The latest outbreaks of the conflict between Zionists and Palestinians have set the Hate Machine of the world population in motion again: everyone has been forced to have an opinion on the matter and hate one side. Although this is a war that has been going on for more than 80 years, the vast majority of the public does not know its history, and takes sides only from the latest events, ignoring the overall context. For example, many have come to think that as Hamas terrorists killed Jewish civilians on October 7, 2023, they should support all actions of the Israeli Armed Forces. They don’t take into account that the state of Israel killed many more Palestinian civilians before this Hamas attack and is killing many more now.
Thus we see the most absurd excuses being given for Israeli bombs that slaughter Palestinian babies, such as saying that Hamas is to blame for using them as “human shields.” Now, if during a robbery a bandit is surrounded by the police and hides behind a victim, no one would tell the police to machine gun the victim and the thief indiscriminately, instead of using a sniper, who would try to aim only at the bandit. If a gang breaks into a bank and holds all the employees and customers hostage, the police response would never be to blow up the bank with everyone inside. If a police force acted like that, it would be considered worse than the robbers. But there are people who say that it is justified for Israel to drop bombs on Palestinian hospitals full of elderly people, women and children because there would be a tunnel used by Hamas underneath this hospital! And on the other hand, we also see people trying to justify the murder of Jewish babies perpetrated by Hamas because of the oppression that Palestinians suffer in Gaza, which is an open-air prison.
While it is true that Palestinians are oppressed by the state of Israel, it is disgraceful to support the killing of Jewish civilians because of it, just as it is foolish to justify the killing of Palestinian civilians because of the actions of Palestinian terrorists. Blaming an entire group of people for the actions of a few individuals is called “collective punishment,” and this is even more absurd when it’s done by people who are supposed to be extreme individualists, like the Randians – after all, it was Ayn Rand who coined the phrase “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” But that’s what the Randians do.
Recently, Yaron Brook, the chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, attacked the libertarian position against any kind of collective punishment by advocating the killing of innocents as a response to an attack. Of all the nonsense Brook says, the biggest mistake he made was quoting the great Dave Smith, who, because of this, made a video completely destroying Yaron Brook. Brook says that when defending himself from an attack he doesn’t need to and shouldn’t check who’s innocent and who’s guilty, to which Smith overwhelmingly replies that if you’re killing innocents, you’re not defending yourself from anything, but being the aggressor yourself attacking others. The Gaza Strip is home to 2 million people, half of whom are under the age of 18. Brook is a genocidal maniac who advocates the death of all of them because 17 years ago, in 2006, when nearly half were not even born yet, Hamas received 44 percent of the vote in a parliamentary election. For Brook, this means that ALL Palestinians are guilty of Hamas’s terrorist acts and must be punished! In addition to being a thug, Brook’s level of argumentation is absolutely vexatious, and everyone should watch Dave Smith’s video response:
For Ayn Rand, if the people did not choose a different government or did not overthrow the regime in power, the entire population must pay for the sins of this government… because the government represents the people of the nation. She says there are no innocents in a war.
In the second audio, released for the first time to the public, Ayn Rand answers a question about the deliberate attack on civilians by saying that women and children should not be spared as they can be used by enemies, as the Viet Cong used them in guerrilla warfare during the Vietnam war to attack invading American soldiers. She says that if it is necessary to bomb civilians, this is not only justified but it is a moral duty to do so; anything that a country that has been attacked does is morally justified. According to Ayn Rand, all the carnage of wars throughout human history has been beautiful and moral, if the exterminated population belongs to a country that “struck first.” So no, Brook and Peikoff didn’t misrepresent the collectivism of Ayn Rand. She is as perverse and barbaric as her faithful disciples of Randian Objectivism.
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