THE WAR PARTY ON CAMPUS
Lynne Cheney's Circles
Call for Mass Murder
by Harley Schlanger
On Oct. 16, 2006, with the mid-term election less than three weeks away, and time slipping away for a Bush-Cheney Administration "October Surprise" military strike against Iran, a speaker told students at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) that a genocidal attack against Muslims was required to generate "a resurgence in the pride for Western civilization."
In covering this speech, the Daily Bruin on Oct. 17 reported that the speaker, Dr. Yaron Brook, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), warned that "Islamic totalitarian states pose a severe threat to the security of the United States," adding that a way to defeat these regimes "is to kill up to hundreds of thousands of their supporters." This, he said, would "shrink popular support for extremist ideas to a small minority of the population," instead of the 40% which he claims supports such regimes now.
While some might wish to dismiss this as the demented rant of a lone madman who was, perhaps, off his meds, the reality is clear to anyone who has read the LaRouche PAC's latest pamphlet, "Is Joseph Goebbels on Your Campus?" Dr. Brook and his ARI are an integral part of the "war party" run by the Vice President's wife, Lynne Cheney, and are deploying to America's campuses to whip up support for new imperial wars, while intimidating their opponents with tactics which would make Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels green with envy.
Brook's presentation was sponsored by LOGIC (Liberty, Objectivity, Greed, Individualism, Capitalism), an ARI-linked organization at UCLA, which also has ties to the right-wing "Collegiate Network" of "conservative" campus throwaway newspapers. The UCLA affiliate is the Bruin Standard, whose editor is LaRouche-slanderer Garin Hovannisian, a protégé of David Horowitz, who is one of the coordinators of Lynne Cheney's campus Gestapo. (See EIR, Oct. 20, 2006.)
It is this network of money-grubbing, self-promoting liars which is recruiting the shock troops for the Cheney-John Train imperial war party.
The War Party
With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proving to be the deadly quagmires that Lyndon LaRouche had predicted they would be, support for the Bush-Cheney suicidal "stay the course" policy has collapsed in the polls. The revulsion of U.S. citizens to this policy has deepened to the point that many former Bush-Cheney loyalists among Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have turned on them, and a Democratic Party landslide has become a real possibility.
Yet, with rapidly declining support at home for these wars, and growing opposition internationally—including in Great Britain, where active duty military leaders are calling for withdrawal—the war party behind Bush and Cheney is continuing its maniacal push for a new war against Iran or North Korea, which could include the use, by the United States, of nuclear weapons.
For example, take the case of George Shultz, the old synarchist, who is the most important architect of the Bush Administration. He told an audience at Stanford University on Oct. 14, that the United States must stop issuing warnings to Iran, and go to war.
The UN and Western governments, he said, say that certain actions are unacceptable, but, when they happen, they accept them. When asked what should be done about this, Shultz, the man behind Pinochet's fascist coup in Chile in 1973, said, "We have to follow up—shoot.... When I joined the Marines, a sergeant gave me a gun and said, 'Never aim at anyone unless you are willing to pull the trigger.' Today we see continual unwillingness to pull the trigger—Darfur, Iran, North Korea, Hezbollah. You have to follow through and shoot."
It is on behalf of these marching orders, to overcome that "unwillingness to pull the trigger," that the network directed by John Train and Lynne Cheney is being deployed.
What Is the Ayn Rand Institute?
The Ayn Rand Institute was founded in 1985 by Leonard Peikoff, who received a Ph.D. at New York University under the direction of Sidney Hook. A LaRouche-hater from the late 1960s, Hook founded the University Centers for a Rational Alternative (UCRA), which was the direct predecessor to Lynne Cheney's campus gestapo, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).
Peikoff is the "heir" to the legacy of the late Ayn Rand, the founder of "Objectivism." Rand's theory mixed the anti-Platonic philosophy of Aristotle, John Locke, and Friedrich Nietzsche with the fanatical anti-nation-state views of Austrian fascist economist Ludwig von Mises. The result is the glorification of Hobbesian man, driven by "self-interest," i.e., greed and lust, in a fight of each against all.
One of the most important followers of Rand is the retired chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, who was part of an initial hard-core group of supporters, known as "The Collective." Peikoff was also part of this group. Greenspan's first appearance in the New York Times was in a letter to the editor of the Book Review magazine in 1957, when he wrote a defense of Rand. He lectured on economics for the Nathaniel Branden Institute, which promoted her views. Branden was another member of Rand's inner circle. When Greenspan was appointed head of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Gerald Ford, he bestowed upon Rand the special honor of an invitation to the swearing-in ceremony. During his tenure under Ford, he was a leading promoter of the dismantling of government programs which advanced the general welfare, while successfully advocating deregulation.
Greenspan was dubbed the "Undertaker" by Rand, perhaps for his grave demeanor, perhaps in prescient anticipation of his role in destroying the U.S. economy during his stint as Fed chairman.
Yaron Brook has been head of the Ayn Rand Institute since 2000, but his curriculum vitae shows that he is far more than a monetarist ideologue. The ARI website notes: "His years of service in Israeli Army Intelligence, along with extensive research, have given him an expertise on the Middle Eastern conflict and terrorism, and American foreign policy in that region. Many college campuses around the country have hosted his most recent talk: 'The Moral Case for Supporting Israel.' " Brook founded three companies, including BH Equity Research, a venture-capital consulting firm in San Jose, California, and was an assistant professor of finance for seven years at Santa Clara University. He holds a B.Sc. in civil engineering from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and an MBA and Ph.D. in finance from the University of Texas at Austin.
Preemptive Nuclear War
Killing the nation-state with bad economic policy, as Greenspan did, is not enough for the Cheney war party. A quick review of the activities of the intersection between the ARI and the Lynne Cheney/Campus Watch/Horowitz network shows that they are presently on an organizing drive to promote preemptive nuclear warfare, modelled on the approach pushed by Britain's Bertrand Russell after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, explicitly defending the use, by Truman, of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and urging the use of nuclear weapons against Russia.
The call by Brook, in his UCLA speech, for killing "hundreds of thousands" of Muslims is characteristic of this bloodthirsty outlook. In a rambling article which appeared in the inaugural issue of The Objective Standard in 2006, Brook attacks the idea of "just war," putting forward instead Ayn Rand's theory of "rational self-interest" to justify a preemptive strike against Iran.
Brook concludes, "We are losing the war on Islamic Totalitarianism because our leadership, political and military, is crippled by the morality of altruism, embodied in the tenets of Just War Theory. The moral code inherent in Just War Theory defines rules that undercut, inhibit, and subvert any hope of success in war."
Brook's co-author in this diatribe was Alex Epstein, who is a junior fellow at the ARI; he also works on the staff of David Horowitz's frontpagemagazine.com.
Horowitz, who once worked for Bertrand Russell, is another supporter of using nuclear weapons to kill large numbers of Muslims. When confronted by LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) members during a speech at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Horowitz defended Truman's use of nuclear weapons, and added that the United States should use nuclear weapons against Iran.
Another member of the ARI genocide team is Prof. John Lewis, who is scheduled to appear at an ARI-sponsored event with Brook in Boston Oct. 20-22. An article by Lewis appeared in Capitalism Magazine in the April 2006 issue, titled "The Moral Lesson of Hiroshima." Lewis argues that the effects of the nuclear bombs detonated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki "were so beneficent, so wide-ranging and so long-term, that the bombings must be ranked among the most moral acts ever committed"!
Presenting the Randian justification for a neo-con strike against Iran, North Korea, et al., he concludes, "It took a country that values this world to bomb this [Japanese imperial] system into extinction.
"For the Americans to do so while refusing to sacrifice their own troops to save the lives of enemy civilians was a sublimely moral action."
Also appearing at the Boston conference will be Brook's close collaborator, Daniel Pipes. In addition to the role he plays as one of the leading neo-con promoters of the Clash of Civilization, Pipes was a founder of Campus Watch.
The ARI produced a supplemental issue of its Impact newsletter in September 2002, titled "America at War." This included an article by Dr. Onkar Ghate, "Innocents in War?" with the subhead, "A Free Nation Should Not Let the Fear of Causing Civilian Casualties Hinder Its Self-Defense." Okhate wrote that "our government's concern—shared by many Americans—about killing civilians is morally mistaken." He ended with a cold-blooded conclusion typical of these "Objectivists": "War is terrible but sometimes necessary. To win the war on terrorism, we must not let a mistaken concern with 'innocents' deter us. As a free nation, we have the moral right to defend ourselves, even if this requires mass civilian deaths in terrorist countries" (emphasis added). Ghate is described as the head of ARI's undergraduate and graduate education programs.
One can add to this rogues' gallery of Randian proponents of mass extermination the name of Leonard Peikoff. He wrote an article for Capitalism Magazine on Oct. 2, 2001, shortly after the events of Sept. 11, titled, "End States That Sponsor Terrorism." The title comes from what he calls the "excellent words" of neo-con Paul Wolfowitz, who was then Deputy Secretary of Defense, and instrumental in pushing the false intelligence reports of WMDs used by the Bush Administration to justify a war against Iraq.
In this article, Peikoff demanded an attack on Iran, and endorsed the use of nuclear weapons, writing, "A proper war in self-defense is one fought without self-crippling restrictions placed on our commanders in the field. It must be fought with the most effective weapons we possess (a few weeks ago, Rumsfeld refused, correctly, to rule out nuclear weapons.)"
What's on Your Children's Campus?
Members of the LYM have taken up the responsibility to expose and defeat "Big Sister" Cheney's gestapo operations on America's college campuses. LYM researchers are in the process of identifying these operations, and showing the interconnections among the various organizations which have been established to brainwash students into accepting the idea that "nothing can be done" to change policy, you might as well "just relax and enjoy it."
The UCLA case is exemplary of the relevant overlaps of personnel, and networks, indicating their common mother. The chairman of LOGIC at the UCLA campus is also the associate editor of the neo-con Bruin Standard, one of the 90-odd college papers controlled by the Buckley/Cheney/Straussian "Collegiate Network" across the United States. This newspaper network is regularly used by the fascist neo-cons to both carry out witchhunts and slanders against professors who oppose the Bush Administration's fascist policies. Naturally, this has led them to be used to publish slanders on the LaRouche Youth Movement as well.
Throughout the country, LYM organizers are demanding that students adopt proactive measures to challenge these fascists. There has been a reign of terror run against professors and students by Lynne Cheney and her minions. The distribution of the LaRouche PAC pamphlet (See "Is Goebbels On Your Campus?'' from pamphlet) is beginning the process of freeing youth to do what youth should do: Challenge authority, especially when that authority demands submission to the corrupt, lying policies of the doomed Bush-Cheney Administration.
