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FLASHBACK: Brazil’s Vinegar Revolution: Left in Form, Right in Content [Part 1 of a 6]

Dissident Voice

July 26, 2013

by Gearóid Ó Colmáin

 

Fascism has presented itself as the anti-party; has opened its gates to all applicants; has with its promise of impunity enabled a formless multitude to cover over the savage outpouring of passions, hatreds and desires with a varnish of vague and nebulous political ideals.
— Gramsci

 

The Working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism; nevertheless most widespread (and continuously and diversely revived) bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class to a still greater degree.
— Lenin

 

“It’s not just about 20 cents”. This was the status message of Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook last week, a message that was relayed through several of Brazil’s major cities. The message became one of the initial slogans of what many are now calling the “Vinegar Revolution” which was reportedly triggered by a 20 cent hike in bus fares in the city of Sao Paulo June 20th.

The very mention of Zuckerberg in connection with mass protests should immediately sound alarm bells among those who have been following closely the Facebook, Twitter fomented ‘colour revolutions’ that have rocked several states targeted for covert regime change by US imperialism over the last decade. Colour revolutions are essentially fake revolutions orchestrated by NGOS funded by the US government which are organized in countries ruled by governments that threaten or present an obstacle to the furtherance of US interests.

Zuckerberg is a close associate of US president Barack Obama and it is open knowledge since the recent NSA scandals that Facebook is a key part of the US intelligence community. His endorsement of the protests should therefore lead one to question the real origins and motives behind some of the largest demonstrations Brazil has seen in over 20 years.

Former Governor of California Arnold Schwartznegger, pop stars Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Britney Spears and the crème de la crème of Brazil’s soap opera stars, were all photographed displaying slogans supporting the Brazilian protests.

“It’s not just about 20 cents. It’s about much more”, say the protestors; corruption, rising cost of living, bad public infrastructure, health care and education. These are left wing causes, and are the issues driving discontent in Brazil’s populous cities teeming with poverty and inequality. No one can deny the genuine character of such complaints. After all, Brazil is a capitalist society in the ‘developing’ world.

Since the rise to power of President Lula de Silva and the Partido Travhalleros (Workers Party) in 2002    Brazil’s economy has experienced a rapid period of growth. It is now set to overtake France and Germany making it the fifth biggest economy in the world. But Lula’s left-wing political orientation was matched to a very large extent by economic policies which opened up the country to further levels of exploitation by foreign multi-nationals. In fact, Lula was so nice to foreign multinationals that he managed to avoid demonization by the Western power elite and was promoted as a suitable alternative to the more radically left-wing policies of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

However, in spite of Lula’s cooperation with the IMF, the Brazilian economy remained under national control to a significant extent but the process of destabilization currently underway is part of Wall Street’s final push for hegemony in a country that has moved closer to Russia and China and whose fiscal policies have pulled it away from Wall Street and its ‘free trade’ agenda.

It should not come as a surprise that hundreds of thousands of citizens would protest the obscene inequalities in a country that is investing millions constructing lavish sports complexes for the World Cup and the Olympic Games while millions continue to live in Favelas. Yet the uprising, in spite of its demands for public services, was anything but left-wing in orientation. In fact, many of those leading the protests attacked communists and socialists, chanting slogans against Cuba and Venezuela. Brazil’s right wing opposition parties and media came out in support of the protests.

Globo Rede, the right wing media group that dominates Brazil’s media, initially believed the protests were left wing and denounced them as terrorism. Then it seemed to realize that the protests were of an entirely different orientation, that they were an attack on the PT government and on left-wing ideology in particular, and proceeded to back and encourage them.

So, the question we are posing here is this: are the protests against neo-liberal capitalism or are the obvious evils of capitalism being covertly harnessed by outside forces to shift the geopolitics of a country moving closer to an alliance with Russia, China and left-leaning Latin American governments, thereby contributing to the possible formation of a new anti-imperialist block of emerging economies?

The struggle between the national and the comprador bourgeoisie.

Lenin, in his book Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism, quotes from a German author who observes that South America “is so dependent financially on London that it ought to be as almost a British commercial colony”.

Anglo-American financial interests dominated Brazil until the 1930 revolution brought Getullio Vargas to power. Vargas, a controversial character, who went from liberal left to far right and back again, is generally credited with having nationalized key sectors of the economy in order to industrialize and modernize Brazil. Vargas drew extensive support from the petite-bourgeoisie but was opposed by the conservative landowning class centred in Sao Paulo, who rose up in rebellion against him in 1932.

Since the 1930s politics in Brazil has been characterized by a struggle between the comprador bourgeoisie, who favour free trade and financial speculation, a class whose interests coincide with foreign companies and centres of financial power such as Wall Street and the City of London, and the rising national bourgeoisie, whose interests require protective tariffs on imports, investment in infrastructure, and a strong interventionist state to regulate and promote domestic industry.

This conflict has often been played out within successive Brazilian governments between the Bank of Brazil linked to the former and the Ministry of Finance linked to the latter. The comprador bourgeoisie in Brazil have always implemented domestic polices in accordance with US interests while the national bourgeoisie have tended to favour a more independent domestic and foreign policy.

Getullio Vargas was ousted in a coup in 1954 by elements of the comprador bourgeoisie backed by Washington. The same year he wrote a letter to the Brazilian people in which he denounced the “international financial groups” who were joining forces with “national groups” to overthrow him.1

Similarly, the recent events in Brazil should be seen as an attempt by the comprador bourgeoisie comprised of speculators and vulture capitalists working for Wall Street interests, who, through NGOS financed by the latter, have mobilized the lower-middle class or petite-bourgeoisie against the institutions that constitute the power base of the national bourgeoisie, that is to say the legislative and the executive organs of the nation-state.

They are doing this on the one hand through manipulation of the judiciary and on the other, through manipulation of the desires and egos of the new, lower middle class or petite bourgeoisie, who have been brought up on a diet of consumerism, video games and pop culture. The point of all this is to use the lower middle class protestors as a battering ram to destroy the state institutions thereby bringing the country fully under the control of  Washington.

There is also another pole of destablisation at work in Brazil; this involves manipulation of the indigenous communities and environmentalism by corporate-financier interests. The purpose of this manipulation is to wrest control of natural resources from the Brazilian Federal state and bring them under the control of international corporate entities such as the World Wildlife Fund.

When President Rousseff suggested calling a plebiscite to find out what the protestors wanted changed, the proposal was highly criticized by opposition members who support the protests. She has proposed reforms which would greatly improve the democratic process in Brazil, yet most of the street oppositionists have rejected them because they “see politicians as being part of the problem, not the solution, and have been critical of both the president’s and Congress’ efforts”.

This is because the protestors do not have a conscious, coherent, political programme. The purpose of this imperialist destabilization is  to break the ‘patrimonialismo estatale’; that is to say, Brazil’s traditional dirigistegovernmental structures that hamper unbridled  penetration by foreign investors, thereby weakening the sovereignty of the Brazilian federal state. This would then prepare the terrain for a right wing seizure of power by the military that would re-orient Brazil’s domestic and foreign policy toward that of the United States, thereby putting an end to the BRICS multi-polar axis in favour of the unipolar, Anglo-American dominated New World Order.

In order to understand the mechanism’s of US power currently at work in Brazil, we need to revisit the 1964 military coup.

Organising the 1964 ‘Revolution’

The Central Intelligence Agency organized a military coup against the government of former President Vargas’ protégé, Joao Goulart, in 1964. Like Lula and the Workers Party, Goulart was an anti-communist liberal who sought to implement modest social and labour reforms, the ‘reformas de base’ were intended to modernize the country.  Goulart’s reforms had support among the working class and the national bourgeoisie and included a mass literacy campaign, land reform enabling the government to take over estates of over 600 hectares deemed unproductive, and electoral reform extending the voting rights to illiterates.

Like the current Brazilian administration, Goulart had also pursued a more independent foreign policy from Washington. He relaxed persecution of communists. This upset Washington. Goulart favoured nationalist military officers over those trained by the United States and began purchasing military hardware from Eastern Block countries such as Poland. Laws limiting the amount of profits multinationals could take out of the country were also enacted by the Goulart administration. This state intervention in the ‘free market’ upset the directors of multinational corporations, who immediately began dreaming of a ‘transition government’.

Goulart had been the vice president of Janio de Silva Quadros, who was overthrown in 1961, by a US-backed coup after he refused to support President Kennedy’s plans for the invasion of Cuba. However, the US-backed coup against Quadros failed to prevent the election of Goulart in 1964. Goulart was no friend of left-wing causes. He supported Washington during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He simply pursued normal diplomatic politics with countries the US wanted to destroy and implemented reforms needed to industrialize the country. This was anathema to Washington who considered Brazil to be a colony of the United States and therefore subject to direct orders from above in matters of foreign and domestic policy.

The Central Intelligence Agency went to work. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Agency for International Development were used as front organizations for the CIA.

Mass demonstrations were organized by CIA agents throughout the country. Over a million people took to the streets calling for a national revolution. Anti-communist hysteria was whipped up by the Catholic Church in conjunction with the CIA. Irish Catholic priest Fr. Patrick Peyton, a CIA asset, helped organize the famous Marcha de Familia Com Deus Pela Liberdade – The Family March with God for Liberty. Funding for the covert ‘people power’ coup came from over three hundred multinational corporations.

In order to create the impression that the ‘revolution’ was ‘popular’ and had support among diverse sectors of the population, the CIA helped set up numerous ‘civil society’ organizations. The feminists were represented by the Campanha de Mulher Pela Democracia, the Women’s Campaign for Democracy, which branched out into myriad groupings throughout the country such as the League of Women for Democracy in Belo Horizonte, the Gaucha Democratic Action in Rio Grande do Sul,  the Ceará Civic Movement in Ceara; the Civic Union of Women in São Paulo  and the  Women’s Crusade in Pernambuco. These organizations worked in the favelas in order to manipulate working class communities into joining the protests on behalf of the ruling class.

As part of its ‘revolutionary’ strategy of regime change, in 1961 US government helped set up the Instituto Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais, The Institute for Research and Social Studies, in Rio De Janeiro. The institute worked to collect data on social trends and behaviour among the Brazilian population, in order to create effective anti-communist and anti-populist propaganda through advertising campaigns, cinema and the mass media. Many lectures by the institute were aimed at housewives who were warned of the dangers that communism posed to family values. The institute also targeted students with influential documentaries such as “Deixem o estudante estudar” – Let the students study.

There is an important book in Portuguese by journalist Denisse Assis entitled Propaganda e Cinema A Serviço do Golpe which studies the use of predictive programming by the Brazilian Cinema and mass media in the run-up to the 1964 coup.

The mass uprisings of 1964 brought more than a million people onto the streets, the slogans used tended to be ‘apolitical’ simply calling for more ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. This was in order to disguise their ultra-right wing agenda. Mercopress writes:

An indication of the importance that the US ascribed to its operation was that the Air Force officer tasked with arranging some of the logistics was Paul Tibbits, who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

 

After the coup a CIA official cabled the following message to Washington:

 

The change in government will create a greatly improved climate for foreign investments.

Operation Brother Sam was marketed as a “revolution” by the mainstream press and it resulted in what William Blum has described as one the worst fascist dictatorships of the twentieth century.

Blum describes American ‘democratisation’ in Brazil as follows:

Within days General Castello Branco assumed the presidency and over the next few years his regime instituted all features the military dictatorship which Latin America has come to know and love: Congress was shut down, political opposition was reduced to virtual extinction, habeas corpus for ‘political crimes’ was suspended, criticism of the president was forbidden by law, labor unions were taken over by government intervenors, mounting protests were met by police firing into crowds, the use of systematic ‘disappearance’ as a form of repression came upon the stage of Latin America, peasants’ homes were burned down, priests were brutalized.. the government had a name for its program: the ‘moral rehabilitation’ of Brazil.. then there was the torture and the death squads, both largely undertakings of the police and the military, both underwritten by the United States. 2

The emphasis on lack of “morality” in a left wing government is, as we shall see, precisely the character of the recent protests throughout Brazil.

The military regime was staffed by puppets of multinational corporations who ran the country on their behalf, smashing unions and collective bargaining rights and maintaining conditions of slavery in many parts of the country. An advisor to the Workers Party, Maria Helena Moreia Alves, told Multinational Monitor in 1982:

The whole Brazilian system, the whole Brazilian government is for the benefit of multinational corporations. It’s a heaven for multinationals: the government has created a system of tax incentives which is phenomenal.

 

Corporations also do not have the same kinds of safety requirements in Brazil as at home. A study was conducted on Ford and Volkswagen and it was found that they had turned off the safety equipment on the assembly lines, particularly on the lathe operations, which has had the result that Brazil has one of the highest industrial accident rates in the world. Fingers get chopped off. Lula (Brazil’s most prominent labor leader) doesn’t have one of his fingers; that’s typical of lathe operators.

 

Workers have gone on strikes just to get protective masks and gloves, just for safety – it’s absolutely essential safety equipment which people have to strike for, and since strikes are illegal, they face imprisonment and trial, just to be able to have safety equipment.

Fiat motor corporation owes its success in Brazil to the criminal financial policies of the military dictatorship. According to Alves:

Fiat came into Brazil around 1975 or thereabouts, and located in two areas, Rio and Minas Gerais. In Rio, Fiat purchased an existing Brazilian-owned factory, Fabrica Nacional de Motores, which employed 6,000 workers and has always done very well.

 

Fiat had a subsidized loan from the Brazilian government for purchasing the plant. The loan was money obtained by the Brazilian government outside of Brazil – thus increasing the foreign debt – and lent to Fiat at a subsidized interest rate, and all to purchase a Brazilian company that already existed in Brazil. It was a ridiculous deal. The first thing, Fiat did was fire 3,000 workers and auto-, mate the plant.

 

Then Fiat also opened a new plant in Minas Gerais. The deal there was that they would get 10 years of no taxes whatsoever, plus subsidized loans for a number of years. After all that, they have recently closed the plant; they decided that they weren’t getting enough loans and enough benefits from the Minas Gerais government.

The role of Fiat, General Motors and other giant manufacturing corporations in the current events will be investigated anon.

During the fascist dictatorship, progressive labour laws initiated in 1943 under Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (CLT), the Consolidated Labour Code were abolished. The CLT had made it difficult for employers to fire workers. During the dictatorship new laws were passed making it much easier for employers to dismiss workers without just cause.  Under the Wage Adjustment Law of 1965, the military regime determined the minimum wage of workers.

The 1988 Brazilian Constitution greatly improved collective bargaining rights of workers; the maximum working hours of workers was reduced from 48 to 44; minimum payment for extra time increased from 20% to 50% of the workers’ wages, working shifts were reduced from 8 to 6 hours per day, a holiday bonus consisting of one third of the workers wages was introduced and firing costs for employers were raised by 30%.

A report written in conjunction with the World Bank in 2000 entitled “Brazil:  The Pressure Points in Labour Legislation”, advocates a return to the labour laws of the fascist regime, citing the ‘pro-Labour bias’ in Brazil’s constitution and labour laws as a serious cause of the ‘Custo Brazil’, the ‘abnormally high costs of doing business in Brazil’.

  1. Gerassi, John, The Great Fear in Latin America, p. 81.
  2. Blum, William, Killing Hope, US Military and CIA interventions since World War II, p. 171
[Gearóid Ó Colmáin is a journalist and political analyst based in Paris. His work focuses on globalization, geopolitics and class struggle. He is a regular contributor to Dissident Voice, Global Research, Russia Today International, Press TV, Sputnik Radio France, Sputnik English, Al Etijah TV, Sahar TV, and has also appeared on Al Jazeera and Al Mayadeen. He writes in English, Gaelic, and French. Read other articles by Gearóid, or visit Gearóid’s website.]

Journey to the End of the Night: The Paris ‘Nuit Debout’ Movement

Gearóid Ó Colmáin

April 20, 2016

by Gearóid Ó Colmáin

 

Nuit_Debout

 

In his novel ‘Journey to the end of the night’ Louis-Ferdinand Céline provocatively described the soldiers who had died in the First World War as ‘idiots’. The French writer was referring to the fact the soldiers had given their lives for a cause that was not their own – a futile slaughter of the poor for the benefit of the rich. In the book’s many pertinent reflections on the human condition, the Céline notes how, in modernity, the street has come to constitute the place of dreams. “Que fait-on dans la rue, le plus souvent ? On rêve. C’est un des lieux les plus méditatifs de notre époque, c’est notre sanctuaire moderne, la Rue.” (“What do we most often do in the street, we dream. It is the most meditative place of our time, it is our modern sanctuary.”)

Since the French government recently introduced legislation reforming labour laws, a new ‘spontaneous’ and acephalous, social movement has taken root throughout French cities – the ‘Nuit Debout’ (Up all night) movement. As the title suggests, the social movement is taking place at night time and one of its slogans is Rêve général! (General dream), which is a pun on Grève générale (General strike).  So, instead of calling for a general strike in order to bring the government to its knees, the activists are calling for dreaming in the streets!

The movement took off after the release on the 23rd of February of journalist Francois Ruffin’s film, ‘Merci Patron‘ (Thank-you boss), a firm critical of French plutocracy.

Although the film criticises the avarice of contemporary capitalism, it does not treat the relationship between monopoly capitalism, foreign wars of conquest in the service of capital accumulation, class warfare and mass media disinformation.

Nor does Ruffin’s film expose and denounce the complicity of all corporate French media outlets in war crimes and genocide in the Middle East and throughout Africa, through the dissemination of lies and disinformation about the role of Western imperialism in these wars. There is no mention of the fact that the reason President Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast was kidnapped in 2010 by French commandos (his country bombed and his character assassinated) was due to the fact that he defied the powerful Club de Paris, the circle of French bankers who control the African neo-colony’s money. Gbagbo had proposed that the Ivory Coast print it’s own currency, a bold move which would have enabled the resource-rich country to build up its own industrial base independent of colonial interests.

Although there is a stand at the place de la Republique claiming to expose the detrimental role of French policy in Africa, there is no real information about what that role is, nor have any of the pan-Africanist intellectuals who have written on the topic been invited to speak and sell their books. The ‘Nuit Debout’ movement is predominantly white and middle class.

Ruffin’s film also fails to point out how French bosses in the cereal industry colluded with terrorism against the people of Libya when they secretly met in  with Libyan traitors in  Paris in November 2010 to organise the bombing and destruction of Africa’a richest and most democratic country.

The French ruling class are not just guilty of destroying centuries of social gains by French workers, they are complicit in genocide and crimes against humanity. So why is Ruffin silent about that fact?

Ruffin writes for ‘leftist’ publications which supported the NATO-backed ‘rebels’ in Libya, rebels who were, in fact, Al-Qaeda terrorists in the service of NATO. In 2011, the ‘left-wing’ Monde Diplomatique published an article on Libya declaring that there was no doubt about the ‘brutality of the regime’, in spite of the fact all of the crime imputed to Colonel Gaddafi, were carried out by the Takfiri ‘rebels’.

Ruffin and the dishonest publications he writes for are all complicit in the genocide waged by NATO against the people of the Southern Hemisphere states, from the Middle East and Africa to Latin America.

No, none of these uncomfortable realities are depicted in Ruffin’s ‘anti-capitalism.’ Instead, we have ultra-leftist slogans, petty-bourgeois irony and the mindless occupation of a public square by youths, who have neither the education nor the experience necessary to understand the structural reasons and deeper implications of the labour reform they claim to oppose.

The ‘Nuit Debout’ movement is certainly not spontaneous, nor is it grass-roots as so many pundits claim. On the contrary, it is the result of decades of careful policy analysis by US imperial ideologues. Since the undemocratic dissolution of the USSR in, 1991, the United States has perfected a regime change technique commonly referred to as ‘colour revolutions’. The strategy involves co-opting leftist slogans and symbols to serve a right-wing agenda. Lenin and the Bolshevik party had repeatedly denounced Leon Trotsky for utilising this counter-revolutionary technique both before and after the October Revolution. It has now become a standard tool of US foreign policy.

The manipulation of youthful naivety and rebellion, for the purposes of either overthrowing a foreign government hostile to US-interests or, creating a ‘left-wing’ opposition movement in imperial countries designed to kill all real opposition – is a strategy which every would-be activist needs to study if he wishes to engage in movements capable of real, social, political and economic change.

The ‘Nuit Debout’ movement is being led by petty, bourgeois-bohemians with little or no understanding of contemporary capitalism. The movement is organised on the same principals as the US-backed colour revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Arab Spring – empty slogans, idiotic puns and political infantilism. Although we cannot yet prove it, the use of the clenched fist as the movement’s logo coupled with  cretinous slogans, are strongly reminiscent of strategies and tactics of CANVAS, the Centre for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies, a regime change youth training organisation close to the CIA.

The ruling class in France have evidently spent more time reading Marx than their would-be opponents. For the objective allies of monopoly capitalism in Europe today are the likes of François Ruffin and the other leading bourgeois leftist ideologue of this movement Frédéric Lordon- both of whom mask the reactionary nature of their pseudo ‘anti-capitalism’ or, to be more precise, their ‘anti-neoliberalism’, with a mixture of convoluted semantics, pseudo-intellectualism and ultra-leftist sloganeering.

There are thousands of real, grass-roots organisations in France, and they get much of their information from independent media such as Meta TV, Cercle Des Voluntaires, Reseau Voltaire and much more. Real proletarian analysis of capitalism is provided by communist organisations such as OCF , and URCF. Coherent bourgeois critique of French and EU imperialism is provided by the political party UPR.

The ‘Nuit debout’ activists talk about a ‘convergence of struggle’ yet  journalists and activists from these genuinely popular organisations have been forcibly escorted from the Place de la Republique and denounced as ‘fascists’. Antifa is an organisation which purports to fight fascism but spends most of its time attacking all genuine anti-imperialist activists by blackening their name with the label ‘fascist’.

Antifa has been active again in the movement where genuine French anti-imperialists such as Sylvain Baron have been forcibly evicted from the square.

This writer repeatedly pointed out in 2011 that the failure of the left to understand the reactionary ideology of the Arab Spring and the role of US agencies in its planning and execution would have dire consequences for progressive politics. Now, similar techniques are being used throughout the world in order to criminalise real anti-capitalist agitation and create the conditions of military dictatorship. The objective allies of that strategy are petty bourgeois ‘anti-capitalists such as François Ruffin and Frédéric Lordon; these are the phantasmagorical, would-be intellectuals who shine in  the streets of the nocturnal, metropolitan dream world so eloquently depicted by Céline.

voyage au bout de la nuit eb5e9

The representation of imperialism’s foreign wars of aggression as ‘revolutions’ and ‘humanitarian interventions’, coupled with an infantile advocacy of vacuous concepts such as ‘social Europe’- this is the nefarious role played by these post-modern ‘revolutionaries’, who are the very avant-garde of reactionary imperialism. A malady when this writer denounced it in 2011, pseudo-leftism has now morphed into a serious planetary pandemic. If this form of leftism did not exist, imperialism would have had to invent it. The ‘Nuit Debout’ movement is now spreading throughout the world. Pseudo-leftist media will zealously present this movement as a global painting of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’ when sadly, it is rather more of a sinister version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Pied Piper2 dcb23

The soi-disant ”anti-fascists” in this movement denounce as ”fascists” those who expose corporate media lies used to justify the crimes of NATO’s foreign wars. The foreign wars of capital accumulation waged by the same corporations imposing austerity and class war at home; but it is they who are the fascists, it is they who are the enemies of the working class!

Ideological confusion is the great political illness of our time. Céline describes war and illness as the two ‘infinities of nightmare’. The French author could have included fascism in among the nightmares cited- the pernicious ideology his cynicism eventually led him to embrace. One could describe the two contemporary ‘infinities of nightmare’  as the proliferation of wars of aggression and the triumph of capitalist repression  due to the political illness of ultra-leftist cretinism, which has taken over the labour movement in the last 30 years.  Until our youth emancipates themselves from the pernicious influence of controlled opposition and pseudo-leftist ideology, which turns them into useful idiots of the monopoly capitalism rather than revolutionaries, their good-natured activism is tragically destined to  precipitate civilisation’s journey to the end of the night.

 

 

 

[Gearóid Ó Colmáin is an Irish journalist and political analyst based in Paris. His work focuses on globalisation, geopolitics and class struggle.]

 

Are the US and the EU Sponsoring Terrorism in Burundi?

Libya 360

May 16, 2015

By Gearoid O Colmain

 

“The US-funded media disinformation campaign is part of the prelude to the mobilization of street protests against the government that can be presented to the world as a ‘popular uprising’against a ‘dictator’ who is ‘killing his own people’ It is a techinique that has been perfected by US ‘democracy’and ‘civil society’ NGOS.”

Policemen walk along a street in Bujumbura, Burundi May 15, 2015

Since protests broke out in Burundi’s capital Bujumbura in April 25th  2015 against the decision of the  ruling party to nominate the country’s leader Pierre Nkurunziza for a third term as president, the international press has published reports suggesting that the country is on the verge of civil war, as president Nkurunziza, portrayed as a dictator attempting to hold on to power, is confronted with  an ever increasing movement of ‘peaceful protesters’, ‘human rights’ and ‘civil society’ activists who have an almost absolute monopoly on reportage concerning Burundi’s electoral controversy.

While the mainstream media continue to report on the activities of the ‘peaceful protesters’ who have lynched and murdered suspected members of the  imbonerakure, the youth wing of the National Council for the Defense of Democracy, the country’s ruling party,  the massive and entirely peaceful demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of government supporters have been completely ignored.  [1]

It seems a consensus has rapidly been reached concerning who the good and bad guys are in this conflict. But all is not what is seems. In fact, the East African nation is currently experiencing the culmination of a US/EU backed regime change programme which has been conducted as a low-intensity media and covert operations war since 2005. The objective of this war is to redraw the map of the resource-rich Great Lake’s region of Central Africa in accordance with Western corporate and geostrategic interests.

Who is Pierre Nkurunziza?

Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza speaks to the media after he registered to run for a third five-year term in office, in the capital Bujumbura

The current incumbent Pierre Nkurunziza joined the National Council for the Defense of Democracy, Forces for the Defense for Democracy (CNDD-FDD) after the brutal murder of left-wing president Melchior Ndadaye in 1993, the country’s first democratically elected leader who stemmed from the Hutu, ethnic majority in the former German and Belgian colony. Burundi was traditionally ruled by the Tutsi minority ethnic group, whose elites ruled the country in the interests of European colonialism.

Nkurunziza lost many members of his own family during the genocide of the Hutus by the Tutsi military regime which plunged the country into a decade long civil war causing the death of over 300,000 people.

Nkurunziza’s rebel movement signed an agreement with the Tutsi-dominated government of Burundi in Arusha, Tanzania in  August 2000, according to which a transition government of power-sharing between Hutus, Tutsis and Twa would be put in place.

Although in power since 2005, sensu strictu, the country only became a democracy during the election of 2010, where Nkurunziza’s CNDD  won a landslide victory.  It is on this basis that Burundi’s constitutional council, the supreme legal authority in the country, judged correctly that the incumbent has the right to be nominated for another electoral term.

Western backed opposition activists have admitted that the government has not violated the constitution, but insist instead that the constitutional council is corrupt as its members were nominated by the president. No one would claim, for example, that the French constitutional council is corrupt because its members are nominated by the President of the French Republic. But in the case of Africa, constitutional councils are regularly scoffed at by Western powers when their decisions do not conform to neo-colonial interests and neo-colonial interests, not disputes over interpretations of the country’s constitution, are the key issue in the current Burundian crisis.

Since coming to power in 2005, Pierre Nkurunziza has done a remarkable job in re-uniting and re-building a country ruined by internecine war. A fanatical supporter of football, the former physical sports teacher has been rewarded by many peace organizations throughout the world for his use of football as a means of bringing Hutu and Tutsi communities together.

Education has also been a key focus of the Nkurunziza administration.

Burundi has built more schools since 2007 than any previous government since independence almost 50 years ago. Nkurunziza wants to transform Burundi’s economy into a major exporter of fruit and has implemented an ambitious fruit tree plantation programme to this effect.

The Burundian president spends much of his time doing manual work with the peasants of Burundi. After coming to power, the Burundian government passed a law according to which citizens are required to preform community labour on Saturdays in order to expedite the construction of vital public infrastructure. A key role in this endeavour is played by the Imbonerakure, the youth wing of the ruling CNDD party.

The Burundian government has made modest progress in reducing poverty, and has promised to increase economic growth from 4.5 percent to 8.5 percent from 2015 from investments made in nickel mining, fruit production and tourism.

Since 2005 gross domestic product levels have increased significantly. In 2012 Nkurunziza won the Pan-African prize for the fight against Malaria. [2]

Burundi’s success in the fight against malaria has been due to the construction of health centres throughout the country, the provision of free health care for children under five years old and pregnant mothers.

Deeply patriotic and highly popular, having fought a long battle for his country’s liberation, Nkurunziza has succeeded in creating a modest form of national voluntarism, nascent self-reliance and a sense of optimism about the country’s future.

He has increased ties with China, India and Brazil, while adroitly taking advantage of inter-imperialist rivalry for access to African markets by signing several important trade deals with Japan.

Indeed, due to the implacable hostility of the neocolonial powers and their press agencies, Burundi will now most likely have no choice but to increase its links with the BRICS powers.

Nkurunziza’s decision in 2010 to sign an agreement with Beijing that provides for closer Sino-Burundian military cooperation is of tremendous significance. Closer relations with China will enable Burundi to strengthen its defense forces from what Burundian patriots refer to as the BHBFC, the Burundi-Hima-Belgian-French Connection, that is to say, the incessant hostility of the neo-colonial powers and their local collaborators.

Who are the Burundian opposition?

The opposition party Movement for Solidary and Democracy (MSD), part of the umbrella organization, the Alliance for Democratic Change Ikibiri (ADC Ikibiri) is led by Alexis Sinduhije. He is a protégé of US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. In the general election of 2010 the The MSD withdrew from the electoral process after gaining a mer 4 percent of the popular vote.  They claimed the elections were unfair, in spite of the fact that international observers did not report any irregularities.

According to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada’s 2013 report, Sinduhije does not fear violence from the Burundian government but, on the contrary, the Burundian government does fear violence from Sinduhije and his armed bandits. [3]

Sinduhije has been accused of terrorism by the Burundi government after it was revealed that he was forcibly recruiting youths in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Eastern Kivu region for the formation of a rebel group with a view to seizing power in Bujumbura.

The MSD leader was arrested in Tanzania in January 2012 where he was accused of forming a terrorist group for the invasion of Burundi. He was subsequently released by the Tanzanian authorities and escaped to Europe,where human rights groups closely linked to the US State Department and Western intelligence agencies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have hailed him as a champion of ‘human rights.’

Sinduhije has little popular support inside Burundi but he does have the support of the European Union and the United States, who never wanted the Hutu majority to rule Burundi, as imperial divide and rule policy dictates that post-colonial countries should remain internally divided on ethnic lines with a militarized minority constituting a neo-colonial comprador bourgeoisie eternally dependent on their foreign masters.

Francois Nyamoya is the secretary general of the Movement for Solidary and Democracy. He is also the son of Albin Nyamoya, one of the generals involved in the 1972 genocide of the Hutus under the Micombero regime.

A 2011 UN report on the situation in Eastern Congo identifies many of the so-called Burundian oppositionists as involved in smuggling of gold and terrorizing the inhabitants of Southern Kivu.

Notwithstanding the official criminal evidence against the Burundian ‘opposition’, however, the ‘international community’ chooses to present them as heroes attempting to free their country from ‘corruption’. [4]

None of these fake opposition parties should be confused with the 17 democratically elected deputies of the opposition party Uprona. As in the case of Syria, one must distinguish between the legally constituted opposition and the US and European sponsored gangster networks posing as oppositionists.

Ethnic Conflict in the Service of Neo-Colonialism

During the 1980s the Pentagon trained Rwandan Major General Paul Kagame at the US Army Command and Staff College (CGSC) Fortleavenworth, Kansas.

Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Forces invaded Rwanda from Uganda between 1990 and 1994, assassinating two Hutu leaders, President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi and President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda.

An impressive US  led propaganda campaign has  presented Paul Kagame as the man who put an end to the genocide in Rwanda, whereas in fact it was Kagame’ forces with full US and Israeli backing who perpetrated most of the mass killings Hutus, Tutsi and Twa blaming all of their crimes on the majority Hutu government.

In October 1996 Kagame’s forces invaded the Congo on the pretext of fighting Hutu rebels. The real objective, however, was to gain control over the mineral rich province of Eastern Congo in close collaboration with Western corporate mining interests. [5]

Kagame’s regime is one of the proxy-forces being used by the United States and the European Union to destabilize and overthrow the democratically elected government of Burundi.  Many researchers in Burundi suspect that the CIA may have been behind the assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye in 1993, given the fact that they directed Kagame who ordered the murder of Ndadaye’s successor Cyprien Ntaramira a year later.

The US government is acutely aware that if the people of Burundi are to know the truth about the US-backed genocide of the Hutus in Rwanda and Burundi, it could jeopardize their foreign policy objectives in the region. Managing people’s perspectives and memory of their own suffering due to US imperialism is a key component of the Pentagon’s strategy in parts of the world it controls. That is why a suitable criminal to replace president Nkurunziza must be found and the CIA database of military intelligence assets is filling up with warlords and war criminals from the Congolese Armageddon, where several million people have been murdered since the US proxy invasion of 1996.

Imperialist geo-strategy: Terrorism and Colour Revolutions

Burundian democracy is currently threatened by two main instruments of Western imperial policy: terrorism and colour revolutions. One of the world’s poorest countries, Burundi could not possibly hope to compete with the barrage of media disinformation waged against it since the Nkurunziza’s election victory in 2010.

Almost every report about the country has been based on the statements of oppositionists and so-called ‘civil society’ activists. These activists are been generously funded by the US State Department think tank, the National Endowment For Democracy,(NED) which on the admission of its founder, functions as a front organization for the CIA. [6]

And as William Blum  has shown in his book ‘ Killing Hope: US military and CIA interventions since 1945’ the Boys from Langley’s job is not promote democracy but,  rather as he puts it ‘make the world safe for democracy by getting rid of democracy.’

Many activists and pseudo-journalists funded by the NED have been arrested by the Burundian authorities on charges of fomenting ethnic tension and promoting terrorist groups in collaboration with the enemies of the country, a crime prohibited by all internationally recognized nation-states.

Terrorist groups who have attacked Burundi in recent years have received extensive and positive coverage from the Francophone media.

For example, in a report entitled ‘Retour de la Rebellion’ French journalist Pauline Simonet reported on a ‘rebel’ group in Eastern Congo, who are hoping to invade and seize power in Burundi. The terrorist group was presented in a positive light, while the point of view of the Burundian government was dismissed. The message was clear: the ‘rebels’ have a just cause and are worthy of our sympathy.

The report also mentioned the massacre of Gatumba of the 18 and 19th of September 2013 where several civilians were murdered outside the Burundian capital. The Burundian National Intelligence Service (SNR) blamed the attack on the Forces for National Liberation (FLN), a terrorist group based in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and headed by warlord Agathon Rwasa, whom UN investigators have accused of gold smuggling. The France 24 team seems to be unaware of official UN investigations.

Instead the French TV station suggested that the Gatumba Massacre might have been a false flag operation carried out by the Burundian Government to discredit the ‘opposition’, in spite of having no evidence to support this conspiracy theory. [7]

Rwasa is a former opposition candidate from the ACD-Ikibiri coalition and a full time criminal who ran against Nkununziza in 2010, lost miserably, declared the election to be false, fled to the Congo and returned to his specialization: terrorism.

Lucien Rukevya, a journalist with Radio France Internationale’s Swahili section was arrested on June 16th 2013 while embedded with a Burundian terrorist group. He was charged with complicity in the promotion of terrorism against the Burundian state.  The French media and associated ‘human rights’ groups, did their best to justify this young man’s flagrant and criminal violation of journalistic professionalism, in order to accuse the Burundian government of cracking down on ‘free speech’.

In September 9th 2013 ‘journalist’ Hassan Rovakuki was also arrested for complicity in terrorism. The charge of the Burundian government against these journalists is that they are spreading propaganda in favour of criminals who are attempting to declare war on the people of Burundi. This is in the context of a poor country whose existence is being constantly threatened by militia on its borders in the service of neo-colonial powers, who have not disguised their wish to implement ‘regime change’ in Bujumbura.

Any serious researcher who reads these press dispatches on the so-called Burundian ‘rebels’ operating from the DRC would have to agree that the reports are incontrovertibly biased against the government of Burundi.

All of the reports emphasize the arguments of the rebels while attempting to dismiss those of the government. This is in violation of the most basic rule in journalism: objectivity. Furthermore, such biased, mendacious and aggressive reporting by the agencies of the most powerful countries in the world against a defenseless developing nation constitutes nothing less than acts of psychological terrorism.

On March 8th 2014 an armed insurrection was organized by the opposition in Bujumbura. Police were attacked and kidnapped in what was a clear attempt to seize power. The contrast between citizens throughout the country engaged in community labour in an attempt to rebuild a broken country and a group of fascist thugs attempting to plunge the country into chaos could not have been more poignant. Needless to say, the United States expressed ‘concern’ about the ‘brutal’ crackdown on their putschists.

On December 30th 2014, Burundi’s Northern Province of Cibitoke, on the border with Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo was invaded by a terrorist gang. It took the Burundian National Defense Forces four days to defeat the invasion. Many of the terrorists were captured and a spokesman for the army in a press conference after the incident assured reporters that they would be treated according to international humanitarian law.

Meanwhile the NED funded media outlets in the country were zealously spreading pro-rebel propaganda, even publishing photos of dead Shebaab rebels in Kenya, claiming they were  Burundian prisoners of war ‘massacred’ by the Burundian  military.

The European Union and the United States have shamelessly expressed ‘human rights’ concerns about the Burundian government’s defeat of the foreign-backed invasion, while showing no concern for their victims.

The international Francophone press was also vociferous in it condemnation of the arrest in January 2015 of Rob Rugurika, the director of Radio Publique Afrique, a privately-funded ‘opposition’ radio station, after he accused the government of ordering the massacre of three Italian nuns in Kamenge in 2014.

Rugurika, who has links with terrorist groups outside the country, has been accused by the Burundian judiciary of being part of a conspiracy to commit crimes and blame them on the government in a destabilization campaign backed by foreign powers.

In September 2014, 40 bodies were found floating on Lake Rweru between Rwanda and Burundi. Villagers upriver in Rwanda fled from French journalists when they attempted to investigate the crime. They told RFI that they had been warned by the Rwandan authorities not to speak to journalists about what they had seen. In spite of the fact that Burundian authorities could not have been behind the crime, US-funded opposition media inside Burundi continue to peddle all sorts of lies suggesting that the corpses might have been oppositionists murdered by the Burundian government.

The US-funded media disinformation campaign is part of the prelude to the mobilization of street protests against the government that can be presented to the world as a ‘popular uprising’against a ‘dictator’ who is ‘killing his own people’ It is a techinique that has been perfected by US ‘democracy’and ‘civil society’ NGOS.

The director of France’s Lazard Bank and proprietor of the French daily Le Monde, Mathieu Pigasse is on record expressing his adoration for the Arab Spring. He has also pointed out that Western policy makers are now focusing on spreading the techniques of the Arab Spring throughout Africa. The millionaire ‘revolutionist’ has made it clear that Western investors prefer to deal with ‘civil society’ organizations in Africa rather than governments. [8]

This phenomenon is what Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci referred to as the ‘takeover of politics by civil society’, that is to say, the destruction of the political sphere and the agora of human agency and social progress by the absolutism of corporate exploitation.

Since the US-backed people-power coups in North Africa in 2011, the US ‘youth industry’, this anti-politics of destruction, has spread its tentacles throughout the African continent, where, paradoxically, ‘anti-corruption’ and ‘down-with-the-dictator’ activism further entrenches imperialism by contriving a discourse on social discontent that obfuscates its material basis, thereby dis-empowering and corrupting the youth. We could call this phenomenon the stultification of dissent.

The aim of terrorism and people-power coups or colour revolutions is to render nations of the Global South powerless in the face of globalization.

It is a deeply cynical but nevertheless ingenious US foreign policy programme, which, due to the fact that so many critics of US foreign policy continue to believe that the Arab Spring was a genuinely ‘spontaneous uprising’ of the masses against US-backed dictators, attests to the sophistication and prescience of the US foreign-policy establishment.

A Neo-Colonial War on a free African nation

The United States and the European Union are at war against the people of Burundi. Situated at the heart of the mineral rich Great Lakes region of Africa, the democratic government of Burundi is an obstacle to the depopulation programme currently being carried out  by US client dictator Paul Kagame of Rwanda and his partner Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, who are attempting to carve up Eastern Congo in order to create an independent  Republic of Kivu, bringing that region’s vast wealth into the possession of European and American corporate interests.

In October 2014 the Burundian military were forced to withdraw by the United Nations ‘peace-keeping’ force MONUSCO from Kiliba in Eastern Congo where they had been cracking down on terrorist groups.  Shortyly thereafter, the Burundian authorities arrested several NED funded activists ,who were busy spreading absurd lies about the Burundian military training pro-government Burundian youth( the imbonerakure) in the Congo for the purposes of terrorizing the Burundian population at home.

These lies were meant to incite fear and ethnic hatred among the population, in order to weaken the credibility of the government.

This withdrawal from the DRC will make it more difficult for the Burundian government to protect its borders from terrorism. Meanwhile, ‘peaceful protesters’ are attacking police and lynching pro-government civilians with the full backing of the international military-industrial-media-intelligence complex.

The protesters  in the streets are chanting ‘’down with the dictator’’ and an ‘’end to corruption’’ but in reality, Nkurunziza is being targeted for not serving the interests of the infinitely corrupt scoundrels currently running the United Nations, the potentates of the soi-disant ‘international community’.

The African Union has called on the Burundian government to postpone the elections. This is the same African Union which stood by and watched French forces bomb and invade the Ivory Coast in 2010, Libya in 2011, Mali in 2012, and the Central African Republic in 2013.

If the African Union is to gain a modicum of respect, it must stand up for the sovereignty of African nations and threaten to lead a coalition of military forces to defend any country attacked by US/European imperialism.

In the case of Burundi, the African Union should have denounced the diabolical terrorist and media disinformation campaign against a young democratic country which has just emerged from a civil war. The fact that they did not shows that they have sided with the enemies of Africa. It is hardly surprising that truly independent, post-colonial countries such as Eritrea will have nothing to do with the sham called the African Union.

If the Burundian authorities do not succeed in crushing the violent insurgency, the country could be facing more years of civil war and permanent foreign occupation by UN ‘peace-keepers’ after a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to ‘stop the massacres’. The script has been tried and tested in Haiti, the  Ivory Coast, Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic.

So, the key question  now is this: Can Burundi defy the Empire and protect its people from carpet bombing called ‘humanitarian intervention’, a terrorist invasion called ‘liberation’, a military coup called ‘transitional government’ and  a possible genocide where once again the victims will be blamed?

Notes:

[4] un.org
[6] ned.org

 

[Gearóid Ó Colmáin is an independent political analyst from Cork, Ireland based in Paris.]

 

Anti-democratic Offensive

By May 11, 2012

As the United States Departments of State and Defense gear up for a new round of destabilization campaigns in South America in 2013 and 2014, the second generation of democratic renewal under leaders like Evo Morales faces a grave threat. Unlike the crude coups and dictatorships of the Cold War and earlier banana republics, this anti-democratic offensive makes exaggerated use of ephemeral pseudo activism in the form of color revolutions used so extensively by the CIA in North Africa and Eastern Europe. Recent snubbing of the US and Canada by South American governments at the Organization of American States may signal a resistance to returning to the days of old, but until they reject neoliberalism and its corrupting influence, they are still susceptible to international markets opening the door to US military control.

[Jay Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies, an author, a correspondent to Fourth World Eye, and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal. Since 1994, he has served as the administrative director of Public Good Project.]

Why the CIA Funds Nonviolence Training

Dissident Voice

by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, March 13th, 2012

O]ne important aspect of the debate over “diversity of tactics” (i.e. the decision whether to be exclusively nonviolent) in the Occupy movement relates to mounting evidence of the role CIA and Pentagon-funded foundations and think tanks play in funding and promoting nonviolent resistance training. The two major US foundations promoting nonviolence, both overseas and domestically, are the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Both receive major corporate and/or government funding, mostly via CIA “pass through” foundations. While the ICNC is funded mainly by the private fortune of hedge fund billionaire (junk bond king Michael Milken’s second in command) Peter Ackerman, the AEI has received funding from the Rand Corporation and the Department of Defense, as well as various “pass-through” foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the US Institute of Peace and the Ford Foundation (see The Ford Foundation and the CIA),which all have a long history of collaborating with the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA in destabilizing governments unfriendly to US interests.

This is a strategy Frances Stonor Saunders outlines in her pivotal Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. According to Sanders, right wing corporate-backed foundations and the CIA have been funding the non-communist left since the late sixties, in the hope of drowning out and marginalizing the voice of more militant leftists. It’s also noteworthy that the governing and advisory board of both AEI and ICNC have been consistently dominated by individuals with either a military/intelligence background or a history of prior involvement with CIA “pass-through” foundations, such as NED and USAID.

Gene Sharp, the Fervent Anticommunist

Much of this debate focuses around America’s godfather of nonviolent resistance, Gene Sharp, the founder and director of the Albert Einstein Institution. Sharp’s handbooks on nonviolent protest were widely disseminated in the Eastern Europe color revolutions, in the Arab spring revolutions and in the Occupy movement in the US (see Nonviolence in the Service of Imperialism). Unfortunately Sharp has become a decoy in this debate, deflecting attention from the larger question of whether the US government is actively financing and promoting the work of the AEI, the ICIC and other high profile organizations that promote nonviolent civil disobedience. The question is extremely important, in my view, because it possibly explains the rigid and dogmatic attitude in the US progressive movement regarding nonviolent civil disobedience. In other words, I think it explains the knee-jerk rejection of more militant tactics, such as smashing windows and other property damage that don’t involve physical violence towards human beings.

Is Military-Intelligence Funding Compatible with Progressive Politics?

The institutional nonviolence clique has cleverly refocused the debate on whether Sharp, who is 83, is a CIA agent and whether he actively participated in US-funded destabilization efforts in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and elsewhere that resulted in so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions. The obvious answer to both questions is no. For me the more important question is why the alternative media and “official” progressive movement embrace Sharp unconditionally as a fellow progressive without a careful look at his past or his ideological beliefs. Sharp has never made any secret of his fervent anticommunist (and antisocialist – he shares the US State Department’s animosity towards Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez) views.

Sharp makes no secret of the funding he has received from the Defense Department; the Rand Corporation; CIA-linked foundations, such as NED, the IRI and the US Institute of Peace; and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. All this information is readily available from the AEI website. Sharp himself states, “I have been arguing for years that governments and defense departments – as well as other groups – should finance and conduct research into alternatives to violence in politics and especially as a possible basis for a defense policy by prepared nonviolent resistance as a substitute for war.” (See The living library: some theoretical approaches to a strategy for activating human rights and peace, George Garbutt, 2008, Southern Cross University).

Less well known is the role military and intelligence figures have played in helping Sharp set up and run the AEI. I think most progressives would be extremely disturbed by the major role played by the military-intelligence establishment in funding and running the AEI. I think they would find it even more troubling that progressives who refer to any of this on so called “independent” or “alternative” media websites and blogs have their posts removed.

To be continued.

U.S. Orchestrated Color Revolutions to Sweep Across Latin America in 2013-2014

Evo Morales, 2010, The People’s Summit, Cochabamba, Bolivia

Destabilizing Arsenals Concealed in US Embassies

Nil NIKANDROV | 02.04.2012

Strategic Culture Foundation

Over the past years, it has been happening with frightening regularity that U.S. diplomats and CIA agents were caught pulling off operations involving illicit weapons supply in Latin America. The inescapable impression is that the U.S. Department of State has irreversibly learned to regard the Vienna Convention and various national legislations as rules which it has unlimited freedom to overstep.

Pressing for unchallenged hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, Washington keeps the populist regimes in Latin America under permanent pressure. Outwardly, the U.S. Administration pledges not to resort to military force to displace the ALBA governments in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, or Cuba, but in reality Washington’s efforts to undermine them are a constant background of the continent’s political picture. The activity began under president G. Bush and shows no signs of subsiding under president Obama. Supposedly, plans are being devised in the White House that a series of color revolutions will erupt across Latin America in 2013-2014 and derail the continent’s advancement towards tighter integration in the security and other spheres. As the fresh experience of Libya showed with utmost clarity, Washington’s new brand of color revolutions will – in contrast to the former coups which used to be accompanied with outpourings of pacifist rhetoric – involve ferocious fighting and massive fatalities.

How to Start a (Wall Street-backed) Revolution

Documentary Whitewashes Wall Street’s Global Blitzkrieg

by Tony Cartalucci

November 26, 2011 – Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution penned the book “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” originally designated for the destabilization and recolonization of Myanmar, still called “Burma” throughout much of the West. Sharp’s book would then be utilized by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) throughout Eastern Europe, throughout Asia, and eventually, in 2011, for the US-engineered “Arab Spring.”

According to Sharp’s own Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) 2000-2004 annual report, AEI had been sponsored by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its funded subsidiary International Republican Institute (IRI) to train activists in Serbia (page 18) Zimbabwe (page 23) and Myanmar (page 26) to help overthrow their respective sovereign governments.

Australia’s Southern Cross University’s “Activating Human Rights & Peace (AHRP)” conference had put out a revealing account of their 2008 proceedings illustrating that all of Gene Sharp’s work, beyond what was even mentioned in his own institution’s annual report, had been fully funded and in support of the US government and its global domineering agenda. Beginning on page 26, Sharp’s affiliations, in particular with the National Endowment for Democracy, which is described as carrying out “a lot of work that was formerly undertaken by the CIA,” as well as the Ford Foundation, and billionaire Wall Street patriarch George Soros’ Open Society Institute are fleshed out in immense detail.