Putin to the West: Take Your Medicine
And don't go socialist
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 We've
truly entered a Bizarro World universe,
where up is down, right is left – and the Russians, of
all people, are now lecturing us about the virtues of free enterprise.
Yes, it happened
at the Davos
conference of bigwigs, insiders, and their sycophantic hangers-on,
where the elite meet to munch canapés and discuss the way the world
works, or, in this case, the way it isn't
working. The conference was heavy with the sort of pessimism
that doesn't usually accompany a gathering of the rich and pompous,
yet instead of the usual self-congratulatory vaunting of their own
virtue and "concern" for the world's peasants, these aristocrats
of the conference table were less than ebullient about the downward
spiral of the global economy – which, you'll remember, yesterday
was touted as the
savior of us all, but these days is portrayed as the instrument of
our collective doom.
 While
the walkout
of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan grabbed the biggest headlines
– he didn't like it when David Ignatius of the Washington Post
shushed him in favor of letting former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon
Peres drone on uninterrupted – the real shocker was Vladimir Putin's
peroration,
which sounded more like Ron
Paul than the leader of a nation that has intruded the state
into the economy and polity in a big way.
Putin likened
the economic crisis the world is facing to "the perfect storm, which
denotes a situation when nature's forces converge in one point of
the ocean and increase their destructive potential many times over."
This is very similar to the apocalyptic tone not only of Rep. Paul, but of gold bugs and libertarians outside the Beltway: save your candles,
the dark ages are coming!
Yet our leaders
were unprepared: in spite of strong indications that the crisis
was breaking over our heads, only a prescient minority
realized
that our chickens were coming home to roost, while the "majority
strove to get their share of the pie, be it one dollar or a billion,
and did not want to notice the rising wave." As the
Remnant looked on, Western elites were oblivious to their onrushing
doom.
Read
the rest of the article
February
3, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
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