I was just checking out the wikipedia article for the “Great Game“, a phrase coined ala-”World War II” to describe a series of political and military events and which all the namesakes to this blog were contributors. In the article, I saw this sub-section:

New Great Game
Main article: New Great Game

With the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, the United States displaced Britain as the global power, asserting its influence in the Middle East in pursuit of oil, containment of the Soviet Union, and access to other resources…

The New Great Game? That phrase has been thrown around for years to describe the Cold War, the post-Cold War 1990s, the current exploration of resources in the Middle East, but how does it warrant it’s own article? Clicking the main article I found this priceless content:

The New Great Game is a current competition between the United States, Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, India, and Pakistan to secure reliable long-term sources of petroleum and natural gas through the construction of oil pipelines in the post-Soviet nations of Central Asia. The term was coined by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in reference to the original Great Game between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for strategic supremacy in Central Asia in the 19th and early 20th century.

And so begins a blog post posing as a wikipedia article. After this opening it goes on for pages, breaking out a Risk-style categorization of allies and neutrals, balancing interests, and an inexplicable temporal breakdown into three “phases.”

At this point it has been edited by dozens of editors and contributors, but examining the history of the article you can see how the kernel of this nonsense was first written by a now-deleted user “RoyalDutchEmpire,” and the bulk of the current nonsense was written by another now-retired wikipedia contributor KazakhPol (most edits since have been minor and grammatical). Both these contributors noted the primary inspiration for the article as “The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia” written by Lutz Kleveman. And that’s how a random opinion becomes a complete wikipedia article.

As for the CA view on Mr. Kleveman, to quote Younghusband from 2003 before this blog was started and when discussions of this nature were limited to email:

I think Lutz is a putz with an axe to grind.

First he steals Ahmed Rashid’s idea for the title of his book, and then he goes all imperial in a region that has floundered for the past few years. There is a lot of geopolitical posturing etc in Central Asia, but it is not as significant as the original Great Game…

In my opinion Lutz is just being alarmaleftist. Washington has started “waiting” in the Caspian region for the last couple of years.

If I had more time I’d nominate this blog-style essay posing as a real article for deletion. As it happens I’ve just made a note in the discussion section.

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