Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Randian Super-Warmonger to Speak at Cato

It looks like those nervous nellies at Cato may in fact have something to worry about.

Yaron Brook, Executive Director, Ayn Rand Institute will be part of a book forum at Cato. He has a new booking coming out on free markets, which appears to be the topic of the forum. But it is getting Brook's name out there among the Cato crowd and when he isn't thinking free markets, he is thinking wars and total obliteration of many Muslims. David Boaz will moderate the forum.

Brook is a major war hawk, who believes that the U.S. must battle "Islamic-totalitarianism".  Wikipedia's summary about Brook is quite informative:
Brook claims that the Islamic terrorists initiated a war against the West because they hate the West's culture, wealth, love of life, and global influence.[15] This is opposed to the ideas that Islamic terrorists attack the West because they are poor, or because the West supports Israel, or any other reason.
They [Islamic terrorists] don't hate us because we support Israel, they hate Israel because they look like us 
Brook claims that the West isn't at war with terrorism, but the ideology of Islamic totalitarianism...

Brook further argues that these Islamic states must be severely attacked in order to crush their will to engage in and support terrorism.

The US has been attacked first thus it has the moral right to fight Islamism. The sole moral duty of the United States is to defend its citizens against its enemies by all means, even with the use of the atom bomb if necessary.

What specific military actions would have been required post-9/11 to end state support of Islamic Totalitarianism is a question for specialists in military strategy, but even a cursory look at history can tell us one thing for sure: It would have required the willingness to take devastating military action against enemy regimes—to oust their leaders and prominent supporters, to make examples of certain regimes or cities in order to win the surrender of others, and to inflict suffering on complicit civilian populations, who enable terrorist-supporting regimes to remain in power..

From the beginning of the War on Terrorism, Brook has argued that Iran should be the primary target of U.S. retaliation for Sept. 11, secondary targets being Saudi Arabia and Syria.

Later in the month Koch-funded Cato will have  Richard Fisher, President, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as a guest speaker.



13 comments:

  1. This is kind of a stupid argument in libertarian circles.

    The existence of those who hate us because we are meddlers does not preclude the existence of those who hate us because of our culture.

    I spent two years deployed as a soldier, didn't kill anybody who didn't try to kill me first, and have personally witnessed both types.

    This is akin to saying, "Western civilians hate islam because of 9-11" vs "Western civilians hate islam because the muslims are sitting on a lot of oil".

    There's no conflict between the two and both situations can simultaneously exist...and in fact do.

    I wish I'd figured that one out before I pissed away years of my life in hardship and danger for nothing.

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  2. On a side note, I have noticed that the articles at Reason are getting weaker and weaker.

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  3. Let's admit it. It's only been a few months, but we already miss Ed Crane. He was a lukewarm libertarian and suck-up to the powers-that-be, but look at what has happened since he left.

    On the one hand, you have the return to power at Cato of the Koch brothers with their objective to turn Cato into an appendage of the Republican Party. Then, you have the psychopathic influences of Randians like current Cato head, Allison, and now Yaron Brook. As suggested above, Yaron Brook, is, if anything, more militant than most neocons.

    Sorry to say, but, as a authentic libertarian institution, Cato is going down the tubes--and perhaps, it's already terminal.

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    1. Good- Let 'em go down the tubes and become a neocon front. They weren't doing freedom any favors with their faux libertarian corporate-funded statist front. Let the dedicated activists become involved with Campaign for Liberty, Von Mises Institute, Tenth Amendment Center and other legitimate fronts for liberty and not get sidetracked at awful CATO

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  4. There are Muslims who hate us and take up arms against us because their religion tells them to. There are Muslims who hate us because our legitimate prosecutions of war against the former group have been undeclared, inarticulately defined, not guided by honest principles of self-defense, and been poorly disguised endless bloody occupation and nation-building. It's BOTH. Libertarians and Objectivists do no one any favors by oversimplifying BOTH the depth and width of the ideological HATRED and the very real BLOWBACK that has resulted from our poorly executed warmongering. The Republican and Democrat foreign policy, one and the same, of the last 40 years has been the worst of all possible worlds. It doesn't clearly name the enemy and it doesn't execute its defense to actually defeat that enemy. Elect Obamney or Obamney, and the only question will be, "Will we be nuked before we are bankrupt, or will we be bankrupt before we're nuked?"

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  5. Cato has been off my radar for awhile, same goes for Reason. They're gladly selling out their libertarian principals to kiss paleocon/buchanite, neocon and liberal asses.

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  6. "Brook claims that the Islamic terrorists initiated a war against the West ..."

    I thought Objectivists were supposed to be rational people? Maybe Brook needs to spend some time at AE911Truth.org or TorontoHearings.org and others. Soon silence will be regarded as complicity...

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  7. Lew Rockwell quoted Norm Singleton the other week in regard to yet another reason to despise the GOP:

    "Its foreign policy is defined by the nuttiest faction of a foreign country,"

    Personally, I don't think Singleton went far enough. It's not just the GOP, but there are Dems, Independents, & Objectivists that feel the same way as you, among a host of others.



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    1. The above was a response to Anon @ 10:04PM

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    2. Of all the policy divides among various political ideologies, I have found the one between neo-pacifist Libertarians and warmongering Objectivists particularly curious and troubling over the past several years. The Ron Paul wing of the Libertarians (and I have been a HUGE supporter of Dr. Paul on most issues) are simply burying their heads in the sand when they ignore the real threat that Islam poses to the West. Its core values are inimical to Western values, and the process of de-fanging the more rabid elements of it via cultural means will be much longer and much more involved than it was historically in the defanging of Christianity. "Bring the troops" home is NOT the end-all answer.

      On the other hand, Objectivists have been more or less inarticulate about or ignorant of the reality that the Republican/Democrat decades of nation-building, non-objective warmongering, sky-high piling on of civilian corpses over literally DECADES, and bankrupting world policing is doing more harm to American interests than doing, virtually, nothing at all. To their credit (and you should read Brook and Journo on this), they have argued the the only right way to prosecute a war is via TOTAL war, as the USA did during WWII. Yet they are completely silent today in arguing that Romney won't continue this long pattern of sorry, misguided interventions, as unlike a WWII strategy as it could be. Dropping context, appealing to pragmatism -- two (rightfully identified) Objectivist sins -- they have been almost unanimously opposed to the idea that a Paul-style foreign policy of massively reducing the interventions and forcing ourselves to focus on real threats and declare legitimate war on those would perhaps be the best course at this time.

      Wenzel-style, Paul-style libertarians say nothing about the real threat of Islam. Objectivists completely ignore the complicity of an uber-meddlesome, bankrupting anti-Washingtonian foreign policy that has been going for at least 40 years. As in so many other areas, a bit of cooler analysis and focus on essential agreements could lead to a much more effective degree of political cooperation -- when their political ends are so extremely similar. Perhaps the CATO reimagination may lead to this, but there is so much enmity among the groups (made worse by the immediacy of emotionalist social media), I doubt it.

      Thank you for responding. I sincerely wish others would weigh in on my thoughts, as well.

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  8. "... total obliteration of many Muslims."
    Sounds promising!

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  9. New Testament self-sacrificial just war theory nonsense aside, conflicts end when one side gives up. At least Brook et al are proposing historically valid strategies for ending the threat--not tolerating it. What strategy do you propose to end the threats? What historical evidence supports that strategy (i.e. when did it successfully end threats in the past)?

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