# Rereading “Atlas Shrugged” **URL:** https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/rereading-atlas-shrugged/1080 **Category:** John Walker's Reading List **Tags:** ayn-rand, atlas-shrugged **Created:** [22 March 2022 15:00 UTC](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/rereading-atlas-shrugged/1080 "2022-03-22T15:00:48Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 6
### Author: ![johnwalker](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/user_avatar/scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/johnwalker/32/17415_2.png) [@johnwalker](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/u/johnwalker) #### Post date: [23 March 2022 12:17 UTC](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/rereading-atlas-shrugged/1080/6 "2022-03-23T12:17:57Z")
> [@Cyrano](#): > > In those years, I found Rand’s descriptions of the looters to be quaint and perhaps anachronistic. They bore little resemblance to the leftists who debated socialism and capitalism at the tables. Those leftists wouldn’t seize factories and sell off the machines to various starving People’s States for no apparent reason whatsoever. But then, the common model, repeated over and over again in communist revolutions, is that the intellectuals and academics who are often the avant-garde of the revolution and imagined themselves near the top of the pyramid in the shining new age, are quickly swept aside and replaced by the likes of Cuffy Meigs and TInky Holloway in _Atlas Shrugged_. In the 1960s I heard a talk at my school by an emigré from Cuba who had been a professor and supporter of Castro and described how, within months of the fall of Batista, what he described as “goon squads” took over the universities with the goal of transforming them into centres of indoctrination for the regime, discarding its original supporters as having served their purpose. It has been said of her writing, “Ayn Rand’s heroes are fake, but her villains are real”. Part of the insight in the story is that the villains are not scheming evil geniuses but rather incompetents who place misguided theories above evidence from the real world and their innumerable subordinates whose first priority is to never take responsibility for any decision or action. --- _[View the full topic](https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/rereading-atlas-shrugged/1080)._