Justin Raimondo, longtime editor of AntiWar.com and a great friend of the Mises Institute, has died.
Far too young, we might add, at 67. We can only mourn the silencing of his voice, and acknowledge him as perhaps the most important libertarian foreign policy writer of the past several decades.
Yet unlike many peace advocates, Justin read and understood economics—not to mention history and political theory.
Justin was well known to many readers of mises.org. He authored two important books in the paleolibertarian genre: Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, where he called for a return to the noninterventionist principles of the Taft/Garrett ”Old Right,” and An Enemy of the State, his biography of his great friend Murray N. Rothbard. He shared a special bond and friendship with Rothbard, and the two spent countless hours together working and socializing. I had the pleasure of emailing and calling him from time to time over the years, and interviewed him here. I always came away laughing at his take-no-prisoners approach, and fortified by his relentless determination.
Justin truly hit his stride during Bill Clinton’s Kosovo War, for which he criticized the former president (and his wife) mercilessly. Kosovo put Antiwar.com on the map, and made Justin a star in libertarian circles. His sharp tongue and sharp pen, translated well across a keyboard. And his acerbic style, coupled with real research and broad knowledge of world affairs, made for a new kind of online journalism. Certainly many of us fondly remember bookmarking Antiwar.com in the 1990s and 2000s, eagerly waiting for Justin’s latest broadside against some deserving tyrant or war profiteer.
Here’s a sample of his signature takedown of self-important pols, from just a few years ago:
Libya, Syria, Iraq, Kosovo — these countries, which lie in ruins, are grotesque monuments to the criminality of American “regime-change” operations, which have wreaked havoc everywhere they’ve been successful. With a record like this, it’s incredible that the same pack of buzzards in Washington are allowed to go on their merry way, without having to answer to anyone for their crimes. Indeed, the two leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, both supported this disastrous war War.
And of course he never ran out of wars to cover. We’ll miss you, old friend.
