Rand Attack

I feel compelled to answer Michael Wilmington’s “review” of “We the Living” (Nov. 12). Actually an attack on Ayn Rand rather than a movie review, the piece contained many biased and malicious statements. I’ll concentrate on the most nauseous.

We learn that the movie is “a vast crazy inversion of ‘Les Miserables,’ with loathsome peasants persecuting impoverished aristocrats. . . .” What we all know, of course, is that peasants are in reality always heroic and those nasty old aristocrats eternally deserve plenty of prosecuting. Sorry, but Wilmington’s backdoor attempt to justify the Bolshevik revolution doesn’t wash. In truth, the book is reminiscent of “The Killing Fields,” with mindless brutes murdering professionals and non-communist intelligentsia, as in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Lastly, at the end of this pile of leftist garbage, we are informed that Rand had no right to call her book a spiritual biography because “she didn’t suffer long in Russia. She fled at 19 to the United States. . . .”

Somehow, an act of incredible courage is made to sound almost cowardly. Somehow, 19 years in a slave pen is not enough for Wilmington.

Ayn Rand had to put up with attacks like these all her life. This small-minded and mean-spirited attempt would probably have elicited a bored shrug. It would have deserved nothing more.

WALTER BALES

Anaheim