| | For a moment let’s set aside what Ayn Rand thought about entering the war against Germany and Japan, and consider another question: Was America better off for FDR having entered the war? Was entering it in America’s interest, as opposed to FDR’s?
We’ve all been persuaded – indoctrinated and seduced really – by years of schooling, and from watching Hollywood propaganda films (dramas, comedies, musicals) produced during the 1940s and afterwards, television later giving them a perpetual lease on life, into replying with an unquestioning: YES !
We all grew up under that cloud of propaganda. I, like about everyone, took the traditional account of WWII for granted. Then as an adult, out of school, after much reading, slowly and by degrees, I came around to — Ayn Rand’s position. I came around long before I knew it was her position.
Now the history of WWII is a huge subject and I’m not going to address here the question I began with – which question amounts to: Was Ayn Rand correct? I bring the question up only because some of you probably think along the following lines: ‘‘No rational person could have opposed U.S. entry into WWII. It simply can’t be true that Ayn Rand opposed it. There must be a catch somewhere.’’ I appreciate that sentiment because once it would have been mine.
That sentiment may be behind Steve’s writing: ‘‘... I’m certain she would not have advocated not going to war in response [to Pearl Harbor]’’ and ‘‘... I can’t see her wanting anything less than going to war ...’’ even as he acknowledges: ‘‘I can’t find a quote to offset those that exist that indicate otherwise.’’ Indeed it looks like a dilemma, until you realize that Ayn Rand may actually have been right on this subject.
To discover background about WWII you weren’t given in school or old movies, knowledge that may eventually bring you around to Ayn Rand’s point of view, see the links under World War II. (Ayn Rand cited four – one is under World War I – of the listed books favorably, as indicated, three more are by or contain material by the same authors. At first skip the links labeled ‘‘Amazon reviews’’ – they’re slow, and not always informative though the books themselves are. Regarding the links in general, see the disclaimer at the top of the page.) Your research isn’t an afternoon project, and you won’t change your mind overnight. But the more you read the worse WWII gets – both as to how the U.S. entered it, how it was prosecuted, and its consequences.
To repeat, the point of mentioning the actual history is to suggest that Ayn Rand’s position is reasonable and very possibly correct – it’s certainly not crazy. With that in mind let’s get back to the question at hand, a merely textural one:
Did Ayn Rand make any statement approving FDR’s war against Germany and Japan? (FDR entered the war before he declared it, remember, with blockades against Japan and air assaults on the Japanese in China.)
Just to be clear, the question is not ‘‘Ought she to have approved?’’ (though I maintain the answer to that is No). Nor is it ‘‘Did Nazi Germany have a right to be left alone by free countries?’’ (No). Nor is it ‘‘Should free people have remained silent about the Nazis’’ (again No). The question is ‘‘Did she ever approve of FDR getting the U.S. into the war? – as evidenced by her explicit statement.’’
Contributors here have made some interesting points about this and I’d like to comment on some of them.
A couple of posts have suggested that we’ll find an endorsement of the war, or at any rate something positive, in the Journals. If anyone finds a positive statement in the Journals by all means post it here (include the page location so it can be easily verified). I don’t recall reading anything like an endorsement in the Journals, and the same goes for the Letters.
Such an endorsement would be hard to explain given Ayn Rand’s many published statements that explicitly lament entry into World War II. And how could ‘not-A’ offset ‘A’ ?
Speaking of Wendell Willkie, during his campaign for president in 1940 he opposed entry into the war, at least initially. Ayn Rand worked for Willkie’s campaign and consequently, considering the importance of the war question, almost certainly agreed with that position. This of course was before Pearl Harbor. [0]
Peter maintains that ‘‘Rand’s anti-interventionist statements date from before Pearl Harbor ...’’ and goes on to say that her opinion afterwards is another story. Comment: All the anti-interventionist statements quoted in
Ayn Rand on World War II were made after Pearl Harbor.
Later you (Peter) suggest that ‘‘Rand was uncomfortable with the entire topic of international relations’’ and that there was ‘‘a conflict between her non-interventionist head and her liberationist heart, and ... this is why she had so little to say on the subject.’’ Comment: On the subject of entry into WWII alone she wrote over 760 words, in four different essays, not counting The Ominous Parallels or two favorable book reviews in The Objectivist Newsletter. Whether you call that a fair amount of writing or quite a lot is a question of comparison. And in her WWII writing she had no ‘‘liberationist heart,’’ no conflict. [*]
I agree, however, that her treatment of foreign policy is generally weak, especially her writing on the Vietnam War, which at times is – I hate to say it – exasperatingly inconsistent. [**]
Steve says ‘‘Some of those quotes on the ARI-Watch site are slightly out of context – some were about FDR as a statist ... domestically, and some were dealing with economics and the myth that WWII ended the depression.’’ Comment: I don’t think the quotes on ARI-Watch are out of context, even slightly. It’s true of course that Ayn Rand despised FDR’s statism and the fact that he used WWII to advance that agenda.
Perhaps you (Steve) are suggesting the following: Suppose there had been another president besides FDR, one who had no statist agenda. Then she would have approved a declaration of war, even if there had been no Pearl Harbor without FDR’s machinations. That of course doesn’t address the original question; after all there is only one world and FDR was in it. Taking the supposition as it is, I would argue that she still would have opposed the war because it simply wasn’t in America’s interest. But let’s stick to your original question, it is objective and easy to answer.
Stephen furnishes two links, without comment. The first goes to a Reader’s Digest article of Ayn Rand’s entitled ‘‘The Only Path To Tomorrow’’ dated January 1944, two years after FDR entered the war. Conspicuous by its absence in that article is anything supporting the war. (That there’s nothing directly opposing the war is to be expected, it’s safe to say Reader’s Digest would not have published the article otherwise. I emphasize ‘‘directly’’ because the essay is an intellectual attack on big government – totalitarianism – which the war saddled Americans with to an unprecedented degree, ‘‘temporary’’ measures many of which became permanent.)
The second of Stephen’s links goes to a page of an RoR discussion dated about a year ago entitled: ‘‘Foreign Policy and Self-Defense: Bidinotto’s Facts.’’ Stephen there wrote: ‘‘... I had always remembered Rand’s discussion of active man v. passive man in that Reader’s Digest piece as applauding the active man for his contribution to the war, specifically to the liberation of Europe.’’ Comment: This is, as I gather you (Stephen) came to realize, a misremembrance. It’s totally mistaken.
Later in the discussion you quote Ayn Rand about helping Vietnam and some other countries. She’s for it! Yet elsewhere, in her writing and in answers to questions after talks, she says she opposed the Vietnam War. As mentioned above, she wasn’t always able to clearly articulate a position on Vietnam. As for the other countries she mentions, apparently she believed the propaganda about benevolent Israel, which at the time or soon after was a conduit for military technical assistance and intelligence to the USSR. [***] She was naively mistaken about Taiwan as well. It’s an oppressive country, there’s even some evidence its government agents once assassinated, on U.S. soil, some Taiwanese intellectually fighting that oppression. Yes, there is Taiwanese ‘‘capitalism’’ of a sort, but the same can be said of its enemy China. Why must you risk your life or become the least bit out of pocket in order to save Chiang Kai-shek, or whomever the Taiwan strongman is now? Ayn Rand was mistaken here perhaps because she subscribed – if she did – to the now discredited Southeast Asia ‘‘Domino Theory.’’ Ayn Rand was neither omniscient nor infallible. [****] RoR posters John Trager and Michael E. Marotta make some good points in the discussion.
Steve had asked: ‘‘Did [Ayn Rand] make a statement following the attack on Pearl Harbor indicating that we should be at war because it had become a case of self-defense?’’ Peter sums things up nicely: ‘‘... to answer the original question: as far as any of us knows she never said this on record.’’
And in fact she said just the opposite.
Ayn Rand on World War II has been up for somewhat over three years now and no one has successfully challenged the accuracy of its quotes. No published work of Ayn Rand exists repudiating those quotes. Still, many people challenge the article’s conclusion. Some of these people do so sincerely, such as Steve who is obviously concerned about finding the truth (indeed so far everyone here it looks like). But to challenge the article’s conclusion successfully critics must discover a heretofore unpublished Ayn Rand manuscript containing something along the lines of: ‘‘I repudiate my past comments about WWII. FDR was right to have entered it. All those draftees (there’s no question a draft was required, even after the Pearl Harbor con), I mean, it was indeed the greatest generation.’’
Mark
ARIwatch.com
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0 See Presidential Elections – Ayn Rand & ARI for a run down of Ayn Rand’s positions.
* ‘‘Liberationist’’ suggests that the U.S. won the war for Europe. Yet by the belated time the U.S. entered the war – which was after Germany invaded Russia – Hitler was already doomed. The main thing U.S. entry accomplished in Europe was to deliver the eastern half to Stalin.
** That is, within itself, even if she’d written nothing else. I suspect one reason was that the Leftists of the day muddied the waters of discourse. They opposed the war by supporting the Vietcong (the enemy), others wishing to articulate their opposition to the war had to take care not to be associated with those ideas.
*** Perhaps it’s worth noting that Leonard Peikoff was her editor by the time she wrote the article from which Stephen quotes (‘‘The Lessons of Vietnam’’ Ayn Rand Letter, 1975). If you trust research from Mr. Peikoff about current events, what can you expect? (This of course is only a suspicion regarding the Vietnam article.)
**** That doesn’t mean you can pick and choose to suit yourself, but it does mean you must do your own thinking. What are the facts and, setting aside Ayn Rand the person, what does Objectivism have to say about them?
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