not even bother debating with these people ... they are simply not on the same level with her ... look at them, listen to them ... would YOU trust them, trust what they say, at all? They're even boring, there's nothing interesting at all in what they say. THEY are the ones commenting like 14 year olds ... they are an intellectual snooze. At least Phil Donahue led an interesting discussion with her, even though he was not quite on her level either. This group of liberal intelligensia's main problem, it seems, was attacking her person and they could not grasp some of the finer points of what she was trying to say because they do not understand this most valuable trait in a human being -- independence, a strong mind, not one of the sheeple. So they have to call her "mad" and "unusual" ... She comes across as "cold" but actually her way of thinking is very kind ... and liberating.
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