Knowing what we do about John Laughland, Sanders Research Associates, and his outfit, the “pretend” British Helsinki Human Rights Group, you could predict what his analysis of events in Uzbekistan would be, even before it appeared in the Guardian.
Rule 1: Laughland always defends “Soviet-era throwbacks”.
Rule 2: Laughland always “discovers” that the US is behind anything bad that happens.
With Karimov, Laughland has a real problem. His natural instinct is to defend him because he is a Soviet-era throwback. But he knows that most Guardian readers think of him as a US stooge. What to do! What to do!
Simple. Karimov isn’t shooting demonstrators in Uzbekistan. Its all a lie dreamed up by the CIA who are probably also backing Hizb’ut Tahrir. Why would they do this? Because the US foreign policy is controlled by twisty-turny trotskyite neocons:
Ostensible US support for a president like Islam Karimov, moreover, gives the Americans the very proximity to a regime that they need in order to buy off turncoats within the power structure when the time comes for regime change; to believe that the current unrest in Uzbekistan will lead to anything other than the consolidation of American power in this strategically crucial region near China’s border is to fail to understand how much US foreign policy under the neocons owes to the theory of permanent revolution.
This is the X Files view of foreign affairs. Sure, nefarious plots do take place. Sometimes things are indeed not as they seem. But usually they are. As the Iraq intelligence fiasco illustrates, the CIA and MI6 are just public sector bureaucracies after all, subject to the same sorts of institutional failings and inefficiencies of all large flabby outfits. It turns out that they’re not capable of running a secret one world government after all.
Unless, that’s what they want you to think! Perhaps the CIA and MI6 were just pretending to be crap, so that people would stop believing they were secretly controlling the world, so that they’d be able to get on with the job of, erm, secretly controlling the world.
That is the mark of a conspiracy theorist. You start off with the conspiracy. Then all the evidence is interpreted in order to fit the theory. Any evidence which points the other way is dismissed as manufactured by the conspirators, with a twitchy ‘that’s what they want you to think’ out of the corner of your mouth.
In fact, to the conspiracy theorist, the best proof of the ultimate conspiracy would be no evidence at all: for who, but the master conspirator, would be able to control the world without leaving any trace?
I wonder why the Guardian insists on printing John Laughland’s ramblings.
Perhaps they think it makes them “edgy”.
Hat tip: Tim Worstall via Eric
