The Mask Slips: ‘Libertarians’ Call for Pre-Emptive War

by | Apr 15, 2014

Egle Markeviciute

Neocon Watch readers may remember Eglė Markevičiūtė. She is the Lithuanian member of the International Executive Board of the Students for Liberty (SFL) who co-wrote, with SFL president Alexander McCobin, an embarrassingly error-riddled attack on Ron Paul over his opposition to US intervention in Ukraine. She is also part of the Young Voices network, which has been recognized for its work by the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government funded regime change organization.

Well Markevičiūtė is back and the mask has dropped. In a recent Daily Caller article, titled, appropriately enough, “Military intervention is the only solution to Russia’s aggression,” she calls for the US to launch a pre-emptive war against Russia. She is sick of the US refusal to fight Ukraine’s battles and her own. “The Western world’s lack of military action only encourages Putin’s regime,” she pouts, channeling her inner Jennifer Rubin.

All the kids on the liberty block should embrace the George W. Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, avers the Lithuanian liberty activist:

Limited military presence, such as an increased NATO presence in the Baltic States and Poland or troop deployment in Ukraine, is something that liberty-minded individuals should reconsider as a preventive measure to stop the spread of Putin’s conquests further into Eastern Europe.

Because nothing says liberty like robbing the American taxpayer to fight your battles. Nothing says liberty like mainlining more trillions into the veins of the US military-industrial complex. Nothing says liberty like the total destruction of a World War III. Peace and prosperity are for losers. To Markevičiūtė and her cohorts, sometimes you just have to force liberty on the rest of the world at the barrel of a gun.

For all her tough talk, it appears Markevičiūtė is quite unlikely to herself put in any time in the military. That is a job for the Americans, apparently.

Like most of the new NATO member countries, she views membership in what once was the Western alliance not as a means by which to resolve old conflicts, but rather to punch above her nation’s class, as a puny kid who finds “courage” in a muscled new friend willing to defend her increasingly provocative actions.

NATO expansion was always a bad idea, but when you have people like Poland’s foreign Minister Radek Sikorski — a former employee of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute — urging Ukraine to provoke Russia, and Lithuania’s Markevičiūtė breathing heavily for a US pre-emptive strike on Russia, it is more than obvious that it was a colossally stupid idea that may have earth-changing ramifications.

Actual non-interventionist Justin Raimondo recently challenged another Students for Liberty board member to clarify whether advocating pre-emptive war was not a rather less than libertarian position to take, but the response was again disappointingly limp: “it’s a big tent org and my role isn’t ideological enforcement.” Apparently you can be a neocon and still be a liberty activist. The liberty label starts to become meaningless.

The Students for Liberty organization is so dedicated to promoting liberty overseas that they are willing to promote it by stealth — or by stealth bomber! Nothing says liberty like a cruise missile headed to your village…

Mission Accomplished!

Author

  • Daniel McAdams

    Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-Producer/co-Host, Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, MD (R-Texas) from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.

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