Philip Rubenstein
Ayn Rand: High Priestess of the American Right
Summary
Thirty years before Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is Good” speech in the movie Wall Street, Ayn Rand declared that “Money is the Root of All Good” in Atlas Shrugged - still considered one of the most politically influential novels ever written. Born Alisa Rosenbaum into a well-to-do Russian Jewish family, Rand’s lifelong espousal of the creed of selfishness, unfettered individualism and unregulated free markets made her a hate figure for America’s left and high priestess for the nation’s right
Philip Rubenstein
Philip Rubenstein was director of the Parliamentary War Crimes Group, which, in the mid-to-late 1980s, campaigned to bring Nazi war criminals living in the UK to justice. Philip was also the founder-director of the Holocaust Educational Trust and played a role in getting the study of the Shoah onto the national school’s curriculum in the UK. These days, he works with family businesses, advising on governance and continuity from one generation to the next.
I think she absolutely believed every word that she said. She was a myth maker and she believed her own myths. And so from that point of view, I think she was fanatical in the sense that she had an extreme point of view and she absolutely believed it.
She was interviewed many, many times. I mean, in the ‘60s and '70s, she was something of a celebrity. You know, she was often on the Johnny Carson show. She was a regular on TV, and she wrote prodigiously. So she wrote a lot about her life. And when her family were still in Russia, and she tried at one point to get her parents out and failed. And then in the 1980s when things got a bit easier, her sister Nora came to the US to stay with her. And she was desperate for Nora to love America as she loved America. But Nora didn’t like America, didn’t like the lifestyle, and wanted to go back. And the two of them argued the whole time and they fell out. So it’s quite sad really. She just really lost touch with her family.
Well, I think very naively, she felt that there should be no such thing as the state helping people. It should all be charity. And she said that charity had to be completely voluntary. So I think she was putting a huge amount of pressure on individual millionaires and billionaires being philanthropic, and to actually sort out the world’s problems. And did she ever help her sisters or parents? A little. She stopped writing to them in the ‘30s because she felt that her letters would be intercepted by the NKVD, as they were. But her family never realised that’s why she stopped. So by all accounts, they were very upset that they didn’t hear much of her.