Foot-in-mouth disease — Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan
August 6, 2014EditorLeave a commentGo to comments
from Lars Syll
Now, I don’t care to discuss the alleged complaints American Indians have against this country. I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man. They had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country …
Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights—they didn’t have a settled society, they had predominantly nomadic tribal “cultures”—they didn’t have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using …
What were they fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence; for their “right” to keep part of the earth untouched—to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen. Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it’s great that some of them did. The racist Indians today—those who condemn America—do not respect individual rights.
Ayn Rand, Address To The Graduating Class Of The United States Military Academy at West Point, 1974
It’s sickening to read this gobsmacking trash. But it’s perhaps even more sickening that people like Alan Greenspan consider Rand some kind of intellectual hero.
Re Greenspan, yours truly can’t but agree with Paul Krugman — he isn’t just a bad economist, he’s a bad person. What else can one think of a person that considers Ayn Rand — with the ugliest psychopathic philosophy the postwar world has produced — one of the great thinkers of the 20th century? A person that even co-edited a book with her — maintaining that unregulated capitalism is a “superlatively moral system”. A person that in his memoirs tries to reduce his admiration for Rand to a youthful indiscretion — but who actually still today can’t be described as anything else than a loyal Randian disciple.
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- Dave Raithel
August 6, 2014 at 12:00 pm
If you’ve never seen the use of images of American aborigines in the pro-gun loving propaganda dispensed by the heirs of Rand – The Teabaggers, who actually run states like Missouri – you’ve missed one of the more sublime ironies of incoherent political philosophy. If dem redskins and (and subsequently, dem nigger slaves) had only had their 2nd Amendment Rights (which merely makes explicit a Natural Right to weapons), ‘Merica would be a free country, unoccupied by Nigerian Muslim Commies. I shit thee not.
As a Blackfoot Indian, the historical revisionism and racism of the likes of Ayn Rand, who, like many libertarians manifested the classic traits of a psychopath (grandiosity; malignant narcissism; ultra-individualism; shallow affect; predation; calculated serial deceit; megalomania; use of people as objects and tools; devoid of compassion); etc.
What I have the hardest time with, and this is true for many Indians, is all these “progressives”, “heterodoxers”, “Marxian scholars” etc who, as my mother a Blackfoot used to put it: “wax so eloquently, so publicly, so piously, so profusely about humanity in the abstract, about struggles and violations of rights in far away places whose names they cannot pronounce or spell, whose locations they cannot find on a blank map of the world, but have nothing to say about genocide going on right here, right now, in America, Canada and other places with indigenous peoples, right where they live. My mother called them “The people who love humanity in the safe abstract but hate or are hateful to real people in the particular and concrete.”
Amherst College? Why not Hitler U? Stephen Amherst was a vile white supremacist and genocidal maniac even for his times. He was the first known exponent of biological and chemical warfare and use of smallpox-infected blankets to kill Indians en mass. It would be nice for example, for those Marxian scholars at the “Little Red Schoolhouse” to make some mention of that fact or those at Yale saying something about Skull and Bones holding the remains of Geronimo and others in the “Tomb”. How many know the real origins of the word “Redskin”? Here is some hard evidence not rants:
https://sttpml.org/redskins-the-origin-of-the-word-and-genocide-behind-it/
https://sttpml.org/the-horrifying-american-roots-of-nazi-eugenics/
https://sttpml.org/marxism-and-indigenous-struggles-speech-to-sacramento-marxist-school-nov-21-2002/