A Putin’s Progress
Peace Protesters in St. Petersburg
It was bound to happen.
Once Russian forces invaded Ukraine, figures from both the right and the left fell into their binary, vacuous thought pits. They proceeded to direct Twitter fits at libertarians and anarchists like dear little ol’ me.
My response is one to ponder:
So, when both your midwit conservative neighbor and your establishment left-wing boss find themselves harmonizing slurs against you (maybe?), me, Dave Smith, Robbie Bernstein, Tom Woods, Robert Higgs, Clint Russell, Scott Horton, Ron Paul, Daniel McAdams–the list goes on and on of principled libertarians–know that we are not agents of Vladimir Putin. We detest governments, whether dictatorships or democracies, but there’s a special, proper rage against those that pose themselves as the latter only to really operate as the former.
For a brief history of the contemporary conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian governments, check out my recent Open Letter to Vladimir Putin. None of this occurred in a vacuum. In fact, it was the United States and Great Britian that, back in 1996 in Budapest, promised to defend Ukraine from outside aggression if only the Ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons. Would Putin have ordered the invasion of a Ukraine with a nuclear arsenal? Highly doubtful.
Since then, it is important to point out that war is all hell and that there are never purely good guy governments involved. That being said, the apparatchiks that start wars rarely become the victims of it: The people always carry that burden. This war is no different, as peace protesters are arrested in Russia and Ukrainian boys and men are conscripted into the army.
Here, as our own apparatchiks play wag the dog (AGAIN) with hopes that they get off scot free after their prescription of Co-Vid despotism, it’s crucial we don’t let the Birx, Fauci, and Hotez led ‘Team Sociopath’ off the hook as they try to whitewash the historical record. Of equal significance: Recognize that Obama and Biden and Pelosi all had their claws in Ukraine thanks to their shared imperial conceits and their respective, voracious greed.
Their ideological and self-serving mechanizations have played a role here. The blowback always fall on us.
We should hope that the final act of this sordid drama features the end of NATO, the end of State Department and CIA meddling, the end of the Russian dictatorship, the end of the Ukrainian plutocracy, the end of war. But that will only come when people who love liberty stick to their principles and move to defend it. For Russia. For Ukraine. For America. For peace. Freedom.
