Ayn Rand on black/white vs gray area:
PLAYBOY: In Atlas Shrugged you wrote, “There are two sides to every issue. One side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” Isn’t this a rather black-and-white set of values?
RAND: It most certainly is. I most emphatically advocate a black-and-white view of the world. Let us define this. What is meant by the expression “black and white”? It means good and evil. Before you can identify anything as gray, as middle of the road, you have to know what is black and what is white, because gray is merely a mixture of the two. And when you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil.
When you chose the lesser of two evils, you still get evil.
Ayn Rand largely chose evil herself.
So if there were two sides in World War II, and one side was fascism while the other side was pseudodemocracy, and fascism is evil, that must mean that pseudodemocracy is good!
That is not some abstract formulation. That was actually Ayn Rand’s position during World War II.
In the sixties, Rand condemned the hippies for not choosing sides, because they correctly saw that neither side was right in the Vietnam War, and then they went off and did useless, parasitical stuff like create microcomputing, biotech, and cool music. Whereas Rand’s followers went on to become productive members of society like neoconservatives and central bankers (see link at side, “The Mess That Greenspan Made”).
imp – no it means that both were evil.