3-part playlist - Thanks to Grauthode for alerting me to this one
End States That Sponsor Terrorism
by Leonard Peikoff (October 2, 2001)
Fifty years of increasing American appeasement in the Mideast have led to fifty years of increasing contempt in the Muslim world for the U.S. The climax was September 11, 2001.
Fifty years ago, Truman and Eisenhower surrendered the West's property rights in oil, although that oil rightfully belonged to those in the West whose science, technology, and capital made its discovery and use possible. The first country to nationalize Western oil, in 1951, was Iran. The rest, observing our frightened silence, hurried to grab their piece of the newly available loot.
The cause of the U.S. silence was not practical, but philosophical. The Mideast's dictators were denouncing wealthy egotistical capitalism. They were crying that their poor needed our sacrifice; that oil, like all property, is owned collectively, by virtue of birth; and that they knew their viewpoint was true by means of otherworldly emotion. Our Presidents had no answer. Implicitly, they were ashamed of the Declaration of Independence. They did not dare to answer that Americans, properly, were motivated by the selfish desire to achieve personal happiness in a rich, secular, individualist society.
The Muslim countries embodied in an extreme form every idea--selfless duty, anti-materialism, faith or feeling above science, the supremacy of the group--which our universities, our churches, and our own political Establishment had long been upholding as virtue. When two groups, our leadership and theirs, accept the same basic ideas, the most consistent side wins. (excerpt)
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2635
Leonard Peikoff, writer, objectivist philosopher Dr. Leonard Peikoff, intellectual heir to Ayn Rand, explores the unlikely tension between a democratic nation and its people. Peikoff claims that, from its beginning, America has stood for the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, individual rights, capitalism, and the pursuit of happiness. He asserts that the dominant trends in America today, trends endorsed not only by our leadership, but seemingly by the general public, represent the opposite of these ideals. Dr. Peikoff, considered the foremost philosopher of objectivism, explores this contradiction, along with what he calls our current moral cowardice, with special emphasis on US foreign policy. In this talk, Peikoff analyzes and rejects the Bush administration response to the terrorist attacks on the U.S., from 9/11 until today. America, he says, should have reacted to 9/11 as it did to Pearl Harbor by declaring war not on Afghanistan or Iraq, but on Iran. The public's approval of Bush's policies, he argues, indicates the tragic deterioration of the American mind in the last 60 years, owing to the influence in our schools and colleges of Progressive educators and intellectuals.
Update: Peikoff vs. O´reilly