2004-12-24

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2004-12-24 07:24 am

Whittaker Chambers on Ayn Rand

Whittaker Chambers was the man who broke away from the American Communist Party in the late forties and denounced Alger Hiss as a Communist spy. He is now known to have been right (although a few Hiss defenders still exist), but at the time Hiss' numerous and highly-placed friends made him pay dearly for his courage and his willingness to defend American democracy against Communist infiltration. After the drama, Chambers became a regular contributor to a number of moderate magazines, and this is the review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged which he wrote for the National Review in 1957.

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2004-12-24 08:11 am

Again about Ayn Rand and Objectivism

E.Michael Jones is the editor and virtual one-man-band voice of CULTURE WARS magazine, an aggressive, slightly eccentric, very learned and highly conservative Catholic commentary and historical magazine. He is not to be suspected of left-wing sympathies, whatever his other intellectual sins (and I could enumerate quite a few, although I have a certain respect for him). This is what he has to say about the impact of Ayn Rand's teachings on one American university college, and incidentally about the lady herself. It is highly instructive (down to the degrading detail that Rand ignored her own parents and that they died, probably of starvation, in the siege of Leningrad/St.Petersburg).
http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/2000/January/hillsdale.html