I Resign From the Mont Pelerin Society

by Paul Craig Roberts
by Paul Craig Roberts

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I have come to the conclusion that the Mont Pelerin Society is no longer an effective force for freedom, becoming instead another tool in behalf of US hegemony, ringing Russia with US military bases and puppet governments in the name of "supporting democracy." As far as I am aware, the MPS has not addressed the Bush administration's assault on US civil liberties or the disrespect the Bush administration has shown for the US Constitution and international law, particularly the Geneva Conventions. Nor has the society taken exception to US wars of aggression in behalf of undeclared agendas.

I don't see how the society can function in behalf of liberty when its long-time Treasurer is so closely associated with the Republican Party, now thoroughly neoconized. The alacrity with which the Heritage Foundation jumped on the Bush administration's propaganda bandwagon about "the Russian invasion of Georgia" epitomizes the new association of "freedom" with American hegemony.

As Secretary of State Rice put it (according to Matthew Lee, AP News, August 18, 16:17 EST), "'We are not going to allow Russia to draw a new line at those states that are not yet integrated into the trans-Atlantic structures', she said, referring to Georgia and Ukraine, which have not yet joined NATO or the European Union but would like to."

But, of course, the US and its NATO allies are going to draw a line around Russia.

What does the Caucasus have to do with the North Atlantic? Why is NATO, which was created to keep the Soviet Army out of Western Europe, still around almost two decades after the disappearance of the Soviet Union? Why has its membership doubled, and why is it being extended to the Black Sea? Is Mongolia next? The US strategic objective – to ring Russia with bases and puppet states in order to exercise hegemony over Russia – will lead to war, the destruction of liberty and perhaps life on earth. This gratuitously insane neoconservative foreign policy is one that will lead to nuclear war. It stands in total contradiction to the alleged values of the Mont Pelerin Society.

As every great libertarian and the founding members of the MPS acknowledged, war is the greatest enemy of liberty.

The US used force to rip Kosovo out of Serbia and to hand it to Muslim drug runners in exchange for a US military base. The US bombed Serbian civilians and accused the Serbians of war crimes. South Ossetia has been autonomous since the early 1990s from which date Russian and Georgian peacekeepers have been in S. Ossetia. The US puppet president of Georgia attacked S. Ossetian civilians with his American and Israeli trained and equipped army, killing about 2,000 and driving 30,000 into Russia, and the Georgian peacekeepers turned their weapons upon the Russian peacekeepers. The American puppet, installed by the neocon National Endowment for Democracy, committed this war crime in order to ethnically cleanse S. Ossetia of Russians and to end the separatist movement in order to smooth Georgia's entrance into NATO.

The "Russian invasion" was a response to this US-sponsored war crime. No real fact or truthful account can be found in the Heritage presentation or the US media. I do not want to be associated with an organization that is a front for American hegemony and wars based on propaganda, lies, and deceit. If Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek were still alive, I am certain they would join me in resignation.

August 21, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, has just been released by Random House.

Copyright © 2008 Creators Syndicate

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