Donald Hamilton

I noticed on Amazon that at least some of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm books are back it print. I am glad to see it. It is a long series, and as with a number of others, the quality declined as the series wore on. (Hamilton even resorted to the old protagonist-has-amnesia and gee-maybe-the- Aztec/Mayan/Navaho/some-other-primitives-myths-are-real tricks in  a couple of the later books.) However, most of the first dozen or so are hard, tough, exciting, well written stories which present a milieu of spies and assassins so vividly and compellingly that a person may catch himself wondering if the author is speaking from direct experience. (I know of no evidence that he was. I have never heard anyone claim the Hamilton was a secret agent during World War II.)

I recommend reading the first few books in the order they were first published, since the events in those stories are tied together chronologically in  the order of publication. Besides, the first book Death of a Citizen is also one of the best.

I also recommend  saving your time and money on the books  published late in the series. By the way, the books have little or nothing in common with the Matt Helm movies starring Dean Martin.  

Sad Similarities

A couple of days ago, while looking over some of Walter Kaufmann’s commentaries on Friedrich Nietzsche, I thought about  some similarities between Nietzsche and Ayn Rand – not in their ideas where the similarities and differences are well known, but in the last years of their lives and the actions of their followers after their deaths.

In early 1889 after producing five books in 1888, Nietzsche collapsed into insanity and spent the last decade of his life as a helpless and hopeless madman.  Ayn Rand did not lose her mind, but the years between her break with her protégé and lover Nathaniel Branden in 1968 and her death in 1982 seem to have been hard, difficult, and relatively unproductive, even apart from the obvious factor of her declining health.

She had seen Branden as an embodiment of much of her vision of the highest type of man and  her sexual relationship with him as an appropriate recognition of and reward  for herself as a women worthy of being the partner of that type of man.  She also had seen him as a man of action and integrity  who would, through his Nathaniel Branden Institute and the magazine he edited with her, spread her ideas and influence and perhaps over time redeem the American culture and reverse what she saw as its decline.  Rand’s finding her paragon had been lying to her and stringing her along while carrying on an affair behind her back with a pretty girl  in her twenties was, on the evidence, devastating and embittering.  She broke all personal and business ties with him, denounced and repudiated him in print,  and put an immediate end to his institute and with it any sizeable organized efforts by anyone to disseminate her ideas. The following years saw  a decrease In the scope and quality of her writing,  the physical and mental decline and later death of her husband, and her struggles with lung cancer and other health problems.

Her post-1968 essays, while often insightful,  are in general more topical, less theoretical,  and more intensely alienated in tone and pessimistic about the world around her than her earlier writing.  At times  bitterness and a sort of willful pessimism seems to have overwhelmed both objectivity and any desire to maintain and display a “benevolent sense of life”.  Her polemics on the American scene are often about as harsh as the things Nietzsche had to say in his later books about the Germans of his day. Eventually she shut down her newsletter and stopped writing essays, giving boredom and disgust with the state of the culture and the sort of subjects she had been writing about (along with wanting to have more time to work on writing books) as reasons for doing so.  She did not publish any fiction during those years, before or after she stopped writing essays.

After Rand’s death control of her estate including all her papers and unpublished writings passed to Leonard Peikoff. This was unfortunate in several ways .  He was not exactly Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, but there were some ominous parallels.  Just as Förster-Nietzsche had a Nietzsche myth to create and perpetuate, Peikoff had a Rand legend to protect – the story that Ayn Rand’s ideas and opinions never changed meaningfully over time but were always consistent with her final preferences and conclusions. He published editions of Rand’s notes and other unpublished writings that are, according to some scholars who have seen the original documents, misleadingly bowdlerized, redacted, and scrubbed. More seriously and damagingly, he fostered the absurd cult of “official objectivism” with its posturing, dogmatic intolerance,  and notion that Rand’s philosophical writings and opinions form a complete,  closed, and obviously true philosophical system which must be accepted in total without criticism or deviation and with himself as  the ordained interpreter and umpire of questions concerning  that system.

It took years and a Walter Kaufmann to repair and correct some of the damage and misconceptions Förster-Nietzsche created in the minds of the public. Maybe over time somebody will repair and correct some of Peikoff’s.  Considering at least Peikoff and Branden, and perhaps also the older Alan Greenspan, a person might well recall the way Kaufmann began the prologue of his book on Nietzsche - with a quote from his subject that the first adherents prove nothing against a doctrine.

Defending One's Rights

People who value freedom need to be working to defeat any attempts to impose more gun control on American citizens. The right to self defense is a fundamental one that we have to defend uncompromisingly. The leftists have made it plain that their real goal is total disarmament of the populace and that any victory they can get now will be used as a step toward that final objective.

The millions of honest gun owners need to ask the leftists a simple question. “We don’t commit aggression against other people. We are armed only for self defense. We are no threat to you. You know that we are no threat to you. So why and to what purpose do you yearn so intensely to disarm us and make  us helpless and defenseless?”

Since they cannot give a good answer, we are justified in at least considering the possibility that they want us made helpless because they intend to do us harm. (Of course even those among them who do not have harmful intentions themselves still want Americans  left helpless against the common criminals who surely do wish to do them harm. That is bad enough, and that is the generous interpretation.)

More moderate leftists sometime argue that, even if they grant (usually grudgingly) that people have a right to self defense, there is no need for weapons such as AR-15s, because they are not particularly useful for self defense against criminals.  There is some truth to this, particularly in cities and suburbs. Rifles can be fine self defense tools in rural areas. However, focusing only on the question of utility against criminals  misses a crucial point. While it is important to be able to defend oneself against  criminals, that is not the only reason to be armed for self defense. There is another very important one.  We do not have to believe we will see, for example,  an uber-Santorum  carrying his convictions to their logical result of a theocratic state or an uber-Obama carrying  his convictions to their logical result  of camps and slave labor gaining  power in this country to realize that most governments throughout most of history have been despotisms and that vigilance is the price of liberty. (People finding this hypothetical example too rude to Rick or Barack  might look at some of Santorum’s speeches or remember that for a while after Obama’s election in 2008, one of his web sites called for mandatory forced labor by young people.) The Founding Fathers knew the history and the danger, and saw an armed citizenry as a bulwark against tyranny. It still is, and the citizens need to be well armed, now and in the future.

Tolerance vs. Approval

One of the worst aspects of the present’s generally low level of political discourse and controversy is the tendency of advocates and propagandists to conflate tolerating a person, activity or belief with approving of that person activity, or belief . It is done by people of various political opinions, and it dangerously ignores or even erodes a basic principle of liberal society – the idea that in a free society tolerance is mandatory while approval is discretionary.

The most important historical application of this principle was in the founding fathers’ treatment of religion.  In many times and places many people, including highly educated people, took their theological doctrines  far more seriously than most people in America  do today. It follows from accepting any one such doctrine as true that all the others are false, and often not merely mistaken  but pernicious, evil, and fraught with the most horrible  long term consequences imaginable for those who believe  them. In much of Europe, Asia, and Africa  this has led to brutal persecutions, wars, pogroms, mass deportations and genocidal massacres.  In the United States (and later in other places where liberal ideas took hold), there was something different –separation of church and state, freedom of opinion, and explicit legal tolerance of all religious sects and  beliefs. There was no attempt to suppress or stamp out strong differences of opinion or create a coerced, phony consensus. You could see your neighbor as a heretic, a cultist, or a heathen and disapprove of him and refuse to associate with him to your heart’s content, but you had to respect his right to his opinion and refrain from trying to force yours on him.  This has worked remarkably well throughout the history of the republic, allowing this to be a country with almost no serious religious conflicts, despite an immense diversity and intensity of religious opinion.

This principle  should be applied to various present day controversies and defended vigorously from both those who refuse to tolerate anything of which they do not approve and those (sometimes the same people on different issues) who demand we be made to approve, or behave as though we approved,  of everything we tolerate. It is essential to a free society.