Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is a policy analyst at the Center for Libertarian Studies, in Burlingame, California; he is also an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which is based in Auburn, Alabama. Raimondo is the author of RECLAIMING THE AMERICAN RIGHT: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (1993) ... Raimondo has lived in San Francisco for 25 years, originally hailing from upstate New York. During the 1970s and 80s, he was active in the Libertarian Party, and ran for public office under that party label. In 1985, he joined the Republican Party, and has been active ever since.

[Raimondo] himself was a player in many of Rothbard's post-1970 ideological struggles so the reader can enjoy a box seat at some of the most exciting debates of the period ... Further, he points out that Rothbard "chided Buchanan for being a classic case of the old adage that some people (especially politicians) often concentrate on those issues in which they have the least expertise; in Buchanan's case, this is undoubtedly the realm of economics." Special credit goes to Raimondo for pointing this out, since he is personally far more favorable to Buchanan than Rothbard was from 1992 forward.

The Radical Caucus was founded in early 1979 by Justin Raimondo (San Francisco) to back radical hard-core principle in the LP, the main activity of the RC being the organizing of members of the LP ... on Wednesday night, while subjecting Earl Ravenal to searching questioning, Raimondo was hopping up and down muttering about Ravenal's warmongering and pure evil; twelve hours later, Raimondo officially endorsed Ravenal and the next day spoke at a "Unity" meeting for Earl ... The high point of unconscious humor at the meeting came when Raimondo urged a vote for Ravenal in the name of Party unity ...

It was inevitable that Arianna Huffington, "compassionate conservative"-turned-limousine-liberal, would join the bipartisan chorus of voices screaming bloody murder over the Dubai port deal. After all, it wasn't that long ago that she was canoodling with Newt Gingrich and cavorting with the neocons. ... In open alliance with neocons like Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, and the National Review/Weekly Standard crowd, Huffington and her fellow "progressives" are poisoning American politics to the point that "World War IV" – the wet dream of every neocon – becomes a distinct possibility.

It’s funny, but Bill Evers used to be one of those libertarians who went around giving everyone else a purity test, and he often found them wanting. Back in the good old days, he used to write a column for Libertarian Vanguard, the newspaper of the Radical Caucus, called 'Brickbats and Bouquets,' in which he handed out kudos and judo chops to those that, in his view, deserved them. ... Oh, but don't hold it against him. I, for one, am glad to see that Bill has finally settled down and found himself a decent job. After all, how long can you pretend to be a grad student – at the age of fifty-something?

America is headed for a military dictatorship – and recent legislation makes this all but inevitable. Last September, Congress passed the Defense Authorization Act, which empowered the president to declare martial law with very little provocation, namely in the aftermath of a "terrorist attack or incident." ... I fear, however, that it may be too late. Bush will surely veto the Leahy-Bond measure – and, if necessary, declare America's governors, who all oppose this brazen usurpation, an "unlawful combination," as the Insurrection Act puts it. Then he will be empowered to "disperse" them, and the Senate, at will.

In defending his edict authorizing surveillance of phone calls and e-mails originating in the United States, President Bush reiterated legal arguments, long made by his intellectual Praetorians, that imbue the White House with wartime powers no different from those exercised by a Roman emperor ... These Weimar Democrats are gutless wonders, fully complicit in the regime's assault on our liberties and the constitutional order. To anyone looking to the Democratic Party as the locus of an effective opposition to red-state fascism, I would strongly suggest that they are setting themselves up for a severe disappointment ...

To say that Malaysia is not what I imagined would be an understatement of epic proportions. Situated just south of Thailand, north of Indonesia, and quite close to the equator, the country describes itself as officially "Islamic," and this, at least in the minds of most Americans, means a stultifying uniformity, a monolithic apparatus of cultural and all too often political repression. ... Malays are generally puzzled by the actions of the U.S. government abroad, and do not support the war in Iraq: but they love America, the country, and show great admiration and respect for the American people.

The timing of the recent incident in which 15 British sailors were arrested by Iran at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway for purportedly entering Iranian waters couldn't have been more provocative if it had been planned that way. And perhaps it was. The question is, however, who did the planning? ... We keep hearing that the U.S. will never attack Iran because we don't have the troops or the military reserves ... As long as domestic political support for an attack spans both parties and includes the key element of "liberal" Democrats like Pelosi and Chairman Dean, all systems are "go" for war with Iran.

How it is that, having lost an election widely viewed as a referendum on the war, the Bush administration has the temerity to announce a "surge" in American forces engaged in active combat in Iraq? The answer was given by incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin (D- Michigan) ... Radical measures are called for. The time for talk is over: you can't reason with these people, and I've given up trying. The time for action is now. Not inchoate rage, or violence, but focused anger, aimed with laser-like intensity at the root and source of all our problems – the seat of the Empire.

The idea animating U.S. foreign policy at the moment is simple: if we "democratize" the Middle East – at gunpoint if necessary, peacefully if possible – we can "drain the swamp" of terrorism and defeat the worldwide Islamist insurgency that is now arrayed against us. With democracy will come the rule of law and all the material benefits of "democratic" capitalism ... the would-be exporters of "democracy" have merely succeeded in creating more and bigger trouble ... It is time to call a halt to this ill-conceived experiment – before it claims more lives and backfires spectacularly in our faces.

The November election is shaping up as a national referendum on the war in Iraq–and the GOP, AKA the War Party, is in deep trouble. A recent CNN poll asked voters to rank the importance of the war issue: 48 percent said it is "extremely important," while 38 percent averred it's "very important." ... Libertarians have nothing to lose but their chains–both ideological and financial–to a movement that has morphed into a peculiarly American form of neofascism. They have a party to win. All hail the Jeffersonian Democrats ...! Now all we need is for someone to nail 95 theses to Hillary Clinton's door, starting with this one.

Was there ever a prose stylist on the Right as elegantly idiosyncratic as Garet Garrett? 'We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire,' he warned in a 1952 polemic, his voice husky with tragedy. ... Garrett's warning to Americans rings down through the years, mocking the confident builders of a New World Order: '... To thine own self a liberator, to the world an alarming portent, do you know where you are going from here?' Garrett knew, but few listened, and The American Story sank without a trace, a lost classic of conservative thought waiting to be rediscovered.

The ongoing hara-kiri of the GOP proceeds apace, with the latest being a concerted effort by the party’s neoconservative wing to oust sitting Republican members of Congress who oppose the war. The latest examples: Walter B. Jones of North Carolina and Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland ... When they've run the GOP into the ground and reduced it to a mostly regional party, they'll abandon the dried-up husk and emigrate back to where they came from – the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, where they can join Joe Lieberman, Joshua Muravchik, and Hillary Clinton's neoconservative fan club in ginning up a war with Iran.

For a good 75 years, the Republican Party has been the party of conservatism, the anointed vehicle for the hopes and dreams of those who believe in limited government and seek to preserve the legacy of the Founding Fathers. No more ... Republicans are headed for a drubbing at the polls, and it couldn't have happened to a more deserving party. Ever since the neocon takeover of this administration, they have been headed for disaster, and now that it is finally striking I just want to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of their extended and agonizing demise. That's right, "stay the course," guys!

Has Al Gore become a conservative? His recent speech to the Liberty Coalition, a group of conservatives and liberals united in opposing the growing authoritarianism that drives this administration, sounded as if it had been written by some disgruntled paleoconservative. ... That [Christopher Hitchens] fails to see the necessary connection between a foreign policy of unchecked aggression and a domestic policy of unchecked surveillance is a consequence, perhaps, of his career as an unregenerate statist of one sort or another. Or maybe that's just what comes of constantly soaking the brain in alcohol.

In a repeat of the calculated insults to the Arab world coming fast and furious these days, Democratic politicians ... are raising a ruckus over a deal in which Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation, a U.K. company ..., would be acquired by Dubai Ports World, a Dubai-based international company that manages port facilities from London to Okinawa. ... an effort to scare the American public into making a few ruthless "entrepreneurs" obscenely rich by giving them a virtual monopoly on America's port facilities shows every sign of apparent success. The victors will be laughing all the way to the bank.

The United States government is hell-bent on a wider war in the Middle East, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone ... capable of stopping them. Threats against the Iranians come on an almost daily basis: only yesterday U.S. officials convened a press conference where anonymous officials made baseless assertions about Tehran ... For over a decade, we've been been holding the fort against the War Party, pointing out the danger posed by the neoconservatives and their ideologically-driven militarism, and calling for a return to rational foreign policy. Now we are facing our greatest test.

We keep hearing about the "liberal," "antiwar" media, which is supposedly spinning the "success" of the administration’s "surge" in Iraq into a defeat. The stab-in-the-back thesis is being run up the flagpole by the neocons, in the hopes that at least some of their base – the most deluded of the Kool-Aid drinkers – will swallow it. ... The same coziness with government officials and leading neocons – who always get airtime to give voice to the opinions of a rapidly shrinking minority of American public opinion – is all too readily apparent. The "antiwar" media? Pal, you’re looking at it!

The new study estimating that 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion was – naturally – dismissed out of hand in Washington and London and disdained by the War Party's pet pundits. My favorite comment came from the president, who announced: "The methodology is pretty well discredited." ... The sheer scale of the crimes committed by the Nazis, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, and all the other mad tyrannies of the 20th century didn't come to light until well after their demise. One wonders if it will take the fall of the American Empire to uncover the full extent of Washington's war crimes.

It's the Chinese Year of the Boar, not very propitious if you're looking to have an easy time of it. Chinese astrologer Raymond Lo predicts: "The Year of the Boar will not be very peaceful. Boar years can be turbulent because they are dominated by fire and water, conflicting elements that tend to cause havoc." ... As the U.S. colossus goes lumbering after its latest victim, and world markets are shaken, we can expect more of the same. The Iraq War Crash is coming down on our heads–but hey, if you own Halliburton stock, or perhaps Lockheed, you don't have a lot to worry about.

John Fund, former editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal and now a familiar talking head on cable gabfests, used to hang out with libertarians. He even used to claim to be one. Back in the day, he would visit the offices of Libertarian Review to chat with the editor – the late Roy A. Childs, Jr. – and anybody else who happened to be in the vicinity ... Driven to the edge of desperation by the GOP's plummeting poll numbers and the looming prospect of losing power, the neocons have become little more than a raging lynch mob, eager to take as many of their enemies down with them as possible.

The Israelis, stung by their defeat at the hands of Hezbollah, are aching for a rematch. There have been a number of border incidents since the IDF retreated and the blockade was lifted, the most recent – and most brazen – occurring when the Israelis crossed a security fence ... The rumblings in Lebanon are the premonitory tremors of a regional earthquake that will shake most of the nations of the Middle East. George W. Bush is far from finished with the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East. The great tragedy is that political resistance to the administration's war moves are too little, too late.

Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, contains just about everything you might find in such a book: portraits of movement luminaries, such as Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek ...
Because there are new and entirely unforeseen threats to worry about–pandemics, terrorism, climate change–that aren't covered by the old paradigm of "negative liberty," which is hopelessly outdated and needs to be "restructured," i.e. entirely abandoned.

The discussion around Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism ... underscores a point I've been making ... to my fellow libertarians [and] to Antiwar.com's many left-oriented readers: libertarianism, i.e., the philosophy that government is invariably a malevolent force in human history, is anti-imperialism ... That some of our intellectual "leaders" are not living up to the example of their forebears is just a blip on the screen of our movement's intellectual history. The rest of us remember, revere, and take courage in [the] exemplars even as various backsliders ... fall by the wayside ...

The Haditha massacre, as it will doubtless be known, tells us something about this war ... and something about ourselves as Americans – or, rather, as creatures who have become a little less American in the post-9/11 era. What that something amounts to, according to your view of the war and of U.S. foreign policy, varies, but not that much. ... If we can look into the monster's face unflinchingly and recognize it as our own, then we have the wherewithal to implement our imperial foreign policy. If not ... then perhaps we ought to find ourselves another line of work, and get out of the empire-building business for good.

As the turbulent year of 1969 dawned, this time, the Rothbards' living room could no longer contain the entire libertarian movement that resided in New York City, and the Libertarian Forum was founded by Joseph Peden and Gerald Wolosz. Over sixty attended the first meeting held in a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side, coming from as far away as Buffalo ... Rothbard's casting out of the sixties counterculture was completed with the publication of "Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor," in which he skewered the egalitarian and primitivist themes that animated the New Left.

They mugged Jack Murtha, and the voters, Thursday morning. As the House Democratic caucus voted to install Rep. Steny Hoyer in the number-two leadership spot, over at the liberal Huffington Post they were running a large picture of Speaker Nancy and Hoyer making nice for the cameras, in a let’s-join-hands photo-op veritably oozing with phoniness ... We don't have any illusions of a quick victory in the battle to change American foreign policy ... Now, perhaps, that illusion has been shattered. The fate of Jack Murtha and the public pronouncements of Democratic party leaders bode ill for congressional action to end the war.

The announcement by North Korea that they have successfully tested a nuclear weapon in a remote region near the northernmost border with China ... was entirely predictable, given the course of the non-negotiations that have been going on since the 1990s ... Until and unless we are willing to reexamine the entire basis of American policy in North Asia and address the principal cause of conflict – the archaic and destabilizing American military presence – the war danger will remain. Indeed, it will only increase as tensions rise and the pressures brought to bear on the North Korean regime culminate in tragedy ...

We expected Bill Kristol and the usual neocon suspects to dismiss the atrocities committed by U.S. troops at Haditha as nothing to get too excited about. After all, these guys don't believe in any morality but that which comes out of the barrel of a gun. So what else is new? ... Popular sentiment in favor of a withdrawal from Iraq has been building for quite some time, and the Haditha massacre may be the tipping point that translates poll numbers into policy. ... will it happen in time, that is, before the neocons get us started on the next episode of their continuing series on the "liberation" of the Middle East?

Desperate to retain whatever remaining support the occupation of Iraq still commands – now hovering at around 35 percent – the War Party is facing the problem of how to explain the Haditha massacre, and the results are the only aspect of this horrific episode ... The Haditha massacre is not the result of individual failings, or of a "renegade" squadron that somehow shucked its training and went berserk. It is the inevitable consequence of a policy that cannot be implemented without inflicting massive casualties on the enemy ... in a country where the overwhelming majority want the occupation to end.

Our "free" media is so eager to accept the official British explanation of why their sailors/Marines wound up in Iranian custody that most Western "news" accounts are ignoring all evidence to the contrary, such as the trenchant observation of former British diplomat Craig Murray ... The coming war with Iran will not end until the entire region is aflame ... Is this the price the world is willing to pay to put an end to the "existential threat" to Israel? Or will our rulers pause, before plunging into an abyss, to ask: what about the existential threat to the rest of the world?

Is the U.S. going to occupy Iraq indefinitely, or will we withdraw our troops within the next year or so, as the majority of Americans would have it? President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki don't care what Americans – or Iraqis – think or want ... To the Beltway crowd, Democrats as well as Republicans, the Empire is a fact of life, and – when the balance sheet is drawn up – a good thing. After all, who, other than themselves, is better qualified to run the world? And if you can't handle that, my friend, then you most certainly are one of those dreadful "isolationists."

Portraits of Congressman Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, invariably descend into cliché–he is "Dr. No," he’s against subsidies even for his own district, he's a libertarian Don Quixote–but, then again, clichés are what the conventional wisdom is made of, and so we are told Rep. Paul's run for the White House is a fool's errand. He's a "fringe" candidate, he has "no chance" ... A Republican victory in the next presidential election seems unlikely no matter who wins the nomination: if Republicans can't win the White House this time around, perhaps they'll be content with winning back their own souls.

We know that Ron Paul did great in the Republican presidential debate sponsored by Fox News and held in Durham, New Hampshire, because how else can we explain neocon Andy McCarthy's exclamation of despair over at the National Review group blog? "Why," he cried out in anguish, "is there so much cheering for Ron Paul?" ... It was the neocons who wanted this war, who planned it, who agitated for it, and who finally got their heart's desire when the bombs began to fall on Baghdad. It is their honor that is at stake – and, as we all know, the honor of those who never had any to begin with cannot be compromised.

The smoke barely had time to clear before a dark cloud of intrigue and suspicion formed around the circumstances leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When the shock had worn off, questions began to be asked, at least by the most sober and realistic Americans: why had the US military been taken by surprise, and who, the Congress and the public wanted to know, was responsible? ... Flynn's trenchant pamphlet was prescient in its conclusion that FDR had to have known a good deal about the Japanese plans. Aside from his prescience, however, [he] was brave beyond measure ...

In our Orwellian age, no one is surprised when American foreign policy takes a U-turn, and, suddenly, we are at war with Eastasia – because, you see, we have always been at war with Eastasia. Yet even the most jaded observers are bound to raise an eyebrow over our embrace of the Somalian warlords, whose disarmament and capture was our announced goal the last time we intervened. ... If al-Qaeda is credited with reversing the threat of a complete social breakdown in Somalia ... then surely the terrorist leader is smiling somewhere in a deep dark cave, rubbing his hands together and chortling at his extraordinary good fortune.

In my column on the Iraq Study Group, I neglected to mention the most objectionable aspect of the Baker-Hamilton report, and that is the suggestion that it might be a good idea to inject a "surge" of U.S. troops to secure Baghdad and stabilize a regime that seems about to fall ... Neither a surge in troops nor an increase in the amount of nonmilitary aid we pump into the stillborn Iraqi "government" can revive the patient. The only way to serve – and save – the national interest is to get out as quickly as possible, before more damage is done to our prestige, the U.S. Treasury, and the long-suffering peoples of the region.

The family of Andrew Bacevich, a 27-year-old first lieutenant who was recently killed in an ambush north of Baghdad, doesn't want to see its beloved son and brother turned into an impersonal symbol of a tragic and unnecessary war: they want him to be remembered as a special person ... Given these circumstances and his own unimaginable private agony, Professor Bacevich may perhaps be forgiven for the deep despair resonating in his voice as he questions the very foundations of who and what we are as a people. I share his outrage, but not his pessimism: our old Republic has weathered many a storm ...

In a recent op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, Andrew J. Bacevich, West Point graduate and professor of international relations at Boston University, takes up the question that will haunt us for some time to come: Who lost Iraq? ... You can go to the slammer for exposing a CIA agent and stealing government secrets, and that's what is likely to happen to Scooter Libby and the AIPAC defendants barring divine or presidential intervention. Ugly? Beauty is quite subjective, and never more so than in this case. As for me, the sight of the War Party getting its just deserts couldn't be lovelier.

The theme of Eugene Jarecki's thoughtful yet hard-hitting documentary, Why We Fight, is inspired by President Dwight Eisenhower's famous farewell speech, in which he warns against the rising danger of militarism as an economic system and a mindset ... this film – and the popular anti-interventionist sentiment ... – is part of a nationwide reaction against militarism that is just beginning to gather momentum. If we take this country back from the gang that lied us into war ... then Why We Fight will have played what may turn out to be a catalytic part by making the victory of Eisenhowerism over neoconservatism possible.

Justin Raimondo explains how the neoconservatives went from being communists to Republicans, and why they took America to war in Iraq.