New Twist of Capitalism: The Demobilization of Citizens

Thinkers and strategists of international capitalism are aware of this growing threat of citizen movement in developed countries. In this article we advance some thoughts and arguments about the ways in which capitalism is making a new twist to keep irreplaceable as an economic system: the demobilization of citizens. 

by Rafael Yus and Paco Puche
Rebellion

June 25, 2011

[Translated from Spanish to English via Google Translator.]

Far left Marxist thesis based on the existence of objective conditions (contradictions) so that, mechanically, was given the transition from a capitalist society to a communist society. Capitalism, dominated by the liberal economy and a democratic political system called (but based only deposit a ballot every four years), has been surviving in spite of the continuing crises inherent in the system. The causes are complex and this is not adequate space to develop them, but we note some touches that show the extraordinary capacity for reinvention of capitalism, though not an eternal system, but sooner or later is destined to disappear , as predicted from Marxism.

In the early twentieth century was brought to the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, under the direction of the first to start a socialist revolution. But this happened in an industrial phase of capitalism that had as resource consumption and market their own national territories. Although the flame lit in some places (Russia, China, etc..), Capitalism reinvented itself through processes of internationalization of the pool of resources and the consumer society. This led to the gradual growth of the middle class, which began to swell up lower sectors of the classic proletariat and bourgeoisie classic. The increase of purchasing power needed to sustain industrial overproduction, caused a feeling of never being felt by the masses of the population and only interrupted by the cyclical crises of overproduction and underconsumption. Thus, the welfare of large middle classes in developed countries rests on the exploitation (development projects via debt or industrial relocation to lower cost of labor) of developing countries, leaving for class developed countries’ average consumption functions of the goods produced, services and speculative capitalism. And also rests on the exploitation of nonrenewable resources unsustainably increasing amounts, not to mention environmental damage and the general loss of environmental quality in developing countries, and further more global impacts but viewed as long-term problems (eg climate change, acid rain, ozone depletion, desertification, etc..) and therefore no concern for short-term enrichment craving and consumption.

The citizens’ movement and the mechanisms of deactivation

In this socio-economic framework, civil society only when threatened by mobilizing their welfare, their access to employment and purchasing power (eg, general strikes and other social movements). In the seasons of bubble development between two crises, however, many sectors of civil society critical of the system, an organized fight against abuses of power and large corporations, through which we generically call citizens’ movement. It is a movement that the system has to admit, while based on constitutional principles inherent in any democracy: freedom of assembly and association. The system supports the citizens’ movement because it is controlled by laws, limiting the possible actions to a legal framework decided only by those who have been chosen as virtual representatives of the community. The recent 15-M Movement is a sign that society is not blind and that clearly warns the pitfalls involved in this system to work as a real democracy seems to enshrine the letter of the Constitution. Thus, a certain level of organization and demands, the citizen movement, through partnerships of various kinds, with their critical disposition and use of the laws, could hinder the development of capitalism in its new phase post- XXI century industrial, or at least undermine the image of “only system capable of ensuring the welfare of the population.” →

Tawakkul Karman: A Tool for Farcical Democratic Initiatives in the Middle East

By Samra Nasser

02.23.2012

The Arab American News

Who is Tawakkul Karman and more importantly, how and why has this religiously-dressed Yemeni woman come to be the darling of Western-oriented democracy movements?  To understand who is actually reaping the rewards of this activist, we should begin by following the money.  Mrs. Karman has a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Sana’a, Yemen called Women Journalists Without Chains (WJWC).  However, for those of you who may not know, an NGO is not always non-governmental because many NGOs invariably receive all or most of their funding through various departments within the government.

Tawakkul Karman

In Mrs. Karman’s case, her WJWC organization asserts it is a non-governmental organization in Yemen that seeks to advocate for rights and freedoms, especially freedom of expression with the aim of improving media efficiency and providing skills for journalists, and particularly women and youth.  Such work, however, should be considered in the correct context being that its funding sources are through U.S. foreign policy organizations. The organization has been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) since 2008.

NED is a quasi-governmental foundation created by the Reagan Administration in 1983 to channel millions of Federal dollars into anti-Communist ‘private diplomacy.’ It is funded primarily through an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress within the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a subsidiary of the U.S. State Department.

NED has a vast influence over U.S. foreign policy initiatives, by way of its Board of Directors who simultaneously represent numerous powerful multinational corporations (MNCs) ranging from AT&T to Boeing to Fannie Mae.  →

The Colonization of OccupyOakland

American anarchists haven’t experienced this much positive public attention since the euphoria and aftermath of N30 in Seattle. We also haven’t been this embattled since then; once again it’s open season on anarchists of all stripes, and from all directions, including attacks coming from other oppositional figures. These are among the more insidious obstacles to a world without cops ordering us around, bosses exploiting our labor, and bureaucrats managing our struggles.

May Day, International Workers’ Day, is a commemoration of the events surrounding the 1887 judicial murder of the Haymarket anarchists. For most liberals and leftists, these anarchists are considered nothing more than railroaded Labor Martyrs, casualties in the fight for the 8-hour day. The mutual flirtations of Labor Solidarity Committee activists with official Labor Councils and low-level union bureaucrats (up to and including contacts with people close to Mayor Quan’s husband) is only the latest manifestation of this colonization of the much more fundamental struggle against Capital and the State. If the radical anti-statist and anti-capitalist views of the Haymarket anarchists (or Sacco and Vanzetti, those other famous “labor agitators”) are acknowledged at all, it is only because they represent the only kind of anarchist that union hacks are able to tolerate: dead ones, who can’t cause them any more trouble by calling into question their self-appointed role as the specialists and mediators of other people’s discontent.

As if the non-violence fetishists were not bad enough on their own, the conjoined twins of Identity Politics and white (male) guilt had already injected the poison of nationalism and essentialism prior to the attempt to change the name of what we were doing in and around the Plaza to “Decolonize.” To be clear: it was not the proposed name change that we found obnoxious, but the all too familiar guilt-mongering with which the proposal was introduced and discussed. The remains from that attempted coup include a caucus who cry “racist!” and/or “sexist!” as soon as anyone dares to question their motives, their methods, or their goals. Such despicable and transparently authoritarian posturing that precludes good faith dialog should remain relegated to the sectarian Leninist rackets who pioneered it in the 60s, and who continue to promote it today. In addition, the privileged leftist intelligentsia (the most prominent being Marxist professors and grad students) continue to insinuate themselves into the mix by using currently fashionable anti-authoritarian terminology as a cover for their grandstanding and careerism.

In the next ring of the anti-anarchist circus we are treated to the campaign of the electoral clowns of MoveOn, who have lifted the anarchist term “direct action,” using it as (what they hope will be) an enticing replacement for the distinctly unappealing strategy of organizing a voting bloc inside the Democratic Party machine. But direct action is actually a refusal to beg for permission from anyone to implement our visions and desires. The organizers of OccupyOakland made it a principle even before we took the Plaza, refusing in advance all interactions with any part of the City of Oakland. To have the liberals expropriate such a fine term disgusts us as much as when the armed bullies of OPD invoke “mutual aid” to reinforce and multiply their brutality, or when the champions of the dictatorship of the marketplace call themselves “libertarians.” The same goes for the “solidarity” of leftists who condemn those anarchists they can’t control.

OccupyOakland has consistently been an important location of an inspiring and unique radicality among an otherwise mostly staid constellation of Occupys. The bureaucrats and bureaucrats-in-training (professional and amateur alike) who are constantly trying to rein in, harness, or merely squander the contagious energy of self-organization that we’ve created and extended in OO need to be exposed and treated with contempt. They need to be confronted for attempting to set up hierarchical and authoritarian structures to negotiate or plead with elected officials and their appointees.

This has already begun, if only in an exploratory manner. Now’s the time to publicly and loudly denounce these wannabe politicians, those who are uneasy as parts of OccupyOakland continue to move beyond their managerial capacity, even as they see their involvement in OO as their surest path to power. The attacks against anarchists in OO (and at plenty of other Occupy locations) began early, and continue, at least partly fueled by the silence of many anarchists — an acquiescence that only compounds the split that our enemies are trying to foment between the “good” anarchists (the ones who created much of the familiar and positive infrastructure of OO when it existed in the Plaza) and the “bad” anarchists (the ones who break shit).

But we need to remember that, in the eyes of all those parts of “The 99%” who find any explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-statist project objectionable, we are all bad anarchists. Let’s be bad anarchists together, finding ways to use our creativity and innovation to spread an anti-authoritarian sensibility, not just as a vital component of OO, but throughout our collective projects to abolish all forms of domination.

We will be worse anarchists when we will have lost the initiative, when we can be easily demoralized, divided, manipulated, marginalized, and dispensed with by our enemies on the left. It seems long overdue to celebrate, if not embrace, the defiance of the Haymarket anarchist Louis Lingg who, in response to being sentenced to death, replied, “…I despise you, I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it!”

Oakland, May Day, 2012
Anarchist Anti-Defamation Caucus of the Anti-Bureaucratic Bloc
antibloc2012@gmail.com

The Anti-Bureaucratic Bloc is an ad hoc cluster of anarchist and anti-state communist individuals and affinity groups who have come together in an effort to counter the incipient growth of a self-selected cadre of professional activists and others with managerial aspirations.

Inconvenient Truths About Tar Sands Action

Manufacturing Dissent

April 24, 2012

The Insider | Counterpunch

U.S. Covertly Funds North Korea Destabilization While Training With South Korea to “Re-stabilize” It Using an Army of 100,000 [Canvas/Otpor, NYC OWS, 350.org]

April 12, 2012

S.Korea, U.S. Practice Stabilizing N.Korea in Civil War

99 Percent Spring: the Latest MoveOn Front for the Democratic Party

MoveOn.org Poster

WKOG editor: Note that MoveOn.org (with Res Publica) is the founder of Avaaz.

It is worth noting that this site has been critical of many components of the Occupy movement – not for what it purports to represent, but for its hypocritical acquiescence to the elite through overt cooperation with police and the FBI. The anonymous author of this piece points to one severe hypocrisy – that of the direct connection to the Democratic Party. However, this author fails to mention – thus far – the inherent weaknesses in Occupy campaigns organized by Zeese and others throughout the country – Occupations that don’t really occupy much of anything; enact Occupy codes of conduct demanding participants attempt no mechanisms of self-defense; and employ self-policing strategies where Occupiers are expected to cooperate with authorities and, in fact, turn one another in to said authorities. We hope “The Insider” will shed more light on these components of the movement that will also lead to its co-optation and eventual failure, should more effective strategies and tactics not be employed.

The Guns That Smoked

Counterpunch | Weekend Edition March 16-18, 2012

What the “Professional Left” Refuses to Share With Their “Followers”: 2011-The Year of the Dupe

WKOG editor: This article contains a mountain of factual information/evidence. Acknowledging such evidence is critical if we are to see the light through veils and illusions. As only then does the possibility for a real influence and positive outcome arise from orchestrated events which are being engineered with a false exterior to serve corporate and Imperialist interests. The very forces we claim to oppose continue to successfully reabsorb us into the very system destroying us – the very system we must starve, struggle against and ultimately dismantle. This is where we fail. If we continue to deny these truths, rather than confront them, our collective denial will serve as the instrument to our own annihilation. [About WKOG]

A timeline & history: One year into the engineered “Arab Spring,” one step closer to global hegemony

by Tony Cartalucci

Editor’s Note: The title, “Year of the Dupe,” was inspired, and indeed coined by Dr. Webster Tarpley of Tarpley.net, who is noted below as giving the initial tip-off regarding Egypt’s unrest back in January 2011.

dupe (dp, dyp)

tr.v. duped, dup·ing, dupes To deceive (an unwary person).

December 24, 2011 – In January of 2011, we were told that “spontaneous,” “indigenous” uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East in what was hailed as the “Arab Spring.” It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but “spontaneous,” or “indigenous.” In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was stated:

“A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

“The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. “

It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous foundations, organizations, and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. As we will see, preparations for the “Arab Spring” and the global campaign that is now encroaching on both Russia and China, as predicted in February 2011’s “The Middle East & then the World,” began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first “fist” was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

The Timeline – 2008-2010 Preparing the Battlefield

December 3-5, 2008: Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM’s various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO “Otpor” who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a “well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.” After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.

Photo: Serbia’s “Otpor,” a model for future US-backed color revolutions.

Foreign Policy Magazine would report in their article, “Revoluton U,” that CANVAS assisted protesters in the “Rose Revolution” of Georgia, the “Orange Revolution” of the Ukraine, and is currently working with networks from Belarus, Myanmar (Burma), all across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as with activists in North Korea, and 50 other countries.

2009: In a US State Department funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Libery (RFE/RL) article titled, “Exporting Nonviolent Revolution, From Eastern Europe to The Middle East,” it was stated, “Popovic then exported his nonviolent methods, helping train the activists who spearheaded Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. And now, Popovic is deploying his new organization, called Canvas, even farther afield — assisting the pro-democracy activists who recently brought down despotic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.”

Activists from Iran, Belarus, and North Korea were also confirmed by RFE/RL as having received training from CANVAS. The RFE/RL article places the activists’ meeting with CANVAS sometime during 2009.

February 2010: The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while awaiting for ElBaradei’s arrival at Cairo’s airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his “National Front for Change” and began preparing for the coming “Arab Spring.”

Clearly then, unrest was long planned, with activists from Tunisia and Egypt on record receiving training and support from abroad, so that they could return to their home nations and sow unrest in a region-wide coordinated campaign.

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm this, when US State Department’s Michael Posner stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to explain that the US “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” That ripple effect of course, is the “Arab Spring.”

The Timeline – 2011 Year of the Dupe

January 16, 2011: Al Arabiya News reported in their article, “Tunisian exiled reformist to head back home,” that Moncef Marzouki was returning to Tunisia (from Paris) amidst the chaos sown by US State Department trained, supported, and equipped mobs who were “triggered” by the convenient release of US State Department cables via Wikileaks. Quite clearly, considering the training Tunisian opposition groups received long before the cables were released, the Wikileaks cables were merely used as a planned rhetorical justification for long ago premeditated foreign-funded sedition. Since then, Wikileaks has been employed in an identical manner everywhere from Egypt to Libya, and even as far flung as Thailand.

Moncef Marzouki, it would turn out, was founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a “Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile” and a participant in the WMD “third assembly” alongside Marzouki’s Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored by NED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

A “call for solidarity” by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) mentions by name each and every group constituting the Tunisian opposition during the “uprising” in January 2011 as “FIDH member organisations.” These include Marzouki’s “Tunisian League for Human Rights,” the “Tunisian Association of Democratic Women,” and the “National Council for Liberties in Tunisia,” or CNLT. FIDH, acting as an international nexus for various foreign-funded organizations carrying out sedition worldwide under the guise of “human rights,” is itself fully funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros’ Open Society, and many others with clearly compromised affiliations.

January 28, 2011: After a warning by journalist/activist Dr. Webster Tarpley of World Crisis Radio, the alternative media began looking closer at the unrest in Egypt which began shortly after Tunisia’s growing crisis. In “All is not what it seems in Egyptian Clashes,” it was noted that protest leader Mohammed ElBaradei was in fact a devoted agent of the West, with a long standing membership within the Wall Street/London funded International Crisis Group (ICG) along side “senior Israeli officials” including the current Israeli President Shimon Peres, the current Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, and former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. The ICG also includes senior American bankers and geopolitical manipulators including George Soros, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Armitage, Samuel Berger, and Wesley Clark.

Ironically, Western media outlets insisted ElBaradei was both anti-American and strongly anti-Israeli in a rouse best described a year earlier in March 2010 in the Council On Foreign Relations’ paper, Foreign Affairs’ article “Is ElBaradei Egypt’s Hero?”:

“Further, Egypt’s close relationship with the United States has become a critical and negative factor in Egyptian politics. The opposition has used these ties to delegitimize the regime, while the government has engaged in its own displays of anti-Americanism to insulate itself from such charges. If ElBaradei actually has a reasonable chance of fostering political reform in Egypt, then U.S. policymakers would best serve his cause by not acting strongly. Somewhat paradoxically, ElBaradei’s chilly relationship with the United States as IAEA chief only advances U.S. interests now. “

The most recent manifestation of this came when Israel farcically called ElBaradei an “Iranian agent.” This latest performance further illustrates the immense level of duplicity with which world events are being manipulated.

February 17, 2011: The London-based National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) calls for a Libyan “Day of Rage” to match the US-destabilization rhetoric used in Tunisia and Egypt. The NFSL has been backed by the CIA-MI6 since the 80’s and had made multiple attempts to overthrow Qaddafi’s government with both terrorist attacks and armed insurrection.

Photo: Please note the “EnoughGaddafi.com” signs. EnoughGaddafi.com’s webmaster is listed on the US State Department’s Movements.org as the “Twitter” to follow.

February 18, 2011: In the wake of Honsi Mubarak’s ousting, billionaire bankster George Soros’ Open Society Institute was found to be behind NGOs drafting Egypt’s new constitution. These “civil society” groups include the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information openly funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute and the Neo-Con lined NED funded Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. It appears that while the International Crisis Group was turning out the strategy, and their trustee ElBaradei leading the mobs into the streets, it is the vast array of NGOs their membership, including Soros, fund that were working out and implementing the details on the ground.

February 21, 2011: An interview with Ibrahim Sahad of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on ABC Australia, featured every talking point covered by the mainstream corporate media from previous weeks regarding Libya, all with the White House and Washington Monument looming over him in the background. He made calls for a no-fly zone in reaction to unsubstantiated accusations Qaddafi was strafing “unarmed protesters” with warplanes.

March 2011’s “US Libyan Policy: Zero Legitimacy,” noted the clearly heavily armed, western-backed insurgency that was still being disingenuously portrayed by Western media as “peaceful protests.”

February 28, 2011: “Destroying Libya” stated:

While Libyan opposition leader Ibrahim Sahad leads the rhetorical charge from Washington D.C., his National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on the ground is armed to the teeth, as it has been throughout its 20 year history of attempted CIA backed rebellions against Qaddafi. In 1984, the NFSL tried to overthrow Qaddafi in a failed armed coup. The Daily Globe and Mail also recently confirmed that the NFSL along with the Libyan National Army, both under Sahad’s new National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO), had both “attempted coups and assassinations against Col. Gadhafi in the 1980s.”

Already at this point, both British and US representatives were admitting Libyan rebels were indeed heavily armed, and instead of condemning the violence, openly called for additional weapons and military support to be provided.

March 17, 2011: The UN decided to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya to save the globalist-backed rebellion sputtering in failure and bordering on a “Bay of Pigs” disaster. Canadian, US, French, Arab, and UK jets were already reported to be preparing for the operation.

March 24, 2011: Unrest had already begun in Syria, as NATO began bombing Libya while Egypt and Tunisia had already fallen into political and economic chaos. In “Globalists Hit in Syria,” the opposition is closely examined and documented to be once again a creation of Western-backed opposition groups.

Much of the “evidence” of Syria’s unrest was being filtered through organizations such as the London-based Syrian Human-Rights Committee whose hearsay statements posted on its website were cited by corporate news media in outlandish reports of violence that also include “activists say” after each allegation. The “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,” also London-based, is now the exclusive source cited by corporate-media reports regarding Syria.

March 26, 2011: In Egypt, signs of a counterrevolution and the first signs of weakness in ElBaradei’s chances to be installed as president began to show. Mobs pelted ElBaradei with rocks calling him “an American agent.” Wikileaks would again come to the aid of US interests and try to reintroduce the “anti-Western” image ElBaradei had been hamfisted in portraying.

Photo: The “barrier of legitimacy” is broken: a mob shouts “American agent” as they hurl rocks at ElBaradei who most certainly is an American agent – a trustee of the US International Crisis Group alongside George Soros.

March 28, 2011: Fortune-500 funded Brookings Institution’s “Libya’s Test of the New International Order” is reported on – exposing the war as not one of a “humanitarian” nature, but one aimed explicitly at establishing an international order and the primacy of international law.

April 17, 2011: Syria’s unrest yields widespread arson as well as reports of gunmen targeting both protesters and state security forces in a bid to escalate violence. In, “Globalist War Machine Fixates on Syria,” the “Libyan Precedent” is already being cited by US and French politicians as justification to use force against Syria. A later article, “Color Revolution’s Mystery Gunmen,” establishes a historical context within which to view the current violence in Syria and the fact that it is provocateurs sowing much of the violence.

April 21, 2011: Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko announces that his nation is now also under covert attack by Western forces to foster an “Arab Spring-style” insurrection. In, “Besieging Belarus,” documented ties between Belarus opposition members and the same Western organizations and institutions fueling the Arab Spring are illustrated.

April 22, 2011: John McCain touches down in Benghazi, Libya and consorts with verified terrorists who were fresh back from Iraq and Afghanistan, killing US troops. A West Point report would later confirm (.pdf from West Point’s CTC can be found here) with absolute certainty that the region from which the Libyan rebellion began was also the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s (LIFG) center of operations. It would also expose the fact that LIFG were in fact long-time affiliates of Al Qaeda with LIFG members occupying the highest levels of leadership within the terrorist organization.

Photo: Ultimate act of treason: McCain calls for recognition and extra-legal support for the very men who had killed US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By denying “Al-Qaeda” a base in Iraq, but handing them the entire nation of Libya, he has brought American foreign policy
to a new level of surrealism.

May, 2011: In “Libya at Any Cost,” the conflict in Libya was reported to be escalating, including NATO attempts to assassinate Qaddafi and the targeted killings of several of his family members including several of his grandchildren.

“America’s Arab Deception” attempted to review the past several months of engineered chaos blowing through Northern Africa and the Middle East, while it was noted in, “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up,” that the National Endowment for Democracy already began its first round of self-aggrandizing, and passing out awards to several of the dupes and collaborators that made its campaign of carnage throughout the Arab World a reality.

June, 2011: In “Arab Spring brings Corporate Locust,” the true agenda behind Egypt’s, and indeed the entire “Arab Spring’s” unrest became apparent as US representatives gave Fortune 500 executives a tour of destabilized Egypt and Tunisia in an effort to promote economic liberaliztion and privatization. John McCain and John Kerry led the tour and had co-sponsored bills to promote what would essentially be the meshing of Egypt and Tunisia’s economy into the Wall Street/London international order.

Photo: McCain (left) and Kerry (right) gesticulate as they explain their paymaster’s agenda within the confines of an Egyptian Coca-Cola factory. This is part of their latest trip surveying the effects of their US-funded opposition overthrowing Hosni Mubarak’s government.

In late June, France would admit to violating the terms of UN resolution 1973, and arming Libyan rebels.

July, 2011: The African Union would wholly reject the International Criminal Court’s mandate against Libya, exposing the severe illegitimacy with which it operates. Ties to corporate-financier funded organizations are revealed in “It’s Official: International Criminal Court has ZERO Mandate,” as well as the tenuous nature of the ICC’s claims against Libya’s Qaddafi. It would later be confirmed by members of Libya’s “human rights” community that indeed they, in collaboration with the rebel leaders, fabricated the numbers supplied to both the UN and the ICC, and that no verified or documented evidence of Qaddafi’s “atrocities” were produced.

In Thailand, another long-running US-backed color revolution finally yielded results and saw the return of Wall Street proxy, Thaksin Shinawatra’s political party to power. Various mouthpieces of the global elite, including the Council on Foreign Relations itself, gave stern warnings to Thailand’s establishment to accept the tenuous results of the July election or face isolation and other consequences. Another Southeast Asian country, Malaysia would also see color revolution take to their streets – this time in Malaysia by the yellow-clad, NED-funded Bersih movement.

Photo: Thaksin Shinawatra, a long time servant of the global elite, since before even becoming Thailand’s prime minister in 2001, reports to the CFR in New York City on the eve of the 2006 military coup that ousted him from power. He has now returned to power in Thailand via a proxy political party led by his own sister, Yingluck Shinawatra. Securing the votes of only 35% of eligible voters puts on full display how tenuous his support really is within a nation he claims stands entirely behind him.

August, 2011: By August, even the corporate-media began admitting that Syria’s opposition was “mostly unarmed,” or in other words, armed. The opposition was starting to be more clearly defined as armed ethnic groups and armed militants of the Muslim Brotherhood.

By late August, NATO began a coordinated attack on Tripoli, Libya, involving an elaborate psychological-operation that claimed to have eliminated or captured the entire Qaddafi family in a single day. The following day, Saif Al-Qaddafi would turn up alive and well, and free, while leading fierce fighting that would carry on until October and result in NATO leveling the cities of Bani Walid and Sirte in particular, into piles of rubble. It had become entirely clear that NATO was providing air support not for democracy-loving freedom fighters, but for hardcore terrorists who were carrying out a systematic campaign of genocide and reprisals throughout the country.

Photo: Libya’s rebels are far from motivated by democratic aspirations. Their grievances lie along ethnic, not political divides. “Gaddafi supporters” is the euphemism being used by the global corporate-media in describing the generally darker skinned and African tribes that form the majority of Western Libya’s demographics and who are bearing the brunt of NATO-backed rebel atrocities.

September, 2011: Sensing victory in Libya, corporate-financier funded think-tanks began preparing for the rebuilding and despoiling of the Libyan economy. In “Globalists to Rebuild Libya,” NATO’s Atlantic Council wrote a report detailing just how they would go about doing this.

Also as Libya’s violence spiraled out of control and atrocities carried out by the rebels and their NATO backers became more obscene, it became clear how fraudulent the “War on Terror” was. In “Libyan Rebels Listed by US State Department as Terrorists,” it is illustrated how NATO members were guilty of anti-terrorist laws for providing material support for listed terrorist organizations.

Image: A screenshot taken directly from the US State Department website showing the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) clearly listed as a foreign terrorist organization. This is important, as US Code prohibits providing material support to listed terrorist organizations. With revelations of Al Qaeda and LIFG fighters leading the Libyan rebellion with NATO-members’ full military, financial, and diplomatic support, attempts are being made to plea ignorance as to the true nature of the rebels. Listed below LIFG, is MEK, an Iraqi/Iranian group also being armed and supported by the US. (click on image to enlarge)

September also saw real humanitarian catastrophe unfold in Uganda, where a British corporation sanctioned genocide to clear land they had “leased” from the Ugandan government. Thus illustrates how the cause of “humanitarian concerns” is called on only when it serves Wall Street and London’s interests, and otherwise ignored when it involves verifiable genocide carried out in the pursuit of furthering their wealth and power.

Photo: Robert Devereux, a long time investor, a long time con-artist spinning his company’s despoiling of Africa as some sort of cutting-edge investment strategy that makes money and “helps” people. Even as Devereux made his disingenuous statements in 2010 regarding New Forests, the villagers in Uganda he was “helping” had already filed a court case a year earlier protesting the British company’s encroachment on their land. These villagers would be forcibly displaced, many of them killed by Ugandan troops acting on behalf of Devereux.
….

John McCain would land once again in Libya, this time in Tripoli to celebrate the destruction of the country and shake hands once again with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that delivered Qaddafi’s Libya into the hands of the Wall Street/London elite.

Photo: It’s all smiles and laughs in Tripoli as McCain, a chief proponent and driving force behind the US intervention in Libya, literally glorifies Al Qaeda’s exploits in the now ruined nation. Miles away, the very rebels he was praising are purposefully starving the civilian population of Sirte in an effort to break their will, while they and NATO indiscriminately use heavy weapons aimed at crowded city centers.

October 2011: While Tunisia and Egypt had fallen, and Libya too being seized by proxy forces fueled by the West, the Obama administration began withdrawing troops from Iraq. This suspicious withdrawal when otherwise the rest of the Middle East was under US proxy assault raised serious suspicions that an escalation, not retreat was to follow.

Rhetoric for war with Iran had been steadily increasing and the beginning of what looked like a covert war was being fought inside and along Iran’s borders. A disastrous ploy of framing Iran for the alleged planned assassination of a Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. fell apart when Iranians linked the plot to US-backed terrorist organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Image: MEK. Admittedly a terrorist organization, listed by the US State Department as being such, it is fully funded, armed, and backed by the United States, based in France and US-occupied Iraq, and allowed to conduct terrorist operations against the Iranian people. The “War on Terror” is a fraud.

It is more than likely that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq would simply provide the US “plausible deniability” for an Israeli airstrike on Iran.

November 2011: Syria’s “peaceful protesters” who had been all along fully armed and attempting to stoke a Libyan-style civil war, were finally acknowledge as such by the corporate-media and more importantly by the corporate-funded think-tanks that supply them with their talking points. In “IISS: Syria’s Opposition is Armed,” it is states that a report out of the International Institute for Strategic Studies by Senior Fellow for Regional Security at IISS-Middle East, Emile Hokayem openly admitted that Syria’s opposition was armed and prepared to drag Syria’s violence into even bloodier depths.

Also in November, Wall Street and London’s assault on Libya came full circle with the installation of Abdurrahim el-Keib as prime minister. El-Keib who spent decades in exile in the US, was formally employed by the Petroleum Institute, based in Abu Dhabi, UAE and sponsored by British Petroleum (BP), Shell, France’s Total, the Japan Oil Development Company, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Photo: And so begins the farce that is Western “democracy.” One corporate-fascist puppet Mahmoud Jibril , steps down, another, Abdurrahim el-Keib, takes his place. In reality, it is NATO-states and their corporate sponsors that now determine Libya’s fate. Pictured above, el-Keib poses with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of the unelected, NATO-backed “National Transitional Council.”
….

In Egypt, in late November, a second “revolution” began unfolding on the streets. In reality it was the same Western-backed forces led by ElBaradei and the emerging Mamdouh Hamza, against Egyptian military forces that seemed to have gone back on whatever arrangements they made with the West after the fall of Mubarak.

The UN, in another attempt to escalate foreign intervention in Syria, would release a UN Human Rights Council report regarding Syrian “crimes against humanity” which was actually co-authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank, Middle East Policy Council, that includes Exxon men, CIA agents, US military and government representatives, and even the president of the US-Qatar Business Council, which includes amongst its membership, AlJazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO’s operations against Libya), and Boeing.

The report itself contained no verifiable evidence, but rather hearsay accounts recorded in Geneva by alleged “victims” “witnesses,” and “defectors,” put forth by “all interested persons and organizations.” In other words, it was an open invitation for Syria’s enemies to paint whatever image of the ruling government they pleased.

December 2011: With Tunisia and Libya fully run by Western proxies, Egypt and Syria still mired in chaos, and with globalists calling for war on Iran, the “Arab Spring” was nearly complete. However, the “Arab Spring” was only the first leg of a grander strategy to encircle Russia and China. In December, the campaigns to move in on Russia and China would begin in earnest.

Image: The “String of Pearls:” China’s oil lifeline is to be cut by the destabilization and regimes changes being made throughout Africa and the Middle East. Along the “String” the US has been destabilizing nations from Pakistan to Myanmar, from Malaysia to Thailand, to disrupt and contain China’s emergence as a regional power.

Hillary Clinton, in Foreign Policy Magazine would pen, “America’s Pacific Century,” a Hitlerian declaration of imperial intent for American “leadership” in Asia for the next 100 years. From “Hillary Clinton and the New American (Pacific) Century:

“Upon reading Clinton’s declaration of intent for American leadership into the next century, readers may recall the similarly named, ranting “Project for a New American Century” signed off on by some of America’s most notorious Neo-Conservatives, which almost verbatim made the same case now made by Clinton. In fact, America’s evolving confrontation with China, marked acutely by Obama’s announcement of a permanent US military presence in Australia just this week, is torn directly from the pages of decades old blueprints drawn up by corporate-financier funded think-tanks that truly rule America and its destiny.

 

As reported in June, 2011’s “Collapsing China,” as far back as 1997 there was talk about developing an effective containment strategy coupled with the baited hook of luring China into its place amongst the “international order.” Just as in these 1997 talking-points where author and notorious Neo-Con policy maker Robert Kagan described the necessity of using America’s Asian “allies” as part of this containment strategy, Clinton goes through a list of regional relationships the US is trying to cultivate to maintain “American leadership” in Asia.

 

For example, the recently reinstalled Wall Street proxy regime in Thailand led by Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, has received reassurances by Clinton herself just this week stating that, “it is in the national security and political interest of the United States to have this government succeed.” As reported in-depth in “CONFIRMED: Thailand’s “Pro-Democracy” Movement Working for US,” Thaksin Shinawatra and his political regime have had long standing, well documented ties to Wall Street and London. The US backing of puppet-regimes like Thaksin, installing them into power, and keeping them there is central to projecting power throughout Asia and keeping China subordinate, or as Kagan put it in his 1997 report, these proxy regimes will have China “play Gulliver to Southeast Asia’s Lilliputians, with the United States supplying the rope and stakes.””

In Myanmar (Burma) “democracy icon” Aung San Suu Kyi, whose entire movement is a creation of Wall Street and London, received Hillary Clinton as well as Thailand’s proxy-PM Yingluck Shinawatra in a globalist show of support designating her as the defacto leader and point of contact within the Southeast Asian country. Clinton’s visit coincided with a successful campaign led by US NGOs to oust Chinese interests in the nation that resulted in the halting of a dam that was to provide electricity, revenue, flood control and irrigation for the people of Myanmar.

Image: The Myitsone Dam, on its way to being the 15th largest in the world until construction was halted in September by a campaign led by Wall Street-puppet Aung San Suu Kyi, a stable of US-funded NGOs, and a terrorist campaign executed by armed groups operating in Kachin State, Myanmar.

Meanwhile in Russia, Wall Street and London attacked more directly, attempting to interfere with Russian elections in December and resulting in several street protests led by overtly linked NED, Soros, and Rothschild operatives. NED-funded NGO “Golos” played a key role in portraying the elections as “rigged” and constituted America’s extraterritorial meddling in Russia’s sovereign affairs.

Image: NATO’s creeping encirclement of Russia has now been combined with another round of “color revolution” destabilizations in Belarus and now in Russia itself.

A concerted effort by the corporate-media to misrepresent the unrest in Russia was pointed out in, “Russian Protests: Western Media Lies ,” illustrating just how coordinated the overarching global destabilization being carried out actually is. In “Wall Street Vs. Russia,” it was concluded:

“It is quite clear that the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and even the US State Department whose new foreign affairs advisory board is full of think-tanks representing overt corporate-financier interests, are not interested in “democracy,” “human rights,” or “freedom” in Russia, but rather removing the Kremlin out of the way, and reestablishing the parasitic feeding on the Russian people and its economy they enjoyed after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

In late December it would be confirmed that the same Al Qaeda militants that ravaged Libya with NATO’s aid, were on their way to Syria to help overthrow the Assad government. LIFG leader Abdel Hakim Belhaj was confirmed to be on the Syrian border preparing troops of the so-called “Free Syrian Army.”

This wasn’t the only recent example of the West operating in tandem with listed terrorist groups. It was also reported in, “EXPOSED: US Troops Guarded Terrorist Camp in Iraq,” that the US has been guarding a terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq training camp inside Iraq with US troops and is planning to relocated them, possibly in a freshly abandoned US military base in Iraq while D.C. lobbyists work feverishly to have them de-listed, armed, and sent to conduct terrorist operations in Iran. Shocking comments are made in the Brookings Institution’s report, “Which Path to Persia?” where US policy experts conspire to use the terrorist organization against the government of Iran. In essence, corporate-funded policy makers have transformed the US into a state-sponsor of terror.

Conclusion

The year 2011 was surely the year of the dupe. Youth enamored with lofty, naive notions of “freedom” sold to them by corporate-fascist funded NGOs were brought into the streets to create chaos and division which was then capitalized on by covert political and even military maneuvering by the West and its proxy forces. In Egypt the nation is teetering on the edge of being fully integrated into the Wall Street/London international order, while a big-oil representative is enjoying his new position as prime minister of Libya. In Tunisia a life-long stooge of Western machinations is now president, and an alarming campaign of NATO-backed violence and terrorism is gripping Syria.

With the encirclement of Russia and China, these dupes have witlessly brought the world to the edge of World War III, and clearly done nothing at all to improve their own state of being. As their nations fall under the control of increasing Western influence, the resources once used to placate them and defend their nationalism will now be diverted into the bottomless maw of the parasitic banking combines that are currently destroying both North America and Europe.

February’s “The Middle East & then the World” is well worth reading again – to see how far we’ve come over the last year since it was written, and what is left for the globalists to do. As the globalists come ever closer to China and Russia’s doorsteps the stakes will continue to rise and the placid spectating Americans and Europeans have enjoyed this year will forever be lost.

Finally, consider what was written in one of the last articles of this year, “The End Game Approaches:”

“Complacency will kill, apathy is complicity: as the elitist-engineered “Arab Spring” reaches its conclusion, we stand on the precipice of being meshed into an inescapable, corporate-fascist, scientific planetary regime…. the End Game approaches.

 

Now more than ever, “we the people” must steel ourselves against this immense corporate-fascist empire as it sprawls death, destruction, and domination, militarily and economically, across the planet. We must, our very survival depends on it, boycott and replace entirely the corporate-financier interests that drive this dark, expansive agenda. It has been literally spawned of our apathy, complicity, and ignorance, fueled by us – the very source of corporate fascism’s power – and it must be our activism, resistance, and intellect that brings it to an end.

 

As far fetched as it may sound, every Pepsi we swig, every day we decide to drink beer and tune into our corporate-sponsored bread and circus, be it the modern day chariot races of NASCAR or the gladiatorial contests of the NFL, we bring inescapable eternal servitude to a corporate-fascist scientific dictatorship one step closer.

 

It is now “do or die” – unlike in the past, mankind now possesses the technology to render the vast majority of the population intellectually inferior through mass medication, food poisoning, GMO crops that rot our bodies and minds from the inside-out, and the martial means of eliminating vast swaths of the population permanently. Not only is this a possibility, it is a reality the global elite have conspired over at great length through texts like Ecoscience penned by current White House science adviser John Holdren and former White House science adviser Paul Ehrlich who openly talk about mass, involuntary medication to forcibly sterilize the population, reduce our numbers and confine us within what they literally call a “planetary regime.” The End Game approaches.”

Let us not “hope” next year fairs better for free humanity. Let us with our two hands, our will, and our capable intellects ensure that it is better. The decision is not that of our “leaders” or “representatives,” it is the decision of each and every one of us and what it is we do with our time, our money, our resources, our energy, and to where we pay our attention – each and every day. Let us define where it is we want our destiny to take us, and start taking one step at a time to get there.

Let us wait no longer for “saviors,” but rather look in the mirror and realize, God, the Universe, or whatever higher power you believe in, has already endowed you with everything you need, in your heart, your mind, and within your hands to prevail in whatever noble pursuit you, or “we the people” choose.

Source: Land Destroyer

Published December 24, 2011

 

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. →

Twitterers of the World Revolution: The Digital New-New Left by Dr. K. R. Bolton – Foreign Policy Journal

“Young people have no conception of the conspiracy’s strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below…. They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they’re fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don’t realise that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes…”

Twitterers of the World Revolution: The Digital New-New Left
Dr. K. R. Bolton. Foreign Policy Journal.
Ephemeris 360°.org

An enlightening article by Tony Cartalucci, entitled “Google’s Revolution Factory”. Here Cartalucci focuses on the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), a.k.a. Movement.org.

Cartalucci states that Movement.org was started in 2008 to co-ordinate “radical” youth movements of what he calls a “left-liberal” nature. Among the founding groups was the April 6 Youth Movement, which has been the vanguard of the revolt in Egypt. What the naïve, the ill-informed, and those who have the disadvantage of a University miseducation will find perplexing is that these young revolutionaries have been sponsored by corporations such as Pepsi, by sundry globalist think tanks and NGOs, and by the U.S. State Department. Cartalucci comments on this:

It is hard, considering these men’s affiliations, to believe that the change they want to see is anything less than a generation that drinks more Pepsi, buys more consumerist junk, and believes the United States government every time they purvey their lies to us via their corporate owned media.

While the activists attending the Movements.org summit adhere to the philosophies of “left-leaning” liberalism, the very men behind the summit, funding it, and prodding the agenda of these activists are America’s mega-corporate combine. These are the very big-businesses that have violated human rights worldwide, destroyed the environment, sell shoddy, overseas manufactured goods produced by workers living in slave conditions, and pursue an agenda of greed and perpetual expansion at any cost. The hypocrisy is astounding unless of course you understand that their nefarious, self-serving agenda could only be accomplished under the guise of genuine concern for humanity, buried under mountains of feel-good rhetoric, and helped along by an army of exploited, naive youth.

Been There, Done That: The Old New Left

A pseudo-revolutionary youth movement controlled by Establishment wire-pullers is not a new phenomenon. The CIA, Tax Exempt Foundations, and Corporate America experimented with AYM’s precursors during the 1960s as a means of dialectical “controlled opposition.” One of these dialectical aims was to push a paradigm shift of the USA in a moderately (?) Leftist direction by sponsoring the extreme New Left nihilists. A concomitant part of this was to also sponsor the “Women’s Lib” of Gloria Steinem, et al, which has assisted the corporate elite in detaching women from the family and incorporating them into the workforce as part of the capitalist production process behind the facade of “equality.”

The ideological foundations for the 1960s “youth rebellion” were laid by dissidents of the Old Left mostly from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, whose academia fell out with Stalin, escaped from Hitler and ended up in the USA at Columbia University and at the New School for Social Research. This coterie from Europe came in under the direct sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Emergency Program for European Scholars, which had last say in who was to be selected.

Under the direction of Theodor Ardorno, this coterie produced the seminal study The Authoritarian Personality, the purpose being to show by the use of personality questionnaires that those who believed in traditional values and especially the family and parental authority were mentally ill, whereas those with a Leftist outlook (presumably like Jim Jones, for example) were mentally healthy. Hence, the ideological basis was laid for a revolt against familial bonds, including traditional gender roles.

From out of this ideological fermentation the individual most responsible for laying the intellectual foundations of the New Left was Herbert Marcuse, who got his start in the USA as one of the refugees sponsored by the Rockefeller program. During World War II, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and then for the US State Department until 1950. During the 1960s Marcuse became the “guru of the New Left”, he was “often discussed” by the mass media, and his students began to gain influential academic positions and to promote his ideas, making him a major force in US intellectual life. Marcuse’s Eros & Civilization became the manifesto of the 1960s counter-culture. He received Rockefeller funding for his book One Dimensional Man.

Timothy Leary, like Gloria Steinem, was “handled” by CIA operative Cord Meyer. Leary later credited Meyer with, “helping me understand my political cultural role more clearly.” In 1953, the CIA established a front, The Society for Human Ecology, and spent $25 million on a research programme at Harvard, Stanford and Berkley universities, to experiment with mind-altering drugs, particularly mescaline and LSD. In 1960 Frank Barrow of the CIA established at Harvard the Psychedelic Drug Research Center. At the time, Leary was a lecturer in psychology at Harvard. It is here, under Barrow’s direction, that Leary began his experiments with LSD. Leary later stated, “Some powerful people in Washington have sponsored all this drug research.”

By 1967 Leary had become the icon of the counter-culture, his slogan being: “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out”. The involvement of the Establishment in promoting the drug counter-culture was frankly stated by Leary in an interview with High Times, a leading counter-cultural magazine of which he was an editor, in 1978:

If you look back, many things that we thought were coincidences turned out not to have been accidents. The entire LSD movement itself was sponsored originally by the CIA to whom I give great credit. I would not be here today if it were not for the foresight and prestige of the CIA psychologists. So give the CIA credit for being a truly intelligence agency.

In 1937 the “Radio Project” was established at Princeton University with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation. The head of the Project was Paul Lazarsfeld, an Austrian socialist who had been brought to the USA as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and became one of the most influential social scientists in America as the founder of “public opinion research.” At Princeton Lazarsfeld established the Office of Radio Research. Lazarsfeld’s students were to become the heads of the CBS, NBC and ABC corporations. A biography of Lazarsfeld states:

In 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation radio research grant was transferred from Princeton to Columbia University, where Lazarsfeld became a professor of sociology. In 1944 the Office of Radio Research was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research , which became in the 1950s and 1960s the leading university-based social research institute in the United States.

Theodor Adorno was one of the major research scientists employed by the Radio Project as director of the project’s Music Division. His research was nicknamed “The Little Annie Project”. This examined the emotional reactions of listeners to characters and scenes, so that a scriptwriter could influence the response in an audience. Adorno described addiction to music as similar to other forms of addiction and as a means for the socialization of individuals into a mass.

This is the background of what New Left luminary Jerry Rubin described as the formula of the “youth revolt”: sex, drugs and music, Rubin stating of this in his revolutionary manifesto Do It! (obliging published by Simon and Schuster): “We’ve combined youth, music, sex, drugs, and rebellion with treason, and that’s a combination hard to beat.”

Organization and Funding

The same type of corporate and Government-connected sponsorship that has been creating the present reanimated “New Left” to act as the vanguard of the world “velvet revolution” pulled the same stunt on youngsters during the 1960s. The specific institution from which the New Left emerged was the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) initially funded by James Warburg, a scion of the Warburg international banking dynasty, and “by the Warburg family” (sic).

According to Sidney Blumenthal, who conducted interviews with IPS for The Washington Post in 1986, “IPS became a bridge between liberalism and the New Left during the 1960s and 1970s.” IPS co-founder Marcus Raskin for example was associated with the Radical Education Project of the primary New Left movement, Students for a Democratic Society. The IPS continues to receive funding from the major Foundations, including Ford and Rockefeller.

The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was born from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). This was the youth wing of the Rockefeller-funded, League for Industrial Democracy, (LID) the U.S. branch of Fabian-socialism. According to Political Research Associates, a prominent Left-wing think tank, SLID was the U.S. affiliate of an international socialist youth movement which received CIA money: LID’s Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) was an associate member of the CIA-financed International Union of Socialist Youth. SLID received money to maintain its international contacts from the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, a major CIA conduit for funds. Another recipient of CIA funding since 1950 was the US National Student Association. Philip Agee states that the NSA provided an important basis for the New Left, and was closely associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the SDS:

…[M]embers of Students for a Democratic Society provided important leadership for campus-based activities. According to Angus Johnston, who had been secretary of the US Students Association, “…NSA played a vital role in the wave of student activism that rose in the early 1960s, doing much to advance a student-centered vision for the American university. Many of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) became involved in national activism through NSA…”

One of those involved with founding the SDS, James Kunen, writes in his memoir The Strawberry Statement that Big Business sought to channel funds to the SDS as part of a dialectical process:

In the evening I went up to the University to check out a strategy meeting. A kid was giving a report on the SDS convention. He said that at the convention men from Business International Roundtables, the meetings sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government —tried to buy up a few radicals. These men are the world’s leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the boys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They’re the left wing of the ruling class.

They agree with us on black control and student control…

They want McCarthy in. They see fascism as the threat, see it coming from Wallace . The only way McCarthy could win is if the crazies and young radicals act up and make Gene look more reasonable. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago.

We were also offered Esso (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the centre as they move to the left.

This Big Business dialectic with the New Left is confirmed independently by Gerald Kirk, who as a student at the University of Chicago, and became active in the SDS, the DuBois Club , the Black Panthers, and the Communist Party, as an informant for the FBI. Kirk broke from the Left in 1969. The following year, he testified before the House and Senate Internal Security panels:

Young people have no conception of the conspiracy’s strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below…. They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they’re fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don’t realise that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes…

The manner by which the dialectical process works was specifically demonstrated in 1968 when the SDS Columbia chapter instigated a student revolt and take-over of the University. Revolutionary leadership was taken out of the hands of the SDS and was taken over by the Students for a Restructured University (SRU) that had been funded with a $40,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation 1968 annual report states that:

At the University of California (Berkeley), a grant of $500,000 was given for a new university Office of Educational Development that enlists both students and faculty in the planning and conduct of educational experiments. These include new interdisciplinary courses that reflect contemporary social, political, and economic issues, and a system of residential colleges linked to specific student interests rather than to academic fields.

The Ford Foundation was funding in Berkeley, noted as the centre of New Left radicalism, the institutional promotion of New Left ideology. Note the reference to “educational experiments,” “courses that reflect contemporary social, political and economic issues,” and the promotion of a system of so-called “specific student interests.” The 1968 Foundation report states further:

To facilitate thoughtful student involvement in academic affairs, the Foundation granted $315,000 to the National Student Association for a three-year program. The grant will assist two principal activities: a national dissemination program to inform students of various patterns of educational innovation and change and participation of N.S.A. staff as advisors in student reform efforts.

At Columbia University, which was severely disrupted by student demonstrations in the spring, grants were made to three groups studying and redefining the roles of faculty, students, administrators, and trustees. They included a faculty committee and a student organization that was active in the demonstrations but is dedicated to restructuring, not overturning, the university.

The Foundation report cryptically mentions “a student organization” active in the New Left demonstrations with the SDS, Black Panthers and others, referring here to the Students for a Restructured University, without naming the SRU as the recipient. Students for a Restructured University presented themselves as the “moderate” wing of the student uprising, the strategy being to threaten that if their “moderate” demands were not met, the University administration would have to deal with the SDS and other extremists. This was the dialectical strategy in operation.

Here We Go Again

The current use of the young generation for capitalist revolution behind the banner inscribed with left-liberal slogans is therefore a well-tried formula. A difference is that where it was once the CIA which co-opted “radicals” such as Gloria Steinem and Timothy Leary under a program directed by Cord Meyer, a co-director of the United World Federalists along with banking scion James Warburg, the CIA programs have been replaced with those of the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, Soros, and an array of often interlocking fronts, think tanks and NGOs.

Cartalucci has exposed the background of a contemporary major youth movement that is analogous to the New Left of yesteryear, as well as cogently explaining the real purposes of this movement. The by-line of AYM/Movements.org is: “Identify. Connect. Support.” Movements.org states:

We match members of our global network with necessary resources from the technology, media, private and public sectors as well as with each other in order to foster peer to peer capacity building. Movements.org hosts annual summits, regional training events, and on online hub for best practices, lessons learned, discussion and news about the use of new technologies in social movements.

The focus is on the use of digital technology, a feature of the “velvet revolutions” from Eastern Europe, to Central Asia to the current turmoil in North Africa and Iran. Movements.org calls their constituency “digital activists.”

Whereas the CIA covertly channelled funds to the New Left during the 1960s, now the new generation of young revolutionaries proudly display the logos of their corporate sponsors. Under the category of “Sponsors” Movements.org states:

Movements.org has leveraged its relationships with exciting movements in civil society to bring together some of the globe’s top technology and communications companies to share their knowledge and expertise with online activists from across the world. Movements.org has received sponsorship and continues to be supported by global industry leaders…

These corporate sponsors displayed on the AYM website are: Howcast, Edelman, Google, Music TV, Meetup, Pepsi, CBS News, Mobile Accord, Youtube, Facebook, MSN/NBC, National Geographic, Omnicom Group, Access 360 Media, and Gen Next.

The Public Partnerships are: Columbia Law School, and the US State Department.

Most of the logos on the AYM website link directly to the companies so that Movements.org also serves as an advertising medium for corporate America. What is of interest is that the digital technology companies approve and support the manner by which their services are being used in the world velvet revolution. They are not only not indifferent; they are the sponsors of the revolutionaries. This is because the “brave new world” being created by their young “digital activists” will be one in which young consumers will emerge from the traditional societies that are now being overthrown. There will be a larger consumer market; more youngsters addicted to consumerism, as they are in the West.

Howcast, the primary backer of AYM, has for example made a business empire out of “how to” videos based around the banality of the mass consumer, the subjects of wisdom being imparted including: “How to go on a date with someone you met on the internet,” “How to prevent a blister,” “How to headbang,” “How to enter and elegantly exit a car…” …Not exactly in the same category as The Communist Manifesto or The Little Red Book, but fitting articulations of the type of revolution that neocon strategist Maj. Ralph Peters predicted would overtake the old order and reshape the world in America’s image by means of consumer addiction via what he called “creative destruction.”

Howcast CEO Jason Liebman conceived the idea of the Alliance of Youth Movements/Movements.org. His profile on the Howcast website states of Liebman: “Jason is also a cofounder of the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), a nonprofit organization that helps young people to effect nonviolent change around the world using 21st-century tools.” Howcast is described as working directly “with brands, agencies, and organizations” such as GE, Proctor & Gamble, Kodak, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Defense, and Ford Motor Company… Howcast is therefore intimately involved not only with global corporations but also with the U.S. Government. Liebman was previously with Google where he forged corporate relationships with Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, Warner Music, Sony Pictures, Reuters, The New York Times, and the Washington Post Company.

The other Movement.org Board Members and Co-Founders are:

Jared Cohen is director of Google Ideas. “He is also an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focuses on terrorism and counter-radicalization, the impact of connection technologies, and ’21st century statecraft.’” The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the omni-present foreign policy think tank that was founded in the aftermath of World War I by corporate interests in conjunction with academics and politicians, and is the prototype of subsequent think tanks. Cohen is a director and founder of a youth movement that claims to be creating revolutionary change throughout the world, yet simultaneously he advises CFR on “counter-radicalization.” With this it might be discerned the actual purpose of Movement.org: that of co-opting and channeling youth dissent into acceptable forms. The profile for Cohen continues:

Previously, he served for four years as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under both Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. In this capacity, he advised on the Middle East, South Asia, counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, and the development of the “21st century statecraft” agenda. He is twice a recipient of the Secretary of State’s Meritorious Honor Award.

Cohen is author of the books Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East and One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide. He has also written several articles, including “Diverting the Radicalization Track” (Policy Review) and “Iran’s Young Opposition” (SAIS Review).

Cohen has travelled extensively throughout Africa, where he examined issues related to democracy, governance, and genocide. He has also conducted research in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, looking at opposition groups, the spread of technology, and interviewing militants ranging from Hezbollah to several Al-Qaeda affiliated groups.

The other corporate revolutionary Board Member and Co-Founder of Movements.org is Roman Tsunder, founder of Access 360 Media, “the nation’s largest digital Out-of-Home media network focused on shoppers that connects to over 100MM consumers each month in over 10,000 locations through the communication platforms that matter most to them – In-store, Online and Mobile.”

In 2009, Roman created the PTTOW! Summit (www.youtube.com/pttow), an invite only event bringing together 35 top execs from the world’s most innovative companies to discuss the future of the youth industry, representing every major industry category, including: wireless (AT&T), clothing (Quiksilver); gaming (Activision), social media (Facebook), technology (HP), online video (YouTube), beverage (Pepsi), athletes (Kelly Slater) and the US Government.

Tsunder’s agenda is clear enough, as with others, being to create and expand the “youth industry” (sic) and that indicates how youth are perceived by the corporate revolutionaries: as consumers and potential consumers. He is also “a founder and board member of Gen Next (gen-next.org), a non-profit organization focused on ‘affecting change for the next generation.’” Revolution has become another means of profit maximization. Gen Next is one of the corporate sponsors of Movements.org.

The Movement’s “Development and Corporate Partnerships Manager,” itself an interesting title for a supposedly idealistic youth organization, is Rachel Silver, who worked for Liebman’s Howcast, and as such organized the Movement’s summits in New York City, Mexico City and London.

AYM Summits

The Movement has held three summits so far. The 2010 Summit held in London, had as its keynote speaker Scott Heifferman from Meetup.com. Other luminaries at the summit were Kristen Morissey from Google; Juan Zarate, CBS News; Farah Pandith: Special Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State on Muslim Affairs.

“Guests, hosts and sponsors” included representatives from Google, Rand Corp., Edelman, Howcast, Access 360 Media, World Bank, US Institute of Peace, Global Engagement Group, and Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Moderators and Speakers were from the National Democratic Institute, Gen Next, Twitter, CBS, Meet Up, Google, World Bank, and You Tube. Farah Pandith and Jared Cohen represented the US State Department.

Movement.org’s Role in the North Africa Tumult

Lest it be thought that Movement.org is not much more than a bunch of nerdish armchair revolutionaries and a past-time for CEO yuppies, the organization has been playing an important role in the North Africa upheavals. Ariel Schwartz writing for the Fast Company, writes:

File this under: Timing is still everything. Just in time to help organize Egyptian grassroots activists with restored Internet access, the Alliance for Youth Movements (AYM) has rebranded itself as Movements.org, an online hub for digital activists….

The AYM has a history of creating change–in 2008, a summit organized by the AYM included leaders of Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement, a protest movement seeking political reform and a democratic government.

“Movements.org is the source for anyone who wants to keep up to date on the use of technology for achieving real social change,” said Movements.org and Howcast cofounder Jason Liebman in a statement. “We have existed for three years as a support network for grassroots activists using digital tools, and today we come out of alpha launch to make our platform and resources available to everyone.”

In other words, the revolution is now centralized…

It should be recalled that the April 6 Youth Movement has been a major factor in organizing the Egyptian revolt. The link for the April 6 Youth Movement provided by Fast Company goes to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the veteran globalist institutions, which describes the pivotal role “social media” played in the creation of the April 6 Youth Movement.

In the spring of 2008, over 100,000 users of the social networking website Facebook joined an online group to express solidarity with workers protesting in the Delta industrial city of al-Mahalla al-Kubra. As the protests escalated into a nationwide strike, the Facebook group gained momentum and eventually coalesced into a political movement known as the April 6 Youth Movement.

In 2009, the group still claimed a membership of around 70,000 young Egyptians, most of whom are well-educated and politically unaffiliated. Like Egypt’s other protest movements, the April 6 Youth Movement is not a formal political party, but it nonetheless provides an outlet for a new generation of politically conscious Egyptians.

Google’s Ghonim

One of the first leaders of the riots in Egypt to be detained was Google’s Egyptian executive Wael Ghonim, arrested on January 8, and freed ten days later. “Wael was also active on Facebook and Twitter regarding the Revolution…” Newsweek credits Ghonim with a major role in the Egyptian revolt, with the subheading: “Wael Ghonim’s day job was at Google. But at night he was organizing a revolution.” Although based in Dubai as Google’s head of marketing for North Africa, Ghonim “volunteered to run the Facebook fan page of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner who had emerged as a key opposition leader.” According to Newsweek, it was Ghonim’s broadcast that actually instigated the revolt that toppled Mubarak:

On Jan. 14, protests in Tunisia felled that country’s longstanding dictator, and Ghonim was inspired to announce, on Facebook, a revolution of Egypt’s own. Each of the page’s 350,000-plus fans was cordially invited to a protest on Jan. 25. They could click “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” to signal whether they’d like to attend.

Interestingly, it is claimed that Ghonim undiplomatically rejected offers by an “American NGO” to fund him. The claim seems disingenuous, given that Google is a U.S. corporation with close contact with the U.S. State Department, sundry NGOs and think tanks and a pivotal part of AYM. The question arises as to whether this is posturing by Ghonim given his comment that he would like to resume his job with Google if he’s not “fired” for his role in “sparking the Egyptian revolution.” The quip is pure cant, as it seems unlikely that Ghonim is ignorant of the role Google and Facebook have played with AYM and the “velvet revolutions.” The following nonsense is supposed to have taken place between Ghonim and Google head office:

On the record, Google’s not talking about Ghonim or the question of employee activism. For his part, Ghonim told CBS’s Katie Couric in an interview on Friday that his participation in the protests had no connection with his employer.

“They did not know anything about this and actually when I took the time off and I went to Cairo, they did not know I was going to the protest,” he said. “But when everything became public, I talked with the company and they suggested that I take a leave of absence and I also suggested that to them and I think it was a good decision for that. Google has nothing to do with this.”

Columnist Charles Cooper is also writing drivel when he questions whether Ghonim is “one off for Silicon Valley” (sic). Ghonim is “one of” tens of thousands of yuppies around the world being agitated, trained and directed towards revolutionary purposes by an array of think tanks, NGOs and US Government agencies. Cooper continues:

Maybe that was meant as a tongue-in-cheek comment. But there’s a larger truth behind his quip. The key role played by one of Google’s key executives in the Middle East revived a decades-old dilemma that many other technology companies face when it comes to the question of political activism: Where should they draw the line?

“It’s one of those things that companies don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole,” a tech public relations exec told me on background.

The obvious truth du jour is that tech companies don’t want to take political positions – even when regimes use their products to oppress their own people.

Cooper is writing unadulterated CRAP. It might be asked whether Cooper is a liar or a half-wit? If he has never heard of AYM, he must surely know about the role long played by the digi-twits in the velvet revolutions in Serbia and elsewhere? Movement.org identifies Ghonim on its timeline for the Egyptian revolt as being the Google executive who instigated the revolt and who was in contact with the April 6 Youth Movement:

…Spring 2010 A group of activists, including Google executive Wael Ghonim and April 6 leader Ahmed Maher, begin meeting once a week to discuss plans for a protest against the government.

… February 8 – Massive protests continue, with many people—inspired by Wael Ghonim —taking to the streets for the first time. Wael speaks to the crowds at Tahrir Square.

Feburary 11 – Wael tells CNN: If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet. http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/wael-ghonim-if-you-want-to-liberate-a-government-give-them-the-internet/

TechCrunch writes of Ghonim and the role that is played by the “digital activists”:

Ghonim, who has been a figurehead for the movement against the Egyptian government, told [CNN’s Wolf] Blitzer “If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet.”

Ghonim, is of course, referring to the fact much of this revolution was organized on Twitter and Facebook (similar to the Tunisian protests). Ghonim was believed to have hosted the first Facebook page that organized the January 25th protests. When Blitzer asked “Tunisia, then Egypt, what’s next?,” Ghonim replied succinctly “Ask Facebook.”

He went on to personally thank Mark Zuckerberg, and said he’d love to meet Facebook’s CEO. Ghonim says that he’s looking forward to getting back to his work at Google but he plans to write a book, “Revolution 2.0? about the role of social media and the internet in political demonstration. There’s no doubt that social media has changed political activism irrevocably, and this moment will surely be a historic moment for Facebook and Twitter.

There is no meaningless rhetoric here about possibly being “fired” by Google, but confidence that Ghonim will return to his job – and I’m sure a promotion – for being what amounts to the epitome of the very “digital activist” who is sponsored by Google, Facebook, Howcast, and the erstwhile social-revolutionaries from AT&T, Pepsi, U.S. State Department, MTV, International Republican Institute, Freedom House, etc.

AYM Inaugural Summit

Movement.org’s inaugural summit in 2008, which the April 6 Youth Movement attended, included a gala hosted by MTV in Times Square. Sponsors of the summit were AT&T, Howcast, Google, Facebook, MTV, and Gen-Next. Eight representatives of the US State Department were present. Some of the speakers were from Columbia Law School, Facebook, Fortune Magazine, Hoover Institution, MTV et al. Panelists included three members of the Obama presidential media campaign; Shaarik Zafar, senior adviser to the US Department for Homeland Security; and Sherif Mansour, Program Officer for Freedom House.

Among the organizations represented were Young Civilians (Turkey), an online activist network of 2,000,000 comprised of sundry “liberals, leftists, feminists, environmentalists, democrats.” Myanmar has a global network working to bring it into the globalist economic fold, the Burma Global Action Network (BGAN) formed by the “‘Support The Monks’ Protest In Burma” group on Facebook, begun 2007. The group at its peak had 450,000 members, which worked together to organize demonstrations around the world.

No Mas Chavez is dedicated to overthrowing a major bugbear of the globalists and the USA, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, whose aim of a Bolivarian bloc in alliance with other nations such as Russia might pose significant opposition to globalism. No Mas Chavez developed from Facebook networking with 80,000 supporters, and has organized demonstrations against Chavez. Another organization at the summit, opposing Chavez was Sumate.

Cuba Development Initiative flagrantly claims to seek the democratization of Cuba as a means of “joining” its “democratic, economic, and social development [with] international financial resources… CDI works with a vast network of individuals and organizations.” Another organization there that is aimed at subjugating Cuba to globalization is Raíces de Esperanza, Inc.: “Our strategy has been to (a) build and unite a student network of campus groups, (b) sponsor academic conferences for Cuban-American youth, (c) mobilize youth abroad in solidarity, and (d) reach out to our counterparts on the Island. We have a committed volunteer core that works on all levels.” (Comment: Whatever happened to the old youth protest slogan: “Hands Off Cuba!”?). CDI was founded by Felice Gorordo, a businessman who has previously worked with the US Departments of State, Commerce and Homeland Security. Another CDI representative at the 2008 summit was Verónica Nur, who “currently works for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as the Associate Director of Strategic Communications for Policy while also managing the Spanish-language media for the department at large.” Nur “has also served as a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, the Cuban Democratic Directorate, the International Youth Committee for Democracy in Cuba, and Raíces de Esperanza.

Speakers at the 2008 summit included Prof. Matthew Waxman from Columbia Law School, who has “served in senior positions at the U.S. State Department, Department of Defense and National Security Council.” Larry Diamond, co-editor of the Journal for Democracy, came from the Hoover Institution and is a director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. “He has also advised the U.S. Agency for International Development (whose 2002 report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest, he coauthored), the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental organizations.” Others speakers were from Fortune Magazine, CNN, Facebook, MTV, and PACT (which is said to be the first community youth organization built in the tradition of 1960s New Left revolutionist Saul Alinsky).

Guests included Marc Sageman, founder of Sageman Consulting, who works with think tanks including the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Homeland Security Policy Institute, and is a consultant for the National Security Council, Departments of Homeland Security and of Defense, and “various agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the U.S. Secret Service.” Ambassador Stuart W Holiday from Meridian House, a “public diplomacy institution [that] works closely with the U.S. Department of State, other government agencies, NGOs, international governments, and the private sector to create global leadership programs.” Holiday is also a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and “works closely with the U.S. Department of State, other government agencies, NGOs, international governments, and the private sector to create global leadership programs.”

2009 Summit

The second AYM was held in Mexico City in 2009 and was opened with a video-relayed talk from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This summit was sponsored by Causecast.org, Facebook, Gen Next, Google, Hi5, Howcast Media, MTV, MySpace, PepsiCo, Univision Interactive Media, Inc., U.S. Department of State, WordPress.com and YouTube.

With the revolutionary zeal of a corporate Trotsky, Richard Lee, vice president of marketing at PepsiCo International, told the summit:

We support The Alliance of Youth Movements and especially the passion, purpose and creativity that young people possess. Today is a moment in time when one individual, with the use of technology can create positive change in the world…and Pepsi will strive to enable this change.

From the U.S. State Department AYM co-founder Jared Cohen stated:

The impact of using online tools and social media to advance positive social change is truly remarkable and exciting. It is critical to encourage and enable today’s youth to apply these technologies as means to catalyze social movements around the world.

Among the “guests, hosts and sponsors” were Juan M. Henao, International Republican Institute; Mick Duffy, PepsiCo International; Sarah Cliffe, The World Bank, et al. There were eight from the US State Department.

Among the participating organizations were reps from the Burma Global Action Network, Corporación Foro de la Juventud Guayaquil, Ecuador; Iranian oppositionist newspaper Etemad Melli; Genç Siviller (Young Civilians, Turkey); JuventudDes (Peru); Tehran Bureau, a “virtual” journalism project; ThinkMoldova, a catalyst for the 2009 so-called “Twitter Revolution” which succeeded in ousting a pro-Russian governing party that wasn’t pleasing to “civil society.”

Raíces de Esperanza, the Cuban oppositionist youth movement, was represented again.

Opponents of Hugo Chavez were represented by Latytud Project who, “So far… have established alliances in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia.” Another was Movimiento Joven de Venezuela, its representative at the AYM summit being Yon Goicoechea, who is also President of the Caracas Youth, Member of the National Board of Directors of the First Justice Party and Representative of the Movimiento Joven de Venezuela, an NGO dedicated to training and organizing young democratic leaders. Another anti-Chavez organization present was Un Mundo Sin Mordaza.

“Moderators, speakers and panelists” included Jack Dorsey, Chairman, Twitter; James Eberhard, Mobile Accord; Kristen Morrissey, Principle New Business Development, Google; Mario González, CNN Español; Matthew Brady, Program Director, Freedom House; Nicole Lapin, CNN; Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, YouTube; and Tara Lemmey, Founder and CEO, LENS, a corporation involved with technology and security issues, among others…

Among guest luminaries were Juan M. Henao from the International Republican Institute; and Mick Duffy and Richard Lee from PepsiCo International; and Sarah Cliffe, The World Bank, along with the AYM executives and others from Howcast, MobileBehavior, Google, GenNext, and Edelman.

From this it can be seen that particularly well represented were the U.S. State Department; Obama’s media experts; opponents of Hugo Chavez; PepsiCola, Freedom House and the International Republican Institute, the latter two particularly involved with training and funding activists of the “velvet revolution” around the world.

Conclusion

While the “Beat Generation” was too whacked out on LSD to comprehend how they were being manipulated by the CIA and others, what is one to make of the “digital generation”? Are they too stupefied by the puerility of MTV, Twitter, Facebook, and Pepsi to find anything questionable about being involved with the US Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Defense; with AT&T, NED, World Bank, Rand Corp., etc., in the name of “revolution,” “human rights” and “democracy”? It is a generation that has been sold on “ideals” that lead to nothing more than the global shopping mall. Their “ideals” offer the “democratic right” for Muslim, Latin American, Asian, and East European youth to become part of that same consumer society that is a manifestation of a civilization in its cycle of decay.

Notes

[1] Mr Cartalucci , Land Destroyer, http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/

[2] Tony Cartalucci, “Google’s Revolution Factory – Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0,” Global Research, February 23, 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23283

[3] Tony Cartalucci, “Google’s Revolution Factory,” ibid.

[4] “(3) Emergency Program for European Scholars, 1940-1945,” Rockefeller Foundation Archives, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:tXK4eQ5oXbAJ:www.rockarch.org/collections/rf/refugee.php

[5] T W Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper Row, 1950).

[6] K R Bolton, “‘Sex Pol’: The Influence of the Freudian-Marxian Synthesis on Politics and Society,” Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Washington, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2010.

[7] Encyclopaedia of World Biography on Herbert Marcuse, http://www.bookrags.com/biography/herbert-marcuse/

[8] Douglas Kellner, “Marcuse, Herbert,” The American National Bibliography, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:5_KUmmTtH7QJ:www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell12.html

[9] Herbert Marcuse, “Acknowledgements,” One Dimensional Man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society, See for the acknowledgement: http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=63QdLKsuqCwC&pg=PR9&lpg=PR9&dq

[10] “Gloria Steinem and the CIA: C.I.A. Subsidized Festival Trips: Hundreds of Students Were Sent to World Gatherings,” The New York Times, 21 February 1967, http://www.namebase.org/steinem.html

[11] Mark Riebling, Tinker, Tailor, Stoner, Spy, Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent? Was JFK the “Manchurian Candidate”? Was the Sixties Revolution Really a Government Plot?, Osprey, 1994, http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html

[12] Timothy Leary interview, High Times, February 1978.

[13] “Biographical Memoir”‘ (Washington: National Academy Press, 1987), Volume 56, p. 255.

[14] “Biographical Memoir,” Ibid., p. 258.

[15] “Biographical Memoir,” op.cit., p. 260.

[16] Paul Lazarsfeld, ‘Biography’, http://www.answers.com/topic/paul-lazarsfeld

[17] Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), pp. 19, 249.

[18] Institute for Policy Studies, Beginning the Second Decade, 1963-1973.

[19] Institute for Policy Studies, Beginning the Second Decade, ibid.

[20] Sidney Blumenthal, “IPS – Left-Wing Thinkers,” Washington Post, 30 July, 1986. http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:X-SHxRkyN9YJ:www.tni.org/archives/media_ips-wp1986

[21] Green Tracking Library, http://www.undueinfluence.com/index.html

[22] ‘Timeline for the Young Social Democrats’, Young Social Democrats, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:A-JZk7 38J:www.youngpeoplessocialistleague.org/library/timeline.shtml

[23] The International Union of Socialist Youth is the youth affiliate of the Socialist International, comprising social democratic and Labor parties throughout the world. The IUSY was founded in Germany in 1919 under the leadership of the German Bolshevik Karl Liebknacht, and became the Communist Youth International. The IUSY was reconstituted in 1946. ‘International Union of Socialist Youth, Statemaster Encyclopaedia, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:OaAnTsZAgKwJ:www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/International-Union-of-Socialist-Youth.

[24] Political Research Associates, “League for Industrial Democracy,” Right Web, 10 January 1989,

[25] Philip Agee Jr., “CIA Infiltration of Student Groups: The National Student Association Scandal,” Campus Watch, Fall 1991, pp. 12-13, http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html

[26] Ibid.

[27] Angus Johnston, A Brief History of the NSA & USSA, US Student Association, http://www.usstudents.org/who-we-are/history

[28] Left-liberal Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.

[29] Conservative Southern Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace.

[30] James Kunen The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, (New York: Avon, 1970), “At the convention, Men from Business International Roundtables,” pp. 130–131.

[31] A Communist Party front named after Afro-American scholar W E B DuBois.

[32] “Investigation of SDS 1969,” Committee on Internal Security, 91st Congress, 1st Session, Pt. 5, pp. 1654-1705 of hearings.

[33] “Columbia University – Students for a Democratic Society – Unrest,” ABC Evening News, 19 September 1968, Vanderbilt Television News Archive, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:hQs-Ccu5i1IJ:tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/program.pl

[34] An article in a leading British Leftist magazine puts the amount given by the Ford Foundation to SRU at $40,000. Mike Marqusee, “1968 The mysterious chemistry of social change,” Red Pepper, 6 April 2008,

$40,000 is also the amount stated by Joel Geier, Associate Editor of the International Socialist Review, “1968: Year of Revolt,” talk at the University of Illinois, Champaign, Il., March 26, 2008. Geier was a leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkley during the 1960s. International Socialist review, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:Tw1lGIjtOAgJ:links.org.au/node/335+

[35] ‘Higher Education: Academic Reform’, Ford Foundation Annual Report 1968,

[36] Cord Meyer was co-founder, with James P Warburg, of the United World Federalists in 1947, to promote a World State. In 1948 Meyer was World Federalist president. (“Opinion in a drawing room”, Time Magazine, 16 February 1948, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,794188,00.html.

[37] K R Bolton, “The Globalist Web of Subversion,” February 7, 2011 Foreign Policy Journal, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/07/the-globalist-web-of-subversion/

[38] Movements.org “Mission,” http://www.movements.org/pages/mission

[39] Movements.org “Mission,” ibid.

[40] A recent article on the website of Radio Free Europe/Liberty states of this: “The work of groups like Canvas, combined with the proliferation of social-networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, and the coming of age of a wired — and increasingly disaffected — young generation have combined to create a perfect storm threatening authoritarian regimes from Europe to North Africa, to the Middle East.” “Exporting Nonviolent Revolution, From Eastern Europe To The Middle East,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 21, 2011, http://www.rferl.org/content/exporting_nonviolent_revolution_eastern_europe_mideast/2316231.html

[41] Movements.org “Mission,” op. cit.

[42] Movements.org “Sponsors,” http://www.movements.org/pages/sponsors

[43] Edelman is a leading “global” public relations firm,[43] whose clients include fellow Movements.org sponsor Pepsi.

[44] Corporate member of the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR “Corporate Membership,” http://www.cfr.org/about/corporate/roster.html

[45] Corporate members of the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR “Corporate Membership,” http://www.cfr.org/about/corporate/roster.html

[46] Corporate members of the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR “Corporate Membership,” http://www.cfr.org/about/corporate/roster.html

[47] Howcast, http://www.howcast.com/

[48] R Peters. “Constant Conflict,” Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly, Summer 1997, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3011.htm

[49] Howcast, “Meet Our Team,” http://info.howcast.com/about/team

[50] Movements.org. “Team Board,” http://www.movements.org/pages/team#Jared

[51]Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[52] Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[53] Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/about/membership/roster.html

[54] Movements.org. “Team Board,” op. cit.

[55] Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[56] Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[57] Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[58] US Institute for Peace, “established and funded by Congress.” USIP was created by Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1984. http://www.usip.org/about-us/our-history

The Chairman of the Board of Directors is businessman, government appointee and CFR member J. Robinson West. http://www.usip.org/about-us/board-directors

[59] Center for Strategic and International Studies: “CSIS provides strategic insights and policy solutions to decision makers in government, international institutions, the private sector, and civil society.” CSIS was founded as a Cold War think tank in 1962 to assure America’s world primacy. CSIS, “About Us,” http://csis.org/about-us

Zbigniew Brzezinski (CFR), the veteran Rockefeller protégé, “co-chairs the CSIS Advisory Board.” http://csis.org/expert/zbigniew-brzezinski

Another familiar face is CSIS counsellor and trustee is Henry Kissinger (CFR). http://csis.org/expert/henry-kissinger

[60] Movements.org/Alliance for Youth Movements, “Attendee Biographies, Summit Details,” 2010, http://www.movements.org/pages/the-summit

[61] National Democratic Institute has sponsorship from The National Endowment for Democracy; U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Middle East Partnership Initiative; United States Agency for International Development (USAID); 18 Governments in addition to that of the USA; OAS, World Bank Group, United Nations organs; and the types of Foundations that one would expect, including Citigroup Foundation, Ford, Soros’ OSI., etc. NDI, “Who supports Our Work,” http://www.ndi.org/who_supports_our_work

The Chairman of NDI is former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, who also serves on the Board of Directors of the omni-present Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “CFR Membership Roster,” http://www.cfr.org/about/membership/roster.html?letter=A

[62] A Schwartz, “More Tech Tools for Egypt’s Protesters: Movements.org, an Online Hub for Grassroots Activists,” Fast Company, February 3, 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1723468/movementsorg-an-online-hub-for-grassroots-activists

[63] ” The April 6 Youth Movement,” Carnegie Endowment, http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-april-6-youth-movement

[64] “Google Executive Freed in Egypt,” February 8, 2011, http://www.politicolnews.com/google-executive-freed-in-egypt/

[65] “The Facebook Freedom Fighter,” Newsweek, February 13, 2011, http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/the-facebook-freedom-fighter.html

[66] It should also be recalled that ElBaradei emerged from the bowels of the International Crisis Group, where he sits with George Soros, to be the man of the hour in Egypt. See: K R Bolton, “What’s Behind the Tumult in Egypt?,” Foreign Policy Journal, February 1, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/01/whats-behind-the-tumult-in-egypt/all/1

[67] “The Facebook Freedom Fighter,” Newsweek, op. cit.

[68] “The Facebook Freedom Fighter,” Newsweek, ibid.

[69] Charles Cooper, “Wael Ghonim: A ‘One-Off’ for Silicon Valley?,” CBS News, Tech Talk, February 11, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20031608-501465.html?tag=mantle_skin;content

[70] Charles Cooper, “Wael Ghonim: A ‘One-Off’ for Silicon Valley?,” CBS News, ibid.

[71] Charles Cooper, ibid.

[72] “Timeline of the January 25 Revolution in Egypt,” AYM, February 14, 2011, http://www.movements.org/blog/entry/timeline-of-the-january-25-revolution-in-egypt

[73] “Timeline of the January 25 Revolution in Egypt,” AYM, ibid.

[74] Leen Rao, TechCrunch, February 11, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/wael-ghonim-if-you-want-to-liberate-a-government-give-them-the-internet/

[75] Movement.org, “The Summit: New York City,” 2008, http://www.movements.org/pages/the-summit#2008

[76] A corporate member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[77] A corporate sponsor of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[78] “Alliance of Youth Movement Summits,” New York City 2008, “Attendee Biographies,” http://allyoumov.3cdn.net/f734ac45131b2bbcdb_w6m6idptn.pdf

[79] K R Bolton, “An ANZAC-Indo-Russian Alliance? : New Zealand & Australia’s Geopolitical Alternatives,” India Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 2 April-June 2010.

[80] For the role of the National Endowment for Democracy see: K R Bolton, “The Globalist Web of Subversion,” Foreign Policy Journal, op. cit.

[81] Alinsky was the organizational guru of the 1960s New Left.

[82] Corporate member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[83] “Alliance of Youth Movements Summit,” 2009, Howcast, http://info.howcast.com/youthmovements/summit09

[84] “Alliance for Youth Movements Second Annual Summit,” http://www.movements.org/pages/284/

[85] Cohen serves on the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff.

[86] K R Bolton, “The Globalist Web of Subversion,” op. cit.

K R Bolton is a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research, and an assistant editor of the peer reviewed journal Ab Aeterno. Recent publications include ‘Trotskyism and the Anti-Family Agenda,’ CKR website, Sociology Dept., Moscow State University (October 2009); ‘Rivalry over water resources as a potential cause of conflict in Asia,’ Journal of Social Political and Economic Studies, and Russia and China: an approaching conflict?, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 2010; Vol. 34, no. 2, Summer 2009.

ALSO SEE:
ARAB SPRING
LIBYA IS IN THE MIDST OF AN ARMED INSURRECTION, NOT A ‘PEACEFUL PROTEST’
WHO IS MUAMMAR GADDAFI?
LIBYA: WHAT WESTERN MEDIA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW
GENOCIDE IN LIBYA? NATO INVASION UNDER WAY. ITS THE OIL, STUPID.
LIBYA AND IMPERIALISM: THE REAL PURPOSE BEHIND ‘INTERVENTION’
FOR GADDAFI, AGAINST IMPERIALISM
EGYPT’S REVOLUTION: CREATIVE DESTRUCTION FOR A ‘GREATER MIDDLE EAST’
WORLD CHEERS AS CIA PLUNGES LIBYA INTO CHAOS
DEMOCRACY PROMOTION: AMERICA’S NEW REGIME CHANGE FOCUS
GLOBALISTS PREPARE LIBYAN INTERVENTION UNDER HUMANITARIAN COVER
LIBYA: THE REST OF THE STORY
DEFIANT LIBYA
THE GLOBALIST WEB OF SUBVERSION
CIA COLLEGE OF COUPS
SOROS AND THE NEW EGYPTIAN CONSTITUTION
COLOR REVOLUTIONS: EGYPT TODAY. THAILAND TOMORROW.
“COLOR CODED”EGYPT: DID U.S. BACKED NGO’S HELP TO TOPPLE MUBARAK?

© Copyright 2011 by Ephemeris 360.org

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FLASHBACK 2001 – The History of “Pro-Democracy” Regime Change: In Bed With the NED. The National Evisceration of Democracy

antiwar.com – 2001-05-05

This article was first published in 2001 by antiwar.com

by George Szamuely

There was good news recently in Washington. Six new directors joined the board of the US Government agency, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The six included such stalwart democrats like former NATO Supreme Commander Wesley "Demented Bomber" Clark, former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke and Francis Fukuyama, who since his 1989 National Interest article "The End of History" has been ideologist-in-chief of post-Cold War neoconservatism.. Another new member is someone by the name of Julie Finley, described in the NED handout as "a prominent Republican Party activist who, as a Founder and Board Member of the US Committee on NATO, has worked actively on issues related to NATO expansion and the conflict in the Balkan region." A NATO expansionist and a Balkan activist – it does not sound as if "democracy’ is high on her agenda. Last year we learned that upon her departure from Foggy Bottom, Madeleine "Hideous Harridan" Albright would become president of the National Democratic Institute, an organization the NED bankrolls.

Of the six, NED president Carl Gershman declared: "This group offers an incredible breadth of experience in foreign policy and American politics. We are incredibly fortunate that such a group of distinguished citizens will be supporting and helping to guide NED in its mission to promote democracy around the world." We know the political creed of these "distinguished citizens": They are all fanatically devoted to the following propositions: That the United States is the last stop on humanity’s historic journey. That the United States has the right, even the duty, to do whatever is necessary to persuade humanity of the truth of this insight. That through their lucrative business connections they intend to make a huge sum of money for themselves and their friends by promoting a US-sponsored "pro-business" and "pro-democracy" agenda. That whatever the United States does, no matter how barbaric.

The NED is one of the many institutions of the Cold War that not only managed to survive the fall of the Soviet Union, but also to grow in power and prestige. Americans are barely aware of its existence or, if they are, the magic word "democracy" in its name frees it from serious scrutiny. Founded in 1983, the NED took over functions that were once the responsibility of the CIA. During the early decades of the Cold War, the CIA would intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries with the objective of thwarting Communist influence. In "democratic" European countries the CIA would covertly promote center-left political parties, non-Communist trade unions and even highbrow journals. In "non-democratic," usually non-European, countries CIA operations tended to be a little nastier. Following the embarrassing revelations about the CIA during the 1970s, a lot of its hitherto covert operations now received open Congressional appropriations. The NED thus became the successor organization to the CIA covert operations arm once run by the likes of William Colby and Frank Wisner.

During the Cold War, the US government acquired some very bad habits. One of them was an eagerness to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries. With supreme arrogance, the NED decides to bankroll certain foreign politicians and to undermine others. Politicians who pursue policies favored by Washington will receive US largesse. Those who pursue policies frowned on by Washington will find themselves the object of a campaign of vilification, originating in Washington and transmitted back via the well-oiled NED machine. It is important that we remind ourselves that in the United States any organization in receipt of money from a foreign government must register as a foreign agent. It is illegal for foreign governments to contribute to an American political party. Evidently, different standards are expected of others. The NED’s commitment to democracy is the same as that of the US government. Elections are deemed "democratic" when they result in the victory of people favored by Washington. They are deemed "undemocratic" when they result in the election of people out of favor in Washington. Before the elections last September in Yugoslavia, the US Government made it clear again and again that a victory by Milosevic would only have come about through fraud. In other words, irrespective of how anyone voted, Washington would only accept one result as the "democratic will of the people."

The extent of the NED involvement in pre-Kostunica Yugoslavia was revealed in the 1998 testimony of Paul McCarthy before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. McCarthy, a program officer at the NED, boasted that, among the many recipients of NED moolah were "the newspapers Nasa Borba, Vreme and Danas, an independent TV station in eastern Serbia, TV Negotin, the prominent news agency BETA, and the important Belgrade station, Radio B-92." Naturally, such media are always described in the NED literature as "independent."

One of the organizations currently being bankrolled by the NED is the Serbian "youth" organization Otpor. According to the NED, it has been doing so since August 1999. Recently, the NED and the International Republican Institute (IRI), which is also funded by the NED, jointly sponsored a forum for Otpor leaders. According to NED literature, Otpor’s notorious "he is finished" posters "helped to galvanize public opinion against Slobodan Milosevic. Otpor’s enormous get-out-the-vote campaign made a critical difference in helping Vojislav Kostunica defeat Milosevic at the ballot box… Subsequently, Otpor’s activists played a crucial role in the street demonstrations that followed the elections and led to Milosevic’s ultimate downfall on October 5."

NED goes on to say that Otpor will continue to do "grassroots political work as a watchdog that will exert pressure on the new government to quickly implement democratic reforms they view as crucial to Yugoslavia’s return to life as a ‘normal’ country." The NED does not specify what "grassroots" work entails. However, it explains, "this extensive grassroots network can work to fill the political vacuum that was created when the Democratic Opposition of Serbia defeated Milosevic, and was left with no serious political rival. Without any ‘loyal opposition’ to pressure the new regime, Otpor intends to keep important reform issues in front of the public and Serbia’s new leaders to make sure that democratic progress continues." Note the repeated emphasis on "grassroots" activism along with the vague nature of the organization’s goals. "Reform," "democratic progress," "normal country" – the NED invariably uses such vacuous trivia to disguise its true agenda.

"At its second National Congress," the NED enthuses, "Otpor…outlined six key areas of reform that the group will monitor, including economic reform, judicial reform, reform of the state security forces, creation of a truly independent media sector, reform of the university and educational system and foreign policy." Sounds like a tall order. Which direction Otpor wants to push these institutions is not spelled out. However, it comes as no surprise when we soon learn that "Otpor’s first major campaign was a nationwide effort to pressure the regime to arrest Slobodan Milosevic." Imagine! So many things to reform! So little time to do it! Yet even so Otpor’s first priority is also that of Washington.

Otpor, continues the NED, "cited concrete examples of major hurdles the new regime must overcome, including the need for more than 800 experienced judges; the creation of a police and security force not led and staffed by officers loyal to Milosevic; the establishment of an official Truth Commission to document the crimes of the Milosevic regime and its cronies against Serbs and others; and the creation of a graduate program to provide training for a new generation of civil servants." Let us examine this list item by item. How does Otpor know that Serbia requires 800 – as opposed to 500 or 2000 or 5 – experienced judges? Moreover, "experienced judges" cannot be manufactured out of thin air since they are the products of, well, experience, which takes years, if not decades, to acquire. What exactly is "experience," by the way? Presumably, the courts in Serbia have been adjudicating disputes and punishing miscreants much like anywhere else. Evidently, those are not the judges Otpor and the NED are talking about. One must assume, therefore, that Otpor is essentially calling on the United States to insist on the appointment of its own judges.

This is revealed by the remaining items on the agenda. The police and security forces are to be purged of all elements "loyal to Milosevic." What constitutes "loyalty" is not spelled out. However, given that Milosevic had been in power in Serbia for 13 years, Otpor and its US sponsors evidently envisage a wholesale change of staff. Note that the sole purpose of the "Truth Commission" will be to "document the crimes of the Milosevic regime and its cronies against Serbs and others." This is clearly very different from the objective of the Truth Commission of South Africa, which had sought to compile a record of crimes committed by all sides. Moreover, in order to discover the "truth" about the past, the Desmond Tutu’s Commission had offered immunity from prosecution to anyone who came forward and openly admitted to wrongdoing. Yet with all the talk of creating spanking-new security services, appointing 800 new judges, not to mention the arrest and prosecution of Milosevic, the last thing Otpor and its US controllers have in mind is the establishment of "truth." The only crimes being talked about are either ones committed by Milosevic of ones committed by Serbs against "others."

The British Helsinki Human Rights Group has a very different take on Otpor. Its recent report about the December parliamentary elections in Serbia, describes how Otpor’s "He’s finished" campaign was "followed up with a similar poster campaign…consisting of the slogan ‘Overi!’ or ‘Be sure’ – ie that he is finished off. The ‘Overi!’ slogans were printed in a rather sinister way, in menacing black letters and sometimes with Slobodan Milosevic’s face. It is a matter of considerable concern that ‘Overi’ is Mafia slang for the three shots which contract killers pump into an already dead body in order to be sure that the victim has, indeed, been finished off. It hardly bodes well for Serbian democracy that such vocabulary is associated with the new era." Indeed. It is even more disturbing that US taxpayers should underwrite such blatant threats of violence.

The BHHRG report goes on: "Otpor also ran a poster campaign with the equally sinister slogan, ‘We are watching you,’ an apparently direct reference to George Orwell’s 1984. The motif of these posters is a bulldozer, a reminder of the heroic vehicle that headed the ‘march on Belgrade’ from Cacak on October 5; it also, no doubt, emphasizes the DOS’ attitude towards its opponents. The Socialists have alleged that menacing leaflets of this nature have been sent to the homes of Socialist Party activists. Finally, Otpor has not hesitated to recruit underage persons for its purposes, an action which is strictly incompatible with the duty of political organizations not to exploit the young." This then is what the NED is pleased to call "grassroots political work." The task the Us Government has assigned to Otpor is to act as the local bully scaring people into not voting for the socialists or the nationalists.

What remains interesting is why the US Government continues to underwrite Otpor. The goals it outlines are also the goals of the Djindjic regime. So why the duplication of beneficiaries? Evidently, Washington does not trust the new regime in Belgrade. Therefore, an alternative regime has to be manufactured and kept on the sidelines. Should Belgrade once again fall out of favor in Washington, there will be new leaders to champion. Doubtless, the NED is already grooming the next "Djindjic." "Yugoslavia," warns the NED, "risks the same fate as its neighbor Romania, which had an important democratic election, but failed to consolidate its democratic gains and soon slipped back into a political culture of nationalism where reformers became divided, were corrupted, and eventually were defeated by former communists."

This then is the warning the United States is issuing to all its clients. Do not dare to vote for the "old" parties and slip back into the "political culture of nationalism"! Or we will unleash our paid thugs. This then is "democracy" as the National Endowment for democracy understands it.

antiwar.com