First there was Georgia, and then Ukraine, followed by Lebanon, and now Kyrgyzstan. Add to that the election in Iraq, and we had no choice but to agree that George W. Bush’s call for spreading political freedom had been winning the hearts and minds of democracy enthusiasts everywhere, including in Kyrgyzstan. The “Democracy Narrative” that dominated media chatter for at least a few hours was creating the impression that the “Good Guys” were winning.

In fact, there are actually a few American experts on Kyrgyzstan and several Western journalists even traveled to Bishkek, and after a day or two they succeeded in getting their message across, and we discovered that – as the New York Times concluded – the uprising looks now less like a democratic revolution and more “like a garden-variety coup, with a handful of seasoned politicians vying for the spoils of the ousted government,” that is, “a plain old coup.”

The ousted Mr. Akayev is now being described as one of the more progressive political figures in Central Asia, while its opponents are depicted as members of the political and economic elite, mostly politicians from the country’s southern and northern provinces, trying to overturn the results of the last parliamentary elections and inciting mobs to commit acts of vandalism.

What many Americans fail to understand is that the collapse of centralized authoritarian governments in Kyrgyzstan, like in many parts of the world, including Central Asia and the Middle East, is propelled quite often by tribal, ethnic, religious, and nationalist forces. ~Leon Hadar

It is gratifying to see someone of Mr. Hadar’s expertise come to the same assessment that I did when the coup first occurred. Also of interest related to this article is the discussion of it now ongoing at Chronicles. My assumption of direct Western intervention was slightly overblown, but only slightly: Freedom House and Soros’ minions were very, very active in subverting the Akayev presidency. If the forged memo, allegedly written by the U.S. Ambassador in Bishkek, tells us anything, it accurately reflects the groups in Kyrgyzstan that pro-Akayev forces perceived as their enemies: the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, Freedom House, Internews Network and the Eurasia Foundation.

The board members of several of those organisations might make up a nice, short list of a Who’s Who of Hegemonists, and it can scarcely be an accident that this pro-Akayev document perceived these people as his enemies, in spite of his generally balanced position favouring neither Russia nor America. That was perhaps his most serious mistake: he failed the test of what the warmongers abusively call “moral clarity” and did not clearly side with “us.” In their book, he might as well have been aiding terrorists and engaging in nuclear proliferation (unless he lives in Pakistan, in which case this is laudable and admirable behaviour).

At first, the only reassuring signs that I had judged the situation correctly (and that I was not simply moved by an enthusiasm for debunking the “democratic miracle” supposedly transforming the world) were the jubilant celebrations of Kyrgyz democracy coming from all the usual suspects in the neocon-friendly media. The Chicago Tribune was one of the leading culprits in furthering the myth of Kyrgyz throwing off the shackles of the not-so-brutal physicist Akayev, going so far in their hyperbole as to credit the recently deceased Pope with the “liberation” of Kyrgyzstan by some extraordinary understanding of causality that would stump the best neo-Thomist. The Post, usually a reliable bastion of Russophobia and interventionism, was duly suspicious of the substance of the “Tulip” Revolution.

As it happens, there was good reason to doubt its merits long before the rioting began or Mr. Bakiyev recognised the legitimacy of the very legislature he rose up to overthrow. Unlike its three immediate predecessors in the Democracy Narrative, Kyrgyzstan was not substantially modernised or Westernised and had historically been outside of the experience of European civilisation (except as a backwater province of the Russian empire), and as a uniformly Muslim country it has historically possessed no Christian intelligentsia, as there was in the Levant, to begin changing the categories of political identity from tribal and Islamic loyalties.

Lebanese politics has continued to be defined by religious identities, but there have at least been theoretical alternatives for defining identity that make remotely possible a functioning representative government. In Kyrgyzstan, the experience of represetantive government has admittedly been mostly nominal, whereas it has had real substance in the Ukraine and Georgia before the so-called “revolutions.” In Georgia, the changing of the apparatchiks was very similar to Kyrgyzstan, but unlike Kyrgyzstan the rhetoric of democracy at least sounded plausible when coming from the next generation of Georgian politicians. The Kyrgyz “revolutionaries” were all old Soviet hangers-on and former colleagues of the president. It is excellent that Mr. Hadar has exploded the myth here, but how could any intelligent, thinking person have believed in it in the first place?