Russia may be seizing Ukraine’s warships and
massing
tens of thousands of troops and armaments along the eastern
border while President Obama warns for the umpteenth time that they
better cut this stuff out, seriously, or else there will be costs,
but that’s not where the real battle for Crimea is. It’s
all about former Rep. Ron Paul and Students For Liberty (SFL)
President Alexander McCobin and the “right” stance for
libertarians.
Recap of
Round One:
Ron Paul penned an op-ed last week stating that the referendum
in Crimea over joining the Russian Federation was legitimate and
that the “occupation” by the Russian military did not have an
impact on the vote. He contended that
it’s a “so what?” issue for Americans, and the U.S. government
should focus on ending its own meddling around the world.
McCobin
wrote on Tuesday that Paul “gets it wrong when he speaks
of Crimea’s right to secede” because it was “annexed by
Russian military force at gunpoint and its supposedly
democratic ‘referendum’ was a farce.” He fires some shots saying,
“it’s much too simplistic to solely condemn the United States for
any kind of geopolitical instability in the world.”
Round Two:
Paul didn’t shoot back himself, but Daniel McAdams, executive
director of the Ron Paul Institute, yesterday
asserted that McCobin has “no evidence” that Russian military
played a roll in annexing the region, and that if Crimeans wanted
to remain part of Ukraine, they could have just delegitimized the
referendum by “stay[ing] home” and not voting at all.
McAdams dropped some more bombs. He accused
McCobin of being a “neocon warmonger,” suggested that his
organization “is in bed” with the National Endowment for Democracy,
and warned that SFL would experience an exodus of members for
attacking Paul.
McCobin retaliated within hours. He
wrote that McAdams made too “many false claims” to bother
addressing, but wrote:
I don’t deny that any part of a country (thus also Crimea) has
the right to secede; I just respectfully disagree that what
happened between Crimea and the Russian Federation was a peaceful
secession, rather than an armed invasion….We ought to oppose war, military aggression, and farcical
democratic posturing by all governments….In this case, I believe
we ought to not only call for the United States to not engage in
war with Ukraine, we ought to call for Russia not to engage in war
with Ukraine.
He concluded with a call for a truce, explaining that he still
supports Paul, even if they disagree, and “hope[s] that [his
readers] will work with the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and
Prosperity.”
Round Three:
The
fighting has
spread to Antiwar.com. God help us all.
At The Libertarian Standard, Anthony Gregory
suggests that both sides have merits and demerits, but that
“refighting the Cold War within libertarianism will only harden
people’s hearts, polarize their loyalties, and ultimately
compromise their principles and clarity of thought. I plead young
libertarians to refuse to be a proxy belligerent in this Cold
War.”
Round Four:
Despite libertarian ideological infighting, Crimea is still
annexed, Ukraine’s eastern border is still threatened, and the
world keeps spinning.
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