Sunk With The Tea

(No, I'm still posting the "three Democides" series - but I am not allocating a great deal of my time to blogging this year, and I decided to give temporary precedence to a current, real-time topic.)

The decision of some Objectivists to support, and to participate in, the "Tea Party Movement" has come to exactly the end that Ayn Rand predicted for such efforts. As Robert LeChevalier writes in the OActivists mailing list,

Evidence is growing that many Tea Parties around the country are being subverted by those who neither share our values or the values on which this country is founded, and that they are paying lip service to them while manipulating the Tea Parties to dilute their effect (Democratic hacks, Libertarian dupes, Republican opportunists, or even very likely the police, by the way), or simply using them as a cash cow for any end you can imagine.

Or, as one organizer of a "Tea Party" wrote to another OActivist,

I'm sure you're aware the focus of the Tea Parties is limited government, fiscal responsibility and free markets. Individual rights certainly doesn't contradict any of those key points but I don't feel it fits ....

One of those slogans (none is specific or well-defined enough to call it a goal) is "fiscal responsibility." "Fiscal responsibility" is also the main slogan of ongoing proposals and campaigns, in several US states (and also at the federal level) to raise taxes (yes, I know that "fiscal responsibility" may also mean "cut spending," but Christian Republicans are not about to give up on the Christian principle that "we all have a responsibility to help the less fortunate.") And the claim that a campaign to raise taxes "does not contradict individual rights" could only be made by someone who has no idea of what rights are.

Those who advocate collaboration with the "Tea Party" movement sometimes cite Ayn Rand's one narrow exception to her caution against "unprincipled alliances:" "The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree." But in its original context (The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 7 January 3, 1972, "What Can One Do?") what Ayn Rand wrote was:

Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to "do something." ... It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies... The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree.

Far from having "a single goal," the organizers of "Tea Parties" seldom list fewer than three or four. And even fewer of these are either specific or well-defined (the ambiguity of appeals to "fiscal responsibility" is just the last case-in-point.) The "Tea Party" movement is - in all respects - the paradigmatic embodiment of "we've got to do something." This means, you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. If only Ayn Rand were alive today to say, "I told you so."

Three Democides by False Morality - Part I, Holodomor

The function of objective morality is to enlarge the quality and the span of human life. The result of false morality, and of its enforcement by law, is death. Prior to the last century, this death was meted out primarily to individuals who were believed, whether falsely or accurately, to have broken the many laws that enforced the false moralities of their age. The last century, beginning in the 1930s, added democide - mass death of millions, many of them visibly innocent of any individual breach of the proclaimed moral law - to false moralities' toll.

The author of the first democide by enforcement of a false morality was Joseph Stalin. Marx, Engels, and most of their Russian followers were consistent materialists, and had no use for the concept or the language of "morality." Stalin, who became the de facto dictator of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, largely on the strength of his genuine proletarian origins was not, as far as anyone knows, either a systematic materialist or an Atheist. Stalin had been educated for priesthood in the Orthodox Christian Church, and there is controversy about whether or not he was duly ordained as an Orthodox priest. Two successive Patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church vouched for Stalin as an Orthodox Christian believer in good standing with the Church - and while their endorsement may have been made under duress, Stalin's understanding that he needed this endorsement was a radical turn away from the explicitly materialist stance of his predecessors. Stalin frequently appealed to "God's Will," both in his official speeches and in his everyday conversation. More than any other dictator in history, Stalin engineered popular assent to his power by appeal to (a false) "morality." It helped that Stalin's "Socialist Morality" was largely identical to the traditional Altruist "morality" of Orthodox Christianity.

Stalin was the first tyrant to use, possibly without any overt understanding, the fact that it was possible to eliminate humans by the million with relatively little direct use of gallows, gas chambers, or firing squads. It was enough to make it impossible for men to use their minds to support and extend their lives. The human is the animal that lives by its mind, and dies when denied its use.

By 1930 Stalin had achieved nearly complete totalitarian control of every aspect of life in the Soviet Union, including its economy. The only significant exception was agriculture. For a thousand years, what was now the Western quarter of the Soviet Union, and especially Ukraine, was the "Breadbasket of Europe," growing much of the Old Continent's harvest of wheat. Its productive, prosperous independent farmers (in Ukrainian "kulaks") were the Soviet Union's last men outside the economic power of the State. It was against them that Stalin deployed the first exercise of enforced "morality" as a means of democide.

Stalin drew on two religious notions. The first, whose roots go back to the pre-history of religion, is that food is not created by human agriculture, but is a holy gift of God or Gods, to be treated as sacred, and consumed only as part of a religious ritual. The second, peculiar to Christianity and going back to the New Testament episode of Jesus driving the money changers out of the Temple, is the notion that it is immoral, and sacrilegious, to trade, for selfish commercial profit, in the stuff of sacred religious ritual. Stalin's fusion of these notions was that food, the sacred stuff of life, belonged to all people, and for individuals to trade it for selfish profit was contrary to Socialist Morality. Therefore commercial trade in food was banned. Farms were systematically searched for grain that had not been turned over to the Soviet State. Farmers convicted of trading or hoarding grain were shot. The resulting famine, the Holodomor, killed between 7 and 15 million people, including 5 to 10 million Ukrainians. The Holodomor was also remarkable for the lack of any resistance. Because they were being murdered in the name of a "morality" that they also shared, Stalin's first democide enjoyed a unanimous sanction, and even a kind of endorsement, from its victims.

Next Part: Three Democides by False Morality - Part II, The Ban on DDT.

GHF Climate-Disasters Report: Worse Than Fiction - A Lie

Roger Pielke writes: "A new report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum ... is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. ... The report is worse than fiction, it is a lie." (click on header above for the rest)

Exactly Why Late-Term Abortion IS Pro-Human-Life

The facts of reality that make the freedom to abort one's pregnancy, up to the moment of birth, a pre-requisite for living a life appropriate to Homo Sapiens (click on header.)

The Ayn Rand Center still needs quality control

The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is the first Objectivist political action organization in history, and a learning curve is to be expected. Ayn Rand distinguished collaboration with those who share the same basic premises - which is to the advantage of the more consistent, in this case, to the advantage of the Objectivist - from collaboration with those whose basic premises are different, in which case collaboration advantages the more evil and irrational, who benefit from the sanction that collaboration gives them. Enlightenment-based Classical Liberals (Reason Magazine contributors such as Radley Balko, Virginia Postrel and Cathy Young, for example) are good potential allies. Supernaturalist Conservatives and populist/localist Libertarians, on the other hand, hold delusional premises - and giving them ideological credibility (and tainting our own) by collaborating with them can only be counterproductive. While individual Objectivists may well collaborate productively with non-Objectivist organizations on specific projects without appearing to endorse their ideologies, the Ayn Rand Center effectively lends Ayn Rand's name to organizations with whom it is seen to collaborate. But the task of distinguishing between those two categories of potential allies is hampered by America's current Pragmatist culture, which discourages even ideological organizations from openly stating their principles. Checking out the websites of potential allies, and identifying the premises underlying their political positions, is an essential component of ideological quality control - and an indispensable precondition of long-term political effectiveness.

I noticed that the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is listed as a "Co-Sponsor" of the 09.12.09 Protest at the Capitol. Reading the list of sponsors, Ayn Rand's name is the only one that the average American will immediately recognize. The logo of the "Protest at the Capitol" shows, with the US Capitol in the background, three red fists, in the style of the old anti-draft Left Libertarian protests that some Objectivists joined back in the 1960s, prompting Ayn Rand to caution them, in the essay I cite in my April 5th blog post (below) against the hazards of unprincipled alliances. The impulse is understandable: slavery, whether by old means of conscription, or of the new threats of higher taxes, "national service," hyperinflation and so on, is despicable enough that even the most rational individualists will feel the impulse to look for allies. But emotions are not a guide to action. Alliances with nuts and cranks transfer the credibility of rational men to men who do not deserve to be made credible. Who are the other sponsors of this event?

The primary "National Sponsor" and main organizer of this event is, as can be told from the red fist logo, a Left Libertarian organization, one called "FreedomWorks Foundation." (When I wrote this blog entry I didn't know that FreedomWorks is a front for Dick Armey. See my comment #6, below.) Their idea of "Freedom" includes the "freedom" to make "free" permanent copies of rented DVDs to one's hard drive - regardless of copyright. Back before the present plague of Pragmatism, even Conservatives, much less Objectivists, would have had qualms at associating with such an outfit. But under the cover of Pragmatism, with its the rejection of principles qua principles, the Left Libertarian position (with its disregard of individualist principles - such as the principle that a creator rightly owns the product of his creative action - for the sake of some "larger" social or political "freedom") has a certain appeal to the sufficiently Pragmatist Conservative. After all, media producers, directors, entertainers and songwriters are big financial contributors to the "Left." If they can be deprived of a part of their income, the campaign coffers of the "Left" will be that much lighter. And about the principle of the creator's right to the product of his mind - "Principle? What's a 'Principle'? You talk like an Elitist Intellectual! The Enemy!" Yet if this principle is discarded, a protest against taxation is left without a moral foundation - and its participants can only look like objectors, not against taxation per se, but only against some specific ends to which they are being taxed.

So much for the organizers. What about the ARC's fellow co-sponsors? They come in two varieties. Some identify as "Conservatives." For example, here is the mission statement from the FAQ of a double co-sponsor, GrassFire, which also lists its ResistNet affiliate as a separate co-sponsor: Grassfire.org’s leadership team holds a strong and unwavering commitment to conservative, pro-family and pro-faith values. And those are the lesser evil.

The other co-sponsors ("Campaign For Liberty," "Young Americans for Liberty" - formerly "Students for Ron Paul." and so on) are "Ron Paul Libertarians" - anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-global-trade, "anti-militarist anti-Imperialists," believers that Iran would be harmless if Americans had not objected when "Iran wanted to control its own oil fields."

Nuts and cranks. And the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.