It was announced on Antiwar.com earlier today that Justin Raimondo has died at the age of 67 after a two-year battle with lung cancer. An energetic and intransigent advocate for peace and liberty, he was gifted with a writing ability that left all others in the dust. His style of writing, and his passion, compelled me to make my own feeble attempt at the craft, and his writing was virtually my sole inspiration at the time I created Republic Reborn, back in 2014. His writing made me appreciate the persuasive power of the written word when done well and with care, and I’ve eagerly read and reread his tri-weekly columns, not merely for the enjoyment, but also to glean lessons of composition and style. I had always meant to communicate with him in some way on the topic of writing, if only to gain insight into what it takes to write truly well. He probably was the most eloquent of the anti-war voices, and his death is a tragedy and a irreplaceable loss for the liberty/peace movement.
The staff at Antiwar.com published a wonderful obituary following his death earlier today, filled with more information than I’d ever known about early years, including his run-in with Ayn Rand’s fatuous Objectivist cult when he was just 14. The article paints a picture of an eternal, inveterate rebel and individualist, passionate about the philosophy of liberty and a desire to deliver it from the realm of ideas and imagination into this world as soon as possible. The entire corpus of his writing stands as an immortal testament to that spirit, an attitude that is certain to realize the ideal of liberty, if only enough of its advocates hold fast to it. What I loved about him, and what I’m sure others also loved about him, was that Raimondo never “evolved” or “matured” as many writers do when they allow their pockets to be filled by rich philanthropists and corporate-sponsored think tanks, committing the ultimate act of artistic perversion and selling their soul in exchange for a false, and fleeting, prestige among the wretched Political Class. Raimondo’s website, Antiwar.com, relied on the monthly donations of its readers to sustain it, thereby retaining its complete and utter independence from the monsters for whom Raimondo was an eternal adversary. He never abandoned his principles, even when the war madness was at its height, and when everyone seemed to succumb to it in the early days of the War on Terror. He was a hero to many, of a type bordering on extinction now, but one that Tennyson surely had in mind when composing Ulysses, and I can think of no more appropriate epitaph for someone who so deftly wielded steel among so much filth and decay of the Imperial perversion of a long-dead Republic:
