John Laughland

John Laughland   (author, journalist)
Born	6 September 1963
Nationality	UK
Alma mater	Oxford University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Interests	• regime change • Slobodan Milosevic
Author of many great articles on regime changes, political trials and war propaganda

John Laughland is a British conservative academic and author who writes on international affairs and political philosophy, and has written extensively on regime changes, political trials, the EU and war propaganda.

Career

Laughland has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford, studied at Munich University, and has been a lecturer at the Sorbonne and at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris. He also holds the French post-doctoral habilitation degree for his work on sovereignty in international relations.

Laughland has contributed articles to The Guardian, The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, Brussels Journal, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The American Conservative and Antiwar.com. The Guardian stopped accepting his articles sometime around 2008. He has been also been published by Voltaire Network and Russia Today.

He was until 2008 the European director of the European Foundation, a eurosceptic think-tank chaired by Bill Cash MP.

From 2008 to 2018, he was Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris, which is headed by Natalia Narochnitskaya, a Russian historian and former State Duma deputy. He then worked for Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a Rassemblement National MEP in the European Parliament until 2019, and for Derk Jan Eppink, a Forum for Democracy MEP since.

Publications and positions

In 1997, he published The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, a critique in which he contends that the European Union shares some ideological affinity with Fascism, Nazism and communism, notably its rejection of the nation-state.

He has written extensively on international criminal justice, condemning the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. He criticises it as a political tribunal and also point out double standards for refusing to open an investigation into whether NATO committed war crimes in Yugoslavia in 1999. Laughland was a strong critic of NATO's intervention in the Kosovo War in 1999, and also opposed the Iraq War.

“People experience a strong psychological reluctance to accept that political events today are deliberately manipulated. This reluctance is itself a product of the ideology of the information age, which flatters people’s vanity and encourages them to believe that they have access to huge amounts of information. In fact, the apparent multifarious nature of modern media information hides an extreme paucity of original sources, rather as a street of restaurants on a Greek waterfront can hide the reality of a single kitchen at the back. News reports of major events very often come from a single source, usually a wire agency, and even authoritative news outlets like the BBC simply recycle information which they have received from these agencies, presenting it as their own.”
John Laughland (2010) 

“A feature of today’s mass media culture which many dissidents lazily and wrongly denounce as "totalitarian" is precisely that dissenting views may be expressed and published, but this is precisely because, being mere drops in the ocean, they are never a threat to the tide of propaganda.”
John Laughland (2010) 

Selected Articles

• The Technique of a Coup d’État
• Credibility of European Court of Human Rights lies in ruins after judges’ links to Soros revealed
• This is not justice
• Who observes the observers?
• The mask of altruism disguising a colonial war
• The Chechens' American friends
• The mythology of people power
• Criminal proceedings
• Lies of the vigilantes
• Too little, too late: Kosovo President Thaçi’s indictment for war crimes 20 years on isn’t justice for Serbia – it’s a travesty
• EU resolution equating Communism & Nazism is tawdry piece of Russophobia
• France’s govt exaggerates Yellow Vest threat to justify measures of political repression
• Has Blair Sexed Up Saddam’s Atrocities, Too?

Bibliography

Authored books

• The Death of Politics: France Under Mitterrand (Michael Joseph, London, 1994)
• The Tainted Source, the Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea (Little Brown, London 1997; later translated into French, Spanish, Czech and Polish; now available as an ebook)
• Le tribunal pénal international: Gardien du nouvel ordre mondial (François-Xavier de Guibert, Paris, 2003)
• Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice (Pluto Press, London, 2007)
• Schelling versus Hegel: from German idealism to Christian metaphysics (Ashgate, 2007)
• A History of Political Trials from Charles I to Charles Taylor (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2nd edition, 2016)

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