Lindsey Graham needs to get a grip about Russia
Why would anyone want to be associated with a party that claims that killing an ethnic group is “the best money they’ve ever spent”?
If the conservative party wants to win the cultural war against the radical left, and convince Americans that it has always been the party of liberty, then it must adopt the principles of the “old right” and stop voting for war-mongering politicians like Lindsey Graham.
The policies of the “old right” were rooted in classical liberalism and Jeffersonian republicanism, which is to say Lockean and Kantian ethics, and were intellectually contributed to and elegantly romanticized by Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson, and Garett Garrett. Indeed, Isabel Patterson’s book The God of the Machine is a tour de force for those who subscribe to the view of limited government and free markets. Additionally, Rose Wilder Lane’s Give Me Liberty, in which she discusses her transformation from a communist to a capitalist, based on her firsthand experience in the old USSR, is a must-read, along with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Garett Garrett’s A Bubble That Broke the World.
Politicians like Lindsey Graham should be widely condemned by the conservative party, because he’s not a real conservative. Rather, he epitomizes the corrupt Washington establishment, which is to say he does nothing productive but propagate fear.
He must be rebuked.
First things first: Russia is employing capitalism as its mode of production. The Russians dismantled much of their centralized production in the ’80s under Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika reformation, and so it’s been nearly a half-century since the nation centrally planned its economy. Therefore, when Graham and others tell you that we should go to war with Russia to fight “communism,” he’s either lying or ignorant. We all know there are still communist factions in Russia, but that’s like saying there are Neo-Nazis in America. They exist, of course, but in trivial numbers.
One might argue that, while the Russian Republic uses capitalism as its mode of production, it’s still a totalitarian country because of Putin’s stranglehold on the political opposition. That argument is reasonable, but I think it’s important to recognize that Russian domestic politics doesn’t directly affect Americans. The reality is that the Russian military has neither the size nor the financing to wage a war throughout Europe. In WWII, it cost the Russians twenty-eight million lives to get from Moscow to Berlin — about 1,000 miles — so it should be obvious that if Putin had the ambition to destroy Americans, he would have done so already and with the only practical means available to him — i.e., nuclear weapons. It’s far more likely that Russia, like everyone else, is more interested in self-determination and preservation than war.
Secondly, Graham and others often tell us that Russia is conducting false flag operations, and that Donbas’s desire to secede from Kiev is manufactured by Russian misinformation, but notice how they never provide us with any evidence. They babble and prattle, but nothing of substance is ever delivered. It seems to me that the only logical conclusion is that Graham and others like him desperately want us to be perpetually terrified so we are willing to give Washington more power, more money, and more control over our lives. But it’s not the first time our establishment has tried to sell us this kind of fear.
When Crimea voted to rejoin Russia, we were all inundated with articles that told us it was a “sham election” and that this was the start of a European conquest, despite the fact that 95% of Crimean citizens are ethnic Russians. Indeed, if you travel to Crimea this summer, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who supports, or knows anyone who supported, the 1992 Crimean constitution.
Lastly, we spent billions of dollars overthrowing the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, presumably because our establishment overlords were unhappy with his cozy relationship with Russia. Not only is that anti-democratic, but that type of realpolitik further weakens us politically and economically. It was also the primary catalyst for the secession of Donbas and the subsequent civil war. Such actions are the equivalent of Russia spending billions to overthrow Trump or Biden. Considering the above, is anyone surprised Donbas seceded?
In other words, our establishment not only supports a sweatpants-wearing, steroid-using apparatchik in Kiev, who openly supports the neo-Nazi Azov battalion, and who refuses to abide by the MINSK agreement, but also has a contradictory view of self-determination. On the one hand, they claim to support Bosnia’s unilateral secession from Serbia, but on the other hand, they refuse to support Donbas’s unilateral secession from Ukraine.
In conclusion, if one purports to stand for liberty, then one must at least try to be logically consistent. Gung-ho political remarks, overthrowing elected officials, and other examples of realpolitik will not win us friends abroad, and screaming “false flag,” without any evidence, more closely resembles the totalitarian countries we claim to detest than the framework on which this nation was founded. It’s absolutely appalling that we have ignoramuses in Washington, like Lindsey Graham, smirking creepily into the camera lens while glorifying the death and destruction of human beings. It has all the hallmarks of a totalitarian thug, and true conservatives should not lend their support.
Eireahmon Feidhlim Ruaidhri is an Irish-American attorney with an LL.B. and LL.M. from the University of London.
Image via Picryl.