America at War

As the gruesome bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon demonstrate--and before that, of the USS Cole, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia, the World Trade Center, Pam Am flight 103--America is at war.

To understand America's depressingly feeble response to those warring against it, one must understand the fundamental ideas, the philosophic ideas, shaping our leaders' foreign policy. And to understand why America is the hated target of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the PLO, Syria, Libya and their hordes of terrorists, one must understand the philosophic ideas motivating them.

What ideas have undercut America? Politically, America's policy is one of appeasement, which emboldens our enemies. We occasionally half-heartedly bomb individual terrorists, but we negotiate with and leave unharmed the countries that perpetrate the attacks. Our leaders have been taught in college that pragmatism--the abandonment of a principled stand--is practical. Morally, America has been disarmed by altruism, the idea that sacrifice for the sake of others is the moral ideal. Our leaders think it is wrong to defend, by whatever force is necessary, America's self-interest. And the moral relativism and egalitarianism flowing from our universities causes our leaders to identify our enemies simply as men who have different but equally valid values. Our enemies are not seen as the evil they are.

Those warring against us are not isolated madmen but people motivated by irrational philosophical ideas. The religious mysticism and supernaturalism of Islam teaches them that the human mind is an impotent nothing that must prostrate itself before God, that the individual must sacrifice himself to the supernatural (the suicide bombers believe their self-sacrifice is the ticket to a blessed afterlife). Accordingly, these people hate those who champion not God but this earth--not mysticism but science and technology--not faith but reason--not collectivism and obedience to authority but individualism and freedom. In short, they hate and want to destroy the core values of Western Civilization--and its greatest flowering, the United States of America. It is no accident that they targeted the two tallest buildings in New York's skyline, concrete symbols of America's achievements.

If you wish to defend your life by defending America, click on the links to the right for articles and interviews from the pro-reason perspective of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. You will learn the ideas and rational principles that you must put into practice to win this war.