20th
conspiracy theory winner
Everybody, we have a winner in the conspiracy theory contest—commenter BenH:
I begin to wonder whether a very clever US administration didn’t deliberately sell Georgia down the river. The US faces a resurgent, petroconfident, irridentist Russia. A Russian that has managed to use its energy resources and its diaspora to gain influence in its near-abroad; that might use those same energy resources and Europe’s dependence on them to project influence even further West; that has suborned the likes of Gerhard Schroeder with petro-lucre to serve as an agent of influence in Germany. At the same time, suspicion of America remains at a historic height in those same countries. Would it not be useful for these countries to get a wake-up call of sorts? Something to allow them to draw a contrast between a fundamentally “good” but presently disliked power (disliked because it falls short of the higher standards to which it is held) and a fundamentally “bad” power (the badness of which is overlooked because the practical consequences of confronting its badness are costly and inconvenient)? Has not Russian behavior drawn that very contrast? Suddenly, a heretofore ambivalent Ukraine shudders in fear and cozies up to the West. Western Europe starts thinking much more seriously about diversifying its natural gas supply.
But this line of thinking doesn’t last long, for I visit the news-stand and relearn from the infallible commentariat that Bush is a mental defective, incapable of deep strategy! Now, if Karl Rove were in charge of the NSC…
Needless to say, this wins hands-down. In addition to introducing the word “petroconfident” to the tumblr, it has all the hallmarks of great conspiracy theory, chief among them the idea that the people running our country are as smart as my commenters. Which, uh, you’d have to come up with a separate conspiracy theory to account for how these geniuses were suddenly put in place (by other geniuses) to govern our country to begin with, instead of the usual idiots. And then another conspiracy theory to explain the geniuses behind the geniuses. If you see what I mean.
In other Saakashvili-is-crazy news, a reader directs me to his Tumblr, where he has posted an interesting fake psychological study of Saakashvili clearly written by the KGB, and the way it’s served as a kind of primer for the Russian mass media—here. The rest of that Tumblr is also very interesting.
In other “are they evil or just dumb?” news, did everyone see that clip of the Ossetian girl on Fox TV over the weekend? It’s here. Shepard Smith, the host, wants to talk about how terrible it was for the girl to be faced suddenly with aerial bombardment—and the girl’s aunt chimes in to point out that it was the Georgians, not the Russians, who were bombing them, and Fox cuts to commercial.
What’s interesting about this is, it brings us back to the first days of the conflict, when I for one had trouble understanding who was bombing who, and for example when there was a dispute over the body count in Tsvinkhali, I must have thought that was a Georgian city, and couldn’t understand why the Russians wanted to maximize the body count, and the Georgians to minimize it. I don’t know if the reports were deliberately fudging this—the fact that the Georgians had attacked the city—or what. (And I should add that Human Rights Watch, which is an organization I trust, has unequivocally stated that the assault on Tsvinkhali was not nearly as vicious as the Russians claimed.) Anyway, so Fox News has the same weird situation—clearly they meant to suggest that the 12-YEAR-OLD GIRL had been bombed by the Russians. But did they think she would just plain never mention it, in the glare of the TV lights—or were *they themselves confused enough by the situation*? I.e., evil or just dumb? It’s a philosophical question. We’ll never know.
