On March 26, in a speech in Poland, President Biden attempted to be inspiring, and as usual when he does that, he emitted string after string of platitudes. It was the kind of thing that political speechwriters create in their sleep. But Americans should be careful not to nod off. Clichés can be very dangerous, just because they are clichés—the stuff that everyone is supposed to know and believe.
I invite your attention to the passage of Biden’s speech in which he tried to say how a free society differs from an unfree one. He claimed that at some time in the mythic past
we emerged anew in the great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression. Between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force. In this battle, we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days or months either. We need to steel ourselves of [sic] a long fight ahead.
And so on. But notice how the synonyms line up. The synonyms for lack of freedom are autocracy, repression, and “brute force”; the synonyms for freedom are democracy, liberty, and “a rules-based order.”
Now, hold on. In our world, the most brutally forceful regimes happen to be rules-based orders, regimes that are filled with rules. Chock-full of rules. And freedom and liberty are so far from being synonymous with “rules” that their very definition is, well, the absence of restraints, commands, and rules. Freedom is the ability to do what you want, not the obligation to follow somebody’s rule.
The signers of the Declaration of Independence had no idea that rules were the foundation of the “new order of the ages” they were creating. Their idea was a rights-based society. The document says that clearly. It says that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” So rights come first, last, and all the time. Rules and governments, if you insist on having them, are justified only in support of rights.
With this in mind, we can see that almost all of the real order that exists in the world—the order we see in families, businesses, churches, and social organizations of every kind—results from free people working together with respect for one another’s rights. This is the spontaneous order of which great economists have written. And we can see that almost all of the inconvenience, poverty, distress, and terror in the world are created by people who have a libido for imposing rules. Hitler and Stalin were deeply attached to rules and rules-based order. And so are the bureaucratic tyrants who have destroyed so much of the world during the past two years of the New Order of Covid.
If there were anything that could make Biden’s idea about freedom and rules look even worse, it would be the reflection that his speech, like his presidency, was the product of vague amorphous movements among vague amorphous organs of the governing class. The speech says what the members of the governing class believe, what they believe so deeply and automatically that to them his daringly false statements about the relation of liberty to order are just random clichés, mere throw-away lines. Yet these are the clichés by which the rest of us are supposed to order our lives.
Stephen Cox is Distinguished Professor of Literature, Emeritus, at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of many books and is the editor of Liberty magazine, available at https://libertyunbound.com/.
Stephen Cox is Distinguished Professor of Literature, Emeritus, at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of many books and is the editor of Liberty magazine, available at https://libertyunbound.com/.
The antiwar movement, the anti-imperialist movement of America, has nothing to apologize for and obediently doing so now is tantamount to facilitating our own systematic demonization, silencing, and persecution.
There were notable analysts in the independent media, antiwar orbit who called this correctly, predicting a Russian attack, leaving the door wide open to an invasion as a major possibility. Those who apparently assumed American policymakers would choose diplomacy and not ultimately risk the deaths and displacement of millions of Ukrainians and Russians, a possible global economic meltdown, catastrophic destabilization in Europe, or all out brinksmanship between the two greatest nuclear superpowers were unfortunately mistaken.
However, the U.S. antiwar scene has always opposed America’s hostile post-Soviet Union policy of coups, color revolutions, NATO’s eastward expansion menacing the Bear, ringing Russia’s borders and coasts with NATO troops, bases, missiles, tanks, bombers, and warships.
The reason for this is not simply because these policies are plainly unnecessary for American security, abhorrently costly, polluting, and aggressive. These new Cold War policies are condemned rightly because they inevitably lead to war, or more likely nuclear war.
For instance, the George W. Bush government’s decisions to tear up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and place dual use “anti-missile” launchers capable of firing hydrogen bomb-tipped Tomahawks in Poland as well as Romania were not in any way authored by non-interventionist libertarian writers and thinkers.
Likewise, the Bush regime made the unprecedented choice to—in the midst of killing countless Somalis and Afghans plus more than one million Iraqis—expand the NATO Article 5 umbrella to include Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Romania. If we maintain our hostility with Russia, this expansion is destined to lead to World War III. For decades, old right conservatives and libertarians alike have opposed U.S. involvement in NATO and this later eastern European policy. This has nothing to do with America’s interests properly understood. There is nothing “sacred” about collectively pledging to blow up the whole world with nuclear bombs for Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, or even London.
In 2014, Barack Obama launched the Maidan coup in Ukraine. Following the “Orange Revolution,” this was the Washington regime flipping Ukraine’s government for the second time in a decade. The government installed by coup plotter Victoria Nuland, the neoconservative Project for a New American Century founder Robert Kagan’s soulmate, was infested with anti-Russian Nazis. Nuland teamed up with then Vice President Joe Biden, who helped lead the coup from the White House.
This illegal overthrow of a duly elected government led to a brutal war in eastern Ukraine which has killed more than 14,000 people. This is the war that precipitated the crisis we see today. The ethnic Russian people of the Donbas region, the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, refused to be ruled by an anti-Russian coup junta. Kiev launched a merciless so-called war on terror against them. Nazis and jihadists attacked the people of the Donbas. Putin then sent deniable, clandestine forces to support the republics’ autonomy. But he refused to recognize their independence for seven years.
Five years ago, Donald Trump began arming Ukraine with anti-tank missiles. As with Biden’s administration, the Trump regime poured weapons into Ukraine, which fell into the hands of Nazi security forces. The arms were sent to Kiev and used in the east to mass murder ethnic Russians in a violent effort to consolidate control of the divided country. Though they knew well that thousands of people were dying in numbers far higher than anything we have seen thus far during Russia’s war, Washington continued to funnel tons of weapons into the country including armed patrol boats, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, and more missiles.
Trump bombed Russian mercenaries in Syria while American troops illegally occupied the eastern third of that country, itself a key Russian ally, explicitly to steal its oil resources. He also expanded NATO and continued the GOP tradition of ripping up critical arms treaties such as the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and Open Skies.
Beginning with the Obama government, CIA paramilitaries and the Pentagon’s Special Forces were deployed to train militants to carry out Kiev’s war. Concurrently, the CIA has been training these same forces at a secret base in the southern United States.
Oh yes, I almost forgot: I once broke a pair of rackets after losing a close tennis match in a French tournament, and a man I didn’t know approached me and offered some pills to calm down. I told him to get lost. He later befriended me and I even hit some balls with him. His name was Mortimer Sackler, and his company Purdue killed 500,000 Americans with his pill Oxycontin.
Like a strange melody that keeps repeating in my ear are four letters, PTSD, an acronym for a psychiatric disorder that seems to afflict most criminals in America. I suppose some shrink invented it, then ambulance-chasing lawyers picked it up; finally the criminals themselves have discovered it. It is the quickest get-out-of-jail scheme since article 1 section 9 of the Constitution, Habeas Corpus.
We are in the midst of soft-on-crime time, where DA’s like Alvin Bragg of New York City, Kim Foxx of Chicago, Los Angeles’ George Gascon, and, most infamous of all, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin have all declared let’s be nice to the bad guys, let’s be less punitive, and other such nonsense. In the meantime, crime has gone through the roof in American cities, with criminals brazenly breaking the law and looting stores, and murders having doubled in mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The media, needless to say, blame the rise in crime on a white-supremacy aftermath, a bit like blaming the Jews for the rise of Hitler.
“If anyone qualifies for PTSD treatment it would be today’s police officers.”
In New York City a black career criminal lures two police officers to his apartment pretending his mother needs help and proceeds to murder them both in cold blood with an automatic pistol, while his witness mother claims that her son is suffering from mental illness and should not go to jail. Another career criminal executes a cashier in a bodega after the 19-year-old girl working a midnight shift handed over the hundred dollars. His family immediately claimed he had mental problems and should not be incarcerated but treated. Still a third career criminal kills a Chinese woman while she was walking to work for no apparent reason (except perhaps being Chinese) and declares that he has mental issues. That’s just three cold-blooded murders in one week in the Big Apple by…er…unstable men. During the funeral for the two slain policemen, photos appeared named “sea of blue” as thousands of cops turned up to honor their slain colleagues. That old hag, actress Susan Sarandon, denounced the pics, saying they reminded her of fascist parades.
PTSD used to be called shell shock, and that trauma was at times real. Soldiers suffered from it while engaged in ferocious combat—trench warfare in World War I, especially—and it hit its peak among the military during the Vietnam conflict. George Patton famously slapped two soldiers claiming to suffer trauma during World War II, and lost his command as a result. My grandfather as a cavalry officer stayed in the front for two years during the Balkan wars, and my uncle six months on the front line without a day off against the Italians in 1940, but for some strange reason the only thing that bothered both of them was the inability to change their underclothes.
Never mind. The world today is increasingly defined by an entire ideology of mental illness that bears absolutely no relation to the psychic reality of human beings—“they must be mad because no one’s that bad” type of thinking. Except criminals are bad, very seldom mad, and the whole psychopathological preoccupation has to do with the root of all envy: money. A cynic would dub it a doctor’s invention of a disease that doesn’t exist, but, not being of a cynical persuasion, I will not go that far. The three-card-monte con is made up by Big Pharma, the psychiatric profession, and insurance companies. One serves the other and so on. The evil doctor who created this Frankenstein monster was of course that arch pseudo Sigmund Freud, now lying in one of Dante’s deadly circles of Hell for having brought such misery to the world.
The question remains, was this a mere “gaffe”? Anti-war journalist Michael Tracey and others sayno: “Biden’s call for regime change in Russia wasn’t some off-the-cuff “gaffe.” It was declared as the climax of a carefully choreographed, “legacy-defining” speech, in a deliberately chosen venue (Poland) where the call would be well-received.“
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday while on a visit to Jerusalem to meet with Israeli PM Naftali Bennett continued the White House’s efforts to try and clean up the mess unleashed by Joe Biden’s words from Warsaw the day prior where he issued statements tantamount to calling for regime change in Russia.
“I think the president, the White House, made the point last night that, quite simply, President Putin cannot be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else,” Blinken said, clearly trying to greatly alter the plain meaning of the words Biden spoke.
Biden had concluded the televised Warsaw speech by bluntly saying of Putin (who he also had called a “butcher” in a separate statement to a reporter)… “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”Within the very hour as headlines spread around the world that the US president called for regime change in Moscow, and none other than the deep state’s preferred mouthpie, the Washington Post, said Biden “sparked a global uproar“, the White House desperately scrambled to walk it back.
A White House official tried to clarify to Bloomberg, “The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” But Biden appeared to be reading a carefully prepared written speech from the teleprompter.
Blinken’s Sunday explanation of Biden’s words continued:
“As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia — or anywhere else, for that matter,” the US’ top diplomat said.
“As in any case, it’s up to the people of the country in question. It’s up to the Russians,” Blinken said.
Vladimir Putin wants to keep Russia’s wealth for himself, for his supporters and also for his people. He sees what the globalists have done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and others. They invaded and destroyed these countries and sucked out whatever wealth they could. And while millions in those lands have been killed and had their lives ruined, the architects of these disasters are well and enjoying their ill-gotten gains. One of them is Joe Biden who had his hand in all these ventures as he was a high government official while they were being planned and executed.
In his recent appearance on Face the Nation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Margaret Brennan:
“The Ukrainians have killed more Russians in three weeks than we lost in Afghanistan and Iraq in 20 years. I think we ought to go into this believing the Ukrainians can actually win. And the way they win is for us to get these defensive weapons system to them as rapidly as possible.”
Listening to this one is seized with despair, because McConnell’s words reveal the monstrous strategy that is being adopted by the western ruling elites regarding the Ukrainian war.
These elites now smell blood in the water. They hope to drag the war on Ukraine for as long as possible, get Russia bogged down and bleed it out, both in terms of human life as well as financially.
This is an inhuman and misguided strategy that is likely to backfire.
To begin with, this war has been provoked by western globalists who were imperiously bent on driving NATO all the way to the Russian doorstep. This was understandably and rightly perceived by Russia as a move that posed a serious threat to its national security.
Russia had for years warned, pleaded, and implored the West not to do this, but to no avail. NATO, lead by the United States, did something the Unites States would never allow were the situation reversed. The United States would never allow a hostile military alliance on its borders. We saw what happened during the Cuban missile crisis when the Soviets were trying to bring military installations to Cuba. The United States threatened both Cuba and Russia and was ready to start a nuclear war if necessary to halt that undertaking. The United States was, of course, justified in its demands then. The Russians now feel the same about Ukraine.
Please watch the lecture below in which one of the world’s most distinguished political scientists Prof. John Mearsheimer explains who is responsible for this crisis. It is sufficient to watch only the first 25 minutes of the video.
Whatever we may be told by the media, the Ukrainians cannot win this war, since they are greatly overpowered by the Russian forces. The main reason why the Russian advance has been slow is because the Russians have been careful to minimize civilian casualties. The Ukrainian fighters have been taking advantage of this by using their own people as human shields.
If you do not believe this, please watch Ukrainians soldiers setting up rockets on top of a residential building in the city of Mariupol. Having been scattered by their more powerful foe, this is the only strategy for the embattled Ukrainians left to pursue.
If they keep doing this, sooner or later the Russians will become more ruthless, and the death toll will skyrocket. Whether we like it or not, the Ukrainians simply cannot come out on top in this dreadful conflict. The longer this war lasts, the more people will die and more of Ukraine will get wrecked.
But this is apparently okay with the western ruling elite who see a chance to bleed Russia in the same way we bled in Afghanistan and Iraq. That a country will get completely wrecked and hundreds of thousands of innocent people will die does not particularly seem to bother them.
Not only do they want to prolong the war in Ukraine, they, in fact, want to expand it further.
A couple of weeks ago they tried to goad the Poles into giving their jets to the Ukrainians even though Russia had made it clear that it would consider such a move an act of war. This action would be akin to Russia urging the Syrian government to give airplanes to the insurgents in Iraq while we were conducting military operations in that country. We would have doubtless declared such a provocation an act of war by both Syria and Russia, and we would have taken retaliative actions which would almost certainly include some kind of military punishment of the offending parties.
The Poles, however, saw through the ploy and did not take the insidious bait which would have brought them into direct conflict with Russia. Instead, they called the bluff and turned the tables on the warmongering schemers in Washington, DC. Without consulting the Biden administration, they issued a statement in which they said they would make their jets available by flying them to an American base in Germany, but it would have to be the Americans who would do the actual handover.
Exposed and humiliated, the Biden administration declined the Polish “offer” and promptly dispatched Kamala Harris to Warsaw to pacify the Poles who were seething at such betrayal by a supposed ally.
Now Joe Biden has come to Europe with promises of support and weapons for Ukrainians. He will encourage the Ukrainians to fight until the last drop of their blood. He will do it even though he knows all too well that the Ukrainians can never win this fight and will get slaughtered and shattered in the process.
But never mind. The Washington schemers do not care about the lives or well-being of the Ukrainian people. They are using Ukraine as a proxy in a war with Russia, hoping that their fighters will inflict sufficient damage on the Russian military to destabilize Putin’s regime in Moscow.
It is awful to think that our regime could be so cynical. For their part, they probably soothe their conscience by telling themselves that they are only engaging in realpolitik 101. The Soviets did this to us in Vietnam, which they used as their proxy against us, so we now do the same thing to Russia.
But the question is why do the global elites hate Russia and Putin in particular? They tell us that Vladimir Putin is a bad and corrupt man who stole from his people to accumulate great wealth and luxury for himself. But this surely cannot be the main reason, because the leader of the free world is also corrupt.
It is well-known that while he was vice president of the United States, Joe Biden would sell his influence around the world for his own personal enrichment. This he did through his lamentable son Hunter. Hunter, for example, was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma. Even though Hunter knew little about gas, he was being paid one million dollars a year in an obvious influence peddling scheme. His father, “The Big Guy,” as Hunter referred to him in his emails, would get a cut from the loot.
Rudy Giuliani called the Bidens a crime family. Even though this may sound harsh, it accurately describes their activities. Like some global gangsters, they prowl around the globe filling their pockets through illicit ventures while scheming with some of the most corrupt people in places like Ukraine, China and Russia. The plentiful evidence of their mischief is contained on Hunter Biden’s hard drive. This hard drive is authentic beyond any doubt, which is something even the New York Timeshas recently conceded. And yet our compromised institutions – such as the Department of Justice and the FBI – refuse to investigate these crimes.
The main reason why the globalists loathe Putin is because he does not want to play their game. He refuses to accept their woke ideology and become part of their corrupt global order based on the collapsing dollar and driven by the desire to plunder the world’s resources and populations.
Vladimir Putin wants to keep Russia’s wealth for himself, for his supporters and also for his people. He sees what the globalists have done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and others. They invaded and destroyed these countries and sucked out whatever wealth they could. And while millions in those lands have been killed and had their lives ruined, the architects of these disasters are well and enjoying their ill-gotten gains. One of them is Joe Biden who had his hand in all these ventures as he was a high government official while they were being planned and executed.
Since Putin does not really want to share the great mineral and natural wealth of his vast country with the globalists, they want to take him out. Once they bring Putin down – or so they think – they will install a puppet in his place who will throw the doors open for multinationals to plunder Russia’s resources in the same way they have done in other places.
But they seem to forget that they cannot kick Putin around in the same way they did Saddam Hussein and Moammar Khadafi.
For one thing, Putin has more nuclear warheads than anyone else on earth. If backed into a corner, it is likely he would use them.
We would do well to remember the wise warning of John Quincy Adams who advised us not to go abroad in “search of monsters to destroy.”
We should always try to pursue peace and not warmonger, especially in places like Ukraine where we have no vital national security interest.
To get ourselves bombed with thermo nuclear warheads over Ukraine would be a terrible mistake indeed.
My own “country” is wherever the principles that I live by are respected, and I’m able to live with the greatest degree of freedom possible. I’m loyal to a concept, not a flag, a particular piece of dirt, or a government.
Recently, after reading an essay of mine, a reader angrily questioned my loyalty to the USA. My immediate reaction was that I’m not a US citizen. I therefore tend to observe the US dispassionately, just as I’d observe any of the nearly 200 “foreign” countries in the world.
But, as I’m British, what if he’d questioned my loyalty to the UK? Would he have a valid point? Well, at the very least, he’d certainly have a question worthy of an answer.
I, of course, have a legal right to live and work in the UK, and yet I choose not to. It’s simply not my idea of a great country in which to reside. As much as I regard the traditional English village to be an ideal environment in which to live, I reside elsewhere. The reason is that I place a very high value on personal freedom, a nonintrusive government, and a populace that doesn’t feel that it’s entitled to largesse that’s been forcibly taken from another segment of the population.
But that doesn’t exactly address the question of “loyalty,” does it? Well, there, I must confess, I tend to answer the question with another question. Whenever someone speaks to me of his loyalty to his country, I’m inclined to ask him to define “country.”
In most jurisdictions, the term “country” seems to be bandied about more by governments and the military than by the average citizen. Whenever a government wants blind compliance from its people, political leaders speak of “loyalty.” Whenever a military seeks to send people off to possibly be killed in battle, again, “loyalty” is the reason given.
But if the question is asked, “Loyalty to what?” answers vary. “Loyalty to the flag” is a common one. Another is “Loyalty to this great land of ours.” And, not surprisingly, these answers are common, no matter which country is under discussion. But is one flag superior to another? Is one land better than another (which would suggest that all those who feel their land is better are incorrect)?
Let’s have a closer look at some possible definitions and representations of “country.”
The Flag
One of my earliest memories is of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. But this is not so much due to the event itself, as it’s because my family’s home was littered with all the flags, pop-up books, biscuit tins, and other memorabilia that commemorated the coronation. The house was tricked out like Christmas in June and I’ve never forgotten it, although I was only five at the time.
So I was taught what the Union Jack represented at an early age. Yet I regard it primarily as a piece of cloth. I’ve lived in numerous countries and they all have their own bit of cloth that they run up the flagpoles. The reader might ask himself, “Am I loyal to this piece of fabric, regardless of whether the leaders of my country represent the principles in which I believe?”
The second article directly undermines Biden’s dramatic warning about a false flag chemical attack. Reuters reported: “The United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring streams of intelligence for them, a senior U.S. defense official said.”
It quoted the Pentagon official as saying, “There’s no indication that there’s something imminent in that regard right now.” Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post published the Reuters article, which appeared in the more obscure U.S. News and World Report.
Never let the facts get in the way of a good story — even if it could lead to the most devastating consequences in history.
Two leaked stories from the Pentagon have exposed the lies of mainstream media about how Russia is conducting the Ukraine war in a bid to counter propaganda intended to get NATO into the conflict, writes Joe Lauria.
The Pentagon is engaged in a consequential battle with the U.S. State Department and the Congress to prevent a direct military confrontation with Russia, which could unleash the most unimaginable horror of war.
President Joe Biden is caught in the middle of the fray. So far he is siding with the Defense Department, saying there cannot be a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”
“President Biden’s been clear that U.S. troops won’t fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you’ll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia,” said U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin earlier this month. (The administration plan is to bring down the Russian government through a ground insurgency and economic war, not a direct military one.)
But pressure on the White House from some members of Congress and especially the press corps is unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war. (Secretary of State Antony Blinken who initially backed a plan to send NATO plans from Poland to Ukraine has backed down and now opposes the no-fly zone. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also supported the Polish planes scheme, which was shot down by the Pentagon.)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, hailed as a virtual superhero in Western media, has vacillated between openness to negotiating a peace settlement with Russia and calling for NATO, again on Friday, to “close the skies” above Ukraine. To save his country he appears willing to risk endangering the entire world.
Keeping government in perspective. The perspective never changes.
Operation Northwoods called for real terrorist attacks against American citizens, in which Americans would die. The attacks (and murders) would be carried out by Pentagon agents secretly posing as Cuban communists.
While the mainstream media and American statists remain transfixed on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s difficult not to notice their moral blindness with respect to the evil and hypocrisy of the Pentagon and the CIA, which have spent years ginning up this deadly and destructive crisis as part of their political gamesmanship against Russia.
After all, let’s face it: When it was the Pentagon and the CIA invading Iraq and Afghanistan, the reaction of the mainstream media and American statists was totally opposite to how they have responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. During those deadly and destructive invasions, there was hardly ever any sympathy for the victims and instead accolades, praise, and glorification of the invaders. Don’t forget the daily mantra that everyone was exhorted to recite, “Support the troops!”
But let’s leave Iraq and Afghanistan aside and let’s go back to the early 1960s, when the CIA and the Pentagon were doing everything they could, including committing fraud, to induce President Kennedy to invade Cuba, which is every bit as sovereign and independent as Ukraine.
Let’s begin with a recent statement by U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, who was expressing the official position of the Pentagon and the CIA. Price stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to violate “core principles,” including “the principle that each and every country has a sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy, has a sovereign right to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances, its partnerships, and what orientation it wishes to direct its gaze.”
Price was referring to Ukraine’s “right” to join NATO, the corrupt bureaucratic dinosaur that should have gone out of existence at the ostensible end of the Cold War. Price’s statement confirms, of course, the point I have long been making — that the war in Ukraine is not about freedom, it’s about NATO.
Keep Price’s statement in mind as we go back to the height of the Cold War and see how the Pentagon and the CIA were hell-bent on doing to Cuba what Russia is now doing to Ukraine.
That’s what the CIA’s invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba was all about — an effort to invade the island for the sake of ousting the Castro regime from power and replacing it with another corrupt and brutal U.S. puppet dictatorship, such as that of Fulgencio Batista, the brutal pro-U.S. dictatorial puppet that the Cuban revolution succeeded in ousting from power.
But that’s not all there is to the Bay of Pigs story. As I detail in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, the Pentagon and the CIA were engaged in political gamesmanship against President Kennedy, who the CIA considered to be a neophyte president who could easily be manipulated into ordering an invasion of Cuba, one that would have been no different from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The CIA told Kennedy that its invasion would succeed without direct U.S. military air and ground support. It was a lie — a deliberate, knowing, intentional lie. The CIA was just playing and maneuvering what they considered was an easily manipulable president. The CIA figured that once the invasion began faltering, Kennedy would have no choice but to send in air support,
Country is a concept of peace, of balance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of power.… And we have the misfortune of being born not only into a country but into a State.…
Individualism, and its economic corollary, laissez-faire liberalism, has not always taken on a conservative hue, has not always functioned, as it often does today, as an apologist for the status quo. On the contrary, the revolution of modern times was originally, and continued for a long time to be, laissez-faire individualist. Its purpose was to free the individual person from the restrictions and the shackles, the encrusted caste privileges and exploitative wars, of the feudal and mercantilist orders, of the Tory ancien régime.
Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, the militants in the American Revolution, the Jacksonian movement, Emerson and Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison and the radical abolitionists—all were basically laissez-faire individualists who carried on the age-old battle for liberty and against all forms of State privilege. And so were the French revolutionaries—not only the Girondins, but even the much-abused Jacobins, who were obliged to defend the Revolution against the massed crowned heads of Europe. All were roughly in the same camp. The individualist heritage, indeed, goes back to the first modern radicals of the 17th century—to the Levellers in England, and to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson in the American colonies.
The conventional historical wisdom asserts that while the radical movements in America were indeed laissez-faire individualist before the Civil War, that afterwards, the laissez-fairists became conservatives, and the radical mantle then fell to groups more familiar to the modern Left: the Socialists and Populists. But this is a distortion of the truth. For it was elderly New England Brahmins, laissez-faire merchants and industrialists like Edward Atkinson, who had financed John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, who were the ones to leap in and oppose the US imperialism of the Spanish-American War with all their might.
No opposition to that war was more thoroughgoing than that of the laissez-faire economist and sociologist William Graham Sumner or than that of Atkinson who, as head of the Anti-Imperialist League, mailed antiwar pamphlets to American troops then engaged in conquering the Philippines. Atkinson’s pamphlets urged our troops to mutiny, and were consequently seized by the US postal authorities.
In taking this stand, Atkinson, Sumner, and their colleagues were not being “sports”; they were following an antiwar, anti-imperialist tradition as old as classical liberalism itself. This was the tradition of Price, Priestley, and the late-18th-century British radicals that earned them repeated imprisonment by the British war machine; and of Richard Cobden, John Bright, and the laissez-faire Manchester School of the mid-19th century. Cobden, in particular, had fearlessly denounced every war and every imperial maneuver of the British regime. We are now so used to thinking of opposition to imperialism as Marxian that this kind of movement seems almost inconceivable to us today.
By the advent of World War I, however, the death of the older laissez-faire generation threw the leadership of the opposition to America’s imperial wars into the hands of the Socialist Party. But other, more individualist-minded men joined in the opposition, many of whom would later form the core of the isolationist Old Right of the late 1930s. Thus, the hardcore antiwar leaders included the individualist Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and such laissez-faire liberals as Senators William E. Borah (Republican) of Idaho and James A. Reed (Democrat) of Missouri. It also included Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., father of the Lone Eagle, who was a congressman from Minnesota.
Murray N. Rothbard made major contributions to economics, history, political philosophy, and legal theory. He combined Austrian economics with a fervent commitment to individual liberty.
MCViewPoint 