naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Hm. I'd be curious what you think Rand's view toward e.g. Native Americans vs the USA would be (or if you know if she ever wrote on that). Were Native American raids on soft targets justified? The USA circa 1800 was very plausibly less free on net than Native American societies; when they scalped and murdered unarmed American citizens, was that just giving what was due to them, as a people upholding an expansionary state with a particularly brutal form of slavery?
There could certainly be a back and forth about which society was worse, but I guess that gets at my objections to Rand's point: it can be deployed by anyone against anyone. If your enemy is worse than you, you can justify anything against anyone governed by them. Indeed, that's the justification for the Hamas attacks: the people they murdered de facto supported the existence of the state of Israel, denying their responsibility to install a just Islamic state from river to sea.
That said, Author Bloom's summary of Rand's position during the Donahue interview isn't very accurate. See here for a transcript, where behind the ellipsis we instead see :
No. I don’t resort to terrorism. I don’t go around murdering my opponents, innocent women and children. That is what I have against the Arabs. That takes the conflict out of the sphere of civilized conflict, and makes it murderous. And anyone, private citizens, who resort to force is a monster. And, that’s what makes me condemn and despise them.
I don't think she ever wrote specifically on the exact bounds of "civilized conflict", but a few of her books touched on her conflicts with 'just war' theory. Most interpretations become... idiosyncratic, to say the least, but I don't think Bloom's "no reason to distinguish between innocent civilians from military targets" is an honest read.
There could certainly be a back and forth about which society was worse, but I guess that gets at my objections to Rand's point: it can be deployed by anyone against anyone. If your enemy is worse than you, you can justify anything against anyone governed by them.
Yep, the justification for war and murder of civilians because they are more technologically 'progressed' as well is frankly ridiculous, IMO. Especially given as you say many less technologically powerful societies on the surface level have had much higher quality of life and were better among many axes.
Hell, if we didn't wipe out 95% of the Native American population with smallpox, they likely would've been able to fend of the Europeans indefinitely.
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Notes -
Hm. I'd be curious what you think Rand's view toward e.g. Native Americans vs the USA would be (or if you know if she ever wrote on that). Were Native American raids on soft targets justified? The USA circa 1800 was very plausibly less free on net than Native American societies; when they scalped and murdered unarmed American citizens, was that just giving what was due to them, as a people upholding an expansionary state with a particularly brutal form of slavery?
There could certainly be a back and forth about which society was worse, but I guess that gets at my objections to Rand's point: it can be deployed by anyone against anyone. If your enemy is worse than you, you can justify anything against anyone governed by them. Indeed, that's the justification for the Hamas attacks: the people they murdered de facto supported the existence of the state of Israel, denying their responsibility to install a just Islamic state from river to sea.
Rand's view on Native Americans was... not great: like a lot of pre-1970s Americans she largely saw them as primitive and nomadic tribal groups that hadn't really developed a concept of properties rights or technological advancement. The modern Objectivist analysis holds that some of this falls from often-bad scholarship of the time, which obscured a lot of Native American social technologies, but I'd expect she'd still find them to have failed her techno-utopian vision.
That said, Author Bloom's summary of Rand's position during the Donahue interview isn't very accurate. See here for a transcript, where behind the ellipsis we instead see :
I don't think she ever wrote specifically on the exact bounds of "civilized conflict", but a few of her books touched on her conflicts with 'just war' theory. Most interpretations become... idiosyncratic, to say the least, but I don't think Bloom's "no reason to distinguish between innocent civilians from military targets" is an honest read.
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Yep, the justification for war and murder of civilians because they are more technologically 'progressed' as well is frankly ridiculous, IMO. Especially given as you say many less technologically powerful societies on the surface level have had much higher quality of life and were better among many axes.
Hell, if we didn't wipe out 95% of the Native American population with smallpox, they likely would've been able to fend of the Europeans indefinitely.
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