The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity (RPIPP) has published an article written by john Laughland, the director of the Forum for Democracy International, an arm of the Dutch far-right political party known as the FvD. The article, titled “The Americans Did It” attempts to cast doubt on the idea that the Russians were likely behind the recent suspected sabotage of the Nordstream 2 gas pipelines and redirect blame onto the United States:
September 29, 2022 In his remarkable book, The Psychology of Totaitarianism, the Flemish psychologist Mathias Desmet explains how collective psychosis can cause people to lose their critical faculties. He cites a famous experiment in which a person can be made to say that one line on a diagram is the same length as another, when in fact it is longer, if seven or eight actors have pretended to come to the same conclusion before him. Desmet is writing mainly about the coercive psychosis of Covid. But the same arguments apply to the current collective psychosis about Russia. For years and decades now, we have been fed horror stories about Russia. These have of course only increased in intensity since the invasion of Ukraine. We have now reached a situation in which entire sections of the media, and their respective national governments, claim to believe things which are simply impossible. The latest example is the apparent sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Russia has been immediately blamed but the accusation is not credible, for the following reasons. I defy any person endowed with normal critical faculties to show the opposite.
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The RPIPP website describes itself as an “educational organization” that “continues and expands Dr. Paul’s lifetime of public advocacy for a peaceful foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties at home.” However, a 2017 US media report says the RIPIPP is a new ‘institute’ for ‘peace’ comprised of anti-Semites, 9/11 truthers, and dictator lovers. The Daily Beast article goes on to characterize the RIPIPP positions on Russia as follows:
In addition, the BHHRG regularly advocates positions that regurgitate Russian nationalist talking points, minimize xenophobic and illiberal attitudes prevalent in the former Eastern bloc, or excuse authoritarian tendencies. Its website, for instance, claims that the Baltic republic of Latvia was “incorporated” into the Soviet Union, not violently invaded by Stalin (who sent over 100,000 Latvians to the gulag) and occupied for nearly half a century, all of which is a “myth.” Daniel McAdams, Paul’s erstwhile congressional foreign-policy adviser and the new executive director of his institute, who has “monitored” elections for the BHHRG, published an article for Rockwell’s website referring to Lukashenko’s “authoritarianism” in scare quotes.
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The Global Influence Operations Report (GIOR) reported earlier that Laughland is a British national and conspiracy theorist with close ties to Russia and who recently spoke at a Hungarian education facility associated with the government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Russia’s closest partner in the EU. We also reported earlier that Forum for Democracy International had posted “a petition for affordable energy in the EU” seeking an end to EU sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
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