In adopting verbatim the rhetoric of the neo-con/Trotskyite "regime-changers", a once-libertarian beltway think-tank has abandoned completely even the pretense of any affection for the libertarian "first principle" of non-interventionism.
How quick they are to jump on the Demintern's slogans such as "last dictatorship in Europe" and to feature as speakers the loyal adjuncts of the intelligence agencies who foment the color-coded revolutions much the same as did their intellectual and moral forebears.
Who better to introduce libertarians to the glories of "people power" than "Orange Revolutionary" ideologue Anders Åslund, who in Walter Durranty fashion treats us to the "greatest hits" of the regime-change myths. How is this for glorious Demintern rhetoric: "When poisoned with dioxin, pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was left physically weakened and disfigured but politically energized.
Delicious. Absolutely delicious. But all lies, of course.
What is most revealing is that while railing about "dictatorship" 4,600 miles away (while ignoring that the vast majority of foreign observers in Belarus gave the recent presidential election a clean bill of health), that same one-time libertarian outfit sings the praises of a US president's assertion of authority to secretly spy on American citizens, attacking the anemic Congressional response as "micromanagement of the executive." Yes, it is always easier to rail against the "dictators" in distant lands while keeping in good graces with the supporters of the rising dictatorship at home.
The great Matt Taibbi captured this phenomenon better than anyone:
In Soviet times, a man who was afraid to speak frankly on any topic in front of his own children and whose neighbor had disappeared two days before was capable of shedding real tears over the plight of the American Negro, a popular Soviet cause for decades. You see the same thing here in the States: no job, no health insurance, fu*ked for life by the credit bureaus, but swelling with pride over the sight of an Iraqi child with a candy bar.Modern observers look back at the early Soviet days and wonder how it is that people could possibly have believed those fantastic tales they read about in the state papers–the lurid descriptions of fascist terrorists and wreckers who conspired to poison reservoirs and turn up rails and put broken glass in sausage in the most faraway, seemingly irrelevant places in Siberia and the far north. The answer probably is that they wanted to believe them. Because that was what was in their hearts. It wasn’t a lie that was being put over on them. It came from them.
So it is with Demintern's newest recruits. A sad day for libertarians.
