Remember the Ron Paul newsletters? The anti-Semitic, anti-gay, racist, conspiracy-mongering garbage published in decades past? The man who published that newsletter was Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul’s former Chief of Staff, and according to The Daily Beast he has just been appointed to the board of Paul’s new think tank.
On April 17, Paul announced the creation of a new think tank, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which, according to its website, “continues and expands Dr. Paul’s lifetime of public advocacy for a peaceful foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties at home.” Sitting on the advisory board is none other than Rockwell. [...]
If Paul “disavow[s] those positions” expressed in the newsletters, as he adamantly told the Times less than two years ago, then why would he place their presumed author on the board of a think tank bearing his name?
Of course this is why Paul didn’t fool anyone when he disavowed the newsletters during the 2012 campaign. His fringe beliefs are well-documented as were his financial ties to the publication of the ugly newsletter that carried his name.
But there’s much more.
But Rockwell isn’t the nuttiest of the people associated with the institute—not even close.
That honor likely belongs to the Dickensian-named John Laughland, a British writer who has never met a Central or Eastern European autocrat he didn’t like. A prominent defender of the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Laughland penned a book on his Hague war-crimes trial titled Travesty (the “travesty” in question not being the Bosnian Serb genocide of Muslims, which Laughland denies ever took place, but the “kangaroo court” that brought Milosevic to justice and which Laughland blamed for his 2006 death). Laughland has also defended Ukraine’s Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych (whose attempt to steal the 2004 election sparked that country’s peaceful Orange Revolution) and lamented the fate of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s last dictator, victim of “humiliating treatment” at the hands of a “propaganda campaign waged against” him “by the West.”
I have no doubt that the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity will promote prosperity, at least for some, but I’m less confident that peace will be on the agenda. That is unless your definition of peace is to become an isolationist and look the other way as murderous dictators engage in ethnic cleansing and genocide. A view that would consider intervention to be “rocking the boat.”
You can’t make this shit up.