She's baaack !

Earlier we joked that surely the Institute of Public Affairs ( The Sydney Morning Herald's legal writer Richard Akland says the IPA is often referred to as the "Institute of Paid Advocacy ") should admire Ayn Rand,  just as US Republicans on the hard right have rediscovered the woman who exhibited all the traits of a text book psychopath.

We spoke too soon. For there she is on the IPA's website with her book The Fountainhead  promoted as one of the "100 Great Books Of Liberty" that must be read by all. They claim that Rand's book is one of the books that " laid the foundation for the modern world". Alarmingly, they are right.

Rand described Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead thus: "He was born without the ability to consider others."

To Rand this was an admirable trait. In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1959 she said "you only love those who deserve it". Those who expressed altruism or a love of their fellow man were weaklings according to Rand who abhorred all religions and in particular Christianity which she considered akin to Communism.

Writing in 1927 about a ghastly killer  named William Hickman who strangled a 12 year old girl he had kidnapped and then sadistically set about dismembering her body with a pocket knife, Rand said this :
 "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," he has "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'".

She could have been describing the ideals of her weird philosophy 'objectism'.

When she died in 1982 Rand was discovered-as an advocate for the demolition  of social security and government health programmes, to be receiving both.

Her funeral was paid for by an admirer Alan Greenspan who hung on her every word. Greenspan became the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve and as an exponent of the 'free market' like Rand actively promoted the dismantling of financial controls that in turn set-up the USA for the sub-prime financial crisis of 2007 that has wrecked thousands of lives in the US.
Be afraid. Very afraid.

# Fresh from his demolition of Noam Chomsky in that organ of intellectual discussion-the Daily Telegraph, a missive arrives from IPA fellow Ted Lapkin to inform us that the term "enemy combatant" is indeed a legal concept-and he is right. Except an enemy combatant is a fighter for a state that a country is at war with.

Unfortunately it defeats Lapkin's claim that former Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks was an enemy combatant as no legal declaration of war has been made against the 'state' of Al Qaeda, Afghanistan or indeed, Iraq.

No problem there for Lapkin though : "the US has fought many armed conflicts without the benefit of a formal declaration of war", he says. So that's all right then. Might is right.

 Here is Mike Wallace's 1959 "I'm Alright Jack' interview with Ayn Rand :

Newspaper Catches Up

It's become quite common now-we lead the way, others follow.

The Sydney Morning Herald today has published a far more eloquent piece than we could hope to produce on the Institute of Public Affair's Ted Lapkin's trashing of not just former Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks but the entire audience for having the temerity to attend a discussion with Hicks and applaud him afterwards. Lapin's piece appeared in the same newspaper.

David Hicks & wife Aloysia chat to NSW Governor Marie Bashir

Not only did Lapkin engage in twisting legal concepts, he made a gratuitous attack upon the moderator of the Hick's event Donna Mulhearn who travelled to Iraq at the beginning of the conflict to be a 'human shield'.

Former SBS presenter Mary Kostakidis lays out the case and dissects Lapkin's  attempts to bend even the slightest piece of information into a condemnation of Hicks. :

"In the Herald yesterday, Ted Lapin from the Institute of Public Affairs, persisted with the Howard government's demonetisation of Hicks with no regard for history, facts or the rule of law."

One issue is the persistent false claim that persons are 'illegal combatants" in the yet to be formally declared  "War On Terror" It's a term used by George W. Bush, former PM John Howard , Tony Blair and numerous others.

It is a fallacy and a meaningless term. It has no legal definition and never has under any of the laws of the countries whose leaders use it nor does the UN accept the term. The US Supreme Court tossed out Bush's attempts to write it into law and Barack Obama finally abandoned the term last year after trying to do likewise.

Hicks was held unlawfully at Guantanamo Bay because there was no law to hold him elsewhere. Howard admitted that Hicks has broken no Australian law.

The US simply swept people up on any pretense and 'rendered' them to Cuba. Hicks was grabbed at a bus stop by the corrupt criminal gangs comprising the Northern Alliance and handed to the US for a bounty.

Read Mary's response to Ted Lapkin here.

Illustrating the dangers of people like Lapkin and the laughingly named Institute of Public Affairs in the fascist style distortions they help promote one only has to read the comments that follow Kostakidis' piece and plenty of readers bang on with this 'enemy combatant' falsehood because it's been drummed into their heads a thousand times.

Compulsory reading for the Lapkins of the world should be this piece by the former US Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Ben Ferencz who at over 90 years of age has seen the precedents set at the WW2 trials to determine who was a war criminal trashed just 60 years after they ended :

 "My Government Today Prepared to Do Something for Which We Hanged Germans"

# The publishing of Hick's autobiography puts the current government in an interesting position. Under the proceeds of crime legislation profits made from books published by convicted persons can be confiscated after court action. 

Will the government take such action and open up the can of worms that may expose former powerful politicians and the lies they told ?.