Key ideas: Published in 1975. "I learned a great deal in the years since. I learned that the concept of individual rights is far, far from self-evident, that most of the world does not grasp it, that the United States grasped it only for a brief historical moment and is now in the process of losing the memory. I learned that the civilized world is being destroyed by its dominant schools of philosophy—by irrationalism, altruism, collectivism—and, specifically, that altruism is the tear gas that defeats resistance, by reducing men to crying and vomiting." (Ayn Rand)
The televised scenes of South Vietnam’s sudden collapse at Da Nang seemed oddly familliar to me; they had a faded, distant quality of déjà vu. The scenes of people in hopeless flight, the panic, the despair, the frantic struggle for a foothold on the last plane or ship leaving a doomed land, with everything left behind and nothing ahead—people running into a void outside history, as if squeezed off the face of the earth—I had seen it all before. It took me a moment and a shock of sadness to realize where I had seen it: this was the Russian population fleeing before the advance of the Red Army in the civil war of 1918-21.
The newscaster’s voice said that fleeing South Vietnamese soldiers had seized control of an American rescue ship and had proceeded to rob, rape, and murder refugees, their own countrymen. I felt indignation, disgust, disappointment—and, again, a faint touch of familiarity. The shock was more painful, this time, when I realized that this was an example of the ignominious amorality of the so-called political right.
Let me hasten to say that individual brutes exist.in any army and cannot be taken as representative of an entire people; that the atrocities committed by those particular South Vietnamese would not even be reported if and when committed by the North Vietnamese, since such atrocities represent the official, ideological policy of North Vietnam; that South Vietnam does not represent the political right or the political anything. Granting all this, it is still true that if a group of soldiers attack their own countrymen in the midst of a national disaster, it means that attackers and victims have no values in common, not even the solidarity of primitive tribalism, that they have nothing to uphold or defend militarily, that they do not know what they are fighting for. And, in today’s world, there is no one to tell them.
I was in my early teens during the Russian civil war. I lived in a small town that changed hands many times. (See We the Living; that part of the story is autobiographical.) When it was occupied by the White Army, I almost longed for the return of the Red Army, and vice versa. There was not much difference between them in practice, but there was in theory.
The Red Army stood for totalitarian dictatorship and rule by terror.
The White Army stood for nothing; repeat: nothing. In answer to the monstrous evil they were fighting, the Whites found nothing better to proclaim than the dustiest, smelliest bromides of the time: we must fight, they said, for Holy Mother Russia, for faith and tradition.
I wondered, even in those years, which is morally worse: evil—or the appeasement of evil, the cowardly evasion that leaves an evil unnamed, unanswered and unchallenged. I was inclined to think that the second is worse, because it makes the first possible. I am certain of it today. But in the years of my adolescence, I did not know how rare a virtue intellectual integrity (i.e., the non-evasion of reality) actually is.
So I kept waiting for some person or group among the Whites to come out with a real political manifesto that would explain and proclaim why one must fight against communism and what one might fight for. I knew even then that the “what” was freedom, individual freedom, and (a concept alien to Russia) individual rights.
I knew that man is not a slave of the state; I knew that man’s right to his own life (and, therefore, to freedom) has to be upheld with as great and proud a sense of moral righteousness as any idea could ever deserve; I knew that nothing less would do—and that without such a stand the anti-Reds were doomed. But I thought that this was self-evident, that the whole civilized world knew it, and that there surely existed some minds able to communicate this knowledge to Russia, which was perishing for lack of it. I waited through the years of the civil war. Nothing resembling that manifesto was ever uttered by anyone.
In a passive, indifferent way, the majority of the Russian people were behind the White Army: they were not for the Whites, but merely against the Reds; they feared the Reds’ atrocities. I knew that the Reds’ deepest atrocity was intellectual, that the thing which had to be fought—and defeated—was their ideas. But no one answered them. The country’s passivity turned to hopeless lethargy as people gave up. The Reds had an incentive, the promise of nationwide looting; they had the leadership and the semi-discipline of a criminal gang; they had an allegedly intellectual program and an allegedly moral justification. The Whites had icons. The Reds won.
I learned a great deal in the years since. I learned that the concept of individual rights is far, far from self-evident, that most of the world does not grasp it, that the United States grasped it only for a brief historical moment and is now in the process of losing the memory. I learned that the civilized world is being destroyed by its dominant schools of philosophy—by irrationalism, altruism, collectivism—and, specifically, that altruism is the tear gas that defeats resistance, by reducing men to crying and vomiting.
The hardest thing to learn (the most difficult one to believe) was the fact that the so-called political rightists in this country—the alleged defenders of freedom (i.e., of capitalism)—were as vague, as empty, and as futile as the leaders of the White Army (more shamefully so, since they had a much, much greater knowledge to evade). For years the intellectual posture of America’s political leaders has been a long, pleading, appeasing, self-abasing whine of apology for this country’s greatness—an apology addressed to every advocate or perpetrator of collectivism’s horrors and failures anywhere on earth.
But even American politicians had some sort of stature when compared to their intellectual mentors, those (to me, still incredible) bipeds who— unable to find a moral justification for man’s life and happiness— attempted to defend freedom on the grounds of altruism (of the “public good”), or on the grounds of faith in the supernatural, or on the grounds of brushing the issue aside and proclaiming that morality is irrelevant to economics (i.e., to man’s life and livelihood).
(At a certain point in recent years, I realized with astonishment that the kind of voice and manifesto I had been waiting for was my own. No, this is not a boast; it is an admission of a sort I don’t like to make: a complaint. [I don’t like self-pity.] I did not want, intend, or expect to be the only philosophical defender of man’s rights, in the country of man’s rights. But if I am, I am. And, dear reader, if I am giving you the kind of intellectual ammunition [and inspiration] I had so desperately waited to hear in my youth, I’m glad. I can say that I know how you feel.) …
In compliance with modern politics, the war was allegedly intended to save South Vietnam from communism, but the proclaimed purpose of the war was not to protect freedom or individual rights, it was not to establish capitalism or any particular social system—it was to uphold the South Vietnamese right to “national self-determination,” i.e., the right to vote themselves into any sort of system (including communism, as American propagandists kept proclaiming).
The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system—and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters’ power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
Outside the context of a free society, who would want to die for the right to vote? Yet that is what the American soldiers were asked to die for—not even for their own vote, but to secure that privilege for the South Vietnamese, who had no other rights and no knowledge of rights or freedom.
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