The Problem with Nonviolent Regime Change

By Brendan Stone and Stephen Gowans

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A wrecking ball of imperialism

By Stephen Gowans

Brian Martin, a professor of social sciences at Australia’s University of Wollongong, has written a reply to my article Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman’s quest to do what the CIA used to do and make it seem progressive , and then a reply to my reply. Martin is the author of a number of books and articles on nonviolence, including Nonviolence against Capitalism, Technology for Nonviolent Struggle, and “Nonviolent strategy against capitalism” (in Social Alternatives, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2008, pp. 42-46.)

In the latest exchange, I try to show that the disagreement between Martin and me is rooted, I believe, in a conflict between Marxist and anarchist perspectives on the state, and the question of whether the state is inherently good or bad.

I argue that because anarchists are opposed to domination, and because the state is an instrument of domination, anarchists often line up alongside imperialist forces seeking the overthrow of foreign states. Because the regime change efforts of imperialist forces are aimed exclusively at states operating outside the North Atlantic imperialist orbit, the effect is for anarchists who participate in campaigns to challenge these states to act as one of Western imperialism’s wrecking balls. While the anarchist aim is to challenge state authority, the aim of the imperialist forces that fund and provide training for the nonviolent resistance campaigns anarchists are often involved in, is to transfer control of the state from often popular and anti-colonial forces to comprador forces that are willing to facilitate the despoliation of their countries by North Atlantic banks, corporations and investors. Anarchist challenges to North Atlantic states, without the generous funding Western governments, corporate foundations and wealthy individuals are prepared to allocate to challenges to states operating outside the United States’ informal empire, are modest and ineffectual by comparison.

The State

I think Martin would agree that the state is an instrument of domination, which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a defined geographical territory, exercised by the police and military. In the Marxist view, the state enforces the interests of one class over another, which is to say, it is an instrument whereby one class dominates and oppresses another. Slave owner states oppress slaves, landowner states oppress serfs, capitalist states oppress workers, and working class states oppress capitalists to limit or prevent capitalist exploitation. To Marxists, the question of whether the state is good or bad depends on who controls it, and who’s asking the question. To people conscious of their membership in the working class, the capitalist state is bad, not because it’s repressive, but because it’s repressive against their interests. Similarly, to a capitalist, the working class state is bad, not because it relies on the use or threat of violence to enforce a system of laws that privilege the working class, but because the system of laws backed by violence is against the interests of capital.

Anarchists, on the other hand, regard the state as inherently bad because it is based on domination enforceable through violence. To Martin, nonviolence is “especially useful for those who want to challenge domination” and it “involves empowerment of the population to challenge groups backed by force.” In other words, nonviolent resistance (NVR) is useful for doing what anarchists do: challenge the state.

But what if the state is under the control of a previously oppressed class or nation and its repressive function is used to prevent its former oppressor’s return to power? The leaders of Zimbabwe’s national liberation, for example, have used the state, and its repressive powers, to advance the interests of indigenous people at the expense of a former colonial oppressor, European settlers, and would-be neo-colonialists. The Bolsheviks used state power to enforce a wide array of measures favourable to the working class at the expense of capitalists and landowners. Is the use of state power to crack down on forces which seek to reduce Zimbabwe to neo-colonial servitude inherently bad? And were the Bolsheviks wrong to use state power to repress class enemies, as a condition of advancing the interests of the working class?

To anarchists the answer is yes. The Zimbabwe state is repressive. It uses violence to enforce the interests of indigenous Africans over those of European settlers and their descendants. The Bolshevik state was also repressive. It used violence to repress capitalists, estate-owners, rich peasants, saboteurs, and political enemies. Whether working class or capitalist, anti-colonial or colonial, the state is repressive; it is an instrument of domination. For these reasons anarchists oppose it.

A movement which challenges the state in Zimbabwe, or the state in countries in which working class interests are dominant, earns the support of anarchists. Indeed, because anarchists are against any state, whether feudal, capitalist, working class or anti-colonial, they often find themselves lining up with capitalist and neo-colonial forces against working class-oriented and anti-colonial states. And because North Atlantic governments, corporate foundations and wealthy individuals are eager to bankroll challenges to working class-oriented and anti-colonial states, but not to North Atlantic states and their satellites, anarchists who participate in these campaigns act as a wrecking ball of imperialism; their function is to tear down independent states so that control can be transferred to forces acceptable to Western banks, corporations and investors. At the same time, anarchist nonviolent resistance aimed at Western capitalist states – which tends to be low-level and largely non-disruptive, owing to the absent or meagre funding received from governments and philanthropic foundations – poses no serious threat.

Interestingly, Martin took exception to what he believed was my description of NVR as being guided by the goal of seizing power. This wasn’t my description, but that of Peter Ackerman, one of the principal proponents of NVR. Anarchists don’t seek power (the ability to dominate); they only seek to undermine it. What Martin failed to recognize was that Peter Ackerman, while a proponent of nonviolence, is not an anarchist but a capitalist, and a very wealthy one, whose avocation is to assist in the transfer of state power abroad from forces not yoked to U.S. financial and export interests, to pro-capitalist forces beholden to the US ruling class. Ackerman defines NVR as the use of strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations and other forms of civil disobedience, including nonviolent sabotage, to make a country ungovernable in order to seize power. And yet while Ackerman’s NVR aims are clearly at odds with those of Martin, Martin talks favourably of Ackerman, and Ackerman’s docent, Gene Sharp.

Nonviolence

Whether nonviolence is a defining feature of anarchism is a matter of dispute among anarchists. Martin, I suspect, would say it is. Peter Gelderloos, an anarchist whose book, How Nonviolence Protects the State, rejects exclusive nonviolence as an effective strategy for anarchists, would say it isn’t.

I agree with Gelderloos that proponents of nonviolence have claimed success in excess of what the data support. The modus operandi of NVR advocates is to exaggerate the achievements of campaigns which have featured the use of nonviolent tactics (India’s liberation from British colonial rule; the US civil rights movement; the anti-Vietnam War movement; the anti-nuclear weapons movement) and then to attribute the success of these campaigns to nonviolent tactics alone.

For example, in his reply to me, Martin credits the movements against nuclear weapons — “which used NVR as well as conventional political methods” — with saving the world from nuclear catastrophe. But how do we know that demonstrations and civil disobedience made any difference? The fact that some people used nonviolent tactics in an effort to deter superpower nuclear proliferation hardly means that nonviolence worked. If it did, I could say the crowing of the rooster causes the sun to rise, because the rooster crowed and the sun soon rose.

A more compelling case can be made that the end of the arms race came about because the United States no longer needed to expand its nuclear arsenal. It had embarked on an arms build-up to force the Soviets into bankruptcy. With the goal of toppling its ideological competitor achieved, there was no longer a need to pile weapon upon weapon. And after acquiring the capability to obliterate the world many times over, there was little point in acquiring more nuclear weapons. There comes a point where one more nuke makes no difference.

Moreover, were the decision to end the arms race attributable to nonviolent tactics, we could still say very little was achieved. The United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, and Israel still have nuclear arms, and evince not the slightest interest in giving them up. India, Pakistan and north Korea have acquired their own nuclear arsenals (or at least, capabilities.) The United States continues to threaten non-nuclear countries with nuclear weapons, thereby encouraging non-nuclear states to develop their own nuclear arms to deter U.S. aggression. What success was achieved was minor indeed.

Ackerman uses the same approach, attributing the success of campaigns that involved nonviolent tactics in some way to nonviolence alone, as if massive surrounding violence played no role. Believe his version of history, and the violence of a Western-sponsored armed insurgency in Kosovo, sanctions, a 78-day NATO terror bombing campaign, unceasing Western hostility, and a political fifth column, had nothing whatever to do with the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia in 2000. It was all due to anarchist activists practicing nonviolent resistance.

In the same manner, proponents of NVR attribute India’s political independence from Britain to Gandhian nonviolence. In doing so, they ignore the armed struggle led by Chandrasekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh’s campaign of bombings and assassinations, and the effects of the massive violence of two world wars and the armed resistance to British rule in Palestine in weakening Britain and sapping it of the manpower and resources it needed to hold onto its colonies. What’s more, the success was limited. Britain exchanged direct rule for indirect rule. It authored India’s constitution, handpicked its successors, and continued to dominate India’s economy. India’s independence was largely symbolic.

Relatedly, Martin disagrees with my point that NVR is a means to an end, and is therefore neither inherently good nor bad, but is good or bad depending on what it’s used for. Nuclear weapons, he rejoins, are inherently bad, because they are indiscriminate, and because they are a means of domination. The corollary, it seems, is that NVR is inherently good, because it challenges the state, an instrument of domination, and does so without recourse to violence, violence also being a means of domination. This follows consistently from the anarchist abhorrence of domination.

On the other hand, one could argue that Martin has to claim that NVR is good independent of its consequence, because the consequences of the Ackerman-Sharp-Helvey deployments that have been associated with regime change successes have been so negative from the point of view of the working class, that to do otherwise would leave his pro-NVR case in a shambles. NVR looks good only if its recent outcomes are ignored and the role of violence in the progressive outcomes it claims as its own are passed over. In other words, NVR’s positive reputation depends on ignoring the reality that NVR color revolutions have cleared the way for the ascension to power of Washington-aligned neo-liberal regimes that have privileged North Atlantic investors at the expense of domestic workers. At the same time the role of violence in the progressive developments (India’s liberation from British colonial rule, the end of the Vietnam War, and so on) that NVR advocates claim as their own must be ignored. Or you can simply say – as Martin and some peace advocates do – that the outcomes are immaterial; what matters is the process itself. This is sheer sophistry. A process cannot be evaluated independent of its outcomes. If so, a process that invariably produced bad outcomes, would be considered good.

A Marxist would say that domination isn’t always bad. It depends on who’s dominating who, and why. The domination of the formerly exploiting few by the formerly exploited many is not bad, but good, progressive and necessary. Marxists don’t want to dominate for the sake of domination, but if dominating a minority of exploiters and the use of violence are necessary to prevent the minority’s return to power, and to prevent the resumption of mass exploitation, then domination and violence are acceptable. Likewise, if a nuclear weapons capability allows north Korea to deter the United States from using military (including nuclear) aggression to dominate the Korean peninsula and integrate north Korea into Washington’s informal empire, can nuclear weapons be said to be inherently bad and necessarily bound up with the enforcement of domination? On the contrary, it would seem that north Korea’s nuclear capability challenges the domination of the most violent of all states, that of the United States.

Conclusion

At root, the disagreement between Martin and me seems to boil down to this: is domination and the use of violence always bad, or are domination and violence bad depending on who uses them, why they’re used, and what the outcomes are? These are normative questions.

An empirical question concerns whether the commitment of anarchists to challenge the state is useful to imperialist forces. Through their control of philanthropic foundations and such organizations as the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, involved in the training of (often anarchist) activists in techniques of destabilization, and through their control of the media, which shape public understanding of states that operate outside the North Atlantic imperial orbit as being based on unjustified authority, imperialist forces galvanize anarchists into action as one of their wrecking balls — challenging working class-oriented, anti-colonial, and North Atlantic-independent states. These challenges never develop to the point where the state collapses, as anarchists hope, but to the point where state control is transferred to comprador forces, as the imperialist sponsors of NVR campaigns intend. Despite their aim of challenging the state, NVR activists act in ways that help enhance the power of North Atlantic states to dominate and exploit the global south and Eastern Europe. Anarchist nonviolent strategy hasn’t threatened capitalism or challenged the domination of North Atlantic states. On the contrary, its record is one of service to North Atlantic imperialist forces in integrating hold-out countries into Washington’s informal empire, through the participation of NVR activists in campaigns to smash independent states.

Nonviolent warfare: Questioning ends, not means

By Stephen Gowans

Brian Martin, a professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong in Australia, has written a reply to my article Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman’s quest to do what the CIA used to do and make it seem progressive. Martin is the author of a number of books and articles on nonviolence, including Nonviolence against Capitalism, Technology for Nonviolent Struggle, and “Nonviolent strategy against capitalism” (in Social Alternatives, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2008, pp. 42-46.)

Martin’s criticism of my article is below. My reply follows.

Martin’s criticism

Stephen Gowans’ article presents a point of view but lacks credibility through not addressing contrary evidence.

Gowans omits to mention the efforts by ICNC (International Center for Nonviolent Conflict) and AEI (Albert Einstein Institution) to introduce nonviolent strategy to movements challenging US client governments. By discussing only those cases allegedly in support of US imperialism, he avoids having to explain equivalent cases apparently in opposition to US imperialism. This is a major flaw in his argument.

Economic sanctions, such as used against Iraq, are often presented as an alternative to violence, but they aren’t nonviolent because they rely on military force to be enforced. A voluntary boycott is a different matter, but what was applied to Iraq wasn’t a boycott of this sort. So Gowans’ implication that nonviolence can lead to mass death via sanctions is erroneous.

Nonviolent action can be used to attack governments or to defend them. Gowans gives only one side of the picture. There are plenty of cases in which nonviolent action has been used in defense of governments, for example to oppose coups.

A piddling amount of money in support of nonviolent movements doesn’t begin to explain their success. A government can easily match $1 million or $30 million – their security budgets typically run in the billions. So they could easily support nonviolent movements in their own support. If nonviolent action is so powerful, why doesn’t Gowans recommend this? Saying that nonviolent movements keep repeating slogans is not an explanation, because governments have far more resources to repeat their own slogans – and they do.

Nonviolent action is not about taking power, as Gowans would have it, but about waging conflict without using physical violence. It can be used to challenge (or defend) a government; it can also be used to challenge a successor government. It was used against the Iranian government in 1978-79 and is being used today against the current Iranian government.

Gowans says “The major proponents of NVR are not independent grassroots organizers, socialists or anarchists”. This is wrong. He doesn’t mention any of the hundreds of nonviolent struggles going on around the world with which ICNC and AEI have had no connection. He doesn’t mention War Resisters’ International, anti-nuclear direct action, ploughshares activists, rank-and-file worker direct action, anti-corporate globalization actions, environmental direct-action campaigns and many others. Gowans says that NVR is “not used by grassroots organizations in the West to force their own governments to change reactionary policies, …” I don’t know how anyone familiar with nonviolent action could make such a statement.

My reply

Brian Martin’s criticism is based on two confusions:

1. He misunderstands the sense in which I’ve used the term nonviolent resistance (NVR.)
2. He misunderstands my article to be an attack on nonviolent warfare as a method, rather than on the ends to which the most celebrated and large scale applications of NVR have been put.

I’ll show that I’ve used NVR in the sense in which Peter Ackerman, the subject of my article, uses it, and not in the different sense in which Martin apparently uses it. And I’ll show that defenders of Peter Ackerman and Gene Sharp have failed to recognize that the pair regards NVR (appropriately) as a means to an end, and not an end in itself. NVR by itself is neither good nor bad. The critical question is: What is it used for?

While supporters of NVR often regard nonviolent warfare as an end in itself (see for example Peace Magazine), we ought to be careful to distinguish means from ends. NVR, as defined by Peter Ackerman, following his docent, Gene Sharp, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end is taking political power. This is the aim ICNC founder Ackerman (not me, as Martin seems to think) attributes to NVR. Indeed, Martin agrees. While denying that NVR is about taking political power, he defines two of three possible uses of NVR as: 1. challenging a government and 2. challenging a successor government. What does challenge a government mean, if not overthrow it, in order to take power? The third possible use, in Martin’s view, is to defend a government, in which case NVR is about defending political power. In either case, NVR is about political power – either taking it, or keeping it. In any event, if Martin thinks NVR isn’t about taking political power, he ought to address his comments to Ackerman. It was Ackerman, not me, who wrote, along with Jack DuVall in a 2002 Sojourners Magazine article, that NVR is “not about making a point, it’s about taking power.”

If NVR is about taking (or defending) political power, we ought to ask: To what end? The answer can be found in the answers to two key questions: (1) Who has promoted the most celebrated uses of NVR? (2) What have been the outcomes (and who has benefited)?

The biggest promoter of NVR is Ackerman, an immensely wealthy investor who is connected to the US foreign policy establishment through the Council on Foreign Relations, the premier U.S. ruling class think-tank. Robert Helvey, another visible proponent, is a 30 year veteran of the US Army who became interested in Gene Sharp’s destabilization techniques as a possibly more effective way of overthrowing foreign governments than armed struggle. Sharp, the “Clausewitz of nonviolence” as he’s known among NVR enthusiasts, has been aptly described as “being the first person to study rigorously the techniques of mass civil disobedience and place them in the context of traditional military strategy.” All three see NVR as an alternative or adjunct to traditional military methods, in pursuit of US foreign policy goals. It is NVR, in this context, and aimed at achieving imperial goals, that I’m concerned with in my article (not with the use of NVR to pursue anti-imperialist or socialist goals.)

Successful destabilization campaigns, of the type my article considers, have invariably led to the strengthening of U.S. financial and corporate interests abroad, and the coming to power of governments oriented to opening doors to US investment and exports. This has been true in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine.

Significantly, successful destabilizations have been massively funded by the United States, other Western governments, corporate foundations and wealthy individuals (among them Ackerman and George Soros.) The use of NVR techniques to “challenge” US client states, as Martin puts it, happens infrequently, and receives none of the backing, funding, material, logistical, and information warfare support that successful destabilizations against US target governments receive. Martin mentions hundreds of nonviolent struggles going on around the world with which the ICNC and AEI have no connection. These are little known, and can boast modest accomplishments, at best, precisely because they’re grassroots supported, and aren’t backed by massive infusions of aid from imperialist foundations and governments. Without money and material and information warfare support, NVR is at a severe disadvantage and has little chance of achieving its goal of taking political power, absent a severe destabilizing crisis, whether war or economic collapse. Indeed, successful NVR campaigns have often been helped along by actual or threatened military intervention and economic hardship created by sanctions or blockade.

Arguing, as Martin does, that Western government- and foundation-supported NVR campaigns operate independently of US foreign policy goals because the ICNC and AEI have introduced nonviolent strategy to movements challenging US client governments, is tantamount to claiming the New York Times is not dominated by a US ruling class perspective because it has a few token left-liberal columnists. (Martin’s points would be more compelling if he backed them up with evidence, rather than simply making unsubstantiated statements, a common practice among supporters of Ackerman, Sharp, and Helvey. For example, he ought to let us know what US client governments the ICNC and AEI are helping foreign dissidents overthrow, citing relevant documents.)

There is, I think, a misconception that Martin labors under. He seems to believe that I have attacked NVR as a technique and have set my sights on discrediting War Resisters’ International, anti-nuclear direct action, ploughsares activists and any other group that uses nonviolent warfare to achieve its goals. That’s not the case. At the end of my article I point to the possibility that NVR “may stimulate Western leftists to think about how they too might use the destabilizers’ techniques to take power in their own country to win the authentic battle for democracy.” This goal is on the same level as Ackerman’s (taking political power) rather than the level on which I suspect Martin operates (pressuring elites, with no intention of replacing them.) In any event, I take issue not with nonviolent warfare, but with the ends to which the most successful and large scale applications of NVR have been put. NVR can be used for good, or bad. It is no more an end in itself than military warfare is. To believe that all NVR campaigns are good (or bad) simply because they’re based on nonviolent warfare is unsupportable. I fear that Martin, like the principals of Peace Magazine, has failed to distinguish means from ends, or has set nonviolence itself as an end, irrespective of what nonviolent warfare is used to achieve.

It’s not clear whether Martin is sincerely confused or whether he is dishonestly trying to portray Ackerman, Helvey and Sharp as champions of a progressive cause. It could be that he believes that resolving conflicts nonviolently is a goal to be aspired to, and doesn’t particularly care about who wins in conflicts, so long as the winners prevail through nonviolent methods. If so, then nonviolence as a value has been elevated above freedom from oppression and freedom from exploitation. Indeed, anyone who seeks to intensify oppression and exploitation, so long as he does so nonviolently, would be all right in Martin’s book and worthy of being defended. Would Martin applaud the Nazi’s pursuit of Lebensraum, had it been pursued through nonviolent warfare?

Finally, Martin claims not to know how anyone familiar with nonviolent action could say that NVR is not used by grassroots organizations in the West to force their own governments to change reactionary policies. This is born of confusion about how Ackerman defines NVR. According to Ackerman, NVR is “the shrewd use of strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience” in addition to mass protests and even nonviolent sabotage, to disrupt the functioning of government and make “a country ungovernable.” If there is a campaign in the United States or elsewhere in the Western world, where activists are using strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, and nonviolent sabotage to make their country ungovernable, then I’m surely not aware of it. (I am, on the other hand, aware of several such campaigns operating outside the West in countries whose governments Washington openly seeks to overthrow.) One would hope that in the United States, home of the principal proponents of NVR, that strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, and nonviolent sabotage were being used to make the US ungovernable, in order to replace a state systemically committed to war, imperialism and exploitation, but sadly that isn’t happening. Instead, the only contribution to peace NVR promoters are willing to make is to agitate for the use of nonviolent warfare to overthrow US regime change targets, so that the Pentagon doesn’t have to be called upon to do so. This is a deeply conservative agenda. Clearly, if Martin believes NVR is being used to change the reactionary policies of Western governments, his understanding of NVR is very different from that of Ackerman.

Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman’s quest to do what the CIA used to do, and make it seem progressive

“When some of State’s desk officers don’t want to create international incidents by advising activists on how to overthrow governments, they gently suggest visiting Ackerman, who has fewer qualms about lending a helping hand.”  [1a]

“Gene Sharp [is] the author of a series of books on nonviolent conflict who is generally credited with being the first person to study rigorously the techniques of mass civil disobedience and place them in the context of traditional military strategy.” [1b]

Interviewer: (Some people say) a government cannot fund or sponsor the overthrow of another government!

Gene Sharp: Why not?…What do they prefer that the U.S. spend money on? [1c]

By Stephen Gowans

Peter Ackerman, an immensely wealthy investor and board member of the premier U.S. foreign policy think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, [2] and Robert Helvey, a 30 year veteran of the U.S. Army [3] who served two tours of duty in Vietnam [4], are the principal proponents of a nonviolent alternative to military intervention in the pursuit of U.S. foreign policy goals. Students of Gene Sharp, who developed a theory of how to destabilize governments through nonviolent means, Ackerman and Helvey have been at the head of a kind of Imperialist International, training “a modern type of mercenary,” who travel “the world, often in the pay of the U.S. government or NGOs, in order to train local groups” [5] in regime change. Ackerman and Helvey’s new type of mercenary are practioners of what the CIA used to call destabilization. To escape the taint of its CIA past, destabilization has been rebranded as nonviolent resistance (NVR), shrewdly drawing upon the reputation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent struggles for black civil rights in the 1960s. But where King sought to bring about change within the system, and in the United States, NVR is strictly a foreign affair, seeking to overturn governments abroad that operate outside the system of U.S. imperial domination. NVR is not about pursuing social, economic and political justice at home. It’s about taking power overseas, in order to bring resistant countries into the U.S. imperial fold. To make itself appear to be squeaky clean, NVR explicitly rejects overt CIA and U.S. military sponsorship. As Helvey explains, “The easiest way to destroy a movement is for the CIA to taint it.” [6] That, however, doesn’t make NVR any different in its aims and content from the destabilization campaigns the CIA used to plan, sponsor and implement. Indeed, Ackerman and Helvey have simply taken over a CIA function, made it semi-overt, and created the illusion that it’s progressive.

What is it?

Ackerman defines NVR as “the shrewd use of strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience” [7] in addition to mass protests [8] and even nonviolent sabotage, to disrupt the functioning of government [9] and make “a country ungovernable.”[10] Since strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience are traditional leftist techniques, NVR campaigns often garner the support of a large number of left-leaning people. But NVR isn’t holding a demonstration, listening to speakers, and then heading home for supper. Neither is it pressuring elites — what most Western leftists set as the limit of their political activism. It isn’t pacifism based on moral or religious principle, either. Former Harvard researcher Sharp, explains that NVR and principled nonviolence are not the same. Principled nonviolence is “abstention from violence based on ethical or religious beliefs.” NVR is a political technique for overthrowing foreign governments. [11] “It’s not about making a point, it’s about taking power.” [12]

Since the aim of NVR is to take political power abroad, NVR can be characterized as a form of Western warfare, employing nonviolent armies behind enemy lines. In fact, it was Sharp’s analysis of how regime change could be accomplished effectively that drew Helvey, the U.S. Army veteran, to the Clausewitz of nonviolence, as Sharp is known, after the Prussian military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz. [13]

Helvey had been the military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, where he witnessed armed opposition groups repeatedly fail in their attempts to overthrow the Myanmar government. [14] The trouble was that rebel groups were going up against a regular army that could exercise overwhelming force. Sharp’s analysis suggested an alternative. Drawing on social science literature on power, Sharp pointed out that governments have two sources of power: their ability to exact obedience coercively through their control of armies, police, courts and prisons; and their moral authority. Since a government can use overwhelming force to defeat most internal armed challenges, the key to taking power is to undermine the reason most people obey: because they believe their government is legitimate and has a right to rule. In Sharp’s view, most people obey, not because they’re compelled to, but because they want to. If a government’s legitimacy is undermined, people will no longer want to obey. That’s when they can be mobilized to participate in strikes, boycotts, acts of civil disobedience, even sabotage – anything to the make the country ungovernable. “Removing the authority of the ruler,” according to NVR advocates, “is the most important element in nonviolent struggle.” [15]

NVR holds that destabilization works best when the target government is not “supported by an entrenched party system that can claim a higher ideological purpose.” [16] This may explain why destabilizers have attacked the ideological basis of Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF leadership, suggesting that the party’s leader and Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, maintains a “hold on power (that) is…reliant on personal loyalties and their reinforcement by material rewards and mortal penalties,” not commitment to national independence. [17] In regime change discourse, Mugabe is said to have cronies, who he rewards with confiscated farms, to hold on to power. That Mugabe and his principals could be genuinely committed to investing Zimbabwe’s nominal post-colonial independence with real content, is dismissed by NVR promoters as out of the question. The same cynical arguments are used to challenge the moral authority of Cuba’s government. The Castros are accused of being motivated by an unquenchable thirst for power, not an ideological commitment to socialism and national independence. For destabilizers, breeding a cynical view of the leaders of countries in their cross-hairs is a necessary part of undermining their targets’ legitimacy.

To buttress their efforts to undermine the moral authority of target governments, the destabilizers depend critically on the frequent use of the words “dictatorial” (to denote the governments they seek to bring down) and “democratic” (to denote the target government’s opponents.) It doesn’t matter whether the target governments are truly dictatorial or whether their opponents are truly democratic. What matters is that these things are believed to be true. Getting people to believe target governments are dictatorial is done by repeating the charge incessantly, until the idea takes on the status of common knowledge, so widely accepted that proof is unnecessary.

But what if the “dictator” has been elected, as is often the case in destabilization efforts? The destabilizers’ solution is to claim the elected leader came to power illegitimately, by means of electoral fraud. For example, while widely denounced in the West as fraudulent, the recent re-election of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears not to have been fraudulent at all. No compelling evidence of vote rigging was ever presented, and the only rigorous public opinion poll done in the weeks leading up to the election — sponsored by the Ahmadinejad-hating International Republican Institute — predicted the Iranian president would be re-elected by a handsome margin. Indeed, the poll foresaw Ahmadinejad winning by a greater margin that he actually did win. [18] Still, Western media and their governments’ propaganda apparatuses — Voice of America, Radio Free Liberty and the misnamed “independent” media that serve as fronts for the Western governments that finance them – repeated the opposition charge of electoral fraud over and over. Soon, the mass media and state propaganda apparatuses were singing out as one: the election was rigged.

In Zimbabwe, which for a number of years has been a target of the destabilizers, elections are routinely denounced as fraudulent, even before they’re held. This was true too of Zimbabwe’s last elections, which saw the opposition parties win more seats than the governing party, and the main opposition leader beat the sitting president in the first round of the presidential vote. While this is powerful evidence the elections weren’t rigged, the destabilizers continue to insist the presidential vote was illegitimate. This is so because the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out at the 11th hour. Tsvangirai’s decision appears to have come straight from the destabilizers’ playbook. Had he stayed in the race, he might have lost, and relinquished any possibility of challenging Mugabe’s rule as illegitimate. (He couldn’t credibly say the vote was rigged because he had won the first round.) By dropping out, and blaming his decision on violence perpetrated by Mugabe’s supporters, Tsvangirai could challenge Mugabe’s moral authority to rule. After all, he could say that in the only contested election, he had won.

Likewise, an important part of the destabilizers’ efforts to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic was to declare well before the first vote was cast in the 2000 presidential election that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Milosevic would win, illegitimately. In fact, Milosevic came second to the main opposition leader, who failed to win more than 50 percent of the vote. With no candidate commanding a clear majority, a run-off election was scheduled. The runoff never happened. Instead, Milosevic was overthrown with the help of forces trained by Helvey [19]…in the name of democracy.

To complement the branding of target governments as dictatorial, opposition forces are branded as democratic. It is no accident that the main opposition party in Serbia, formed under the guidance of U.S. advisers [20], was called the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, or that the main opposition party in Zimbabwe is called the Movement for Democratic Change, or that the main opposition party in Myanmar, Helvey’s pet project, is called the National League of Democracy. Western media reinforce this branding by frequently referring to opposition parties in countries undergoing destabilization as “the democratic opposition,” implying the governments they oppose are dictatorial. This invests the opposition, and its struggle to replace the government, with apparent legitimacy, while undermining the legitimacy of the government under attack. Likewise, the modern nonviolent mercenaries who travel the globe in the pay of the U.S. government and NGOs, are celebrated as “pro-democracy” activists, as are the armies of (typically) youth activists they train. Even some left scholars, out of ignorance or collaboration, refer to these groups as an “independent” democratic left, presumably because they use techniques traditionally associated with the left, though hardly with the same aims.

After absorbing Sharp’s teachings, Helvey became deeply involved in helping the National Council Union of Burma try to destabilize the Myanmar government, not by challenging it militarily, but by undermining its moral authority to govern. He took a detour along the way, to train Serb youth groups on how to destabilize the government of Slobodan Milosevic [21], an event Ackerman would celebrate in a documentary titled (with predictable NVR language distortion) “Bringing Down a Dictator.” With the socialist-leaning Milosevic safely out of the way, and Serbia opening its door to takeover by U.S. investors, Helvey jumped back into organizing the destabilization of Myanmar.

Over a number of years, Helvey’s mercenaries,

“trained an estimated 3,000 fellow Burmese from all walks of life – including several hundred Buddhist monks – in philosophies and strategies of non-violent resistance and community organizing. These workshops, held in border areas and drawing people from all over Burma, were seen as ‘training the trainers’ who would go home and share these ideas with others yearning for change.” [22]

“That preparation – along with material support such as mobile phones – helped lay the groundwork for dissident Buddhist monks in September (2007) to call for a religious boycott of the junta, precipitating the biggest anti-government protests in two decades. For 10 dramatic days, monks and lay citizens…poured into the streets in numbers that peaked at around 100,000 before the regime crushed the demonstrations…” [23]

The U.S. Navy would dearly love to lay its hands on Myanmar. The country lies strategically along the Strait of Malacca, a major shipping-lane linking China to the oil of Western Asia and Africa. Control of Myanmar would allow the U.S. Navy to choke off one of China’s major oil supply routes, bringing the behemoth to its knees, if ever Washington felt the need. The Myanmar government, however, has aligned itself with China, and is not ready to allow the Pentagon to use its ports as naval bases. What’s more, the country has a largely state-owned economy, closed to U.S. corporations, banks and investors. Washington would like to bring Myanmar under its control, and Helvey and Ackerman’s destabilization techniques offer the best chance of doing so.

“Burmese opposition activists acknowledge receiving technical and financial help for their cause.” The help came “from the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’s Open Society Institute and several European countries. […] International donors and activists figure Burmese opposition groups received $8m-$10m in 2006 and again in 2007 from American and European funders… […] In 2006 and 2007, the (U.S.) congressionally funded NED…spent around $3.7M a year on its Burmese program…These funds were used to support opposition media, including the Democratic Voice of Burma, a radio station and satellite television channel to bolster dissidents’ information technology skills and to help exiles’ training of Buddhist monks and other dissident techniques of peaceful political resistance.” [24]

From 1992 to 1998, Helvey taught eight, six-week courses to more than 500 members of the National Council Union of Burma, on how to apply Sharp’s techniques to overthrow the Myanmar government [25]. More recently “some 600 Burmese have gone through both introductory and advanced courses” in destabilization taught by the Albert Einstein Institution [26]. Sharp is the organization’s scholar in residence.

Antiviolence, not antiwar

Antiwar activists will find no ideological soul mates in Ackerman, Helvey and Sharp, who are conditionally against the use of violence, not out of moral principle, but because they believe violence is often an ineffective method of achieving what political violence is normally intended to achieve: the seizure of power. As New Republic writer Franklin Foer points out, “Ackerman’s affection for nonviolence has nothing to do with the tactic’s moral superiority. Movements that make a strategic decision to eschew violence, he argues, have a far better record of” success. [27]

The destabilizers represent a faction within the U.S. ruling class that pushes for a nonmilitary means of achieving a goal all ruling class factions agree on: regime change in countries that resist integration into the U.S. imperial orbit. Ackerman, for example, argues that “It is not true that the only way to ‘take out’ (axis of evil regimes) is through U.S. military action.” [28] He opposes the faction led by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, which favors a robustly militaristic imperialism, based on the overwhelming use of force. In the lead-up to the 2003 U.S. and British invasion of Iraq, Ackerman and DuVall wrote an article in Sojourner’s Magazine arguing that “anyone who opposes U.S. military action to dethrone (Saddam Hussein) has a responsibility to suggest how he might otherwise be ushered out the backdoor of Baghdad.” (Notice Ackerman and DuVall implicitly removed the option of leaving Saddam Hussein’s fate to Iraqis, to decide for themselves, without outside interference.) The answer, they contended, was to “use a panoply of forceful sanctions – strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, disrupting the functions of government, even nonviolent sabotage…” [29]

Ackerman’s mentor, Sharp, expresses similar views. Asked what he thought of mass demonstrations in the United States against the war on Iraq, Sharp replied,

“I don’t think you can get rid of violence by protesting against it. I think you get rid of violence only if people see that you have a different way of acting, a different way of struggle. […] Part of my analysis is that if you don’t like violence, you have to develop a substitute. Then people have a choice. If they don’t see a choice, then violence is all that they really have. […] The thing that is most shocking is that the Bush Administration acted on the basis of the belief – dogma, ‘religion’ – in the omnipotence of violence. […] The assumption is an invading country can come in, remove its official leader, arrest some of the other people, and well, then, the dictatorship is gone.” [30]

In other words, Sharp’s contribution to the peace movement is showing the U.S. ruling class it can achieve its imperialist goals by nonmilitary means. Sharp and his disciples Ackerman and Helvey aren’t progressives at all. Nor are they advocates of the moral superiority of nonviolence. They’re imperialists who believe violence isn’t always the best policy in achieving imperial goals. The antiwar activists who have been misled by this trio, and by their publicist within the progressive community, Stephen Zunes, should be clear that NVR is a military technique yoked to political goals that serve the ruling class interests of the United States. It is not a moral position. It is a form of warfare with imperial political content. Helvey calls it “nonviolent war.” [31]

“It’s a form of warfare. And you’ve got to think of it in terms of a war. […] What is it that I want to accomplish? And how do I want to accomplish it? […] One option, of course, is an armed struggle. Another option is…a nonviolent struggle. And in some cases the ballot box is the way to bring about change. […] You’ve got to make a decision which is a strategic decision. And if you decide to accept nonviolent struggle, the same principles of war (apply.)” [32]

War can be waged in many ways: economically, through sanctions, blockade and financial isolation; militarily, through the use or threat of violence; electronically, through cyber attacks to freeze an enemy’s bank accounts and cripple its government and communication systems; and through other methods of destabilization, to make an enemy society ungovernable. It’s wrong to believe that war is limited to violence and that violence is always the most injurious form of warfare. Other forms can be just as devastating. For example, sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s were estimated to have led to the deaths through malnutrition and disease of well over one million people, an outcome Madeleine Albright, who sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations with Ackerman, said was worth it. [33] Political scientists John and Karl Mueller pointed out that more people have died from sanctions (an element of NVR, as we’ll see in a moment) than from weapons of mass destruction. [34] For these reasons, antiwar activists should ask: What am I against: Violence — or warfare (both violent and nonviolent) to achieve imperialist goals?

Outside assistance

In his earlier writings Ackerman was open about Western support for destabilization campaigns. But in more recent articles he has become circumspect, calling destabilization movements home-grown and arguing that “external aid can help, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient.” [35] He was not so modest about the role played by the West when he boasted in a 2002 National Catholic Reporter article about Serb students bringing Milosevic down without a shot being fired. In that article he wrote about how “massive civilian opposition can be roused with the shrewd use of strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience and other forms of nonviolent resistance – all of which can be quietly assisted, even funded from abroad, as happened in Serbia.” [36] The reference to outside assistance being delivered quietly shows he’s aware that were it widely known that so-called “people power” movements are aided from abroad, their moral authority (and alleged home-grown character) would be called into question. That explains why “An iron rule for (the Milosevic opposition) was never to talk about Western financial or logistical support,” [37] and why, with the massive involvement of Western governments in “people power” movements having since become a matter of public record, Ackerman denies that outside aid is necessary. But only the incorrigibly gullible would believe Western governments and corporate foundations spend countless millions funding destabilization movements unnecessarily.

U.S. involvement in the hardly spontaneously erupting drive to dump Milosevic was massive. As the Washington Post’s Michael Dobbs reported,

“U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers with the slogan “He’s Finished,” which became the revolution’s catchphrase.” [38]

Helvey was at the center. [39] “Behind the seeming spontaneity of the street uprising that forced Milosevic” from power “was a carefully researched strategy put together by (anti-Milosevic forces on the ground) with the active assistance of Western advisers and pollsters.” [40] The U.S. government “employed every element of Sharp’s nonviolent strategy for destroying” a foreign government. To assist, “sanctions were applied in a … targeted fashion. For example, they were not applied to municipalities that voted to support opposition politicians.” [41]

Washington spent $41 million to oust Milosevic, $10 million in 1999 and $31 million in 2000. “The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development…which channeled the funds through commercial contractors” [42] and the National Endowment for Democracy, established by the Reagan administration to overtly fund destabilization campaigns the CIA once funded covertly.

Helvey, the military strategist, might disagree with Ackerman about outside assistance being unnecessary. According to Helvey, in order to carry out a successful destabilization campaign,

“You need radios and the ability to produce and distribute information. You need to be able to train. You need to provide the activists with some income to take care of their families. When people get arrested, you need to take food to them in prison or the hospital.” [43]

Real grassroots activists — that is, those who aren’t dependent on lucre from philanthropic foundations — are unlikely to have the cash to pay for the inputs a campaign of nonviolent warfare requires. That’s where Western governments and corporate foundations come in. They’re often happy to furnish the needed material support, because the power-seizing aim of NVR has happy consequences for the bottom lines of their transnational business and investor patrons. If real grassroots activists think they’re going to secure foundation or government funding for genuinely democratic and socialist projects, they’re mistaken. Western governments and corporate foundations limit funding to activists who, whether they know it or not, act to advance corporate and imperialist goals.

Even Ackerman disagrees that outside help is unnecessary. In a Christian Science Monitor article written with Jack DuVall in 2002, Ackerman complained that Iranians didn’t have the “know-how” to take power from the government in Tehran and that the know-how should be delivered by Western “pro-democracy programs.” (He cautioned that aid should “not come from the CIA or Defense Department,” to keep the movement seemingly free from taint.)[44] He echoed this view in a New York Time’s article written with Ramin Ahmadi, pointing to the lack of “a clear strategic vision and steady leadership” among the anti-Ahmadinejad opposition. [45] At the same time, he advised readers to watch the streets of Tehran, seemingly confident the know-how and clear strategic vision and steady leadership would be delivered. And he called on,

“Nongovernmental organizations around the world (to) expand their efforts to assist Iranian civil society, women’s groups, unions and journalists. And the global news media should finally begin to cover the steady stream of strikes, protests and other acts of opposition…” [46]

This was a curious appeal from someone who believes outside aid is unnecessary.

The New Republic’s Franklin Foer wrote that “Ultimately, (Ackerman) envisions events (in Iran) unfolding as they did in Serbia, with a small, well-trained, nonviolent vanguard introducing the idea of resistance to the masses.” [47] Ackerman, of course, could be sure the vanguard would be helped by a substantial injection of money from outside, as happened in Serbia — aid Ackerman claims is unnecessary.

Whether necessary or not, Washington has delivered. Last June, The Washington Post reported that,

“The Bush administration told Congress last year of a secret plan to dramatically expand covert operations inside Iran as part of a long-running effort to destabilize the country’s ruling regime…The plan allowed up to $400 million in covert spending for activities ranging from spying on Iran’s nuclear program to supporting rebel groups opposed to the country’s ruling clerics…” [48]

Ackerman, Helvey and Sharp are part of the $400 million campaign. According to Sharp,

“Our work is available in Iran and has been since 2004. People from different political positions are saying that’s the way we need to go. […] If somebody doesn’t decide to use military means, then it is very likely there will be a peaceful national struggle there.” [49]

For his part, Ackerman has several ideas for ousting Ahmadinejad. His films on destabilizing governments have been translated into Farsi, and are broadcast repeatedly over the Los Angeles-based Iranian satellite networks. He has worked with Helvey to train Iranian Americans, many of them followers of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah. And the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), which Ackerman founded, and which progressive Stephen Zunes is a part of, has made contacts with the referendum movement within Iran, which campaigns for a binding vote on the clerical state. [50]

“Events in Iran are reminiscent of Serbia just before a student-sparked movement removed Slobodan Milosevic,” write Ackerman and DuVall. “His regime had alienated not only students but most of the middle class, which the dismal economy had shattered.” [51]

Ah, the economy. What Ackerman and DuVall ignore is that Western sanctions were instrumental in crippling the Yugoslav economy, and therefore in alienating students and the middle class. Disorganizing an economy through sanctions is an important part of nonviolent strategic regime change, a point John Bacher made in a Peace Magazine article on Robert Helvey. Bacher describes the targeted sanctions employed by the U.S. government against municipalities that voted to support Milosevic as being one of the elements of Sharp’s nonviolent strategy. [52] Significantly, Washington applies multiple sanctions against and financially isolates countries that are the targets of NVR destabilization efforts: Zimbabwe, Belarus, Iran, Myanmar and Cuba. Economic warfare, though nonviolent, wreaks terrible devastation, while providing immeasurable help to the destabilizers.

An Imperialist International

In a Dissent Magazine article, Mark R. Beissinger remarks on how overthrowing governments

“has now become an international business. In addition to the millions of dollars of aid involved, numerous consulting operations have arisen, many of them led by former revolutionaries themselves. Since the Serbian revolution, for instance, Otpor (youth) activists (trained by Helvey) have become, as one Serbian analyst put it, ‘a modern type of mercenary,’ traveling the world, often in the pay of the U.S. government or NGOs, in order to train local groups in how to organize a democratic revolution. A number of leaders of the Ukrainian youth movement Pora were trained in Serbia at the Center for Nonviolent Resistance, a consulting organization set up by Otpor activists to instruct youth leaders from around the world in how to organize a movement, motivate voters, and develop mass actions. […] After the Rose and Orange Revolutions, Georgian and Ukrainian youth movements began to challenge Otpor’s consulting monopoly. Pora activists even joked about creating a new Comintern for democratic revolution.” [53]

Foer borrows Leninist terminology to describe destabilization activists as a vanguard. [54] Lenin, however, was never interested in promoting imperialism; this vanguard is. Consider Nini Gogiberidze. Every few months she is deployed abroad to teach activists how to destabilize their governments. She has traveled to Eastern Europe to train Belarusians and Turkey to instruct Iranians. She is employed by the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or Canvas, one of the many organizations in the destabilizers’ network. “The group is funded in part by the International Republican Institute,” the international arm of the GOP “and Washington-based Freedom House, which receives most of its funding from the U.S. government.” [55] Freedom House is a CIA-interlocked [56] organization of which Ackerman was not too long ago chairman of the board.

But building an imperialist international is not solely the project of Freedom House. The ICNC, the organization Ackerman founded, is also heavily involved. Ackerman regularly holds conferences hosting new recruits into the destabilization vanguard from around the world. One recent summer “he brought activists from more than a dozen countries to a retreat in the Montreal suburbs for a week of solidarity and study.” ‘We can’t say where they are from,” Ackerman said. “’But think of the 20 biggest assholes in the world, and you can guess.’” [57]

I’m thinking of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Benjamin Netanyahu, but Ackerman isn’t training a vanguard to destabilize the United States, Britain and Israel. He benefits too much from their dominant positions. And yet these are the world’s principal purveyors of massive violence. You would think that proponents of nonviolence would surely set their sights on undermining violence’s biggest champions. Instead, Ackerman’s 20 biggest assholes seem to be the leaders of Iran, Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Gaza, and Venezuela, judging by where Ackerman, Helvey and Sharp have been active: countries that are charting their own course, outside the U.S. imperial orbit. The State Department has distributed Ackerman-produced destabilization videos to anti-Castro dissidents in Cuba. “When some of State’s desk officers don’t want to create international incidents by advising activists on how to overthrow governments, they gently suggest visiting Ackerman, who has fewer qualms about lending a helping hand.” [58] Ackerman has sent a trainer to Palestine “to spend twelve days creating a nonviolent vanguard to challenge Hamas.” [59] The list goes on.

Who is Peter Ackerman?

Ackerman is the managing director of Rockport Capital Incorporated, a private investment firm. He was chairman of the board of Freedom House and sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, along with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, and various other war criminals, CEOs, investment bankers, and highly placed media people.

As part of his Council on Foreign Relations role, Ackerman not too long ago participated in a task force headed by former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director and current U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The goal: to craft a new approach to Iran. [60] He is also a member of the U.S. Advisory Council of the United States Institute for Peace, a phoney U.S. government peace outfit headed by the U.S. secretaries of defense and state. And when he’s not hobnobbing with the U.S. foreign policy establishment and managing his investment firm, he’s building an Imperialist International through the offices of the ICNC, of which he is the founding chair.

Ackerman made his fortune working alongside junk-bond king Michael Milken. His “Prada parka and winter tan remind you that you’re not in tattered NGO-land anymore. You’re in the presence of wealth.” [61] After graduating from Colgate, he joined the graduate program at Tufts University Fletcher School, where he met Gene Sharp. “Ackerman spent eight on-and-off years at Tuft’s refining Sharp’s thesis.” [62] After obtaining a PhD in 1976, he joined investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, where, according to James B. Stewart’s Den of Thieves, he had his head so far up his boss’s ass, he was known as “the Sniff”. [63] Recruited by Milken to work as one of Drexel’s traders, Ackerman soon became the junk bond king’s highest-paid subordinate. In 1988, he made $165 million, after putting together the $26 billion KKR leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. One year later, his net worth having soared to about $500 million, he quit finance and turned to whittling down his 1,100 page PhD dissertation into a book, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict. [64]

It should come as no surprise that a man who reeks of wealth, heads a private investment firm, and sits on the board of the premier U.S. establishment think-tank, defines a central element of democracy as protecting “property rights.” [65] Indeed, the promotion of this central tenet of capitalist ideology is the reason Freedom House, the organization he formerly headed, exists. “You can’t,” Ackerman insists, “have government constantly expropriating the fruits of the labor of its citizens.” [66] Which citizens? Since property rights, in the words of Ackerman and other owners of productive property, are the rights of ownership to what other people have produced, Ackerman equates democracy with capitalism. What he really wants to protect is the right of investors (himself included) to expropriate the fruits of other peoples’ labor. That might explain why he thinks the United States, the world’s premier champion of capitalist exploitation, “has an awful lot to teach people around the world.” [67]

Conclusion

The destabilizers are clever marketers. They choose their words carefully. They draw on the reputation of nonviolent resistance, popularized in the United States by the civil rights struggle led by Martin Luther King Jr. And they repeat the words “democracy” and “dictator” endlessly. It’s all part of a clever marketing campaign, one that has deceived more than a few leftists in the Western countries whose financial and corporate elite profit from NVR. But then, you have to be clever to take on the former CIA function of destabilizing foreign governments, make it seem progressive, and get away with it.

Let’s be clear on what NVR is, what its goals are, and who’s behind it. It’s not nonviolence as a moral or ethical position; it’s a form of warfare, aimed at taking political power in other people’s countries. And while it’s based on nonviolence, it has, in its reliance on sanctions and financial isolation as an integral part of alienating people from target governments, devastating consequences, as real as those violence produces. It’s not used by grassroots organizations in the West to force their own governments to change reactionary policies, or to take political power at home. Instead, it is invariably aimed at foreign governments that have resisted integration into the U.S. imperial orbit. The major proponents of NVR are not independent grassroots organizers, socialists or anarchists. They are, instead, members of the U.S. financial and foreign policy establishment, or are linked to them in subordinate roles through organizational and funding ties. NVR is hardly progressive; it is an imperialist project whose only redeeming feature is the possibility that it may stimulate Western leftists to think about how they too might use the destabilizers’ techniques to take power in their own country to win the authentic battle for democracy.

1a. Foer, Franklin, “Regime Change Inc. Peter Ackerman’s quest to topple tyranny,” The New Republic, April 16, 2005.
1b. Lake, Eli, “Iran launches a crackdown on democracy activists,” The New York Sun, March 14, 2006.
1c.  Spencer, Metta, “Gene Sharp 101,” Peace Magazine, July-Spetmeber, 2003.
2. Ibid.
3. Spencer, Metta, “Training pro-democracy movements: A conversation with Colonel Robert Helvey,” Peace Magazine, January-March, 2008. http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v24n1p12.htm
4. Dobbs, Michael, “US advice guided Milosevic opposition,” The Washington Post, December 11, 2000.
5. Beissinger, Mark R., “Promoting democracy: Is exporting revolution a constructive strategy?” Dissent, Winter 2006. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=155
6. Bacher, John, “Robert Helvey’s expert political defiance,” Peace Magazine, April-June, 2003. http://archive.peacemagazine.org/v19n2p10.htm
7. Ackerman, Peter, “Paths to peace: How Serbian students brought dictator down without a shot fired,” National Catholic Reporter, April 26, 2002.
8. Ackerman, Peter and Jack DuVall, “The nonviolent script for Iran,” Christian Science Monitor, July 22, 2003.
9. Ackerman, Peter and Jack DuVall, “With weapons of the will: How to topple Saddam Hussein – nonviolently,” Sojourners Magazine, September-October 2002 (Vol 31, No. 5, pp.20-23.)
10. Ackerman and DuVall, 2003.
11. Schaeffer-Duffy, Claire, “Regime change without bloodshed,” National Catholic Reporter, November 15, 2002.
12. Ackerman and DuVall, 2002.
13. Peace.Ca, “Gene Sharp: A Biographical Profile.” http://www.peace.ca/genesharp.htm .
14. Bacher, 2003.
15. Dobbs, 2000.
16. Ackerman and DuVall, 2002.
17. Ibid.
18. Ballen, Ken and Patrick Doherty, “Ahmadinejad is who Iranians want,” The Guardian (UK), June 15, 2009.
19. Bacher, 2003.
20. Dobbs, 2000.
21. Bacher, 2003.
22. Kazmin, Amy, “Defiance undeterred: Burmese activists seek ways to oust the junta,” Financial Times, December 6, 2007.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Bacher, 2003.
26. Shanahan, Noreen, “The NI Interview: Gene Sharp,” New Internationalist, Issue 296. November, 1997.
27. Foer, 2005.
28. Ackerman, 2002.
29. Ackerman and DuVall, 2002.
30. Pal, Amitabh, “Gene Sharp Interview,” The Progressive, March 2007.
31. Spencer, 2008.
32. CANVAS, “Is nonviolent action a form of warfare?” Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, 2004. http://www.canvasopedia.org/content/servbian_case/otpor_strategy.htm
33. 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996.
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.

34. Mueller, John, and Karl Mueller. 1999. Sanctions of mass destruction. Foreign Affairs vol.78, no.3:43-53.
35. Ackerman, Peter and Jack DuVall, “Homegrown revolution,” International Herald Tribune, December 29, 2004.
36. Ackerman, 2002.
37. Dobbs, 2000.
38. Ibid.
39. Dobbs, 2000; Bacher, 2003; Spencer, 2008;
40. Dobbs, 2000.
41. Bacher, 2003.
42. Dobbs, 2000.
43. Spencer, 2008.
44. Ackerman and DuVall, 2003.
45. Ackerman, Peter and Ramin Ahmadi, “Iran’s future? Watch the streets,” The New York Times, January 4, 2006.
46. Ibid.
47. Foer, 2005.
48. The Washington Post, June 30, 2008.
49. Pal, 2007.
50. Foer, 2005.
51. Ackerman and DuVall, 2003.
52. Bacher, 2003.  Bacher is an example of how parts of the peace movement promote US imperialism. In an October-December 2004  Peace Magazine review of Robert Helvey’s  On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Thinking About the Fundamentals, Bacher writes, “Rather than attempting to build costly and likely leaky shields for missiles from Iran and North Korea, why not seek nonviolently to change these regimes into democracies?”
53. Beissinger, 2006.
54. Foer, 2005.
55. Daragahi, Borzou, “A Georgian soldier of the Velvet Revolution,” The Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2008.
56. Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988. p. 28.
57. Foer, 2005.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Brzezinski, Zbigniew and Robert M. Gates, “Iran: Time for a New Approach: Report of an Independent Task Force Sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, July 19, 2004. http://www.cfr.org/publication/7194/iran.html .
61. Foer, 2005.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, “Interview with Peter Ackerman, founding chair of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict,” October 19, 2006. http://www.international.gc.ca/cip-pic/discussions/democracy-democratie/video/ackerman.aspx?lang=eng .
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.

The Role and Aims of US Democracy Promotion in the Attempted Color Revolution in Iran

By Stephen Gowans

As the head of Freedom House, a CIA-interlocked think-tank [1] that promotes free markets, free enterprise and free trade, Peter Ackerman has been at the forefront of efforts to topple foreign governments that place more emphasis on promoting the welfare of their citizens (and often their own bourgeoisie) than providing export and investment opportunities to US corporations, banks, and investors.

An ex-Wall Street investment banker who was once junk bond trader Michael Milken’s right-hand man, Ackerman’s speciality these days is regime change civil disobedience – training activists in the use of civil disobedience destabilization techniques to bring down foreign governments.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington-Wall Street insiders’ group that brings together corporate CEOs and lawyers, scholars, and government and military officials to recommend foreign policy positions to the US State Department, Ackerman also heads the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC). Working in parallel with billionaire financier George Soros’ Open Society Institute and The Albert Einstein Institution, the ICNC deploys civil disobedience specialists to teach “activists how to agitate for change against” governments on Washington’s regime change hit list, “going everywhere from Eastern Europe to train Belarusians to Turkey to coach Iranians.” [2]

Ackerman and other civil disobedience imperialists, like Stephen Zunes, a self-styled progressive who acts as chief apologist for Ackerman among leftists who have romantic illusions about “popular” uprisings [3] give their efforts to topple foreign governments the deceptively reassuring name “democracy promotion.” Democracy promotion, a Bush administration official once said, is a rubric to get people to support regime change that cannot be accomplished through military means. [4] Zunes has also sprung to the defense of Gene Sharp, the head of the Albert Einstein Institution, who advised right-wing Venezuelans on how to use civil disobedience to overthrow Hugo Chavez. More than two years ago, in a March, 2007 interview in The Progressive, Sharp, who says he has been working since 2004 with Iranian dissidents on how to bring down the government in Tehran, predicted that “if somebody doesn’t decide to use military means, it is very likely that there will be a peaceful national struggle there.” [5] In the same interview, Sharp set out his view on how the US should topple governments on its regime change hit list: by using overthrow movements trained in nonviolent direct action, rather than military intervention. This is a view supported by his chief defender, Zunes, who thinks imperialism through non-violence is somehow not imperialism.

Three years ago, and not long after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ackerman, along with Ramin Ahmadi, co-founder of the US State Department-funded Iran Human Rights Document Center [6], sketched out a scenario of Iranians using civil disobedience to topple the Iranian government.

In a January 6, 2006 International Herald Tribune article, prophetically titled “Iran’s future? Watch the streets,” the pair complained that Ahmadinejad promised “to redistribute wealth to the poor and curb capitalists,” and described the new president’s electoral victory as plunging Iranian “society into a mood of despair.”

Iranian society hadn’t plunged into despair, at least the large majority that elected Ahmadinejad hadn’t. Instead, it was the losers, “Iran’s parliamentary reformists” and the wealthy, Western-educated Iranians they represented, who were in despair. In Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s view, this stratum, a budding comprador class, was equal to Iranian society as a whole, rather than a minority whose interests were about to be curbed by the newly elected president.

Looking ahead, Ahmadi and his Freedom House co-author, pointed to “a grass-roots movement…waiting to be roused in Iran,” that would “demand real economic reform,” so long as “its cadres” were provided “a clear strategic vision and leadership.” “Grass-roots” by Ackerman’s and Ahamdi’s restrictive definition, was anyone targeted by Ahmadinejad’s redistribution and capitalist-curbing program. “Economic reform” was giving capital free rein.

The model for overthrowing the income-redistributing, capitalist-curbing Ahmadinejad, they wrote, would be the Polish trade union Solidarity, which worked to destabilize another set of capitalist-unfriendly income-redistributors, the communist government of Poland. Solidarity – the only trade union Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the CIA and the Wall Street Journal ever liked — was instrumental in the collapse of Polish communism, and more widely, in the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe. Western corporations and investors seeking export and investment opportunities in Eastern Europe – people represented by Ackerman and Soros — profited handsomely, but for ordinary people, communism’s demise has been a disaster. Poverty, unemployment, economic insecurity and inequality have soared. [7]

To help Iran’s disgruntled budding comprador class, the pair urged “nongovernmental organizations around the world” to “expand their efforts to assist Iranian civil society, women’s groups, unions and journalists. And the global news media,” they wrote, should “cover the steady stream of strikes, protests, and other acts of opposition.” In other words, the media should play a role by depicting the Iranian government as deeply unpopular to justify its overthrow.

Significantly, organizations like Freedom House, ICNC, and the Soros Open Society Institute, operating on grants from Western governments, parliaments and corporate foundations – all of which were opposed to Ahmadinejad for his asserting Iran’s right to a self-reliant civilian nuclear power industry and refusal to accelerate the sale of Iran’s state-owned economy to private investors — would provide the strategic vision, leadership, as well as the money and training, for Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s slumbering grass-roots movement.

In May of 2005, R. Nicholas Burns, then U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, said the U.S. was ready to hike funding to groups within Iran seeking regime change. The United States had already spent $1.5 million in 2004 and $3 million in 2005 on exile groups with contacts inside Iran. [8]

Burns equated the ramped up spending to “taking a page from the playbook” on Ukraine and Georgia, where, as the New York Times explained,” in those countries the United States gave money to the opposition and pro-democracy groups, some of which later supported the peaceful overthrow of the governments in power.” [9]

But it would take longer to spark a color revolution in Iran, Burns warned. “We don’t have a platform to do it. The country isn’t free enough to do it. It’s a much more oppressive environment than Ukraine was…during the Orange Revolution” where the U.S. was able to take advantage of the country’s openness to overturn the election of a pro-Russian government to install a pro-Washington one. [10]

On February 15, 2005, then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added $75 million to the $10 million already earmarked for U.S. government programs to “support networks for Iranian reformers, political dissidents and human rights activists.” Two-thirds of the additional funding was to be used to “increase television broadcasting to 24 hours a day all week in Farsi into Iran.” [11] The purpose of the broadcasting was to sour the population on the Ahmadinejad government.

The country was soon awash in regime change funding, a cornucopia that led some opponents of the government to beseech the United States to tighten its pursue strings. The funding, they said, made all opponents, especially those with Western contacts, appear to be potential conspirators. The group added that “no credible civil society member would want to be associated with such a fund.” [12] But there were many non-credible ones that did.

Meanwhile, Ackerman’s ICNC was inviting Iranians to workshops to teach them how peaceful revolts in Georgia, the Philippines and elsewhere were set off. Training sessions were held “every month or so, hoping to foment a non-violent conflict in Iran.” [13]

Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s comparison of Iran’s aspiring color revolutionaries to Solidarity is only partly correct. Unlike the former, who tend to be well-heeled, well-educated, and to have spent time abroad, Solidarity was born of a genuinely working class grass-roots movement, which had legitimate grievances against Poland’s Communist government. [14] The grievances of the aspiring color revolutionaries, however, are rooted in a contested election which the balance of evidence suggests was fair. A Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored poll, carried out three weeks before the election, found that Ahmadinejad led his nearest rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, by a margin of more than two to one, similar to the outcome of the vote. [15] The head of Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, hardly an Ahmadinejad supporter, found no greater irregularities in Iran’s presidential election than in those of Western countries. [16] On the other hand, claiming that an election is stolen, and using the alleged fraud as a pretext to launch a campaign of civil disobedience, is a hallmark of the regime change programs Ackerman has been at the center of. [17]

Where the color revolutionaries and Solidarity are similar is in serving as the vehicles of the same class. Solidarity was quickly hijacked by anti-communist intellectuals who provided the strategic vision and leadership, with the help of financing from Eastern European émigrés assisted by the CIA. They had no interest in helping the Polish working class, which remained solidly committed to socialism. [18] They sought, instead, to destabilize the Polish government.

Likewise, Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s slumbering “grassroots” movement has been roused by civil disobedience regime change promoters from outside and wealthy locals who have soaked up pro-imperialist values while studying abroad. They’ve taken a leaf from Western-backed color revolutions carried out in other countries, ones Ackerman and company have been instrumental in promoting. Their interest lies not in the social welfare of the majority of Iranians, who appear to have voted for Ahmadinejad, but in destabilizing the Iranian government to serve their own narrow class interests.

Many leftists have turned a blind eye to the class character of Ackerman’s and Ahmadi’s “grassroots movement,” as well as to the source of its strategic vision and leadership. They have done so out of infatuation with the romance of a seemingly popular uprising, dislike of Ahmadinejad’s social conservatism, and the mistaken belief that the uprising is about democracy and human rights. The “grassroots” movement is hardly grassroots, and its goals are hardly the lofty ones leftists have attributed to it. They are, instead, the goals a wealthy former Wall Street investment banker turned regime change promoter and Washington-insider and wealthy Iranians who have studied at expensive universities in the imperial center, are able to share in common – toppling a government that stands in the way of their mutual enrichment.

Postscript

According to a March 14, 2006 New York Sun article by staff reporter Eli Lake (“Iran launches a crackdown on democracy activists”), Ackerman and Ahmadi set up workshops in April 2005 to train Iranian dissidents in human rights documentation and nonviolent resistance, activities Ackerman has termed elsewhere as destabilization aimed at “taking power.”

Ahmadi was involved in setting up a workshop in Dubai, sponsored by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The center was granted $1 million in 2004 by a U.S. “government aid program intended for Iran’s opposition inside the country.”

 “Dubai,” notes Lake, “is emerging as a nexus for the West’s efforts to aid Iran’s opposition” where the U.S. State Department sent “10 special diplomats to monitor activities of (the Iranian government) and assist the opposition.”  

Ackerman’s ICNC also held at least one session with opponents of the Ahmadinejad government, using members of Otpor, the Serb destabilization group trained, funded and equipped by the US government in techniques developed by Gene Sharp, as trainers.

 Sharp, notes Lake, “is generally credited with being the first person to study rigorously the techniques of mass civil disobedience and place them in the context of traditional military strategy.”

1. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988, p. 28.
2. The Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2008.
3. Stephen Gowans, “Stephen Zunes and the Struggle for Overseas Profit,” gowans.wordpress.com, February 18, 2008. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/stephen-zunes-and-the-struggle-for-overseas-profits/
4. Guy Dinmore, “US and UK develop democracy strategy for Iran,” Financial Times (UK), April 21, 2006.
5. Stephen Zunes, George Cicariello-Maher & Eva Golinger, “Debate on the Albert Einstein Institution and its involvement in Venezuela,” August 5, 2008. www.venezuelanlysis.com, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3690; Amitabh Pal, “Gene Sharp Interview,” The Progressive, March, 2007. http://www.progressive.org/mag/intv0307
6. Steve Weissman, “Iran: Nonviolence 101,” www.truthout.org, June 21, 2009. http://www.truthout.org/062109Y
7. Stephen Gowans, “Hail the Reds,” MLToday.com, October 23, 2004. http://mltoday.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=186
8. The New York Times, May 29, 2005.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. The New York Times, February 16, 2006.
12. Carah Ong, “Iranians Speak Out on Regime Change Slush Fund,” MRZine, July 15, 2008. http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/ong150708.html
13. Reuters, April 30, 2003.
14. Albert Szymanski, Class Struggle in Socialist Poland, Praeger, New York, 1984.
15. Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, “Ahmadinejad is who Iranians want,” The Guardian (UK), June 15, 2009; Stephen Gowans, “Iranian electoral fraud: A skeptic’s view,” gowans.wordpress.com, June 16, 2009. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/iranian-electoral-fraud-a-sceptic%e2%80%99s-view/
16. George Galloway, “I’m not a traitor…or a hypocrite,” DailyRecord.co.uk, June 29, 2009.
17. Stephen Gowans, “Learning for color revolutions,” gowans.wordpress.com, March 16, 2009. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/learning-from-color-revolutions/
18. Szymanski

Iranian Electoral Fraud: A Skeptic’s View

By Stephen Gowans

So, the presidential election in Iran was rigged. How do we know this? Because the Western media almost invariably say it was. How do they know? Because the main opposition challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi – who officially got far fewer votes than the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — said it was. And how does Mousavi know the election was rigged? Because he didn’t win it.

It’s clear Mousavi thinks he won, but is their any evidence independent of the candidate’s own opinion to back the claim he actually scored an electoral upset?

The answer is, not much. And the evidence on the other side, that Ahmadinejad won, is just as strong, if not stronger.

Washington Post staff writers Glenn Kessler and Jon Cohen, in an article titled “Signs of fraud abound, but not hard evidence,” point out “there were few independent polls taken before the election and no exit polls afterward, making it extremely difficult to assess the accuracy of the vote counts announced by the government.” And making it extremely difficult to assess the merits of Mousavi’s claim that he is the real winner.

But didn’t Mousavi hold large rallies in Tehran? Yes, but so too did Ahmadinejad. And Western media outlets, the journalists say, are concentrated in Tehran, where Mousavi’s support was strongest. That created “a misleading picture of the Iranian electorate.”

Kessler and Cohen spoke to Walter Mebane, a University of Michigan professor who specializes in uncovering crooked elections. He told the reporters “there are suspicious elements, but there’s no solid evidence of fraud.”

That’s why “the United States and other Western powers” have failed to “denounce the results as unacceptable.” There’s just no compelling evidence.

Plus, there’s evidence that Ahmadinejad “simply won a commanding victory.” Flynt Leverett of the New American Foundation, a US ruling class think-tank, says Ahmadinejad is “a really good campaigner” who seemed to have slowed Mousavi’s momentum in their final debate.

More tellingly, a May 11-20 telephone poll co-sponsored by the New American Foundation, and by another ruling class think-thank, Terror Free Tomorrow, “showed Ahmadinejad with a 2 to 1 lead over Mousavi,” consistent with the official outcome of the election.

What hasn’t been acknowledged is that Mousavi may be perpetrating a fraud of his own: that of deliberately creating an expectation he won in order to declare the election illegitimate.

With the Western media long ago having relegated Ahmadinejad to its rogues’ gallery, it was certain that whatever damning allegations Mousavi would hurl at him would be treated by the Western media as gospel. Once CNN, the BBC and other Western media outlets began to broadcast Mousavi’s charges of electoral fraud, the allegations quickly assumed the status of incontestable fact.

Mousavi declared himself the winner of the election before the polls were even closed, standard operating procedure for those seeking to instigate a color revolution. Color revolutions are insurrections sparked by claims of electoral fraud. Failing at the polls, a challenger calls for his supporters to take to the streets to pressure the government to step down. The Western media have played a role by making the charges of electoral fraud seem legitimate, by the simple ploy of treating them as such.

While the election may very well have been rigged, there is little solid evidence it was. At the same time, there is reason to be suspicious of Mousavi’s motivations. And as always, there’s reason to be skeptical of Western media coverage of foreign affairs and to be equally wary of their power to create incontestable truths – freighted with political baggage — out of thin evidence.

Learning from color revolutions

By Stephen Gowans

A common complaint made against critics of color revolutions, the Western-engineered insurrections that have brought neo-liberal governments to power in Serbia (the 5th October Overthrow), Georgia (the Rose Revolution), and Ukraine (the Orange Revolution), and have been attempted in Zimbabwe and Belarus, is that they err in minimizing the degree to which these revolutions are spontaneous, grass-roots-organized eruptions of popular anger against oppressive “regimes.”

One such defender of color revolutions, Philippe Duhamel, a “non-violent actionist (sic) and an educator for social change” takes issue with criticism of non-violence, pro-democracy activists who cheer on, and contribute to the organizing of, color revolutions (1). He argues that:

1. Criticism of such color revolution supporters as Stephen Zunes for his connections to ruling class foundations is unfair, and amounts to guilt by association; (2)
2. Color revolutions provide a model for non-violent social change in the West;
3. Anti-government mobilizations in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine were not imported from the West, but were grass-roots in origin.

Duhamel argues it is “possible for somebody to study the dynamics of popular revolutions and want to further nonviolent methods…without necessarily becoming a fan of the types of regime or rulers that emerge” – an implicit acknowledgement that the governments that have been swept to power by color revolutions, aided by “non-violent actionists and educators for social change,” are not the kinds of governments “pro-democracy” activists care to be associated with. No wonder. Western-directed uprisings have produced governments in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia committed to the Washington Consensus of harshness to the weak and indulgence to Western business interests. Considering that these uprisings have cleared the way for the ascension to power of governments that cater to the interests of the same Western governments and corporations that funded them (and hired the West’s docents of non-violent social change as color revolution advisors), they can hardly be said to be popular, progressive or democratic.

As regards studying color revolutions to apply their lessons to bringing about social change in the West, one must ask why it is that the model has enjoyed vaunted success in spring-boarding to power neo-liberal governments outside the West, but has failed to bring about a popular revolution in the West. (3) Color revolutions have relied heavily on funding from imperialist governments, ruling class foundations, and wealthy investors. (4) Western funding provides enormous advantages that genuine popular revolutions not aimed at serving imperialist goals struggle (usually unsuccessfully) to obtain. Obviously, Western governments and corporate foundations don’t fund revolutions in their own countries. (5) For this reason, color revolutions have been strictly non-Western phenomena.

In Serbia, where the 5th October Overthrow succeeded, and in Zimbabwe and Belarus, where Western governments and corporate foundations have worked to replicate the color revolutions of Georgia and Ukraine, economic warfare and threats of military intervention were, and are, important regime change inputs. They conduce to the success of anti-government uprisings by establishing regime change as a necessary condition for ending the crisis conditions economic warfare and threatened (or actual) military intervention create. Whether techniques of non-violent direct action are more effective than other means of bringing about revolutionary change under siege conditions is an open question. What is clear is that in Ukraine and Georgia, anti-government mobilizations were bankrolled, organized and assisted by Western governments, corporate foundations and billionaire investor George Soros. Could anti-government mobilizations succeed in toppling governments in the West without the strategic advice, polling, legal support, media infrastructure, public relations backing, legal expertise, civil disobedience training, leadership education, hiring of full-time organizers, creation of unified political opposition parties, unqualified media support, and mountains of spending money that Western governments and corporate foundations have showered on color revolutionaries outside the West?

Duhamel and other pro-democracy non-violence activists argue that major social mobilizations cannot be created on demand from a socio-economic vacuum or imported from the US, but critics of color revolutions haven’t tried to make this case. The argument they make is that engineered uprisings depend on three critical inputs: a crisis (induced by economic warfare, actual or threatened military intervention, or related to the impugned legitimacy of an election); an understanding that relief from the crisis is contingent on removal of the government; and a united political opposition working with an interlocked civil society apparatus pursuing clear and specific goals related to removal of the government. (6) The idea that popular uprisings of sufficient mass and coherence to topple governments arise spontaneously is a pleasant thought, but fatally minimizes the necessity of crises, the establishment of a contingent relation between ending the crisis and overthrowing the government, and the advantages of generous funding in building an opposition capable of carrying out the assigned task of sweeping the government away.

The goals of color revolutionaries are narrow and circumscribed and quite different from those of truly popular revolutions. Color revolutionaries care about toppling the current government, not about the government that follows. Not surprisingly, color revolution enthusiasts in the West are usually completely unaware of the nature and character of governments that have been swept to power by color revolutions. They celebrate the process, not the outcome. Unlike color revolutions, truly popular revolutions have been concerned first with establishing new systems of government and second with removing the existing government because it stood in the way of achieving this goal. Color revolutions, however, are inspired by no positive vision, only a negative one.

The beneficiaries of color revolutions have been neo-liberal governments committed to privatizing publicly-owned assets, providing a low-wage, low-tax environment for Western investors, eliminating tariffs and subsidies to please Western exporters, and signing up to integration into Nato to please the Pentagon. For all their boasting about being pro-democratic, color revolutions haven’t brought democratic governments to power (democratic in the sense of representing the interests of the mass of citizens.) Since the outcome of ostensibly pro-democracy revolutions cannot, therefore, be said to be truly democratic, why it is that color revolutionaries don’t try again, if, indeed, democracy, or at least, removal of oppressive antidemocratic governments, is their true aim? Surely, equipped with techniques of non-violent activism imparted by corporate foundation-supported educators for social change, a movement, emboldened by success in toppling one oppressive government, would have no trouble toppling another – or at least, giving it a good try. Yet the post-revolutionary governments of Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, which have been no better than the ones they replaced, and in the case of Serbia, far worse, have faced no popular insurrections that have threatened to bring them down.(7)

Consider the case of Georgia’s Rose Revolution. The popular insurrection that brought US-trained corporate lawyer, and George W. Bush-admirer, Mikhail Saakashvili to power, has not ushered in a new, democratic, day. Instead, Georgia has become decidedly less democratic and emphatically friendlier to US corporate and military interests.

Lincoln A. Mitchell, a Georgia expert at Columbia University says that,

“The reality is that the Saakashvili government is the fourth one-party state that Georgia has had during the last 20 years, going back to the Soviet period. And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the restrictions on media freedom.” (8)

According to Sozar Subari, Georgia’s ombudsman for human rights,

“That Georgia is on the road to democracy and has a free press is the main myth created by Georgia that the West has believed in. We have some of the best freedom-of-expression laws in the world, but in practice, the government is so afraid of criticism that it has felt compelled to raid media offices and to intimidate journalists and bash their equipment.” (9)

Indeed, so severe are the new government’s restrictions on the press that Nino Zuriashvili, a Georgian investigative journalist, says, “The paradox is that there was more media freedom before the Rose Revolution.” (10)

So why haven’t the Rose Revolutionaries trotted out their pro-democracy, non-violence techniques to oust the oppressive, anti-democratic and violence-prone Saakashvili (who sent troops to Iraq, started a war in South Ossetia, and sent riot police into the streets to bash the heads of demonstrators protesting the loss of their jobs)? One reason why is because they’re otherwise engaged doing Uncle Sam’s work elsewhere in the world. Instead of staying at home to topple the oppressive Saakashvili government, the non-violent, pro-democracy activists who helped organize the Rose Revolution have been “deployed abroad to teach democracy activists how to agitate for change against their autocratic governments, going everywhere from Eastern Europe to train Belarusians to Turkey to coach Iranians” (11) but not Georgia.

Who deployed them abroad? Their employers, billionaire financier George Soros and “the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or Canvas. The group is funded in part by the International Republican Institute, which many describe as the international arm of the GOP, and Washington-based Freedom House, which receives most of its funding from the U.S. government” (12) and is interlocked with the CIA. (13)

The other reason a second Rose Revolution hasn’t come along to sweep away the anti-democratic, pro-violence, Saakashvili is that while “U.S. support for Saakashvili resulted in a sharp increase in foreign aid to the Georgian government…funding for the advocacy groups that had been at the heart of the Rose Revolution dried up, forcing organizations to shut down programs that could monitor and challenge his decisions.” (14)

In other words, Washington cut off the funding that fuelled the Rose Revolution, and, predictably, without the impetus of generous funding, no grass-roots organized popular mobilization has arisen (or has, but is so starved for funds, and has such a low profile as a consequence, that nobody has noticed.) And yet pro-democracy, non-violence activists, who take money from imperialist governments and corporate foundations to train Belarusians, Iranians, Zimbabweans and Venezuelans to overthrow their governments, insist that color revolutions are not fuelled by Western lucre, but are grass-roots, independent, uprisings against oppression.

Finally, the idea that color revolutions are carried out non-violently, while also a pleasant thought, is without foundation. Engineered uprisings invariably arise in the context of implied or threatened violence, whether it is the persistent threat of non-violent demonstrators suddenly turning into a violent mob, or the threat of Western military intervention, lurking in the background of events related to efforts to oust the Mugabe government in Zimbabwe, and actual military intervention preceding the Serbian 5th October Overthrow.

Western-assisted revolutions have also been aided by the efforts of Western governments to destabilize target countries through economic warfare. The West imposed sanctions on the former Yugoslavia, and maintains sanctions on Zimbabwe and Belarus. As mentioned, these destabilizing efforts are accompanied by signals to the besieged population. Topple your government and the threats and sanctions end. These conditions (blackmail, in straightforward language) give birth to an incipient movement to overthrow the government, coalescing around the existing opposition. The hiring of full-time anti-government organizers, grants to establish “independent” media to shape public opinion, Voice of America and Radio Liberty broadcasts to further tilt public sentiment away from the local government, the hardships imposed by the West’s economic warfare, the training of activists in techniques of popular insurrection, diplomatic maneuvers to isolate the country internationally — these things together establish the conditions for the success of an engineered insurrection. At the same time, they challenge the idea that color revolutions are pure, spontaneous, and grass-roots-organized, not contrived, nurtured and facilitated from without.

Western-engineered insurrections cannot, then, serve as a paradigm for organizing in the West, for the ingredients essential to their success could never be expected in the foreseeable future to be present in the case of attempted popular revolutions in the US, UK, France or elsewhere in the Western world. The necessary crisis conditions, and the contingency between relief from the crisis and removal of the government, will have to arise independently of the will of Western ruling classes. In Serbia, Zimbabwe and Belarus, they have arisen owing to the will of Western ruling classes.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from attempted and successful color revolutions. There are two important lessons to be learned:

o Funding, and the organization that generous funding enormously facilitates, cannot be underestimated in its power to bring about disciplined mass mobilizations guided by clear and specific goals.
o Organizers serve the interests of those who provide the funding.

From this we can conclude that for a revolution to serve popular interests, its funding, unlike that of color revolutions (which have served Western corporate and military interests), must be popularly sourced. Non-popularly sourced leadership training, training in techniques of civil disobedience and insurrection, “independent” media and NGOs, serve the interests of their funders.

As regards the guilt by association of Stephen Zunes and his peers, it can be said that what they are guilty of is taking money from Western governments, ruling class foundations and wealthy individuals to train activists to topple foreign governments. The purpose of these activities, whether the guilty acknowledge it or not, is to clear the way for the ascension to power of reactionary dependent governments committed to catering to imperialist interests. What Zunes et al are associated with, then, are the outcomes of these insurrections – harsher, more uncertain, and certainly less democratic lives for the local populations, but enhanced profit-making opportunities for Western banks, corporations and investors. That the funding for these activities comes from Western governments, corporate-sponsored foundations and wealthy investors is no accident.

The argument of non-violent actionists and educators for social change that this funding contributes in no way to the success of antigovernment uprisings and in no way shapes their outcome is an obfuscation spurred by obvious self-interest. Those who take lucre from imperialist governments and corporate foundations to help bring to power foreign governments to cater to imperialist interests must be held accountable for the outcomes of their actions. They must not be allowed to hide behind the delusion that they’re only studying the dynamics of “popular revolutions” abroad in order to understand how to be bring about social change non-violently at home. Anyone who works diligently to overthrow foreign governments in order to clear the way for the more vigorous pursuit of imperialist interests can hardly be expected to be genuinely interested in bringing about truly democratic change at home.

1. http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/the-war-over-south-ossetia/#comments
2. Zunes has been criticized from the left by Michael Barker, “Peace activists, criticism and non-violent imperialism,” MRZine, January 8, 2008, http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/barker080108.html and “Sharp reflection warranted: Non-violence in the service of imperialism,” Swans Commentary, June 30, 2008, http://www.swans.com/library/art14/barker01.html; John Bellamy Foster, “Reply to Stephen Zunes on imperialism and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict,” MRZine, January 17, 2008, http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/foster170108.html; George Ciccariello-Maher and Eva Golinger, “Making Excuses for Empire: Reply to Defenders of the AEI,” August 4, 2008, Venezuelanalysis.com, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3690; Netfa Freeman, “Zimbabwe and the battle of ideas,” The Black Agenda Report, September 25, 2008, http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=node/10802; and Stephen Gowans, “Stephen Zunes and the struggle for overseas profits,” What’s Left, February 18, 2008, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/stephen-zunes-and-the-struggle-for-overseas-profits/.
3. Stephen Gowans, “Stephen Zunes and the struggle for overseas profits,” What’s Left, February 18, 2008, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/stephen-zunes-and-the-struggle-for-overseas-profits/ and “The war over South Ossetia,” September 4, 2008, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/the-war-over-south-ossetia/
4. Michael Barker, “Regulating revolutions in Eastern Europe,” ZNet, November 1, 2006, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/2846
5. The funding that ruling class foundations and Western governments provide to left and progressive groups in the West is counter-revolutionary, intended to channel potential militancy into bureaucratic, litigious and electoral arenas where ruling class forces have the upper hand. Foundations are keen to support left groups that promote the idea that “we can change the world without taking power” and limit their goals to “pressuring elites”, i.e., leaving capitalist ruling class structures in place. Foundation grants are also used to upset the development of class consciousness by promoting identity politics and particularism. There is plenty of foundation funding available to support groups organized around women’s issues, ethnic media, gay, lesbian and transgender concerns, the elderly, and so on, but not for those working to create a working class conscious of its collective interests and place in history and the world. See Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism, State University of New York Press, 2003.
6. Zimbabwe provides an example of how Western governments, media and foundations work together to destabilize target countries to promote anti-government uprisings. Western efforts to replicate Eastern European color revolutions in Zimbabwe have so far failed, possibly owing to the reality that the formula has become evident and target governments know what to expect and can take defensive actions. See Stephen Gowans, “Zimbabwe at War,” What’s Left, June 24, 2008, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/zimbabwe-at-war/ and “US government report undermines Zimbabwe opposition’s claim of independence,” What’s Left, October 4, 2008, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/us-government-report-undermines-zimbabwe-opposition%e2%80%99s-claim-of-independence/
7. For a summary of post-5th October Overthrow Serbia see Stephen Gowans, “Stephen Zunes and the struggle for overseas profits,” What’s Left, February 18, 2008, http://gowans.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/stephen-zunes-and-the-struggle-for-overseas-profits/.
8. New York Times, October 7, 2008.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Borzou Daragahi “Soros’ Army: A Georgian soldier of the Velvet Revolution,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2008
12. Ibid.
13. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon Books, 1988, p. 28. 17.
14. Philip P. Pan, “Georgia, a nation stalled on the road to democracy,” The Washington Post, March 9, 2009.

West Takes Aim at Belarus’ Pro-Social Policies

Belarus is one of the few remaining genuine alternatives to the neo-liberal economic order. A US nurtured and bankrolled fifth column is working with Washington to topple it from within.

By Stephen Gowans

The US government has nurtured a fifth column in Belarus to help overthrow the Lukashenko government to replace its socialist-oriented policies with a made-in-the-USA neo-liberal regime that favours US investors and corporations.

The US State Department last year provided funding to five opposition parties and 566 opposition activists, and support and training to over 70 civil society organizations, 71 antigovernment journalists and 21 opposition media outlets in Belarus. On top of that, 900 Belarusian youth were enrolled tuition-free at US government-expense at the European Humanities University. The university is an alternative to Belarusian state schools which the US government condemns for failing to “support the country’s transformation to a free-market democracy.” [1]

The US government has been nurturing Belarus’s anti-Lukashenko coalition since President George W. Bush signed the Belarus Democracy Act in October 2004. The act authorizes the US government to spend millions of dollars to create antigovernment media in Belarus, train election monitors to discredit Belarus’s elections, and back civil society organizations opposed to the Lukashenko government. [2] Washington pledged nearly $12 million to Belarusian antigovernment forces to fight the March 2006 presidential election. [3] The opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, lost badly, an outcome Washington attributed to vote fraud. But even Western newspapers and polls paid for by the Republican Party’s international arm, the IRI, acknowledged that Lukashenko would win the vote handily and that the opposition’s support was in the single digits. Having failed to meet its regime change objective in 2006, Washington authorized further spending of $27 million in each of 2007 and 2008 to support opponents of the Lukashenko government. [4]

The mantra from Washington, echoed by dodgy leftists close to the US ruling class, is that Belarus is governed by an authoritarian president who abuses power to win elections. As we’ll see, this is an invention used to justify US meddling in Belarus’ internal politics. What authoritarian measures the Lukashenko government have taken have been defensive reactions to blatant Western attempts to engineer a free-market coup d’etat.

Contrary to the charge that he is Europe’s last dictator, Lukashenko is an elected president whose electoral victories have been based on wide popular support, earned by promoting the interests of the vast majority of Belarus’ citizens. Washington’s real grievance with the Belarusian government is that its policies are at odds with the interests of US investors and corporations.

Here’s what’s wrong with Belarus, according to the CIA:

• Not enough structural reform.
• Market socialism.
• Private companies have been re-nationalized.
• A wide range of income redistributive policies has produced levels of income equality almost unmatched in the world, but these policies have made Belarus unattractive as a destination for US investment. [5]

Here’s the view of the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal:

• Foreign banks are virtually shut out of the country.
• US investors are barred from buying land.
• Basic goods and services are subsidized by the state.
• Retail prices are regulated.
• The government continues to rely on state-owned enterprises.
• Tariff barriers and subsidies make it difficult for US companies to compete in Belarus. [6]

The Economist’s Intelligence Unit complains that:

• Belarus follows active policies of import suppression and export promotion.
• Lukashenko “pursues a policy of pervasive state involvement in the economy.”
• The government denies ownership rights to the commons, keeping natural resources, waters, forests and land under public control. [7]

The Washington Post says “The economy of Belarus is still state-controlled (and) the nation’s food is grown on collective farms.” [8] And The New York Times points out that “Mr. Lukashenko…has steadily turned Belarus into a miniature version of the Soviet Union itself, with a state-run economy.” [9]

Is Belarus under Lukashenko really as socialist-oriented as US establishment sources say?

Tatyana Golubeva, general secretary of the Communist Party of Belarus, part of a governing coalition with Lukashenko, says “Belarus is still on the socialist path of development. We are one of the few that never gave up.”

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez praises Belarus “as a model of a social state,” likening it to the society Chavez’s Bolivarian revolutionaries are building in South America. [10] Chavez, who calls Lukashenko “a brother in arms” [11] awarded the Belarusian leader Venezuela’s highest award for foreigners, the Order of the Liberator. Lukashenko has also been awarded the highest honor Cuba bestows on foreigners, the Order of Jose Marti.

Belarus retains the symbols and social supports of its Soviet past. An imposing monument to Lenin still guards the approaches to the government headquarters. Education through university is still free, and university students continue to enjoy living stipends as they did in Soviet days. [12] Much of the economy remains under public control.

Clearly, Belarus isn’t the kind of place the CEO’s, corporate board members and investment bankers who dominate decision-making in Washington can warm up to. Sure, Minsk’s policies are good for ordinary Belarusians. Basic goods and services are kept affordable, the public controls the commanding heights of the economy, and income equality is virtually unmatched in the world. But what about the interests of American investors and exporters? Where are the profitable investment opportunities? Where are the lucrative export markets?

Building an opposition

To oust Lukashenko and his socialist-leaning policies, the US government set out to mold a disparate group of opposition parties and activists into a single, coherent unit, guided by a single executive with authority to enforce common goals and strategy. The international arm of the Republican Party, the IRI, has assumed a leadership role in focusing “primarily on the process of consolidating and unifying all of the pro-democratic elements in the country into a single coalition.” [13]

True to the game plan the US government has followed in engineering soft coups in other countries, the opposition has been given a name that underscores its professed struggle for democracy against an alleged dictatorship. While the West created the Democratic Opposition of Serbia to oppose what it called the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic, and the Movement for Democratic Change to oppose the misnamed dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, in Belarus the US-backed and funded opposition goes by the name of the United Democratic Forces (UDF). Its goal is to oppose and topple the alleged dictatorship, and socialist-oriented policies, of Alexander Lukashenko.

The US government uses the word “dictatorship” in a unique way. Belarus is decried by Washington as a dictatorship even though the country’s political system is a multi-party democracy with universal adult suffrage. [14] Dictatorship is to be understood in the world of Washington’s regime changers, not as rule by an individual or committee, where suffrage is absent, but as rule by elected officials the US government opposes because their policies are either immediately or indirectly at odds with the interests of US capital. Branding a socialist or nationalist leader as a dictator provides the US government with a pretext to sanitize its interference in the internal politics of foreign countries by misrepresenting its meddling as democracy-promotion.

The US government has likewise tried to discredit the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, referring to Chavez as a would-be autocrat, to justify nurturing and bankrolling the “democratic” opposition. Chavez, Milosevic, Mugabe and Lukashenko have all pursued policies that have rejected, in various degrees, the free-market, free-enterprise, free-trade orthodoxy Washington insists all countries (but itself) adopt.

The UDF comprises 10 opposition parties and more than 200 NGOs. In 2005, the coalition selected Alexander Milinkevich as its candidate for president. Terry Nelson, national political director of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, practically ran Milinkevich’s 2006 campaign, according to The New York Times. [15] But help from the Republicans was not enough to overcome Milinkevich’s failure to resonate with the public. The UDF’s own polling, paid for by the IRI, “showed the ratings of Milinkevich and other opposition leaders in the single digits.” [16] Lukashenko won the election handily with 83 percent of the vote, a lopsided victory the US government immediately attributed to vote rigging, on grounds that no one could be that popular.

But there are plenty of elections elsewhere won by higher margins which the US government has endorsed as fair reflections of the democratic will. The US-educated and fiercely pro-US ruling class Mikhail Saakashvili polled 97 percent in Georgia’s 2004 presidential elections, without Washington batting an eye. Kurmanbek Bakiyev won 89 percent of the vote in Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution, without incurring Washington’s disapproval. And Eduard Shevardnadze, when he was still Washington’s man in Georgia, polled 92 percent of the vote in Georgia’s 1992 election, without repercussions.

Laying aside US government double standards, there are a number of reasons to believe the 2006 presidential vote in Belarus was free and fair. All the polls, including the opposition’s IRI-paid poll, anticipated a Lukashenko victory as a virtual certainty. This reflected Lukashenko’s enormous popularity, something even members of the opposition acknowledge. [17] “Even his fiercest opponents don’t question the accuracy of independent polls that rate him the most popular politician in the country.” [18]

Lukashenko’s popularity derives from policies which favour the working class over Western investors. He has,

“presided over a continual increase in real wages for several years…He has also cut (the value added tax), brought down inflation, halved the number of people in poverty” and created “the fairest distribution of incomes of any country in the region.” [19]

Belarus’ egalitarianism has been a particular irritant to the US government. While the Lukashenko government’s income-redistribution policies have maintained a narrow gap between the rich and poor, they have also reduced the attractiveness of Belarus to the US corporate rich as a venue for profitable investment. With a choice of serving ordinary Belarusians or catering to corporate America, Lukashenko chose the former and incurred the wrath of the latter.

Beginning in April 2007, the IRI, along with the Democratic Party’s international arm, the NDI, and the Council of Europe, hosted a series of meetings with UDF members, culminating in a national congress attended by 693 delegates. The purpose of the meetings was to formulate coalition strategy and to draft a transitional constitution to be rolled out if and when the UDF topples the government and seizes the reins of power [20] (at which point it will sell off public enterprises, end subsidies for basic goods and services, and reverse Lukashenko’s income redistribution policies.)

Uncle Sam’s NGOs

The US government also provides “extensive support, grant making, leadership and capacity building to over 60 indigenous NGOS.” The US State Department, PACT and the NDI have assisted 60 NGOs in various ways, purchasing goods and services for the organizations, setting up cross-border exchanges with other NGOs, offering advice on strategic planning, and doling out over 40 grants. To strengthen connections among NGOs, the sponsors established a Leadership Fellows Program, to build leadership skills among members of the anti-Lukashenko opposition. [21]

The NDI, “held a youth conference in February 2007 to assist youth groups in their efforts to mobilize, build organizational capacity, (and) improve cooperation.” Not to be outdone, the IRI hosted 10 sessions for more than 300 Belarusian youths, to train “the next generation of political leaders.” These sessions were led by “trainers from across democratic Europe,” [22] non-violent pro-democracy activists trained to foment uprisings in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. Every few months, disciples of Gene Sharp, the US-based guru of non-violent regime change, are “deployed abroad to teach democracy activists how to agitate for change…going everywhere from Eastern Europe to train Belarusians to Turkey to coach Iranians.” The Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, bankrolled in part by the IRI and the CIA-interlocked-Freedom House, plays a leadership role in these training sessions. [23]

Along with Renaissance, Pontis, and the Eurasia Foundations, the US State Department helped found the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank of pro-US ideologues prepared to disgorge policy advice congenial to the US government’s free-market, free-enterprise, free-trade ideology. [24] When the media need quotes from “experts,” they turn to BISS.

As part of efforts to shape public opinion, the US State department funds European Radio for Belarus, an anti-Lukashenko radio station, joining Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, US-government-sponsored propaganda radio stations, in preaching the anti-Lukashenko, anti-socialist, pro-neo-liberal gospel. On top of ERB, Western regime changers doled out $24 million to Media Consulta, a German-led consortium to broadcast anti-government news into Belarus. Individual European countries have also kicked in. [25]

The fifth column goes to Washington

The Republican Party has been heavily involved in nurturing Belarus’s opposition, meeting frequently with its key activists. In April 2005, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held meetings in Lithuania with members of the opposition, discussing the use of “mass pressure for change,” [26] and pledging $5 million in backing, to be provided through the IRI. [27] It is typical of color revolutions, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the ouster of Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia, for the US-sponsored opposition to accuse the government of electoral fraud. This provides an occasion to mobilize opposition supporters to take to the streets to force the government to step down. At her meetings in Lithuania, Rice told opposition representatives that the impending presidential election would be an “excellent opportunity” to challenge the government. [28] The opposition followed Rice’s strategy to a tee, not as much “running an election campaign as…trying to organize an uprising.” [29] The New York Times commented that Milinkevich was “campaigning not for the presidency but for an uprising.” [30] For the opposition, an uprising was the only realistic path to power. Polls paid for by the IRI “showed the ratings of Milinkevich and other opposition leaders in the single digits.” [31]

Opposition activists have unique access to high US State officials through the IRI, and have been provided a platform from which to deliver persuasive communications to a wide audience – a platform they would not have without US government influence.

The IRI hosted a delegation of opposition activists over eight days in December, 2007. The delegation had private meetings with Rice and a nearly one-hour meeting with US President Bush, after which each delegate had his photograph taken with the president. The IRI also arranged for the delegation to meet with the Washington Post editorial board, to answer questions on a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty call-in show beamed into Belarus, and set up radio and television interviews with the official US overseas propaganda service, Voice of America. [32]

This came on the heels on another UDF visit to Washington hosted by the IRI from February 26 to March 2. On this trip, delegates met with State Department, White House, and Congressional officials, and shared their points of view with the media, including The Washington Post, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In its meetings with US officials, the delegation expressed its gratitude “for the support of the US government.” [33]

Supporting a working class-friendly alternative

There are a few reasons to oppose US interference in Belarus’ democracy.

Belarus is one of the few remaining places on earth in which the commanding heights of the economy are publicly owned, where robust income redistribution narrows the gap between rich and poor, where essential goods and services are subsidized so they remain affordable to all, and where education is free and university students receive a living stipend.

US government interference in Belarus is not aimed at promoting democracy. Belarus already has a democracy, both in the narrow, technical, sense of offering universal adult suffrage and regular elections featuring a multiplicity of parties, and in the broader, more meaningful, sense of being a place in which the interests of the bulk of people predominate.

US government interference in Belarus is aimed at the very opposite of democracy: promoting the interests of a super-privileged minority comprising US and Western investment bankers, CEOs, corporate board members, and hereditary capitalist families, who seek unfettered access to Belarus’ resources, markets, labor and public assets. Corporate America wants to own Belarus’ banks, waters, forests and other natural resources; to buy Belarus’ state-owned enterprises; to sell goods and services unimpeded by tariff barriers and unhindered by subsidies to domestic firms. It wants a low-tax environment, no restrictions on expatriation of profits, and a low-wage and biddable workforce held in check by a reserve army of the unemployed. From the point of view of the US ruling class, Belarus should be investor-friendly, not working class-friendly.

US citizens and citizens of other Western countries that contribute to nurturing Belarus’ fifth column should oppose the use of their tax dollars to bring down one of the few remaining challenges to the neo-liberal economic order. Taxpayer dollars should be used to help fund public health care, provide free education, and subsidize basic goods and services at home, not to undermine working class gains abroad.

1. United States Department of State, “Belarus 2007 Performance Report,” November 16, 2007. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACL044.pdf
2. The Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2005; “Belarus Democracy Act Will Help Cause of Freedom, Bush Says,” October 21, 2004. http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2004/October/20041022100536btrueveceR0.8822595.html
3. The New York Times, December 17, 2005.
4. Russian Information Agency Novosti, July 13, 2007.
5. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, Belarus. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/bo.html
6. The Heritage Foundation, 2008 Index of Economic Freedom. http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/country.cfm?ID=Belarus
7. Cited in The Heritage Foundation, 2007 Index of Economic Freedom.
8. The Washington Post, September 23, 2005.
9. The New York Times, January 1, 2006.
10. The New York Times, July 24, 2006.
11. The Financial Times (London), August 2, 2007.
12. The Morning Star (UK), January 7, 2008.
13. Remarks by Stephen B. Nix, Director of Eurasia Program, International Republican Institute, Conference on European Union and Democracy Assistance, Center for European Studies, the University of Florida, March 30, 2007, http://www.iri.org/eurasia/belarus/2007-03-30-Belarus.asp
14. The IRI’s Belarus page describes Belarus’ type of government as a dictatorship. On the same page, under the rubric “suffrage” is written: universal, age 18. http://www.iri.org/eurasia/belarus.asp The CIA’s World Factbook lists 19 political parties in Belarus.
15. “Bringing Down Europe’s Last Ex-Soviet Dictator,” New York Times, February 26, 2006.
16. Ibid.
17. The Washington Post, March 21, 2006.
18. The Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2005.
19. Times Online, March 10, 2006.
20. United States Department of State, “Belarus 2007 Performance Report,” November 16, 2007. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACL044.pdf
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. “A Georgian soldier of the Velvet Revolution,” The Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2008.
24. United States Department of State, “Belarus 2007 Performance Report,” November 16, 2007. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACL044.pdf
25. The New York Times, February 26, 2006.
26. The New York Times, April 22, 2005.
27. Xinhua News Agency, May 13, 2005.
28. The New York Times, April 22, 2005.
29. The New York Times, January 1, 2006.
30. The New York Times, February 26, 2006.
31. Ibid.
32. “IRI Host Belarusian Democratic Leaders,” IRI News Release, December 12, 2007. http://www.iri.org/eurasia/belarus/2007-12-12-Belarus.asp
33. “IRI Host Belarusian Democratic Leaders,” IRI News Release, March 9, 2007. http://www.iri.org/eurasia/belarus/2007-03-09-Belarus.asp

The U.S. Department joins the CIA, the Heritage Foundation, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist in complaining about Belarus’s refusal to establish conditions congenial to foreign investment:

“After an initial outburst of capitalist reform from 1991-94, including privatization of state enterprises, creation of institutions of private property, and development of entrepreneurship, Belarus under Lukashenko has greatly slowed, and in many cases reversed, its pace of privatization and other market reforms, emphasizing the need for a ’socially oriented market economy.’ About 80% of all industry remains in state hands, and foreign investment has been hindered by a climate hostile to business. The banks, which had been privatized after independence, were renationalized under Lukashenko. The government has also renationalized companies using the ‘Golden Share’ mechanism–which allows government control in all companies with foreign investment–and through other administrative means.

“The U.S. Government continues to support the development of the private sector in Belarus and its transition to a free market economy. With the advent of the Lukashenko regime, Belarusian authorities have pursued a generally hostile policy toward the private sector and have refused to initiate the basic economic reforms necessary to create a market-based economy. Most of the Belarusian economy remains in government hands. The government, in particular the presidential administration, exercises control over most enterprises in all sectors of the economy. In addition to driving away many major foreign investors–largely through establishment of a ‘Golden Share’ requirement, which allows government control in all companies with foreign investment–Belarus’ centralization and command approach to the economy has left only a trickle of U.S. Government and international assistance programs in this field.

“The United States has encouraged Belarus to conclude and adhere to agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on macroeconomic stabilization and related reform measures, as well as to undertake increased privatization and to create a favorable climate for business and investment.

“Because of the unpredictable and at times hostile environment for investors, the U.S. Government currently does not encourage U.S. companies to invest in Belarus. Belarus’ continuing problems with an opaque, arbitrary legal system, a confiscatory tax regime, cumbersome licensing system, price controls, and lack of an independent judiciary create a business environment not conducive to prosperous, profitable investment. In fact, several U.S. investors in Belarus have left, including the Ford Motor Company.” (My emphasis.) US Department of State, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5371.htm .

Stephen Zunes’ False Statements on Zimbabwe and Woza

By Stephen Gowans

Stephen Zunes is making a career of legitimizing fundamental US government assessments of all but a few of its foreign policy targets, uncritically mimicking State Department slanders of target countries and falsely declaring US funded regime change organizations to be “progressive organizations which could by no means be considered American agents.”

Reacting to a Netfa Freeman article in the Black Agenda Report criticizing his position on Zimbabwe, Zunes refers to “Mugabe’s election fraud, mismanagement of the economy, and human rights abuses.” This is State Department boilerplate. While it would be too much to ask Zunes to back up his statements in his brief reply to Freeman’s article, I cannot recall that he has ever produced evidence of any of his charges against US foreign policy targets in his longer articles, or has ever shown the slightest hint of scepticism regarding the charges Washington has levelled against “outposts of tyranny.” Instead, Zunes freely apes State Department rhetoric, defending from the left fundamental State Department views.

Particularly galling is his reference to Mugabe’s “mismanagement of the economy,” standard fare from US Secretaries of State, the CIA and New York Times, but hardly what one would expect from a critical and sceptical progressive who claims to be independent of US establishment positions. Attributing Zimbabwe’s economic difficulties to Mugabe’s policy errors whitewashes the role of the US in sabotaging Zimbabwe’s economy through the US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, which effectively cuts Harare off from balance of payment loans, development assistance and lines of credit from international lending agencies.

In his reply to Freeman, Zunes falsely states that Women of Zimbabwe Arise can by no means be considered American agents. The group’s leader, Jenni Williams, was presented with the State Department’s 2007 International Woman of Courage Award for Africa by Condoleezza Rice in a March, 2007 ceremony in Washington. The US State Department does not give out awards to people who work against the interests of the US economic elite. It does, however, award those who advance the elite’s positions.

A US government report on the activities in 2007 of its mission to Zimbabwe reveals that the “US Government continued its assistance to Women of Zimbabwe Arise.” US government assistance to Woza and other civil society organizations was channeled through Freedom House and PACT. Freedom House, which is interlocked with the CIA and is a “virtual propaganda arm of the (US) government and international right wing,” according to Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, is headed by Peter Ackerman, who also heads up the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Stephen Zunes is chair of the board of academic advisors to the ICNC. Ackerman’s wife, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, is a former director of the Albert Einstein Institute, an organization which trained activists in popular insurrection techniques to overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Zunes has vigorously defended the AEI. She is also currently a director of the US foreign policy establishment-dominated Human Rights Watch, which recently launched a dishonest attack on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s human rights record.

Woza supports two US State Department propaganda vehicles: SW Radio Africa, a US State Department funded short-wave radio station that beams anti-Mugabe propaganda into Zimbabwe, and the Voice of America’s Studio 7, also funded by the State Department to broadcast US foreign policy positions into Zimbabwe. All political parties in Zimbabwe have, in their recent Memorandum of Understanding, urged journalists to abandon these pirate radio stations to “start working for the good of the country rather than for its enemies.” Jenni Williams and Woza are not, as Zunes falsely claims, working independently of the US government.

Zunes is close to individuals and organizations that are members of the US foreign policy establishment (Freedom House head and Council on Foreign Relations member Peter Ackerman) and have received funding from the US government and ruling class foundations to train popular insurrection groups to overthrow US foreign policy targets (Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institute). He has been criticized from the left by Michael Barker, Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster, and George Ciccariello-Maher and Eva Golinger. He is intolerant of criticism, asking WordPress to shut down my blog for criticisms of his association with Ackerman.

His modus operandi is to accept State Department denunciations of most US foreign policy targets as true, while attacking Washington’s foreign policy for being based on hypocrisy. He denies that insurrectionary movements trained by organizations that are funded by wealthy individuals, ruling class foundations and Western governments are agents of US imperialism, portraying them instead as independent grassroots groups.

There is much about Zunes to raise doubts about his politics.

The War over South Ossetia

By Stephen Gowans

On August 4, 2008, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin phoned US assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried to complain about the build-up of Georgian troops in the vicinity of South Ossetia. [1] Two days later, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity, having evidence that Georgia planned a military strike before the month was out, told Denis Keefe, Britain’s ambassador to Georgia, that a Georgian invasion was imminent. [2]

Georgia had increased its military budget from $30 million to $1 billion per year, under its US-aligned president, Mikhail Saakashvili, relying on deep infusions of aid from Washington. [3] A country of only 8 million, Georgia had sent 2,000 troops to help US forces occupy Iraq, the third largest occupation force in the oil-rich country, after the US and Britain. Tbilisi “considered participation in Iraq as a sure way to prepare the Georgian military for ‘national reunification’ – the local euphemism of choice for restoring Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Georgian control.” [4]

Georgia’s attack was emboldened by three US moves: the sending of “advisers to build up the Georgian military, including an exercise” in July “with more than 1,000 American troops”; Washington’s “pressing hard to bring Georgia into the NATO orbit;” and the US “loudly proclaiming its support for Georgia’s territorial integrity in the battle with Russia over Georgia’s separatist enclaves.” [5]

On the eve of the war, Russia convoked an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, presenting a resolution that called on both sides to renounce the use of force. [6] The US, Britain and France refused to back the resolution, arguing that it was unbalanced. Only South Ossetia and Russia should be called upon to renounce the use of force, they said. Georgia should be allowed to defend herself. [7]

The above shows that far from restraining the Georgian hand, the US was facilitating, even encouraging, an attack; that the South Ossetians and Russians anticipated an attack and that the Russians used their position at the United Nations to try to stop it; and that the West was setting the stage to blame the attack on the victims.

The war was swift, and for the Georgians, ignominious. Georgian forces were rapidly pushed back, their positions easily over-run and much of their equipment captured or destroyed. In the end, Saakashvili would rail against Russian aggression, and wonder histrionically who was next.

The Russians did not strike first, as Georgian officials now claim. The New York Times cited evidence from an extensive set of witnesses that Georgia’s military began to pound South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, with heavy barrages of rocket and artillery fire, after Saakashvili gave the order and before Russian troops entered Georgia. The result was hundreds of civilian deaths. Among the targets of the Georgian assault was a Russian peacekeeping base. There “has been no independent evidence, beyond Georgia’s insistence that its version is true, that Russian forces were attacking before the Georgian barrages,” reported The New York Times. [8] Moreover, an unnamed senior US official told the newspaper that Russia’s response didn’t look “premeditated, with a massive staging of equipment,” adding that “until the night before the fighting, Russia seemed to be playing a constructive role.” [9]

On August 26, Moscow recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent. Meanwhile, Saakashvili vowed to rebuild his army to try again at a later date. [10]

Origin of Tensions

Ossetians have their own language and, in recognition of this, enjoyed autonomy within Soviet Georgia. Abkhazia, too, was an autonomous region. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Georgia declared the autonomous status of both regions to be void, and attempted to integrate them. This sparked fighting between the Georgians on one side, and the South Ossetians and Abkhaz on the other. The two regions “settled into a tenuous peace monitored by Russian peacekeepers,” in which both enjoyed a de facto independence. But “frictions with Georgia increased sharply in 2004,” when Saakashvili was elected,“ pledging “to restore Tbilisi’s rule over South Ossetia and Abkhazia.” [11]

Pipelines

There are two overland routes for pumping petroleum resources from the oil- and gas-rich Caspian basin to markets in Europe: through Russia, and alternatively, through Western-built pipelines that run through Georgia. Washington would like Caspian oil and gas to be delivered to European markets through the pipelines Western oil companies control in Georgia; Moscow would like Europe to continue to rely on pipelines that transit Russia. [12]

Two Western pipelines run through Georgia: “the 1,000-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan line, which can deliver up to one million barrels of crude a day from the Azerbaijani coast on the Caspian Sea, through Georgia and Turkey to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea”; and the BP-operated Western Route Export pipeline, capable of carrying up to “160,000 barrels of oil a day from Baku on the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan to the Georgian Black Sea port of Supsa.” [13]

For Washington, the routes through Georgia represent a way of checking “Russia’s control over pipelines and energy resources.” Pipeline projects through Georgia are valued owing to their potential “to loosen Russia’s grip over European energy supplies”, and to fatten the bottom lines of US oil companies. [14]

From Moscow’s perspective, control of Georgia and its pipelines puts it in a position to establish an “energy chokehold on Europe.” [15]

Georgia, then, is of strategic importance to Washington because Western oil companies can transport “oil, and soon also gas, that lies not only in Azerbaijan, but beyond it in the Caspian Sea, and beyond it in Central Asia” to European markets, through Georgia, thereby cutting the Russians out of the action and giving Washington control over Europe’s energy resources. [16] Equally, Georgia is of strategic importance to Moscow for the same reasons.

Encircling Russia

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the United States found itself in a unique position. As the lone remaining superpower, it had the potential to dominate the world for the foreseeable future. To maintain its primacy, it would have to prevent potential rivals from growing strong enough to challenge US pre-eminence. The route to remaining top dog lay in unchallenged military supremacy, and the determination to use military force to eclipse the rise of potential competitors.

The Pentagon set out its strategy in the Defense Planning Guide, a 16-page Pentagon policy statement leaked to The New York Times, on March 18, 1992.

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival…First, the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.
We must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” [17]

In 2000, a group of US ruling class activists established The Project for a New American Century, a think-tank whose aim was to press the Clinton administration to more closely follow the 1992 Defense Planning Guide’s blueprint for US primacy. Members of the group — investment bankers and CEOs who had circulated between top jobs in Washington and corporate America — furnished the personnel for key positions in the Bush administration and would soon become the principal architects of the war on Iraq. They urged the Pentagon to eclipse the rise of new greater power competitors, and to adopt this as its main 21st century mission. [18]

Russia was, and remains, of particular concern to the US ruling class. While weak compared to the Soviet Union, it remains the country most able to challenge the US. To preserve US military pre-eminence, Washington seeks to build a ring around Russia, integrating countries on Russia’s periphery into the Nato military alliance. Despite promises that it would not expand toward Russia’s borders, Nato’s policy since the demise of the Soviet Union has been to aggressively expand, dismissing the alarm raised by Russian leaders as paranoia. Expansion serves the purpose of hemming Russia in militarily and expands markets for US arms manufacturers who supply the standardized military equipment Nato countries buy as part of the alliance’s equipment interoperability requirement.

A continuing strategy

While it seems as if Washington’s encirclement strategy is new, dating from the early aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, it is, on the contrary, an extension of a Western policy pursued since the beginning of the Cold War.

The Cold War, remarked R. Palme Dutt in 1962, was “directed against the Soviet Union” since it, and the countries it liberated in WWII “remained…completely independent of American domination and control. The aims of American world domination required the overthrow of this independent power.” [19] The new Cold War is no less directed at Russia, and is no less perpetrated by the US, than the old one (or the continuing one) was.

These “ultimate major aims,” Dutt continued, “required as their presupposition and first step the building up of a coalition of governments and armed forces under American control.” The “long-term strategic plan required the preliminary conquest of (the Soviet Union’s) periphery, and establishment of a chain of bases and hinterland territories from which to launch the offensive.” [20]

Thus, it has been US policy since the beginning of the Cold War to encircle Russia with a chain of bases and armies under US domination. The strategy was not born in 1992 and cannot be said to be the brainchild of neo-conservatives of either the Bush I or Bush II administrations. Its origins stretch back to the 1940s.

In the West, the spat between Georgia and the Ossetians appears to be rooted in longstanding ethnic animosity, but in Russia, it is seen quite differently. Russians understand that the United States is gradually encircling their country, and that Georgia is an important link in the chain. [21] Russian president Dmitri Medvedev complains of “being surrounded by bases on all sides” and of the “growing number of states…being drawn into the North Atlantic bloc.” [22] He and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin protest vehemently against US plans to site antimissile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, on Russia’s doorstep. They fear, justifiably, that the missile shield is aimed at Russia, and provides the US with a new offensive capability.

Saakashvili and the Rose Revolution

Mikhail Saakashvili is typical of local rulers Washington brings to power to act as its proxy on the ground. He is US-educated, fanatically pro-American, and implicitly shares the imperialist values of his backers in Washington. It is not by chance that the Saakashvili government enthusiastically pledged troops to the occupation of Iraq, and named a street in honor of George W. Bush.

With aid from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and billionaire financier George Soros’ Open Society Institute, Saakashvili was carried to power by the so-called Rose Revolution of 2004, a US ruling class-financed overthrow movement that forced Georgia’s then president Eduard Shevardnadze, to step down. Soros’ intimate connection to Saakashvili’s rise to power is evidenced in his helping finance the Georgian government once Saakashvili was installed in the president’s office, and in Georgia’s designation as Sorositan by critics of the financier’s meddling. [23]

Washington was happy to partner with Soros to rid Georgia of Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister who was too close to Russia and not close enough to Washington. Intent on extending its ring of armies and military bases around its potential great power competitor, the US finagled Shevardnadze’s ouster and replaced him with the biddable puppet, Saakashvili.

The name for our profits is democracy

While the official propaganda holds Saakashvili to be a champion of democracy, the real story is quite different. The Georgian president is in reality a champion of Western investment interests who is prepared to suspend political and civil liberties to crush opposition to his pro-US economic policies.

The World Bank recognizes Saakashvili’s Georgia to be “the number one economic reformer in the world,” having climbed to 18th place from a shameful 112th under Shevardnadze, by creating “a friendly business environment.” Saakashvili earned the bank’s high praise by replacing Georgia’s progressive income tax system with a regressive flat tax; [24] privatizing publicly-owned assets; and gutting the civil service. The latter action sparked huge street protests last autumn, which Saakashvili put down with riot police, rubber bullets and truncheons, charging that the protesters were planning to stage a coup, with Russia’s collusion. [25] Ruling with an iron fist, he had no qualms about dispatching masked police officers to ransack an opposition television station, forcing it off the air. [26] Soon after, he declared a state of emergency, suspending advocacy rights and freedom of assembly – an action which, had it been done by his predecessor Shevardnadze, would have called forth howls of outrage and new infusions of aid for pro-democracy activists from Western governments, imperialist foundations and billionaires. On Saakashvili’s watch, by contrast, abridgments of civil and political liberties are met with fond reminiscences of the Rose Revolution and paeans to Saakashvili’s pro-American leanings and supposed democratic credentials.

Saakashvili won snap elections held two months after he cracked down on protestors, but his victory was secured under a cloud of accusations of blackmail and vote-buying. The government accused two opposition leaders of treason, charging they were conspiring with Russia to overthrow Saakashvili. [27] Having himself come to power with the aid of outside forces, Saakashvili more than anyone else knew the danger of foreign-directed overthrow movements, and perhaps knew better than others, how to defeat them.

Post Rose Revolution

Once Saakashvili had been installed as president, Washington scaled back funding to the civil society organizations that had been instrumental in destabilizing Shevardnadze’s rule, shifting aid instead to building up the central government, now under Saakashvili’s control. [28] Achieving the policy aim of installing a local proxy quite naturally led Washington to channel funding away from the manipulated “pro-democracy” civil society groups on the ground who paved the way for Saakashvili’s rise to power, to the government forces that would secure the friendly economic and military environment Washington desired. In other words, once civil society served its purpose, it was cut free.

Today, Rose Revolution true-believers are embittered. “Georgia is a semi-democracy. We have traded one kind of semi-democratic system for another,” laments Lincoln Mitchell, who worked for the Rose Revolution-funding Democratic Party-arm of the NED in Georgia from 2002 to 2004. “There is a real need to understand that what happened is another one-party government emerged.” [29]

Naïve do-gooders who thought money pitch-forked into the coffers of civil society groups by wealthy individuals and the US government would create democracy in Georgia now complain that Georgia under Saakashvili is no better, and probably worse, than it was under Shevardnadze.

Mitchel, for example, points out that under Shevardnadze, there was freedom of assembly and the press, the government was too weak to crack down on dissent, and the parliament could lay a restraining hand on the president. Under Saakashvili, the media have far fewer freedoms, civil society has been weakened, the government is strong enough to crack down on dissent with ease, and the parliament is less able to restrain the president. As regards elections, they’re run no better under Saakashvili. [30]

Exporting color revolutions

The Los Angeles Times of September 2, 2008 ran a story on Nini Gogiberidze, a Georgian who “is deployed abroad to teach democracy activists how to agitate for change against their autocratic governments, going everywhere from Eastern Europe to train Belarusians to Turkey to coach Iranians.” She is not, predictably, deployed within her own semi-democratic country, working to bring down the liberal democracy-disdaining Saakashvili.

Gogiberidze’s salary is paid by the Soros-linked Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, funded by the Republican Party arm of the US Congress’s National Endowment for Democracy, headed by John McCain, a friend of Saakashvili. Freedom House, a US ruling class organization that is interlocked with the CIA and is headed by former Michael Milken right-hand man Peter Ackerman, also chips in.

Gogiberidze is hardly the kind of grassroots, left-leaning, radical democracy activist one is led to believe make up the officer corps of the Soros-funded international army against autocracy. Like one of her Zimbabwean colleagues, who is a white conservative businessman with a penchant for good manners and the British royals (who we’re to believe is working underground to overthrow the Mugabe government because he’s keenly interested in democracy), Gogiberidze sounds more like a conservative interested in promoting Western economic interests on behalf of Uncle Sam. She studied at the London School of Economics and is married to an investment banker. She’s also on the payroll of US ruling class foundations. Moscow “views the so-called color revolutions as US sponsored plots using local dupes to overthrow governments” Washington is unfriendly to “and install American vassals.” [31] Is it any wonder?

The Los Angeles Times reporter who brought the Gogiberidze story to light, mocks Moscow’s assessment of the color revolutions, while at the same time documenting the manifold connections Gogiberidze and her fellow color revolutionaries have to US ruling class organizations. The only way to square this circle – to explain how color revolutionaries can be on the regime changer’s payroll while mocking the idea that color revolutions are US-sponsored plots to overthrow governments Washington has targeted for regime change – is to believe billionaire financiers, CIA pass through organizations, and foundations dominated by US investment bankers and CEO’s, are really concerned with promoting democracy.

Conclusion

US ruling class activists and George Soros, sponsored dupes in Georgia to overthrow the Shevardnadze government to bring the ardently pro-US, pro-foreign investment, pro-imperialist Mikhael Saakashvili to power. Since ascending to the presidency, Saakashvili has gone on a neo-liberal binge, privatizing formerly publically-owned assets, replacing the country’s progressive income tax system with a regressive flat tax, and firing civil servants in heaps. While this has earned him the admiration of the World Bank, it has created unrest at home, which Saakashvili has put down with truncheons, rubber bullets, police attacks on opposition media, and abridgements of political and civil liberties.

At the same time, Saakashvili has acted to further his US-sponsor’s military designs, deploying 2,000 Georgian troops to Iraq, bulking up his military, clamoring to join Nato, and keeping Russia off kilter with incessant threats to annex South Ossetia and Abkhazia militarily, now acted upon.

The great democrat, in the eyes of color revolution hagiographers, is hardly a democrat. Leaders who deploy troops to occupy conquered countries, who attempt to integrate regions that don’t want to be integrated, and who limit political and civil liberties when they threaten to derail the building of a business friendly environment, are not democrats, no matter how many dollars their supporters receive from Freedom House, George Soros and the National Endowment for Democracy.

The US seeks to expand its sphere of influence to hem Russia in militarily in order to preserve US pre-eminence; to draw new countries into the Nato alliance to expand markets for US arms manufacturers; and to secure new markets and investment opportunities for US investors and corporations in countries whose economic ties have historically been oriented toward Russia. Russia seeks to resist the encroachment, to hang on to as much as the former Soviet sphere of influence as possible.

To expand its influence into the former Soviet domain, Washington deploys a number of tactics. In Belarus, it sponsors a civil society-based overthrow movement to destablize the Russia-aligned government of Alexander Lukashenko. In Ukraine, it sponsored the Orange Revolution to force the Russian-aligned leader Viktor Yanukovich to yield power to the US-oriented Viktor Yushchenko. Washington is very likely to have sponsored, encouraged and aided the secessionist movement in Chechnya, with the aim of breaking the territory away from Russia.

To maintain, or in an attempt to restore, its influence in these regions, Moscow backs Lukashenko in Belarus and Yanukovich in Ukraine, facilitates Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s remaining independent of Georgia, and militarily crushed the Chechen secessionists.

The struggle to expand spheres of influence (the US) and to maintain or restore them (Russia) inevitably leads powers to take hypocritical positions: the US insists on Georgia’s territorial integrity (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) but denies that of Serbia (Kosovo); Russia insists on its own territorial integrity (Chechnya) but denies that of Georgia.

There is no doubt that the US is the more aggressive party in this clash, but it can be, because it is by far the stronger of the two. The jingoist depiction in the Western media of Russia as provoking a new Cold War and seeking to expand militarily into neighboring countries is without foundation and is an inversion of reality. The US pursuit of a Cold War against Russia has been carried on without interruption since the 1940s. It is not Russia that is aggressively acting to expand its sphere of influence, it is the US. And yet this reality is so infirmly grasped that it is possible for the leader of a country whose scores of thousands of troops occupy conquered Iraq and Afghanistan to lecture Russia that countries don’t invade other countries in the 21st century.

The Rose Revolution was not a people power-driven rebellion against autocracy but a movement of dupes sponsored and manipulated by Washington whose purpose was to pave the way for the rise to power of a US-educated lawyer with connections to Washington and Wall Street.

Saakashvili is not a hero of democratic reform, but a representative of US ruling class interests who is prepared to suspend civil and political liberties, tinker with elections, and commit war crimes if that’s what it takes to secure his patron’s economic and military objectives.

Russia did not initiate an attack on Georgia. Georgia launched an artillery and rocket barrage on the capital of South Ossetia and on Russian peacekeepers before Russia entered Georgia.

The US did not try to defuse tensions in the region; it has actively moved to inflame them.

Russia has not provoked a new Cold War; the US has allowed the Cold War is had pursued against Russia since the 1940s to heat up, using its puppet, Saakashvili to fan the embers.

1. RIA Novosti, August 4, 2008.
2. RIA Novosti, August 6, 2008.
3. Russia Today, August 8, 2008. US assistance to Georgia is about to increase significantly, with Washington announcing on September 3 that it is hiking economic aid to Georgia to $1 billion per year from $63 million in 2007, placing the country among the top recipients of US aid, along with Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Colombia: The Guardian (UK), September 3, 2008.
4. New York Times, August 10. 2008.
5. New York Times, August 13, 2008.
6. Independent (UK), August 8, 2008.
7. New York Times, August 10, 2008.
8. New York Times, September 3, 2008.
9. New York Times, August 10, 2008.
10. New York Times, August 26, 2008.
11. New York Times, August 10, 2008.
12. Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2008.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Zbginiew Brzinski, quoted in Serge Halimi, “The Return of Russia,” MRZine, August 28, 2008,
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/halimi280808.html .
17. Nato in the Balkans, International Action Center, New York, 19998. p. 4.
18. http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
19. R. Palme Dutt, “Problem of Contemporary history,” International Publishers, New York, 1962.
20. Ibid.
21. View of Russia’s representative to NATO, New York Times, August 28, 2008.
22. New York Times, August 28, 2008.
23. Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2008.
24. “The political realities of ‘democratic’ Georgia,” World Socialist Website, August 18, 2008. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/saak-a18.shtml
25. New York Times, August 12, 2008.
26. New York Times, August 14, 2008.
27. “The political realities of “democratic” Georgia,” World Socialist Website, August 18, 2008. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/saak-a18.shtml
28. Glenn Kessler, “Georgian Democracy A Complex Evolution,” The Washington Post, August 24, 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/23/AR2008082301817_pf.html
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2008.