Atlas Shrugged, 1943

Young Francisco D’Anconias

Surely you’re thinking “The Fountainhead,” I hear you wonder… but neither book was written in a day. The Fountainhead was indeed part of the war effort against National Socialist collectivism–including its religious component. Safely ensconced within These States, Ayn Rand, age 38, read in the newspapers about how in the Europe she’d fled, Germans and Russians fought, starved, bled and died–whether enslaved to sacrifice for Communism or enslaved to save German NSDAP Christianity from “stock market jewry.” (Does this sound familiar? Occupy Wall Street?)

As usual, These States got sucked into the vortex of that foreign war after the attack on Hawaii. Newspapers and radio were the internet of the 1930s and 1940s. In their pages young Ayn Rand read about Sweden’s fantastic new Harden metal alloy, shadowy Match Kings and Beer Barons. She read about young men whose ambition led them to hire on with railroad maintenance crews in 1943 before maturing into Copper Barons able to rattle stock markets into a panic with a gesture.  This latter news item was framed in exhortations to buy war bonds, with air raid signals and instructions on the facing page. She also read of the Allied Military Government putting some Nazis back in power while hanging others for genocide as she was writing Atlas Shrugged.

The same thing is happening today. Christian National Socialism, motivated by altruism, now targets a different semitic people and religion–all the while angling to monopolize and control drug markets through the only mechanism it understands… war, coercion, murder.  Totalitarian communist territory has dwindled to Cuba, China, North Korea, Venezuela and a tiny scattering of pestilent dictatorships likewise limited to war, coercion, murder as ways of getting things done in the name of altruism. The ku-klux fascists‘ competition? Lay or Gaian socialists claiming to be democrats, likewise motivated by altruism–and guided by pseudoscience to rule by violence.

Christians and Gaians alike are terrified of imaginary hobgoblins. LSD-possessed Manson clan communists plot with Saracen terrorists to lead Christian youth away from Jesus and confiscate their money and guns, worry the former–with some justification as to the money. The Gaians’ nightmares are animated by Ku-klux mercantilist plutocrats advised by mad scientists and Hell-bent on turning the planet into a rotisserie,–with urine testing with licensing regulations so that only their toadies have jobs. Again, their fears as to urine-test blacklisting are not at all unfounded.

This is the Cold War all over again, with different actors–but always and on both sides the same altruism and reliance on faith as opposed to reliable evidence. The one constant is the belief that altruism is a good enough reason to have someone else pick up deadly weapons and coerce some third party. But… by what standard is altruism or the initiation of force good?

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