From ka_strom@ix.netcom.com Sat Sep 21 10:08:30 PDT 1996 Article: 67334 of alt.revisionism Path: nizkor.almanac.bc.ca!news.island.net!vertex.tor.hookup.net!hookup!news.graphics.cornell.edu!news.tc.cornell.edu!caen!newsxfer2.itd.umich.edu!news.eecs.umich.edu!news.sojourn.com!newsfeed.concentric.net!news.texas.net!news1.best.com!news.sgi.com!spool.mu.edu!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!dispatch.news.demon.net!demon!netcom.net.uk!ix.netcom.com!news From: Kevin Alfred StromNewsgroups: alt.politics.nationalism.white,alt.politics.white-power,alt.revisionism Subject: Re: Nazism v. Communism Date: Mon, 16 Sep 1996 13:48:19 -0700 Organization: Netcom Lines: 337 Message-ID: <323DBD13.E48@ix.netcom.com> References: <199609070135.SAA02878@abraham.cs.berkeley.edu> <50siqs$fui@freenet-news.carleton.ca> <3236F30F.D8F@conterra.com> <516tsi$s96@lendl.cc.emory.edu> <323B18BA.54FF@conterra.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: roc-mn2-17.ix.netcom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-NETCOM-Date: Mon Sep 16 11:48:35 AM PDT 1996 X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.01 (Win16; I) Xref: nizkor.almanac.bc.ca alt.politics.nationalism.white:30471 alt.politics.white-power:44024 alt.revisionism:67334 Here is more evidence that the "Whitaker is a nazi" "argument" has been used: ---begin quotes message from forman@netcom.com--- Subject: My Early Years From: forman@netcom.com (frank forman) Date: 1996/02/03 Message-Id: Sender: forman@netcom23.netcom.com Organization: NETCOM On-Line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism MY EARLY YEARS, 1964-66 by Frank Forman 1996 February 3 John Ridpath's nasty review of Chris Sciabarra's _Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical_ in the current issue of _The Intellectual Activist_ brings back some memories of college and graduate school days. I knew Ridpath and his friend Northrup Buechner [pronounced BEAK-ner, at least in those days] during my final semester as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. This was the second semester of the 1965-66 academic year. I was a mathematics major and took most of the graduate math courses U.Va. had to offer. But I was getting sick of the endless piling of abstraction upon abstraction but nevertheless stuck it out. Midway through college, in the Summer of 1964, Rooy Dent, a friend back in Colorado Springs (where I had lived since I was ten) gave me a copy of _Atlas Shrugged_ and said "read a hundred pages a week and you'll be finished by the end of the Summer." He didn't say what the book was all about and for the first two or three weeks I thought it was a satire about whiners. But not long thereafter I found out otherwise and got so hooked I read it to the end, with time outs for my Summer job. The upshot was that I became an Objectivist and subscribed to _The Objectivist Newsletter_. This lasted about a year, when I got into the Colorado Springs network of Robert LeFevre [luh- FAVE] and his Freedom School, a place where businessmen went to attend one- and two-week seminars to learn about freedom. (They had lecturers like Milton Friedman, not hard to do in those far more beleaguered days.) Before then LeFevre had been editor of the editorial page of the _Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph_, one of the Hoiles Freedom Newspaper chain, headquartered in the then-infamous right-wing Orange County, California. LeFevre was an anarchist and he, and his replacement at the _G- T_, Cecil Grove, persuaded me to become an anarchist, or more specifically, Bob's philosophy, which he called "autarchy." Bob had changed Freedom School into the more grandiose sounding Rampart College and had put together a faculty, two of whom were James J. Martin (now 80 and living in Colorado Springs and the author of _Men against the State_, still the classic treatment of American anarchists) and W.H. Hutt, the free-market South African economist, who died a few years ago. Martin stayed on until the end of Rampart College, but when Hutt learned that Rampart College was not a true college, he decided not to go (I don't know whether he broke any contract) and instead went to the University of Virginia, where he taught a course in labor economics during my final undergraduate semester. As I said, I had gotten royally sick of math, and so I went over to the economics department and spoke to James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, two of the Founding Fathers of the Public Choice school, about switching to economics in graduate school. They encouraged me to do so and I took Hutt's course, the only economics course I had as an undergraduate, though I read Mises' _Human Action_ and Rothbard's much better _Man, Economy and State_, as well as lot of lesser free-market economics works. I got an A in Hutt's course, even though with his thick South African accent and my hearing loss I faded out after about ten minutes in every class. (It was the *third* easiest A I ever earned, for all I did was show up to class and spent two hours looking over a book he wanted us to read.) I also audited a course taught by Leland Yeager (later and still the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Auburn University in Alabama) called Political Economy. Yeager had all of us, including me, write and read a paper to the class. It was after the first class with Yeager that Tom Ireland, then finishing his second year in graduate economics, came up and introduced himself to me, took me over to the student union, and bought me a coke. (None of the math graduate students were ever that friendly.) A few days later, Tom spent almost a whole weekend arguing me out of my Objectivism (anarchist variety), by pointing out that Ayn Rand did not ground morality successfully and in fact used "man" in several distinct ways, something noted regularly in this Newsgroup. Tom was an amoralist, and as I could not respond to his arguments, I gave up my pretensions to knowing true morality. This was seven years after I gave up, at age 14, my belief in god in response to a similar challenge to justify my beliefs. Tom said that I must get to know another graduate student, then in his third year, Bob Whitaker. Bob definitely thought that blacks were inferior to whites and presented another argument against Objectivism: what good would an Objectivist society be if were made up solely of [[TABOO WORD DELETED!!-The Internet Monster]]. I had no answer to that, given his characterization of the ability of blacks. (Later I went to the big university library to see what evidence there was on the question. I found no evidence that the races were equal in innate mental ability and recently started a thread, cross-posted to a great many Newsgroups to see if there is any evidence my search at the U.Va. library and subsequent reading failed to uncover. If you've been following this thread, you know how heated the responses have been! I did NOT have to learn about premise-checking >from Ayn Rand.) Tom introduced me to Ridpath and Buechner, then also in their second year in graduate school, though they did not get their doctorates intil 1974 and 1971, resp. (I didn't get mine until 1985 and then from George Mason University under Buchanan, but that's another long story.) These two Objectivists found my premise-checking intolerable and so no conversations were forthcoming after the first. (Buechner said to me, when I brought up Bob, "Whitaker is irrelevant." I repeated that comment to Bob, and he was delighted.) Tom later told me that when he asked Ridpath and Buechner about the morality of abortion, they hemmed and hawed and had to write to Ayn Rand to get the answer! Talk about a bunch of second- handers, just like Dr. Pea Cough. I must say, though, that I have a certain admiration for the sheer persistence of the two, since they are still Objectivists, Pea Coughers even, and will be giving lectures at the upcoming Second Renaissance Conference. (Ridpath is eminently recognizable from his photograph in the flyer for the Conference. He is the second handsomest Objectivist, save only Frank O'Connor himself.) I had forgotten R&B more or less, until Tom came to me and asked that I support him in his bid to be elected president of the John Randolph Society, a sort of Young Conservatives, i.e., to the right of the Young Republicans. This Society was quite prestigious at U.Va., much more so than the Young Republicans, and had sponsored a good many lectures. (U.Va. was one of the last "conformist" schools; today it is as politically correct as any of them.) [[SO WHO'S THE CONFORMIST??]] Now Ridpath was also running for the presidency of the John Randolph Society. During the election, Buechner got up and said, roughly, "Ireland knows Whitaker, who is a Nazi. Whitaker says he would shoot President Johnson if doing so would further his Nazi aims. Now Ireland said he would stop Whitaker from shooting Johnson, if able to do so. But I don't believe Ireland would in fact stop Whitaker. Therefore, vote for Ridpath." My memory is a little unclear after nearly thirty years, but that is the gist of it, to the best of my recollection. As you might imagine, Ireland won the election. As things turned out, Tom did not stay for his third year at U.Va. (In the Ph.D. program, the first two years are spent on courses, which most complete, and the third year on the dissertation, which few complete in a single year.) Instead, he got a teaching job at Loyola University in Chicago and his wife a fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School (quite an honor, since law school fellowships then were extremely rare, as opposed to graduate school fellowships, like mine from the National Science Foundation). Meanwhile one of Objectivists told the Secret Service of an assassination plot against Johnson. They duly came to investigate at the economics department, which Yeager took all-too- seriously. He was then in charge of the graduate economics program and called me into his office. Knowing I was a friend of Ireland, he tried to discourage me for entering graduate school that Fall and explained to me the graduate school did not want any "ideologues." I assured him that I was not an "ideologue" and was *not* an Objectivist trouble-maker. He was distinctly uncomfortable with this whole business and his hands turned blue as he was talking to me. But he wrote the dean of the graduate school to rescind my admission. (Not just anyone can get admitted to graduate school with no completed undergraduate courses in the subject under their belt, but U.Va. was different. I pretty much had the run of the place as an undergraduate and took graduate courses, starting my first year, in math and philosophy (a course in symbolic logic, which got me my easiest A; the second easiest, to make it complete, was a math course in the "topology of fiber bundles," but whose take-home final could have been done by someone who had had only the basic first-year graduate math courses. It took me all of half an hour to do. Wierd.) as well as in English (second year) and, under Hutt, economics. Would that other colleges trust the lowly consumer to know what he wants!). But Buchanan intervened with a letter calling me an "erratic genius" and asking that I be admitted. The dean compromised, just saying I had to get a 3.2 (out of 4) average that last semester. (The reason I know all this is that Sarah took a job in the graduate school office shortly after we got married between semesters of my second year in graduate school and found these letters in the files.) To follow up, the John Randolph Society simply lapsed, though in my *second* year in graduate school (1967-68) I took it over and got it affiliated with the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, much more conservative than libertarian). I got the ISI to sponsor a seminar on Man and Property in the Spring of 1968. We brought the great Mises there and well as James Jackson Kilpatrick, then a columnist for the Richmond _News Leader_; it was his first invited visit to U.Va. Also speaking was Alfred Avins, who gave a good talk about how the Reconstruction Era civil rights laws *only* gave freedmen the right to belong to *civil* society, i.e., to make contracts, something denied them as slaves. (The Supreme Court paid no heed to history and interpreted these laws as mandating *restrictions* on freedom of contract in the name of non-discrimination.) I plum forgot who the fourth speaker was, until Sarah just reminded me that it was Paul Craig Roberts, now a conservative/libertarian columnist. Sarah and I got to eat dinner next to Prof. and Mrs. Mises. I just remember him as quite dogmatic, but then old men often are, and so was Ayn Rand as she got older and Nathaniel Branden purged nearly everyone who was not a young sycophant, like Mr. (as he was then) Pea Cough. How dogmatic Miss Rand was along, I don't know, for I don't know how old she was when (so I read) when she was attacking a Christian for being irrational at some gathering or other, Mises later upbraided her for being "too Jewish." Anyhow, some history you're unlikely to get from any other source. I doubt either Ridpath or Buechner even remember me today, and it is highly unlikely that they tried to get Yeager to keep me from entering graduate school. But let this serve as a warning to you. You are unlikely to have get a wife with a job where the files happen to be. And had Yeager succeeded in keeping me out of graduate school--I'm don't see how he could have had anything at all against me personally--I would be completely in the dark. I open up this thread to a discussion of the morality, and fundamental decency, of any "Objectivist" who would call up the Secret Service in a case like this. Or is it that, when it comes to Objectivism, the end justifies the means? Frank ---end quoted message from forman@netcom.com--- The evidence is clear: several people, at least, have tried to discredit Mr. Whitaker with the synthetic smear word "nazi." With all good wishes, -- Kevin Alfred Strom ----------------------------------------------------------- Resource list; not all are affiliated with me; I speak only for myself: Occupied America Homepage: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/america/ Information on Amateur Radio Operations on 3950 kHz: http://www.usaor.net/users/mckinney/ The Finest in European Art: http://www.telecall.co.uk/~synergy/gframing/cat2.html Patriotic Resistance: http://www.natvan.com/ http://www.natall.com/
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