☆ Mark Hinkle: Atlas Shrugged and my brush with socialism

Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association president Mark Hinkle considers how Ayn Rand’s renowned “Atlas Shrugged” (albeit fictitious) echoes the terrifying realities of socialism — that he’s experienced firsthand. The latest installment in favorite political book analyses. An Opp Now exclusive.

Pat Waite nailed it by starting with Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Great book, okay movie.

I read “Atlas Shrugged” at age seventeen while traveling around Europe with my family in 1968. My mother wanted something to occupy my evenings, and a book with 1,168 pages was just the ticket. It took weeks to read.

As luck would have it, our family got to experience some real life socialism during that trip. 

On August 20, 1968, the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. Prague was on our itinerary for September. To gain access, we had to secure a visa from the Czech embassy in Vienna, Austria. When in Vienna, we stayed in a B&B that also housed two refugees (a mother and daughter) who fled during the Russian invasion because the daughter was arrested by the Russians, but immediately released by the Czech police. They packed a suitcase and left immediately. The mother had numbers tattooed on her wrist courtesy of the Nazis (a socialist regime).

As luck would have it, the mother’s sister (who also had numbers on her wrist) came to visit, and we offered to give her a ride to Prague and stay at the sister’s home. Later, we brought a number of their possessions back to Vienna and delivered them to the two refugees.

On the day we drove to Prague, we traveled to the Czech border, where we saw a tower with a spotlight, machine guns, barbed wire, German Shepard dogs, and Russian soldiers armed with sub-machine guns, to check our papers and let us travel to Prague. Fortunately for us, they didn’t speak or read much English, as we were smuggling in a book of poetry by Beat Generation Poet Allen Ginsberg. He and my parents were friends since the late 1940s.

A side note: In order to confuse the Russian invaders, the Czechs took down every street sign in the country. We often had to ask citizens which road (many of them NOT paved, by the way) was to Prague.

As we arrived in Prague, we were greeted by rows and rows of Russian tanks, all guns pointing towards Prague.

While in Prague, my parents contacted the person that was supposed to get the book of poetry, but they didn’t want to come to the sister’s home as she was a widow of a Supreme Court Judge, and they lived in the nice area of town where all of the government officials lived. So, they arrange to meet in a coffee shop and pass the banned book under the table so no one could see. The guy receiving the book feared for his freedom if caught. That’s socialism.

Ayn Rand wrote a “fictional” story about socialism, that I got to experience firsthand. She nailed it.

Upon returning to the U.S., in my senior year in high school (Pioneer High, by the way), I ran, and was elected “Home Room Senator” for the student government.

I've been involved in politics ever since, and I credit Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” and my mother, for my Libertarian career.

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