Is It Time to Critically Interrogate Nonviolence & Nonviolent Direct Action?

Black Agenda Report

March 15, 2018

By Doug Henwood

  

Time to question nonviolent direct action as the path to change.

Activism. Democracy. Change through nonviolent direct action. These, Doug Henwood points out, have been fetishes for much of the US left for quite some time, especially that portion of the US left that takes its marching orders from corporate funders. Gene Sharp, the founder of the Albert Einstein Institute who passed away at the end of January was regarded as the father of American nonviolent direct action.

I usually write a weekly piece for Black Agenda Report, but this time I’m going to use that space to republish somebody else’s work, easily the most important thing I’ve heard so far this month. It’s an hour long Doug Henwood interview for the weekly radio show Behind The News on KPFA radio. Doug talks with Marcie Smith, who is writing a book on Sharp’s long and problematic career in the service of the US national security apparatus. Smith is an adjunct econ professor at John Jay College. She reveals how Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institute which he founded weaponized and deployed nonviolent direct action in the service of successful and unsuccessful US attempts to overthrow the governments of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, China, Myannmar, Iran, Egypt during the Arab Spring, Venezuela, the former Yugoslavia and the Baltic States.

Besides deploying nonviolent direct action to topple governments standing in the way of Uncle Sam’s global empire, Gene Sharp and his funders have mentored a good deal of what some regard as the US left – at least those parts of it under the influence of one-percenter philanthropy – in the tactics and what passes for the philosophy of nonviolent direct action. According to Sharp’s and the Albert Einstein Institute’s peculiar philosophy, property destruction is violence, while the ravages of poverty and deprivation, of economic blockades and lack of medical care just to name a few phenomena, are not. Sharp’s views on the methods and importance of nonviolent direct action are highly influential in such quarters as Moral Monday and the so-called New Poor Peoples Campaign, parts of the environmental movement, and other places. Whether or not we embrace or espouse nonviolent direct action as an occasional tactic or a bedrock and fundamental strategy we owe it to ourselves to understand the origin of this idea, why the national security state promotes it, how and for whom it works and does not work, and why.

It’s time to critically interrogate the fetishes of nonviolence and nonviolent direct action as a path to the world we need to build. This great interview is a good start to that conversation. Here is the link. Click to listen or download it.

 

[You can find Doug Henwood’s Behind the News shows archived for the last several years at http://leftbusinessobserver.com .]

WATCH: The Limits of the Web in an Age of Communicative Capitalism

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

December 5, 2013

Getting It Right: Hugo Chávez and the “Arab Spring”

Zero Anthropology

Some opening vignettes might set the right tone for properly appreciating the question of “who was right” about the so-called Arab Spring. (The notion of there having been an “Arab Spring,” a term first coined by U.S. neoconservatives such as Charles Krauthammer back in 2005, is one that has been subject to radically diverse interpretations, from marking in generic terms some sort of struggle for “freedom” and “democracy” [as if there is only one kind of democracy], to views of a covertly directed process of U.S. political intervention, and direct military intervention. Nonetheless, this article is aimed at those who, even now, are still enchanted with the positive aura of the Arab Spring idea.) As usual, my focus will be on Libya. →

Why the CIA Funds Nonviolence Training

Dissident Voice

by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, March 13th, 2012

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

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

Gene Sharp, the Fervent Anticommunist

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

Is Military-Intelligence Funding Compatible with Progressive Politics?

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

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

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

To be continued.

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.

Photo: ElBaradei’s ties to the West go much deeper than merely play-acting within the ineffectual, genocide-enabling UN. He is also a memberof the corporate-financier funded International Crisis Group.

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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.

Image: Red = US-backed destabilization, Blue = US occupying/stationed. China’s oil and sea access to the Middle East and Africa are being or have already been cut. A similar strategy of isolation was used on Japan just before the onset of World War II.

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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.”
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Joining el-Keib would be US-funded activist, Moncef Marzouki, named Tunisia’s president. Marzouki’s organization, the Tunisian League for Human Rights, was a US National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros Open Society-funded International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) member organization. Marzouki, who spent two decades in exile in Paris, France, was also 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 byNED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

Photo: US NED-funded activist leader Moncef Marzouki after spending two decades in Paris, helps foist the facade of “democracy” onto the Tunisian people. Of course, he, or someone of equal servitude to the West was going to become “President.” In 1993 Noam Chomsky would concisely describe the work of NED as “an attempt to impose what is called democracy, meaning rule by the rich and the powerful, without interference by the mob but within the framework of formal electoral procedures.” In other words, those fighting in the “Arab Spring” did so for gilded tyranny.

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

Egypt Leads Fight Against NGO Agitators | A real revolution may be about to follow

Feb 20, 2012

by Tony Cartalucci | Land Destroyer Report

Neo-Conservative Max Boot is a certified warmonger, an elitist policy wonk sitting on the Fortune 500-funded Council on Foreign Relations, has signed his name to letters that called for sidestepping both national and international law to militarily intervene further in Libya, as well as call for troops on the ground even after Tripoli fell last year. He is a man you would least expect to champion NGOs and their liberal-progressive agendas.

However NGOs are not “liberal-progressive.” They are the system administrators of modern empire, an empire being forged by the wars and covert operations Boot is a chief proponent of. The absence of NGOs in any given nation, means a nation free from the influence of Wall Street & London’s networks and meddling. That is why Boot feverishly penned, “Obama’s Egyptian Hostage Crisis,” in an attempt to spur a more vigorous response to what would seem like a very minor event in the context of greater global conflicts. Egypt’s arrest and trying of 19 Americans, all of whom are directly involved in Wall Street’s network of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded NGOs, including the head of the International Republican Institute (IRI) office in Egypt, signifies a potential turning point not just in Egypt, but around the world. →