Those in panic at Cato are getting their worst nightmares confirmed. Another Ayn Rand Institute fellow and war hawk, Don Watkins, is speaking at Cato.
Catch @arinstitute's @dwatkins3 speaking NOW on Ayn Rand's concept of selfishness: cato.org/live twitter.com/CatoInstitute/…Watkins tweets out a link to an ARI war hawk article that says:
— Cato Institute (@CatoInstitute) September 24, 2012
Here we go again: More bloody violence from the Middle East, more angry threats from Islamists, more appeasing whimpers from the White House and the State Department—it’s like a movie on an endless loop, one that we’re condemned to watch over and over.
Except that we have a choice. There’s a way out of this theater of horrors—a way to win this supposedly unwinnable war—and the Ayn Rand Institute has been talking about it for many years now. In articles, op-eds, lectures, panel discussions, blog posts, letters to the editor, and press releases, we’ve been warning about how Western appeasement of Islamist aggression encourages further aggression.
Take a look at the list I’ve compiled, at the end of this post. It’s a track record of consistent commentary that explains current events overseas and offers practical, principled solutions. With the recent spike in attention to Ayn Rand’s ideas on domestic issues, fueled by vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s admiration for some of her writings, perhaps there’s now a better opportunity for the Institute’s message on appeasement in foreign policy to gain a hearing.
What is that message? It’s indicated in an early passage from the 2009 book by the Institute’s foreign policy fellow Elan Journo, Winning the Unwinnable War (my bold):
Facing the Islamist onslaught, our policymakers aimed, at most, to manage crises with range-of-the-moment remedies—heedless of the genesis of a given crisis and the future consequences of today’s solution. Running through the varying policy responses of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton there is an unvarying motif. . . . Our leaders failed to recognize that war had been launched against us and that the enemy is Islamic totalitarianism. This cognitive failure rendered Washington impotent to defeat the enemy. Owing to myopic policy responses, our leaders managed only to appease and encourage the enemy’s aggression
Or, given Occam's razor, we are experiencing blowback directly related to our myopic foreign policies.
ReplyDeleteAppeasement of Islamic totalitarianism is invading the Muslim people and murdering their innocents?! Quite the humanist we have here.
EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES! (But do it rationally.)
ReplyDeleteHere is a guy who is basically saying "if we kill all the Muslims in the world, all will be well". (someone should tell this guy that there are a lot of them.) He might as well have added, "we also need to kill them because they are actually lizard people from the planet Neptune". That would have not made his statements any more nonsensical.
ReplyDeleteThe Cato people are just sitting there, listening to this?
This doesn't have anything to do with Ayn Rand. Are they using this Ayn Rand Institute as some kind of cover? When did it get taken over by neocons?
I wonder, do the Koch brothers explicitly go along with all this?
After Ayn Rand died, a gang of parasitic sadists climbed up on her reputation and began thumping their chests and promoting the mass murder of their bogeymen, all while parroting her rhetoric favoring self-interest and rationality. It is reminiscent of the neo-con takeover of the Tea Party movement and their promotion of mass murder while parroting the rhetoric of the liberty movement.
ReplyDeleteFortunately, however, Ayn Rand speaks clearly through her novels which continue to sell well. She will be remembered. They won't.