From: Roman Skaskiw [Email him]

I live in Ukraine, and it pains me to see conservatives and libertarians getting the story wrong. I've made increasingly strong rebuttals (here, here, here, and here) and have argued that the Russian idea is just as anti-nationalist as the EU in its ends, but much more brutal in its means. See The Conflicting Nat’l Myths of Ukraine – Russia & the strange union w/ Putin – Europe’s Right, June 11, 2014.

I'm happy to not be alone in attempting to correct conservative misconceptions. Today, my friend Curt Doolittle of the Propertarian Institute posted this rebuttal to Pat Buchanan's December 9th column to Facebook, which I reposted on my own blog:

On False Equivalence Of Comparing Exports Of Russian And American Political Influence (reposted from original site) Pat. You posit a moral equivalency where none exists. Here is why: US *Demonstrated* Postwar Policy Assumes the Following 1) BORDERS – states who don’t respect borders can lead to world wars. 2) HUMAN RIGHTS – states who don’t respect human rights export problems to the rest of us. 3) CONSUMER CAPITALISM – consumer capitalism is in the interests of ordinary people, because it will raise them out of ignorance and poverty, and more importantly, it creates states that can be competed with, and cooperated with, economically rather than militarily – this is profound because just as under consumer capitalism the market competition and conflict produce beneficial ends for consumers, so does market competition between states produce beneficial ends for consumers since it forces a choice between consumption and expenditure on the ambitions of the central government – not the least of which is military expansion. BUT ALSO OUR FAILURES 4) DEMOCRACY – it is our evangelism of democracy under the myth that all people desire and are capable of it, rather than, that northern Europeans were uniquely capable of self-rule for historical reasons...[More]

Read the whole thing at my own site.

Roman Skaskiw (email him) is an American of Ukrainian ancestry. He writes and develops software in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, where he also teaches Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. His blog is Roman In Ukraine.

James Fulford writes: In February, Roman Skaskiw wrote The Enemy Of Ukraine’s Protesters Is Not Necessarily The American Right’s Friend for VDARE.com.