The United States was absolutely justified in killing Ali Khamenei. It was a good and moral act. Khamenei was one of the most evil political leaders on earth. Since taking power in 1989, he presided over a regime that systematically oppressed the Iranian people. His government relied on torture, imprisonment, and murder on a massive scale long before the recent protests.

According to this traditional dichotomy, values either exist apart from valuers (intrinsicism) or do not exist in any philosophical sense, representing only psychological dispositions (subjectivism). Rand defends an objective account of values. On this view, certain things are objectively values to a living organism. A value is something a living organism “acts to gain and/or keep.” The standard of value is the individual’s own life. For human beings, the purpose of that life is happiness.

Don’t tell me whom to love or loathe,

Or whom to praise or whom to rake;

The measure of my friends and foes

Is something only I can take;

I’ll walk with whom I’ll walk today;

For good or ill, I’ll find my way.

On the Marxist theory, only labour produces value. The difference between the labour that pays for itself (in the form of wages, or “variable capital”) and the additional labour-value that flows to the capitalist, is the “surplus value”. Machines are a form of “constant capital” and they do not contribute to surplus value. Nor do machines, on this theory, create any new wealth – they merely “transfer” the labour-value that went into building them into the totality of the products they create throughout their use-life.

Since reality is a single, integrated whole, free of contradictions and governed by the law of identity and its derivatives, any theory that purports to describe reality from a fundamental standpoint must itself form a non-contradictory whole. Objectivism satisfies both requirements. It corresponds to reality, and it is internally coherent. It therefore describes reality and man as they are, at the most basic level, and advances a unified, non-contradictory system of ideas grounded in facts.

What is happening in Iran is not repression in the ordinary sense. It is a massacre carried out deliberately by a regime that knows exactly what it is doing and has decided that its theocratic project justifies any level of unspeakable, barbaric savagery.

Under the rule of Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic has unleashed a campaign of terror against its own population. Over the course of just a few weeks, reports indicate that more than 16,500 protesters have been killed, and the number continues to grow.

The Bondi Beach massacre was not an incomprehensible eruption of evil. It was the logical consequence of an ideology that rejects individual rights, glorifies violence, and seeks political power through slaughter.

The stated goals of Islamist totalitarian movements are not hidden: the destruction of Jews, the enslavement of women, the murder or forced conversion of atheists, and the replacement of secular law with religious dictatorship.