| | If you want to add this thread to the fabric of your conspiracy theories, ask what is accomplished when people who like each other fall out over ideology. I agreed with all of your criticisms of Ted Keer - and your praise for him But Ayn Rand taught us to psychologize philosophical issues.
You mentioned Leon Trostky and that sent me back to forgotten studies. Stalin, of course, consolidated his political power by removing competitors. However, realize that Trotsky was a Menshevik: he opposed Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Then, Lenin put him in charge of the army. Marxism knew no shortage of intense disagreements and denunciations, but also, those intellectuals recognized the importance of dialectic and debate. We do not.
The Rand-Branden split validated repeated excommunications until it became an element of Objectivist culture. You are not really an active Objectivist unless you have been kicked off someone's discussion board.
But if you understand that under Stalin, Standard Oil took leases on Russian wells, while Ford and IBM did business with Germany, then you see why a "capitalist" philosophical school would use excommunication as a tool of intellectual inquiry.
I once met a right wing populist who told me that Ayn Rand had been the mistress of both Clarence Carson and Leonard E. Read. He said that the capitalist ruling class paid her to write Atlas Shrugged as their plan to destroy true democracy and replace it with a plutocratic dictatorship.
The fatal flaw was that Ayn Rand's Nietzschean influence meshed well with H. L. Mencken's anti-establishment polemics. (Mencken had worked to have We the Living published.) As a result, rather than a pro-business fascism in service to Prescott Bush and the conservative putschists, Rand sang the praises of complete laissez faire.
Thus, when the globalist factions infused the youth generation of the 1960s with resources to challenge the holdings of the nationalists, Ayn Rand's ideas were picked up. At the 1965 convention of the Buckleyite Young Americans for Freedom, opposition to the war in Viet Nam and to the draft both had to be defeated on the floor. Libertarianism was born.
That presented a problem.
As an open system of thought - more a state of mind than a program - libertarians were a direct threat to the established order. The Civil Rights movement rescued Henry David Thoreau from obscurity. Libertarians advocated tax revolt and even anarchy ("anarcho-capitalism") which was totally unacceptable to the Bush Faction of conservatism. However, Ayn Rand remained a loyal Republican, in part because despite her laissez faire ideology, she adopted America with the fervor of a convert, even writing a Textbook of Americanism.
Thus, Rand denounced Ralph Waldo Emerson as a "small mind" for his aphorism that "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Consistency, of course, is the sine qua non of Objectivism. There can be no honest differences of opinion.
How does this serve the conspiracy of the ruling class?
It deprives the anti-establishment libertarian movement, which is essentially universalist and globalist, of an engine of intellectual discovery. Any study of history shows that classical Athens, Renaissance Florence, and Silicon Valley all prospered not at all because of their natives, but because of their immigrants - the infusion of new ideas drew people with new ideas. Intellectual ferment creates the innovations, inventions, and enterprises of "creative destruction" causing unpredicted (unpredictable) change.
The American national ruling class - the Rockefellers and the Bushes - do not want unpredictable change ... and certainly not of global proportions.
Thus, there has been a shift in alliance, with Japan pushed aside for China. The Chinese state-capitalist gerontocracy is a better ally. In fact, near 100 years of age John D. Rockefeller was kept alive with human milk. It is understandable that he would want to stay alive - "All I own for one more day," were the last words of England's Elizabeth I - but the extraordinary measures are temperamentally suited to a gerontocracy that uses capital punishment of petty criminals to keep a supply of organs for transplant. George W. Bush may live to see the year 2200.
As will Barack Obama. A product of Harvard, President Obama is the fair-haired boy of the nationalist ruling class, the perfect paw to use against the globalists. Like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama serves the Rockefeller-Bush junta whose wealth - now so far flung - still comes largely from oil. That is why the new General Electric's new CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt works with the White House to tout the Chevy Volt, an "electric" vehicle with a gasoline engine.
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