I recently read a book by Ayn Rand called We the Living, which I highly recommend. She wrote it after fleeing from Soviet Russia, as a warning to the rest of the world. Here are some highlights from the commentary about why she wrote it in the first place:
We the Living (First Novel by Ayn Rand)
Having escaped to the United States, Ayn Rand had to get
Russia out of her system -- by telling the world what was actually happening
there. A young Russian had said to her at a party in 1926, just before she left
for America: “When you get there, tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery and
that we are all dying.” We the Living told them. For example, these bits from
what she heard at mandated Party rallies:
“This is not a funeral, comrades, but a birthday party! We are not celebrating the death of a comrade, but the birth of a new humanity.”
“The most dangerous, the most insidious, the
most evil of human words is the word
‘ I.’ We have outgrown it. ‘ We’ is the slogan of the future.”
‘ I.’ We have outgrown it. ‘ We’ is the slogan of the future.”
Hers is a story about dictatorship, any
dictatorship, anywhere, at any time, whether it be Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany,
or — which this novel might do its share in helping to prevent — a socialist
America. She shows that the primary communist principle is that Man must exist for the
sake of the State, rather than the other way around. She experienced it
first-hand when her family returned to what was once their home. All private
property had been confiscated. Many families inhabited what were once single-home
families. These inhabitants were assigned -- you as the former owner of the
residence had no say whatsoever. Rand is an eyewitness to the essential issue,
that the communist principle is evil, and that it can lead to nothing but evil.
Rand knew that the American public did not understand the nature
of communism, but she did not know that she was trying to publish the truth at
the start of The Red Decade, as it was later called. An anti-communist
librarian had told her, when she was still working on the novel, that “the
communists have a tremendous influence on American intellectuals, and you will
find a lot of people opposing you.”
Rand’s original title for We the Living was Airtight,
the meaning being that under dictatorship, man cannot survive. In it, she
intended to answer the many-too-many advocates of collectivism, and answer them
in a manner which would not be easily forgotten.
Rand says she wrote the book because she believes “that man
will always be an individualist, whether he knows it or not, and I want to make
it my duty to make him know it.”
Do we know it yet, even this late? Do we know the nature of
a dictatorship as it grows ever more visible in the land of the free?
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