But Project X is clearly designed to keep internal order by killing a lot of people at once, and so I think your observation about regimes willing to do that is precisely accurate. One of the nomenklatura - Mouch? - blandly recommended murder in that conversation about Directive 10-289 and Kinnan put his foot down. The union thugs won't stand for it at the moment but later they will. Maybe it's just that they won't stand for people other than themselves doing it.
Rand's written violence has a fairyland-like quality to it that may have been a product both of her times (although Raymond Chandler was putting out some pretty graphic stuff) and her antecedents - as we'll see later, she writes about a gunfight like a philosopher, not a gunfighter.
I'd love to know how much she really knew about the starvation campaign in the Ukraine - at the time the novel was published Krushchev had only just made his secret speech, so a lot of Stalin's abuses were still pretty much papered over, but Rand did have relatives in the old country at the time who occasionally wrote to her. I have to wonder, though, if she had stuck that stuff into AS - would anyone have believed it?
Not Mouch. Ferris is the one who always pushes for death.
I don’t think it was Ferris and I’m not sure if it was Mouch. Rand’s style puzzles me. She dances around two dark truths, which are the use of force in a totalitarian state and the effects of incempetence in an industrial society.
Project X is demonstrated but never used. Rand’s leaders, though obviously despicable, are afraid to use physical force. Imagine a world that issues death threats then kowtows to a union leader who says they can’t threaten to kill the union men. Or else what? They’re evil enough to starve the world through stupidity and political favors, but not evil enough to actually pull the trigger.
Rand mentions a couple of plane crashes and industrial accidents as if they were headlines flashed on the New York Times headline scroll in Manhattan. The train wreck is the only detailed description. It’s reminscent of a scene in The Fountainhead. Dominique Francon meets with a bunch of wealthy do gooders in New York to discuss the plight of the poor. We would refer to this audience as limousine liberals and/or morons. Dominique tells them about the poor people she studied, how they had brand new radios (written in the 1930s) but didn’t pay the rent, spent their days drinking and ignoring their children, etc. Both scenes are described with clinical detachment. They’re not meant to make the reader sad or angry.
Those incidents have consequences, though, which are shockingly real and accurately foretold. We’re familiar with the welfare moochers of the 1980s and fools with heavy machinery were a staple of the Soviet Union. I assume she wanted to appeal to the readers’ sense of logic, rather than emotion. But anger and sorrow are natural when confronted by deadly acts of stupidity. If we didn’t get angry about them, they would happen more often.
No, I think it was Ferris. Ferris is always wanting to kill people. He mentions it in the first person there, and his attitude is referred to by others elsewhere as well.