Laughland

Once again we have a British columnist/campaigner who has made it his task to defend the dictators. Putin, John Laughland tells us, "has been the very opposite of a dictator or an imperialist. He has preferred instead to adopt an attitude of appeasement in the face of relentless US expansionism. During Putin’s presidency, Russia has been geopolitically weakened far beyond even the catastrophes inflicted under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and yet the so-called tyrant in the Kremlin has done absolutely nothing to stop it." Milosevic, he tells us, is a scapegoat in a "show trial" organized by the West. Most recently, as David Aaronovitch has shown,Laughland has been trying to discredit the Ukrainian opposition and its leadership, and lavishing praise on Yanukovych.

Laughland and the type of views he presents are not really a new phenomenon in Britain and in Europe. During the 1930s, when there reigned a confusion of political and social values not dissimilar to the one that exists now, the Laughlands could be found all over the British press - especially the Beaverbrook press. In many ways, the rise of Hitler was made possible because of such confusion - a loss of moral and intellectual focus, which enables the crossing from one political extreme to another, where fascists become communists, and "libertarians" are allied to the most intolerant and anti-liberal ideologies. After the collapse of Soviet Communism, a return to this mish-mash of extremisms was always on the cards, and it has begun to assert itself in many quarters, including, it seems, areas of the British political establishment.

In the 1930s, liberal democracy became deeply unfashionable - the vogue was for "commitment", whether of left or of right, and the ideals of moderation and tolerance , were exchanged for those of "creative destruction". The push towards illiberal, totalitarian modes of thinking and acting exists also now, in our modern society - human kind cannot stand very much reality, and the urge to escape into the pseudo-certainties of anti-democracy, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, anti-"bourgeois"-ism, is as strong as it was back then. The tactic of the political and moral smear becomes all-important in the media, as the distortions of thinking that characterized the ideologists of Nazism and Stalinism still prevail - though now harnessed to a new and possibly even more destructive form and force of nihilism.

Update: RIAN haven't been slow to seize on the "Laughland controversy": here they go with an old-fashioned propaganda piece in time-honoured Soviet style, by one of their in-house commentators:

Western Europe seems to have accepted the American theory that the presidential election in Ukraine was rigged. Washington and Old European capitals, in particular Berlin, demand a repetition of the second round of the election.

But respected European organizations disagree. The British Helsinki Human Rights Group, whose observers sat in election districts in Ukraine, is convinced that the election was honest.

Does anyone in Europe know about the Group's opinion? No. The Ukrainian news circulated in Europe is screened to favor opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko and all other views are discarded as spam..

It's a rather tedious read, but you can catch the whole of it here. (via Marius)