The Anger of Compassion

Enemies of the Revolution

I could not believe the utter cluelessness of what I read at FrontPageMag.com this morning: the teaser under the headline "We Have No Peace Process" reads: "A violent, totalitarian jihad group comes to power in the Palestinian parliament."

Hello? Yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization. But are they not taking control from the PLO -- the fucking PLO -- those warm and fuzzy moppets who created modern airline hijacking, fomented civil war in Jordan, and then helped destroy Lebanon and provoke the Israeli invasion of that country? Isn't it that PLO?

Better'n forty years ago Ayn Rand gave a lecture she called "Conservatism: An Obituary." It's available in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

The Hamas electoral victory, and the reactions to it, bring to mind this comment from the lecture:

It is obvious that with this sort of theoretical equipment and with an unbroken record of defeats, concessions, compromises, and betrayals in practice, today's "conservatives" are futile, impotent and, culturally, dead. They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country's uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.

Sound familiar? Remind you of this? Or this?

Stalin and Trotsky fought for control of the late 1920s Soviet Union. The particular identity of the ultimate victor made no difference to those who lived under Soviet tyranny. Similarly, the Gang of Four were no better and no worse than Chairman Mao himself (though they did enjoy worse PR). One could be forgiven for assuming that Ayn Rand predicted Fatah's loss to Hamas, way back in '61:

When men share the same basic premise, it is the most consistent ones who win.

Posted by Craig Ceely at January 27, 2006 02:51 PM