On July 16, 1945, a plutonium implosion atomic bomb was detonated in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Within a month, a uranium-based and a plutonium-based atomic bomb were detonated above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. Atomic fission, and later fusion, became the basis for the most deadly arsenal ever assembled, giving the US government the power to eradicate the human population, making it history’s most powerful institution. The Soviet Union’s development of its own nuclear arsenal in the 1950s challenged US power. Per Lord Acton’s famous dictum, absolute power produced absolute corruption on both sides of the Cold War.
Their leaders saw the world in terms of an amoral chess match. Other nations’ governments were pawns in their strategies for global domination and individual lives were of no consequence. Intelligence agencies rose to preeminence, employing sabotage, deception, propaganda, political manipulation, revolution, regime change, and assassination in foreign countries, supposedly excused by the imperatives of fighting the other side’s nefarious designs. Although there was a fair amount of playing one side against the other, brutally repressive autocrats willing to ostensibly align with either side received diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and military support from their benefactors.
Vietnam fully displayed the immoral depths the US government had plumbed. It engaged in regime change, assassination, deception of the American people, drug running, secret bombing of countries with which the US was not at war, false flag terrorism, torture, and war crimes—including rape and murder—against civilians. None of this was unique to Vietnam, either before or after. Estimates of the total dead range from 1.3 to 3.8 million. After spending trillions (in today’s dollars) and with 58,000 military deaths and 153,000 wounded, US forces left Vietnam having accomplished none of their objectives (its remaining partisans still refuse to use the word “defeat”). South Vietnam was eventually conquered by North Vietnam.
Vietnam has been the template for every major US military engagement since. The Soviet pawn-master resigned the match in 1991, but by that time perpetuation of US empire and maintenance of the military-industrial-intelligence complex was of far greater concern than the supposed Soviet threat. Islamic extremism was adroitly substituted for the Red Peril. The 9/11 attack served as the rallying cry against this new, supposedly mortal threat, justification for invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and impetus for the wholesale expansion of government surveillance and concomitant diminution of individual liberties. The foray into the Middle East and its ever escalating blowback may already be a bigger disaster for the US than Vietnam, and if is not yet, it will be. It has certainly been a catastrophe for the Middle East and Europe, which will soon be overwhelmed by the refugee flood.
Aside from Vietnam protests, propelled in part by fear of the draft (the protests stopped when Nixon abolished it), most Americans have docilely accepted the post WWII expansion of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and its string of disasters. The mainstream media has been co-opted by the government. Coercively extracted, redistributed largess and myriad distractions keep the populace pacified. Taxation, regulation, debt, and the government’s destructive and corrupt involvement have strangled the once magnificent US economy, stifling honest innovation and production, skewing incentives towards government-favored economic activities, and rewarding cronies. Bankruptcy looms as government policy makers maintain that patently absurd nostrums—government debt, central bank monetization, negative interest rates—will revive the patient they’ve rendered comatose.
It is time to discard the fiction that those who have brought the US to this pass have had honorable motivations. There is an understandable reluctance to state that they want what they have wrought: deterioration, destruction, ruin, and death. Many people are motivated by a desire to improve their and their families’ situations; find meaningful work; make friends and support a community; engage in enjoyable activities, in short, to live constructive lives as they see fit. They are reluctant to ascribe purely malicious and malignant motivations to any other human being, and they excuse failure, even repeated failure by people they detest, as stemming from the wrong political orientation, or as the unintended consequences of good, but unrealistic intentions.
This plays into the hands of the depraved. To say to them: “I’m sure you have the best of intentions,” is to lose the argument before it begins. It acknowledges the beneficence and nobility in which they rhetorically cloak themselves, when their motives are anything but beneficent or noble. Those who would oppose them are left to wonder why their irrefutable arguments and prescient predictions of failure have the same effect as pebbles bounced against castle walls. However, even when it occurs to them that perhaps the disastrous results were exactly what was intended, social opprobrium and the power of the “benefactors” generally prevents them from voicing their suspicions. Obamacare is clearly designed to fail and pave the way for a single payer system, but only a handful of its critics, and none of its proponents, will come right out and say so.
To state the truth: “They have the worst of intentions,” casts the “they” as irretrievably evil, opposed to every value of human existence. It means that “they” want the decay, destruction, and death they promulgate, that “they” want to see you and everybody else who is not “they” dead. It is because she clearly and unequivocally stated this truth that Ayn Rand has been savagely denounced since Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957. She took it one step further, however. One of the most important scenes in the novel was towards the end, when the heroes rescue John Galt from the destroyers.
He [James Taggart] was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake of whatever was not. It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself that he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts. A moment ago, he had been able to feel that he hated Galt above all men, that the hatred was proof of Galt’s evil, which he need define no further, that he wanted Galt to be destroyed for the sake of his own survival. Now he knew that he had wanted Galt’s destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt’s greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy—he was seeing it as greatness by his own admission, greatness by the only standard that existed, whether anyone chose to admit it or not: the greatness of a man who was master of reality in a manner no other had equaled. In the moment when he, James Taggart, had found himself facing the ultimatum: to accept reality or die, it was death his emotions had chosen, death, rather than surrender to that realm of which Galt was so radiant a son. In the person of Galt—he knew—he had sought the destruction of all existence.
Here is what “they” want—”the destruction of all existence.” They want life or death control over you and not because they want you to live. They want to kill you because they want to kill themselves. That is the black hole that has sucked in what was once their souls, if they ever had souls.
The obliviousness that most Americans embrace is a death wish: ignore the reality of evil and it will go away. Reality doesn’t go away; it destroys the oblivious. Humanity is hanging by a slender threat and its only hope is recognizing the evil of those who would destroy it. The battle is joined when we choose to fight them. The choice is this: Life, or Death? The refusal to choose is a choice.
CHOOSE LIFE. CHOOSE THE GOLDEN PINNACLE.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
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Thanks for this blog post regarding this book by Robert Gore; I really enjoyed it and am definitely recommending this blog to my friends and family. I’m a 15 year old with a blog on finance and economics at shreysfinanceblog.com, and would really appreciate it if you could follow, read and comment on some of my articles, and perhaps follow, reblog and share some of my posts on social media. Thanks again for this fantastic post.
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Cultural marxism is the human extinction movement.
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I am sometimes asked by a young person, usually by one who I have acquainted with the works of Rand, what are my thoughts of her? Your article Robert has reminded me of how I sometimes respond.
I compare Rand to Newton. I do so because I judge them both as geniuses. Though Newton’s citation is indisputable, Rand’s remains contentious – except of course in the minds of people such as myself.
Newton desired to be a scientist, one focused on the enormity of the universe. He brought to his desire a set of visions, curious and exciting fantasies of his imagination concerning gravity and motion. He pursued this curiosity with insatiable passion and intelligence. An intelligence of such focused greatness, that as it was called upon by his steadfast belief in his visions, it facilitated his devising of the Calculus in order to demonstrate and prove said visions were true!
Thanks to Newton, the mind of Man is now able to peer into the universe as was previously impossible.
Rand desired to be a writer, one focused on the heroic nature of Man. She brought to this desire a set of visions, curious and exciting fantasies of her imagination concerning philosophy and happiness. She pursued this curiosity with insatiable passion and intelligence. An intelligence of such focused greatness, that as it was called upon by her steadfast love of the human potential, it facilitated her devising of an entire philosophic system of thought in order to demonstrate her ideals were true!
Thanks to Rand, the mind of Man is now able to articulate the universe and Man’s relationship to it, as was previously impossible.
Yes Robert, she argued that the logic of those whose values embrace those of Taggart’s, is actually consistent with a hatred of life, and therefore, in concert with death. However, the idea of such a thing – let alone the knowledge of it, “escapes” all but those who pursue that knowledge – steadfastly, remorselessly, without evasion, distortion, or psychological blinking (“blank-out” as she termed it).
Galt, like Taggart, represents a fictional literary figure – perhaps in Galt’s case an almost mythical one. While many of us have encountered and, at times, clearly emulated a Rearden, Dagney, Francisco, or any number of the other characters in Rand’s fiction, realization of the presence of a Galt has singularly escaped me. Someone who always KNOWS what they are doing with almost omniscient insight remains, as I have termed it, mythical.
Conversely, the evil that Rand demonstrated in the passage of AS that you included in your article, while I have never consciously encountered it to the degree she portrays, I have certainly met those whose combinations of evasion, distortion, or psychological “blanking-out,” would lead me to believe they were entirely capable of such evil. In that regard, I try to always remain ever-mindful of Roark in his dealing(s) with Toohey. “But I don’t think of you” [Ellworth].
These people exist. Invariably, owing to the current philosophical state of the world, they must be dealt with, whether beneficially or inescapably.
I will close this response with a repeat of one I have previously posted on the “Galt’s Gulch” forum. I am unaware and remain puzzled that it has apparently had little impact thought worthy of response however.
I have two recommendations for Objectivists. These recommendations assume that we each must exist in the world we inhabit. A world that does not, as yet, contain an invisible and “secluded” domain, protected by an otherwise invisible shield, allowing for the values of human life to remain unencumbered by those of death.
Rule #1: Lead with your life and not with your mouth. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an example is worth ten-thousand. When you choose to ignore #1, skip to #2.
Rule #2: KNOW your audience! We live in a society that, in significant measure, is dominated by Judeo-Christian philosophy. Therefore there is a tendency for many of us to become pessimistic and caustic. While I do at times lapse into pessimism, I try, though not always successfully, to never become caustic.
Keep in mind, a virtue of pessimism is that most of your surprises tend to be favorable. Always remain benevolently open to such surprises. Depending on YOUR virtue(s), favorable surprises come more often than you might imagine – as long as, through the exercise of rational virtue(s), you EARN THEM!
Dave
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Dave, you said a lot of good things. Indeed, it all begins with each of us. We must all find away to stick together, because the only way we are going to make it through what these evil people and their evil they foment, is together.
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Newton was also a believer in alchemy. Many great men also were dipped in beliefs that clouded their achievements.
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Newton’s achievements in Math and Physics, in both of which he is #1 in Charles Murray’s Human Achievement, are not “clouded” by anything, including his interests in alchemy, gravity waves, and Bible codes. It’s amazing how people love to nip at the shoelaces of the great thinkers.
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I believe the death wish you see in so many Americans today, is simply the result of being bone weary of getting up, going to work and busting their ass for 40+ hours a week, only to pay their bills and be broke again 3 hours after they get paid… so they can go to work and bust their ass again. It is the rat on a treadmill life that exhausts them – and that, too, is part of the plan of TPTB. Then, with the distractions offered the exhausted by .gov and the media, and their ‘cronies’; they watch mindless t.v., play video games, and do their best to check out of a reality that is simply too ‘overwhelming’ to deal with – it is simply too much for the rational and hard working to deal with. So they don’t.
The hard reality is this: we will have to deal with it, like it or not.
And much as has been stated by Bracken, et al; when (not if…) these overworked and underappreciated (and under compensated) folks finally get fed up, pushed and shoved into a corner… they will snap. And when they snap, it will be writ large – as in SNAP. As in… those who have betrayed them, those that have abused them… those ‘targets of their wrath’… will find what little time they have left in life to be very tragic, painful – and educational. At that point, “we had no idea…” or other such mouthed platitudes; will be sung as they hang by the neck until dead. Thus always to tyrants.
Years ago, I read something attributed to Chuck Norris… it was something like “the folks in D.C. would be well served by looking at a map, we’ve got them surrounded.” To that might also be added those on the coasts, who refer to the middle of the country as “flyover country”. It will be loud, it will be viscious… and as has been said, it won’t be mistaken for a 4th of July parade…
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Viva la Revolution!
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Great column, Robert! I long ago came to agree with Bruce Charlton that something demonic is going on in the Western elites, and I think your description of a death wish is an excellent way of looking at it….because how can these billionaires and depraved “leaders” hope to survive collapse?
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Robert–your best, IMHO!
The contents of this should be distilled down and taught in the simplest terms to every young boy and girl placed upon their father’s knee. It is a crucial part of growing up and maturing to know evil truly exists and it wants to extinguish you. Forever.
To omit this life lesson imperils the nuclear family’s entire existence, since to not acknowledge evil and its culture of death, allows it singular free play on life’s playing field.
We shall prevail; we shall conquer evil.
FOR LIFE!
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Thank you.
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Reblogged this on Starvin Larry.
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This is part of what Christianity teaches: the devil aims to kill all of us, and destroy all of creation. The evil people you are writing about are evil because they are demonic.
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Ummm, this is spoken of in the Bible. Your leaders are under control of the evil one who desire that mankind to be killed off since they will replace him.
Yes, so they all want you DEAD or a boot on your neck. Most people do not realize this by the smiling lips but not the DEAD eyes your politicians always look at you with.
Soldiers must refuse orders if it is to kill fellow humans, but they desire it as much as their leaders since the whole world falls under the sway of the WICKED ONE. Who, if you remember, want all humans dead!
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Such a profound and honest profession of her, and those who worship Death, when she blurted out, “what difference does it make!”.
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John Derbyshire quotes a very important passage about how the USA was governed before the 1960’s (as a nation-state, encouraging national cohesion) and how that changed during the ’60’s/’70’s (as an empire, encouraging factionalism and infighting in a classic divide-and-rule despotism.) http://tinyurl.com/gnrjv9o is the quote, Derbyshire’s entire “presentation” is here: http://www.vdare.com/articles/derbs-canceled-williams-college-hate-address-national-question-race-ethnicity-and-identity-in-the-21st-century?content=into%20the%20hut
The USA clearly went from a loose union (1787-1861) to a centralized union (1865-1898) to a partial empire (1898-1964) to a full empire 1964 to the present. Full empire required completion of the centralization of power that was kicked off in 1913 (Federal Reserve Act, Income Tax and the direct election of senators) and between 1964 and 1971 the monetary system was entirely cut adrift from consistent relationship with silver or gold, respectively.
Today the USA is an Empire of Debt (h/t to Bill Bonner) and its central organizing principles are utterly theocratic, i.e., the dogmas of Gaia-worship (via Anthropogenic Climate Change), cultural Marxism, misandrist feminism and anti-racism are so potent that any contrary thought is treated as utter blasphemy, and any persons who indulge in such “evil” are to be hounded out of their jobs, driven from polite society and in some cases their extermination has been called for.
This goes a long way to explaining why so many comparisons to the Roman Empire as it rolled over toward dissolution now exist. Ours is a most amazing condition, the appearance of vitality and strength (albeit suffering a mild flu or cold, cough-cough) standing astride unimaginable destructive power (nuclear weapons) but in fact rotten to the core and riven with what amount to auto-immune disease (the various wars on whites, males, crimethink, and the all but continuous Two Minutes Hate spasms about AGW, rape culture, xenophobia and racism.)
It is truly terrifying.
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regulations for Wall Street = tyranny.
we should just let them do what they want and stay OUT OF THEIR WAY.
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