Terrorism franchise: The Gene Sharp Method

Printed in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

April, 2014

Gene Sharp is a former American military who nowadays teaches political sciences at the University of Massachusetts. He founded the Albert Einstein Institute and is the author of an essay entitled From dictatorship to democracy, which is the result of a pragmatic and political analysis of supposedly non-violent actions as a means to undermine the stability of the constituted power. The work, translated in more than 30 languages, describes methods to overthrow governments; these methods are divided into three big stages: the protest, the non-cooperation, and the intervention, which are always carried out after electoral processes. These three stages are subdivided into five stages that, as it will be seen, have been rigorously applied in Venezuela after the lack of acknowledgment from the opposition of the results obtained during the presidential elections on April 14, 2013.

1. SOFTENING (by means of 4th Generation War): development of opinion matrix focused on real o potential deficit; promotion of conflicts and dissatisfaction; promotion of uneasiness factors, mainly: shortage, criminality, citizens’ safety, dollar manipulation, lockout strikes, corruption complaints; promotion of sectarian intrigues, and unity fracture.

2. DELEGITIMISING: manipulation on anticommunist or antipopulist prejudices; propel of advertising campaigns to defend freedom of press, human rights, and public freedom; accusations of totalitarianism and single systems of values; ethical-politic fracture.

3. STREETS WARMUPS: promote of street mobilization; creation of a fighting platform that globalizes political and social demands; generalization of all kind of protests, propel of government failures and mistakes; coordination of protests, blockage, and take of public institutions (disrespect towards institutions) that turn the confrontation into radical.

4. COMBINATION OF DIFFERENT WAYS OF FIGHTING: organization of loutishes and take of emblematic institutions, with the aim to turn them into advertising platforms; development of operations of psychological war and armed actions in order to justify repressive measures and create an atmosphere of ungovernability; propel of rumors campaigns among military forces and try to demoralize the security bodies; promotion of international isolation and economic siege.

5. institutional fracture : based on street actions, take of institutions, and military uprising, the President is forced to quit. In the case of failure, the pressure on the streets is maintained and armed resistance is assumed, preparing the stage for a military intervention or a prolonged civil war.

This coup protocol has been applied several times around the world against governments that oppose Washington’s rulings with different levels of success. It is clear that in Venezuela this plan is currently in its fourth stage, the most powerful of all since it includes violence by means of armed actions and permanent provocation towards the police forces in order to promote repression.

The main protagonists of this subversive script in Venezuela are the members of a varied group of students referred to as manitas blancas (white hands), made up of youth of the extreme right wing, mainly of private universities.

The students of public universities in Venezuela, which surpass the private universities in enrolments, have had little or none participation in the violent actions, despite their traditions of fight and historical sense of their communities.

The visible heads of the movement known as manitas blancas (their hands are painted white according to the soft coup handbook) are supposedly young people (some of them older than 40 years) who have made student representation in the universities their way of living and have studied endlessly in their institutions, as are the cases of Gaby Arellano and Vilcar Fernández; these two are experts in destabilization thanks to the advices received in training sessions on the soft coup designed by Gene Sharp.

Those are the “students” that, by late January 2014, began a series of so called aggressive actions simultaneously in different regions of the country, which lead to violent actions near the universities chosen to activate the street warm-ups stage of the coup plot. The white hands had received the express order of mobilize from the right-winged leaders Leopoldo

López and María Corina Machado in a bizarre press conference that took place on January 23, and that, at that moment, was seen by distracted analysts as an untimely, politically incompressible act. “The streets must be set on fire”, Machado said to her supporters, while López urged them to keep the protest actions until Nicolás Maduro would leave the Presidency; it happened in a moment of quietness after the widely positive results for the Government during the “plebiscite” that had taken place on December 8.

Download the full document: respect_venezuela1-2

Respect Venezuela

Nicolás Maduro Moros

President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

Delcy Rodríguez

Minister of People’s Power for Communication and Information

Rolando Corao

Vice-Minister for Communication and Information

William Castillo

Vice-Minister for Television

Francisco Pérez Santana

Vice-Minister for Radio

Felipe Saldivia

Vice-Minister for Printed Media

José Miguel España

Vice-Minister for Social Networking

WATCH | RT: NGO Documents Plan Ukraine War

Published March 8, 2014

How Oppositionist Organizations Act Worldwide – From Egypt to Venezuela

The American Revolution

The American Revolution (June 18, 2012)  | Written by Natalia Viana of Pública | Republished in English on the website  In Serbia by Vladimir Stoiljkovic on  Nov 24, 2013.

[*This article has been translated by a volunteer translator. Read the original article in Portuguese here. ]

In one of the Wikileaks leakage – in which Pública (not-for-profit investigative journalism center in Brazil, founded by a team of women journalists) had access – shows the founder of this organization communicating often with analysts from Stratfor, an organization that mixes journalism, political analysis and espionage methods to sell “intel analysis” to clients such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical – who monitored environmentalists’ activities who opposed them – as well as U.S. Navy. →

Internazionale: In Venezuela, Otpor e Javu

Ingerenze. Gli scontri del 12 febbraio richiamano tattiche già viste nella ex-Jugoslavia

February 17, 2014

by Geraldina Colotti

WATCH: ‘Democracy Projects’ Are Not Democratic: The Case of Ukraine & Russia

LPAC TV

Video published on Feb 20, 2014

Greenbacks for Blue Buckets: USAID Support for Instability in Russia

Strategic Culture Foundation

January 13, 2014

By Wayne Madsen

One «themed revolution», for which the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its allied operatives of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the George Soros Open Society Institute have become so infamous, went virtually unnoticed in the English language Western media.

In 2010, anti-Russian government provocateurs, financed by Western non-governmental organizations (NGOs), staged a number of protests featuring plastic blue buckets. The buckets were meant to symbolize the portable flashing blue lights, known in Russian as migalki, used atop many vehicles for Russian VIPs, including government officials and private businessmen.

The themed blue bucket protests were directly linked to the «pro-democracy» activities of USAID in Russia. American-backed provocateurs began placing blue buckets on top of their cars to mock the use of blue lights by officials. In response, three parties represented in the State Duma, United Russia, A Just Russia, and the Liberal Democratic Party, proposed a bill to crack down on the use of the blue buckets by protesters who were intent on causing traffic problems, sometimes resulting in vehicle accidents.

U.S. NGO support for the «blue bucket» revolution preceded by a year the nomination by President Barack Obama of anti-Russian activist Michael McFaul as the U.S. ambassador to Russia. McFaul began his tenure in Moscow by opening up the U.S. embassy to all sorts of anti-Russian political activists, provocateurs, and troublemakers. →

Capitalising On Nonviolence

Above image: March 3, 2013: Otpor/Canvas (fist symbol) rears its ugly head in Venezuela. Today’s youth are the oligarchy’s sacrificial lambs.

Massive displays of nonviolent resistance have always been an essential component to challenging oppression successfully. One can only hope that Western citizens will learn from contemporary history and rise up to overthrow the ultra-violent warmongers who manage their countries too, mindful of the fact that nonviolent liberal institutions are routinely complicit in the brutality of the systems they ostensibly criticize. – Michael Barker

Swans Commentary

June 20, 2011

By Michael Barker

Berel Rodal is the founding vice chair of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) — a center that was formed in 2006, ostensibly “as a catalyst to stimulate interest in nonviolent conflict…” Like many peace reformers, members of the ICNC’s cadre of intellectuals are happy to work with a wide variety of institutions, organizations, and groups. This includes peace groups, resistance movements, and — strangely — war academies and intelligence agencies. While their engagement with the latter groups may seem contradictory, teaching peace to leading members of the military-industrial complex is critical to peace advocacy efforts at the ICNC. This is because they aim to change the views of people they disagree with, not just confirm the ideas of those who are already close to their views. Therefore, in this respect, it is fitting that at the peak of his former career Berel Rodal served as the director general of the policy secretariat for Canada’s Department of National Defence and continues to maintain close connections to leading hawks in the US foreign policymaking circles, like, for example, long-time cold warrior Richard Perle (see later). This should not be taken as a demonstration of a massive conspiracy, but is simply evidence that imperial elites are interested in co-opting critical voices. →

FLASHBACK | The Velvet Slipper And The Military-Peace Nonprofit Complex

The following excerpts are from the article The Velvet Slipper And The Military-Peace Nonprofit Complex written by Michael Barker. The article in its entirety can be read at Swans Commentary where it was published February 18, 2011.

The political clout of the military-peace nonprofit complex is growing apace, and too many people at home and abroad are in danger of being lulled and then crushed by an oligarchy capable of wearing both the velvet slipper and the iron heel. Such anti-democratic developments hold no surprises to opponents of the oligarchy, but apologists for the velvet slipper who seek to teach anti-democratic intelligence agencies about the power of nonviolent activism must be identified and excluded from further involvement with progressive social movements. A good example that springs to mind is Lester Kurtz, who — in addition to residing on the advisory board of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict — recently responded to an article that challenged the fact that he had given a lecture to the CIA, by “arguing”: “I spoke as an independent academic and in no way as a representative of the ICNC when my government asked me to dialogue with members of its intelligence community. I feel that it is my duty as a citizen to educate others…” and “was glad to give my modest input…” (17)

In his timeless novel The Iron Heel (1907), Jack London was all too aware of John D. Rockefeller and his plutocratic ilk’s desire to crush humanity “under the iron heel of a despotism as relentless and terrible as any despotism that has blackened the pages of the history of man.” Yet London recognized the other dangers that capital posed to an increasingly powerful revolutionary movement, as he warned how the oligarchy complemented their violence against organized labor by providing selective subsidies to conservative unions much as the Rockefeller Foundation went on to do in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. (1) But in 1907, when London first published his book, the art of capitalist philanthropy was not fine-tuned, and so if he were writing today, London might well have authored a second book titled The Velvet Slipper. →

Desperate for Destabilization in Venezuela, US Funded OTPOR Rears It’s Ugly Head

“We had a lot of financial help from Western nongovernmental organizations. And also some Western governmental organizations.” Slobodan Homen, Otpor, 2000

 

Otpor logo

“Just how much money backed this objective is not clear. The United States Agency for International Development says that $25 million was appropriated just this year. Several hundred thousand dollars were given directly to Otpor for “demonstration-support material, like T-shirts and stickers,” says Donald L. Pressley, the assistant administrator. Otpor leaders intimate they also received a lot of covert aid — a subject on which there is no comment in Washington.” Who Really Brought Down Milosevic? New York Times, Nov 26, 2000

Otpor, as reported by the New York Times, was a well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States via the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Otpor (now calling itself CANVAS) has since been most instrumental in the recruiting and training behind the imperialist destabilization campaigns crushing sovereign states, and the far from spontaneous “Arab Springs”.

“The tranquility prevailing in Tachira, Venezuela, was interrupted a few days ago by violent right wing youth groups that are sponsored by foreign NGOs. The so-called “white hands” that do not recognize the government and the vice president, Nicolas Maduro, as well as the decision by the Supreme Court of Justice allowing President Chavez to take oath before this judicial institution. COPEI Party, the Popular Will Party and the first justice party are encouraging sabotage and terrorism in the state of Tachira. They are wishing for a person to die or be injured, but we will not allow it. … [Source: TelesSUR]

In the following video published January 14, 2013, at exactly 1:07 in, the Otpor symbol on the t-shirt of the “protestor” is clearly identifiable.

Democracy Promotion: America’s New Regime Change Formula

“On a trip to South Africa to train Zimbabweans in 2003, Djinovic and Popovic decided to establish CANVAS.  … Djinovic had founded Serbia’s first wireless Internet service provider in 2000 and was well on his way to becoming a mogul. Today he is head of Serbia’s largest private internet and phone company and funds about half of CANVAS’s operating expenses and the costs for half the training workshops out of his own pocket. (CANVAS has four and a half staff employees. The trainers are veterans of successful democracy movements in five countries and are paid as contractors. CANVAS participates in some workshops financed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United Nations Development Program, an international NGO called Humanity in Action, and Freedom House, an American group which gets its money from the U.S. government. But CANVAS prefers to give Washington a wide berth, in part due to Otpor’s experience. Like the entire opposition to Milosevic, Otpor took money from the U.S. government, and lied about it. When the real story came out after Milosevic fell, many Otpor members quit, feeling betrayed.” – REVOLUTION U – FOREIGN POLICY FEATURE, FEB 16, 2011, BY TINA ROSENBERG

Otpor has also surfaced in North America’s Occupy Wall Street and 350.org …

Image on far left: In 1998 the Otpor logo appears in Belgrade. Image on left: Otpor logo as found on the New York Occupy Wall Street Official website (2012),  featured above an Avaaz destabilization campaign against Syria. (screenshot below). Read more about Avaaz here.

350.org presents Otpor

350.org | Sept 22 and Sept 29 2011, Creative Activism Thursdays Srdja Popovic and Slobo Djinovic Lecture

“Due to the widespread interest in the Creative Activism Lecture Series this fall, and in order to better accommodate all guests, RSVP is required; please show up early. If you don’t RSVP, you can still show up and we’ll let you in 5 minutes before the lecture starts if there’s room. Note: immediately after the lecture, the audience will head down to #occupywallstreet!”

FLASHBACK: DEEPER DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE OF U.S. BACKED COLOR REVOLUTIONS

US Department of Imperial Expansion

March 6, 2011