| Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism. The absolute state is merely an institutionalized form of gang rule, regardless of which particular gang seizes power. And -- since there is no rational justification for such rule, since none has ever been or can ever be offered -- the mystique of racism is a crucial element in every variant of the absolute state. The relationship is reciprocal: statism rises out of prehistorical tribal warfare, out of the notion that the men of one tribe are the natural prey for the men of another -- and establishes its own internal sub-categories of racism, a system of castes determined by a man's birth, such as inherited titles of nobility or inherited serfdom. The racism of Nazi Germany -- where men had to fill questionnaires about their ancestry for generations back, in order to prove their "Aryan" descent -- has its counterpart in Soviet Russia, where men had to fill similar questionnaires to show that their ancestors had owned no property and thus to prove their "proletarian" descent. The Soviet ideology rest on the notion that men can be conditioned to communism genetically -- that is, that a few generations conditioned by dictatorship will transmit communist ideology to their descendants, who will be communists at birth. The persecution of racial minorities in Soviet Russia, according to the racial descent and whim of any given commissar, is a matter of record; anti-semitism is particularly prevalent -- only the official pogroms are now called "political purges." There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism. Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members. It is not a man's ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own individual ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly. No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism. A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semi-free economies of the 19th century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country's freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany -- and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe. -- excerpted from the article "Racism" by Ayn Rand, published in the September, 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter, excerpts of which can be found HERE. |
"The left attempts to brand us tea party patriots as haters, while in reality they are the ones spewing hate from deep within their souls." -- Lloyd Marcus, April 2nd, 2010 here: http://www.lloydmarcus.com/
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