Michael Malice - The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

ALSO BY MICHAEL MALICE

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The Anarchist Handbook

by

All I maintain is that on this earth

there are plagues and there are victims,

and its up to us, so far as possible,

not to join forces with the plagues.

Albert Camus

Copyright 2023 Michael Malice

All rights reserved.

ISBN:

Contents

Chapter 1

Doesnt anybody smile in Russia anymore?

Ayn Rand was not laughing.

This was no laughing matter. In the fall of 1947, Rand had been summoned to Washington to appear as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). She was in a unique position, being the only witness to have come from the Soviet Union. As such, Rand understood that she could offer insight and perspective that even the most informed American would be somewhat ignorant of.

It had been a very long road for Rand to get to Washington, D.C. She had been born in czarist Russia in 1905 as Alice Rosenbaum, a name unknown to everyone in America. Even her native-born husband would spend their fifty years of marriage without ever learning her birth name. To Americans this sort of thinking is so paranoid as to be downright alien: if you cant trust your husband, who can you trust? But that was precisely the point for Rand. Unlike the people in that congressional room, she had seen firsthand what happens when the country you live in becomes a country where no one can be fully trusted. If, say, a family member would never betray you as long as they had breath in their lungswell, there were mechanisms to take that breath away, and there were powerful men who knew how to exploit those mechanisms extremely well.

When Alice had entered young adulthood she was increasingly moved by philosophy and the world of ideas. Strong-willed to the point of obstinacyshe was later notorious for arguing with her young protgs until dawn about whether a movie they liked was, in fact, a good oneAlices outspoken personality would not serve her well in Lenins newfound Soviet Union. Things started getting downright dangerous by the time she was attending Petrograd State University. She had seen herself what happened to outspoken classmates who felt comfortable getting up in class and denouncing what had been going on politically. As a freshman in 1921, Alice watched one student give an anti-Communist speech during student council elections:

Alice never forgot the shock of the day she arrived at school to discover that the arrogant young man had been arrested in the night, and was to be sent to the slow, terrible death of Siberia. She never saw or heard of him again. [] By the end of that school year, there were no more anti-Communist speeches on campus, and there were no more anti-Communists on the student council.

By the spring of 1924 it got even worse, with students being purged all over the Soviet Union simply due to their familys economic class. It was done under the slogan of We will not educate our class enemies, Rand later wrote. Thousands of young people were expelled from schools all over the country and were denied an education, in payment for the sins of their ancestors. As the daughter of a pharmacist, Alice was clearly part of the despised bourgeois class. Between her background and her temperament, her family agreed that she had little future in Russia. She would either be vanished herself, or she would have to do the vanishing.

It was during her university years that Alice had strongly fallen in love with America and published her first two works. The first was a biographical sketch of the actress Pola Negri, while the second was entitled Hollywood: American Movie City . Alice was not alone. To Russians, the word abroad had come to take on a miraculous meaning. As she later explained it:

The meaning of that word for a Soviet citizen is incommunicable to anyone who has not lived in that country. If you project what you would feel for a combination of Atlantis, the Promised Land and the most glorious civilization on another planet, as imagined by a most benevolent kind of science fiction, you will have a pale approximation. Abroad, to a Soviet Russian, is as distant, shining and unattainable as these; yet to any Russian who lifts his head for a moment from the Soviet muck, the concept abroad is a psychological necessity, a lifeline and soul preserver.

It took until 1926, when Alice was twenty years old, for her to gain permission to go abroad, during one of the brief thaws when Soviet citizens were still allowed to step foot outside of the Soviet Union. The pretense was that Alice was going to visit American relatives, but this was a brazen lie. Everyone understood that she would never return to Russia. At her going away party, one of the older guests pulled Alice aside and asked her to make him a promise. Tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery and we are all dying slowly, he said. And so she left her homeland, not with wistful remorse, but with complete loathing for the whole country, including the czarist period.

Her grasp of English being somewhat spotty, the rechristened Ayn Rand made her way to Hollywood, American movie city, to try and make it as a screenwriter. A lack of skill in language would be somewhat mitigated since this was still the era of silent movies, where concept could make up for a lack of dialogue. In September 1926 she bumped into superstar director Cecil B. DeMille as she left his studio after being told there were no job openings. DeMille gave her a ride in his roadster and then gave her a part in The King of Kings , his epic film about Jesus. Sure she was just an extra, but Ayn Rand had officially made it into the movies. It was the first of many odd jobs she would hold in Hollywood.

While shooting the film Rand spotted a young actor with a minor role named Frank OConnor. OConnor soon married that very interesting and funny Russian girl.

By the mid-1930s Rand began shopping around her first full-length novel. Originally called Airtight , the book she retitled We the Living is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. Mindful of how to market a bookespecially at the heights of the Great DepressionRands angle was a clever one. The novel was:

the first story written by a Russian who knows the living conditions of the new Russia and who has actually lived under the Soviets in the period described. My plot and characters are fiction, but the living conditions, the atmosphere, the circumstances which make the incidents of the plot possible, are all true, to the smallest detail. There have been any number of novels dealing with modern Russia, but they have been written either by migrs who left Russia right after the revolution and had no way of knowing the new conditions, or by Soviet authors who were under the strictest censorship and had no right and no way of telling the whole truth. My book is, as far as I know, the first one by a person who knows the facts and also can tell them.