Παναγιώτης Ήφαιστος

Καθηγητής, Διεθνείς Σχέσεις-Στρατηγικές Σπουδές

Πανεπιστήμιο Πειραιώς, Τμήμα Διεθνών και Ευρωπαϊκών Σπουδών

www.ifestos.edu.gr  -- www.ifestosedu.gr  --  info@ifestosedu.gr  -- info@ifestos.edu.gr

 

Για μετάβαση στην κεντρική σελίδα, άνοιγμα σε άλλο παράθυρο, κλικ εδώ www.ifestos.edu.gr  ή www.ifestosedu.gr

Στρατηγική "Μαλακής ισχύος" και διεθνικοί δρώντες

Σημείωση. Η παρούσα ανάλυση αναπαράγει κείμενα που θεωρούνται σημαντικά, έγκυρα και αξιόπιστα στην εξέταση της στρατηγικής της "μαλακής ισχύος". Αν και η στρατηγική αυτή αποτελεί κύριο χαρακτηριστικό της εξωτερικής πολιτικής των ΗΠΑ δεν περιορίζεται μόνο στην χώρα αυτή.

περιεχόμενα (κλικ προς και από τον τίτλο για μετάβαση)

1. Jonathan Mowat, Ukrainian postmodern coup completes testing of new template

2. Heather Coffin, George Soros, Imperial Wizard.

3. Critical Constructivists and "soft power"

4. Μαλακή ισχύς εισήγηση Π. Ήφ. 4.2.2009

5. David Gibbs. Academics and Spies: The Silence that Roars

6. ... Reinhold Niebuhr famously warned about the dangers of "mis-memory" or, worse, the deliberate rewriting of history"

7. CIA - Agency-Academic Relations

8. American academic community and CIA

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Excerpts from The Final Report of the Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee"), Book I, "Foreign and Military Intelligence," U.S. Senate, April 26, 1976
The Church Committee on the CIA in Academia

____________

Committee's note: The material italicized in this report has been substantially abridged at the request of the executive agencies.
____________

The Central Intelligence Agency has long-developed clandestine relationships with the American academic community, which range from academics making introductions for intelligence purposes to intelligence collection while abroad, to academic research and writing where CIA sponsorship is hidden.

The Central Intelligence Agency is now using several hundred American academics ("academics" includes administrators, faculty members and graduate students engaged in teaching), who in addition to providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes, occasionally write books and other material to be used for propaganda purposes abroad. Beyond these, an additional few score are used in an unwitting manner for minor activities.

These academics are located in over 100 American colleges, universities, and related institutes. At the majority of institutions, no one other than the individual concerned is aware of the CIA link. At the others, at least one university official is aware of the operational use made of academics on his campus. In addition, there are several American academics abroad who serve operational purposes, primarily the collection of intelligence.

Although the numbers are not as great today as in 1966, there are no prohibitions to prevent an increase in the operational use of academics. The size of these operations is determined by the CIA.

With the exception of those teachers, scholars and students who receive scholarships or grants from the Board of Foreign Scholarships, the CIA is not prohibited from the operational use of all other categories of grantee support under the Fulbright-Hays Act (artists, athletes, leaders, specialists, etc.). Nor is there any prohibition on the operational use of individuals participating in any other exchange program funded by the United States Government.

The Committee is disturbed both by the present practices of operationally using American academics and by the awareness that the restraints on expanding this practice are primarily those of sensitivity to the risks of disclosure and not an appreciation of dangers to the integrity of individuals and institutions.

The Committee believes that it is the responsibility of private institutions and particularly the American academic community to set the professional and ethical standards of its members.


[ The CIA asked University of California administrator Earl Clinton Bolton, who was spending some time at CIA headquarters, to suggest ideas on how to improve relations between the Agency and academia. ]

Academia 01, p.1

5 August 1968
MEMORANDUM
SUBJECT:
CIA - Agency-Academic Relations

This is an attempt to make some observations and suggestions about Agency-academic relations. In doing so I am grateful for the stimulus furnished by your outline. Although I believe I have addressed myself to most of the questions you have raised I have done so in free form rather than by a point by point consideration. I have also used "head notes" for purposes of organization and in an attempt to highlight the crucial questions in the subject.

Justifying an Agency-Academic Relationship: Let me stress at the outset that I believe Agency-academic relations are for the most part very good. Though I have no quantitative data to support such a conclusion my guess is that 99% of the members of the academy would be willing to assist the Agency if properly and skillfully approached, and that only a small fraction of that other 1% would be angered by an invitation to assist or would attempt to embarrass the Agency in any way.

However, on occasion when a university or an individual has acknowledged any contact with the Agency there has been some outcry by a few vocal members of the academic community.

In a later part of this paper I suggest "an affirmative program" designed to improve the Agency's reputation in academic circles and thus decrease the risks (costs) of association with the Agency. However, until either the passage of time or an image bolstering plan changes the cliches of the moment an educational institution or individual electing to assist the Agency may be on the defensive.

In my view the best way to defend association with the Agency when such a defense is necessary is:

1. By relating work for the Agency to one of the traditional functions of a university; and

Academia 01, p.2

2. By basing the defense or rejoinder on long established academic values.

The Functions of a University: There is almost universal agreement that universities do (and properly should) engage in the following basic functions:

1. The preservation and transmission of knowledge to their constituency (i.e. the so-called teaching function); and

2. The testing of that which is currently accepted as "truth" and the discovery of new truth (i.e. the research function); and

3. The performance for society's benefit of those functions which can best (or exclusively) be performed by a university (i.e. the public service function)

Authorities will differ as to whether a sub-function e.g. the training of a leadership elite to be innovative and responsive should be included under "1" or "3" above, but there is little disagreement that what higher education is all about is encompassed within these general goals.

The Agency should phrase its requests to academia in such a way that the service being sought relates as clearly and directly as possible to one of these traditional functions and when necessary the university and individual scholar should explain involvement with the Agency as a contribution to one of these proper academic goals. It should also be stressed that when an apologia is necessary it can best be made: (1) by some distant academic who is not under attack, (2) in a "respectable" publication of general circulation (e.g. Harpers, Saturday Review, Vital Speeches, etc.), and (3) with full use of the jargon of the academy (as illustrated below).

Traditional Mores of the Academic: Every profession develops a certain ethical or philosophical penumbra which is more or less sacred and which protects from attack the most vulnerable or least understood rites of that profession. This body of doctrine usually develops by "common law" and is subsequently codified. (Incidentally the codified dogma never precisely articulates the full scope of the protective doctrines; hence there is sufficient vagueness in the total traditions of the profession to provide a skillful polemicist with formidable ammunition for defense.)

Academia 01, p.3

Two doctrines fiercely protected by the academy are "academic freedom" and "privilege and tenure." The former is the absolute right of the scholar to investigate any subject within his competence, in any lawful way, at any time. The latter doctrine holds that a fully initiated member of the profession has certain irrevocable privileges, including but not limited to, the right to continue his association with the university until retirement without fear of termination except for a very few egregious offenses.

When attacked for aiding the Agency the academic (or institution) should base a rejoinder on these sacred doctrines. For example, a professor's right to undertake classified research is unassailable if he stands on the ground of academic freedom and his privileges as a scholar. And he should be reminded that although his derogators may undertake a good deal of no loud rhetoric they really cannot impair his tenure.

Contracts and Grants: I have discussed [several words deleted] the matter of research arrangement between the Agency and academic world. Here are some of my further ideas on the subject.

1. Shouldn't the Agency have an insulator such as Rand or IDA? Such entities have quite good acceptance in academia, do excellent work and provide real protection against "blow back." Such an independent corporation should of course have a ringing name (e.g. Institute for a Free Society), should do work for the entire intelligence community, and should really have a sufficiently independent existence so that it can take the heat on some projects if necessary.

2. In my opinion we are in a cycle in which we are moving away from institutional involvement in classified contracts toward a time when no classified research will be allowed on campus even by a professor acting on his own. The Agency might want to try to anticipate this trend by offering off-campus leased space to scholars doing work for the Agency.

Academia 01, p.4

3. The indirect cost rate which is allowed by BOB Circular A-21 is regarded by academic people as being unfair to the university. This "overhead" rate does not allow adequate recovery of actual hidden costs. Your contracting officer ought to be encouraged to adjust the established rate upward by a point or two as an incentive to institutions of higher education to take work.

4. As a general rule contracts and grants should be made only in response to proposals which "originate" with the principal investigator on the campus. The real initiative might be with the Agency but the apparent or record launching of the research should, wherever possible, emanate from the campus.

5. (Here is a declaration against interest.) It seems to me that there are few instances in which it is indispensable or even necessary to contract with an academic entity rather than the principal investigator directly. Therefore because of the increased complexity of the transaction of the institution is involved I would suggest that virtually all of your contracts and grants be made directly to the individual. Perhaps personal service agreements could be used to replace traditional contracts and grants for sponsored research.

6. Would it be possible to substitute some new designations for words such as "classified," "secret," "confidential," etc? Perhaps labels such as "limited access research," "not to be discussed with others without prior permission of the Agency," etc. could be used. My point is that such terms as classified research have become so emotionally charged that they provoke an irrational response before substantive content is even considered.

Academia 01, p.5

"The Image": An Affirmative Program: Good public relations means excellent performance publicly appreciated. Because of the nature of the Agency's work discussions about performance must be limited, and efforts to gain public appreciation minimized. However I think it is possible to improve acceptance among that "public" which is the academic world.

To accomplish such a result would require a positive, long-term public relations plan. My impression is that the Agency has excellent press relations, but is not affirmatively interested (probably intentionally) in overall public relations. As to the academic community I would suggest that a very well considered, affirmative public relations program be developed.

The evolution of a public relations plan follows well recognized steps. These steps are suggested by the following questions.

1. How do we appear to the target group (academia) today?

2. How do we want to appear to that target group five years hence?

3. What steps should we take to get from phase 1 to 2?

It is of course unlikely that the goal in 3 above will just happen by accident; the goal is obviously more likely to be reached if there is a plan.

It is difficult to suggest implementing techniques without first knowing the precise future image the Agency would like to have in the academic world. However, I believe the following suggestions would generally improve that image among academicians.

1. Follow a plan of emphasizing that CIA is a member of the national security community (rather than the intelligence community) and stress the great number of other agencies with which the Agency is allied in advancing national interests. Several such agencies (FBI, AEC, Secret Service, State Department, etc.) have spent much time, money and thought on telling their story. In my view the Agency will benefit by some "transfer" effect.

Academia 01, p.6

2. Establish at Yale the Walter Bedell Smith or William J. Donovan Lectures or Chair on Intelligence as an Instrument of National Policy. (Try in as many ways as possible to establish the study of intelligence as a legitimate and important field of inquiry for the academic scholar.)

3. Invite qualified and sympathetic scholars to take their sabbaticals at the Agency. They would work not as consultants, for that is a very different function, but on subjects and in a manner traditionally followed by a professor on his sabbatical.

4. Permit a few carefully nominated and selected doctoral candidates to spend a year at the Agency working on their dissertations. The unclassified materials in the library are a rich source of materials for genuine academic research. The candidate would of course have to recognize the Agency's right to review the finished document for accidental leaks.

5. Provide a handsomely funded post doctoral one-year opportunity for selected scholars. (The John McCone Fellowships?)

6. Publicize any effort of the Agency to make scarce materials available to scholars. (Could the story of the Hoover Institution -- Agency arrangement be told by a distinguished scholar of Chinese affairs in a publication of general interest to academics?)

7. Stress in recruiting, articles and speeches that the Agency is really a university without students and not a training school for spies. There is as much academic freedom within the walls of the building and among those competent on a given subject as on any campus I know. (I haven't detected the slightest tendency on the part of anyone to resist saying what he thinks.)

Academia 01, p.7

8. Encourage Agency representatives who attend academic meetings to clearly identify their affiliation.

9. Do all recruiting off campus and try to time these visits so that the probability of reaction is decreased e.g. during the summer, between semesters, after the last issue of the student paper is printed for the semester, etc.

Time for a fresh look at a fateful year -- 1989

"The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously warned about the dangers of "mis-memory" or, worse, the deliberate rewriting of history"

By Michael Meyer

January 3, 2010

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyer3-2010jan03,0,4139270.story

Americans are prone to take credit for the Soviet bloc's demise. The reality is that 'our' victory in the Cold War was not what we thought it was, and our myths have hurt the world and ourselves.

Alight snow came down in Bucharest, covering the mounds next to freshly dug graves, open and gaping in long straight rows. "Here are the fallen," intoned a solemn priest as four men placed a wooden coffin before him on a wobbly trestle. Jacob Stetincu, shot by a sniper, lay wrapped in a thin cotton sheet, wearing a worn blue beret, snowflakes catching in his grayed mustache. After a hurried sacrament, the men nailed his coffin shut, carried him to the nearest grave -- his widow struggling to keep up -- and shoveled in the heavy earth. The priest, working in shifts with a dozen of his brethren, was already shaking holy water on the next victim of Nicolae Ceausescu's brutal reign.

It was the bitter last day of an epic year, 1989. Revolutions had swept across Europe. From Poland to Hungary to East Germany, communist regimes toppled like proverbial dominoes. The Berlin Wall was gone, the Cold War over. And now, the hated regime of Nicolae Ceausescu was gone as well, the only revolution won with blood in the streets.

Abruptly, I felt an overwhelming need to be out of Romania, out of Eastern Europe, before the New Year. Perhaps it was the visit to the cemetery and the poor innocents being buried in the snow. "Revolution overload," one friend called it.

The faded Orient Express left for Vienna that night. Twenty-seven hours later, I walked into my house in Bonn, the capital of what was then still West Germany, in time to join a midnight chorus of friends and neighbors singing "Auld Lang Syne," just as people were in Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and Budapest. For the newly free peoples of Eastern Europe, this was a moment of celebration.

On Christmas Day in Berlin, Leonard Bernstein had conducted Beethoven's Ninth ("Ode to Joy") with the word "joy" changed to "freedom." Less than a year later, long-divided Germany would be reunited, and a year after that, the Soviet Union would come undone. The grim concrete symbol of the world's division, East versus West, free and unfree, began its slow fade into historical imagination. And with it, so did truth.

The recent 20th anniversary celebrations of these epochal events are over. For Americans, especially, the fireworks and rousing rhetoric recalled victory in an existential struggle -- four decades of Cold War confrontation, trillions of dollars spent on national defense, too many lives lost in shadowy wars overseas.

And in most ways it was a victory. The year 1989 changed the world. It moved us from a world of division and nuclear blackmail to one of new opportunity and unprecedented prosperity. It set the stage for our contemporary era: globalization, the triumph of free markets, the spread of democracy. It ushered in the great global economic boom that lifted billions out of poverty around the world and established America as the one and only superpower.

Yet it was a dangerous triumph, chiefly because we claimed it for our own and scarcely bothered to fully understand how this great change came to pass. We told ourselves stick-figure parables of defiance and good-versus-evil triumph, summed up in Ronald Reagan's clarion call: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

From the vantage point of 20 years, we should be wiser. The reality is that "our" victory in the Cold War was not what we thought it was, nor did it happen the way we think it did. Most painfully, the myths we spun about it have hurt the world and ourselves.

What are these myths that we embrace as truths?

First, people power. Most popular accounts of 1989 come down to a simple plot line: Eastern Europe's long-repressed citizens, frustrated by poverty and lack of freedom and inspired by our example, rose up and overthrew their communist overlords.

Well, yes and no. In East Germany, that is pretty much what happened. In Hungary, by contrast, change came from the top, as a small cadre of communist reformers threw over the old order and began, quite literally, cutting holes in the Iron Curtain. In Poland, the activists of the Solidarity trade union sat down with their onetime jailers and agreed to hold elections. There, democracy came first, and only afterward revolution.

A second myth concerns the role of history. Americans tend to see the end of communism as foreordained, born of its inherent flaws. This is the tectonic overview of history as the interplay of great and seemingly inevitable forces. Seen from the ground, however, it looked very different.

Factors beyond our control figured in the equation as well, not least a drop in oil prices from roughly $40 a barrel in 1980 to less than $10 a decade later.And if you were there the night the Berlin Wall fell, you know that it came to pass, in the dramatic way it did, because of a freak accident -- an utterly human blunder.

In a Cold War vignette now become famous, played and replayed on YouTube, the spokesman for the East German Communist Party misread a press release and told his country's people they were free to go -- "immediately," as of the night of Nov. 9, 1989, and not the next day, when new travel rules were officially supposed to take effect. In the ensuing administrative chaos, the Berlin Wall "fell." The iconic pictures of Berliners dancing atop the wall owe as much to happenstance as to culminating history.

A third myth is the most dangerous: the idea of the United States as emancipator, a liberator of repressed peoples. This crusading brand of American triumphalism has become gospel over the past two decades in certain foreign policy circles, especially among neoconservatives. For them, the revolutions of 1989 became the foundation of a post-Cold War worldview. All totalitarian regimes are hollow at the core, they suggest, and will crumble with a shove from the outside. If the inspiration for this was the Berlin Wall, coming down as Reagan "ordered," the operational model was the mass protests in Romania leading to the violent overthrow of the Ceausescu regime.

"Once the wicked witch was dead," as Francis Fukuyama put it, "the Munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation." It is a straight line from this fantasy of 1989 to the misadventure in Iraq, and beyond.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously warned about the dangers of "mis-memory" or, worse, the deliberate rewriting of history in order to shape the future, much as the old communists tried to do. The United States contributed uniquely to the end of the Cold War, from the reconstruction of Europe and containment to capitalist economics. But others "won" it, on their own (and our) behalf. Among them were the likes of Jacob Stetincu, all but forgotten in his grave.

Drunk on pride and power, we Americans have tried to rewrite history. Having got it so wrong, it's time to figure out how, and why, and move on.

Michael Meyer, Newsweek's bureau chief for Germany and Eastern Europe in 1989, is the author of "The Year That Changed the World."

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Los Angeles Times, 28 January 2001, Sunday Opinion Section, p. M2

Academics and Spies: The Silence that Roars

by David N. Gibbs

David N. Gibbs, an associate professor of political science at the University of Arizona, is the author of The Political Economy of Third World Intervention.

TUCSON: An academic controversy has revealed a most interesting fact: A significant number of social scientists, especially political scientists, regularly work with the Central Intelligence Agency.

It has long been known that the academia-CIA connection was a staple of the early Cold War. During the 1940s and '50s, the CIA and military intelligence were among the major sources of financial support for America's social scientists. In Europe, the agency covertly supported some of the leading writers and scholars through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as Frances Stonor Saunders recently documented in her book The Cultural Cold War.

Such ties supposedly withered during the 1970s, in the aftermath of Vietnam and hearings by the U.S. Senate select committee on intelligence, which revealed extensive CIA misdeeds, including fomenting coups against democratically elected governments, plotting assassinations of foreign leaders and disseminating propaganda. After these revelations, it seemed that no self-respecting academic would go anywhere near the agency.

A recent article in the magazine Lingua Franca, however, reveals that this perception is inaccurate and that the "cloak and gown" connection has flourished in the aftermath of the Cold War. The article states that since 1996, the CIA has made public outreach a "top priority and targets academia in particular. According to experts on U.S. intelligence, the strategy has worked," it says. The article quotes esteemed academics, including Columbia's Robert Jervis, former president-elect of the American Political Science Assn., and Harvard's Joseph S. Nye. Both acknowledge having worked for the CIA. Yale's H. Bradford Westerfield is quoted as saying: "There's a great deal of actually open consultation and there's a lot more semi-open, broadly acknowledged consultation."

What is interesting about the above quote is that it is offered so casually, as if no reasonable person could find fault with the activity. Something is seriously wrong here.

The CIA is not an ordinary government agency; it is an espionage agency and the practices of espionage -- which include secrecy, propaganda and deception -- are diametrically opposed to those of scholarship. Scholarship is supposed to favor objective analysis and open discussion. The close relationship between intelligence agencies and scholars thus poses a conflict of interest. After all, the CIA has been a key party to many of the international conflicts that academics must study. If political scientists are working for the CIA, how can they function as objective and disinterested scholars?

This problem of objectivity is essentially the same one that scientists are addressing with regard to biomedical research funded by drug companies. Biomedical scientists increasingly are expected to reveal financial support that might bias their findings. It is regrettable that political science, which has no expectation of full disclosure relating to work for the CIA, holds itself to a lower standard.

The CIA likes to advertise that it has "reformed" since the end of the Cold War and no longer engages in many of the secretive practices that resulted in so much congressional and public disapproval. Indeed, several academic defenders of the CIA, including Westerfield, emphasize CIA "reform." This is mostly a public-relations gambit. People who think the agency has reformed should try requesting documents through the Freedom of Information Act; they probably will find it impossible.

Secrecy poses a special problem for scholars. Research undertaken for the CIA often is classified, so that academics who have performed the research are legally barred from revealing much of what they may find. Scholars thus are prevented from doing their jobs, which must include disseminating the fruits of their research through publication. In undertaking classified work, researchers have become complicit in the practice of secrecy, one of the most undemocratic characteristics of the intelligence services.

Jervis, Nye and Westerfield seem to discount any suggestion that academic-intelligence ties might bias scholarship. But consider covert operations undertaken by the CIA. These operations resulted in some of the most controversial actions during the Cold War, including U.S. support for overthrowing governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Zaire in 1961, Indonesia in 1965 and Chile in 1973. These operations have been extensively documented in Senate hearings and by other reliable sources. How does political science treat these issues? I reviewed all the articles published during the past 10 years in five of the most prestigious journals in the field. Apart from a rare paragraph or perhaps a sentence or two, they contain no mention of CIA covert operations. Covert actions have been effectively expunged from the record.

This failure of political science to discuss covert operations is troubling. The Los Angeles Times and other news media run articles on covert operations, such as the recent revelation that the CIA had close links to Gen. Manuel Contreras, Chile's dreaded secret police chief during the Pinochet dictatorship. The U.S. government has acknowledged some of these operations. This past March, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright publicly acknowledged to the Iranian government, in light of evidence, that the CIA had supported the 1953 coup in that country. Nevertheless, political science journals remain virtually silent on such issues. Can anybody explain this?

 

 

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Σε συνέδριο χθες Τρίτη 4.2.2009 έκανα σύντομη παρέμβαση σε συνέδριο με θέμα το soft power. Παραθέτω το σύντομο σημείωμα που χρησίμευσε για την προφορική παρέμβαση. Συμβουλεύω, βεβαίως, όποιος ενδιαφέρεται, να μελετήσει το 20σέλιδο του Jonathan Mowat βλ.

Στρατηγική "Μαλακής ισχύος"- διεθνικοί δρώντες

Speaking notes

«Μαλακή» ή «έξυπνη» ισχύς και σύγχρονη διεθνής πολιτική

«Soft» power or «smart» power in contemporary international politics

Παναγιώτης Ήφαιστος, Καθηγητής Διεθνών Σχέσεων, Πανεπιστήμιο Πειραιώς, www.ifestosedu.gr

 

Για ένα διεθνολόγο είναι πλέον πειθαναγκαστικό να συνεκτιμά τον διανεμητικό ρόλο της στρατηγικής μαλακής ισχύος που λίγο πολύ όλα τα κράτη εφαρμόζουν.

          4 είναι τα εργαλεία:

          Πρώτον, οι επίσημες διακηρύξεις της στρατηγικής των κρατών. Σήμερα γνωρίζουμε επαρκώς το πώς η μαλακή ισχύς ενσωματώνεται οργανικά ως μέσο στην αμερικανική στρατηγική. Μπορεί να μην γνωρίζουμε συγκεκριμένες απόρρητες πτυχές αλλά ξέρουμε ότι δεν υπάρχει εφαρμογή στρατηγικού σχεδίου που να μην εμπεριέχει αυτές τις πτυχές σε πολύ ισχυρές δόσεις.

          Δεύτερον, αποκαλύψεις που γίνονται κατά καιρούς λόγω διαρροών αρχείων ξεχωριστές περιπτώσεις εκ των οποίων είναι αναμφίβολα η περίπτωση του σχεδίου Αναν και η πορτοκαλί επανάσταση στην Ουκρανία.

          Τρίτον από ακρομυθίες κυβερνητικών εκπροσώπων μεγάλων δυνάμεων, από απομνημονεύματα παιχτών της στρατηγικής τους, από ομολογίες αξιωματούχων μετά από δημόσιες δίκες και από ακαδημαϊκές ομολογίες όπως οι συνάδελφοι αμερικανοί νεοφιλελεύθεροι οι οποίοι όταν στελέχωσαν την αμερικανική κυβέρνηση την δεκαετία του 1990 μίλησαν πιο ελεύθερα για το τι ρόλο διαδραματίζει η στρατηγική μαλακής ισχύος στην στρατηγική των κρατών τους (που υπηρετούν με πίστη και νομιμοφροσύνη και γι’ αυτό θεωρούν φυσιολογικό να μιλούν έτσι).

          Τέταρτον, εκ του αποτελέσματος όταν πλέον η στρατηγική επιτυγχάνει και οι δράστες που επιστρατεύονται μεταμφιέζοντας προπαγάνδα με ακαδημαϊκούς μανδύες αφελώς νομίζουν ότι «η επιτυχία δικαιώνει» και ότι μπορούν πλέον να προσχωρούν δημόσια με τον νικητή λέγοντας με περηφάνια ότι συμμετείχαν στην εκπλήρωση της μεγάλης επιτυχίας.

          Την καλύτερη περίπτωση που γνωρίζω, είναι αυτή του σχεδίου Αναν και τις χρηματοδοτήσεις που οι υπηρεσίες των ΗΠΑ και της Βρετανίας διοχέτευσαν με διάφορους τρόπους.

          Αν το σχέδιο Αναν επιτύγχανε ή αν επανέλθει και επιτύχει δεν θα κρύβονται αλλά θα υπερηφανεύονται για τον ρόλο τους. Αυτό βεβαίως δεν αναιρεί την ορθότητα της αντικειμενικής και επαληθευμένης επιστημονικής παρατήρησης.

 

Η δική του απόδοση της φράσης «soft-power» ως «μαλακή ισχύς» ίσως να μην αποδίδει σωστά την σχετική στρατηγική μερικών μεγάλων δυνάμεων.

          Φίλος μεταφραστής: από τα συμφραζόμενα αποδίδεται ως αόρατη ή υπόγειας προπαγάνδας, ύπουλης ή επί σκοπώ διασποράς αντιλήψεων και διασποράς ή διάδοσης δόλιων αντιλήψεων.

 

Είναι πολυσχιδής όρος με πολλές κατά περίπτωση έννοιες.

 

Μπορεί να σημαίνει μια πολύ θεμιτή καλλιέργεια των εθνικών συμφερόντων ενός κράτους εκ μέρους των διπλωματών που συνομιλούν ή και φιλοξενούν δημοσιογράφους και πολιτικά πρόσωπα μέχρι την επιστράτευση επί πληρωμή πολιτών άλλων κρατών προδίδουν την πατρίδα τους.

 

Ενδιαμέσως υπάρχει ένα μεγάλο φάσμα δρώντων που μπορεί να κυμαίνεται από μαθητές που ανεπίγνωστα εξωθούνται να κάψουν το κέντρο μιας πόλης μέχρι ένα καθηγητή Πανεπιστημίου όπως ο υποφαινόμενος που επειδή πιστεύει σε κάτι ή επειδή πληρώνεται σε αυτό από κάποιο διεθνικό δρώντα, για παράδειγμα τον George Soros, λέει πράγματα τα οποία αν και χωρίς το παραμικρό επιστημονικό κύρος θα μπορούσαν να είναι φοβερή προπαγάνδα προς όφελος του ενός ή άλλου κράτους.

 

Θα μπορούσα για παράδειγμα να σας λέω με επιστημονικοφανείς και σπουδαιοφανείς επιφυλλίδες το βολικό για το βολικό για τις ηγεμονικές δυνάμεις θεώρημα ότι οι δημοκρατίες δεν πολεμούν ή ότι πολεμούν λιγότερο.

          Έτσι, θα ρίχνω στάχτη στα μάτια όσων τηλεθεατών κάθε βράδυ ανοίγουν την τηλεόραση και βλέπουν φοβερά εγκλήματα κατά της ανθρωπότητας όλα από δημοκρατικές ηγεμονικές δυνάμεις.

          (Μετά από χρόνια φτάνουν τα Τούρκικα πλοία στο Σούνιο και ψάξε να βρεις τι έλεγε ο κάθε Ήφαιστος πριν δέκα χρόνια σε κάποια επιφυλλίδα του στην Καθημερινή ή στα Νέα).

 

Η νέα αμερικανίδα υπουργός εξωτερικών στον λόγο της ενώπιον του Κογκρέσου πριν μερικές μέρες μίλησε για «έξυπνη ισχύ» (smart power) που εκτιμώ ότι δεν είναι κάτι διαφορετικό από το soft power παρά μόνο υποδηλώνει μια πιο πυκνή και πιο εντατική και διευρυμένη ενσωμάτωση πρακτικών της μαλακής ισχύος στην διεθνή πολιτική της χώρας αυτής.

 

Ένα δηλαδή πιο εξεζητημένο τρόπο για να πείθονται τρίτες κοινωνίες και τα πολιτικά και πνευματικά ελίτ για την σκοπιμότητα συγκεκριμένων αμερικανικών σχεδίων που εξυπηρετούν τα αμερικανικά στρατηγικά συμφέροντα.

 

Η μαλακή ισχύς σχετίζεται με μύρια κεντρικά ζητήματα της μελέτης των διεθνών σχέσεων και ιδιαίτερα των στρατηγικών σπουδών, μεταξύ άλλων, με την έμμεση προσέγγιση, την εξαπάτηση, τα κριτήρια και τις μεθοδεύσεις της κατανομής ισχύος, την δημιουργία συμμαχιών ή την υπονόμευση των συμμαχιών των αντιπάλων και την κατατριβή εχθρών ή  και φίλων για να ελεγχθεί η αλλάξει η κατανομή ισχύος σύμφωνα με τις ανάγκες υπερπόντιων εξισορροπήσεων των ανελέητων ηγεμονικών αντιπαραθέσεων.

 

Η ουσία είναι ότι η συζήτηση για την μαλακή ισχύ αφορά την δύναμη των κρατών, τους σκοπούς, τα μέσα και τον τρόπο τα μέσα μεγιστοποιούν την ισχύ για να επιτευχθούν οι σκοποί με λιγότερους πόρους.

          Είναι δηλαδή, ένα κεντρικό ζήτημα της στρατηγικής ανάλυσης.

 

Το ίδιο ζήτημα βρίσκεται στον πυρήνα της θεωρίας της αποτρεπτικής στρατηγικής.

          Το πώς δηλαδή με παραστάσεις που δημιουργούν πλήθος θέσεων, κινήσεων, παραπλανητικών πληροφοριών, επιδείξεων ισχύος, μπλόφας για την ισχύ που διαθέτει κανείς και λόγια που θρέφουν κάθε λογής αμφιβολίες στον αντίπαλο, εξοικονομούν πόρους.

 

Βέλτιστη στρατηγική, συνηθίζουμε να λέμε, είναι εκείνη που οι πόροι που δεσμεύονται στην εκπλήρωση ενός στρατηγικού σκοπού είναι ακριβώς αυτοί που απαιτείται από το είδος της απειλής ή του συμφέροντος που διακυβεύεται.

          Ταυτόχρονα, λένε οι αγγλοσάξονες, μέγιστη αποτρεπτική τέχνη είναι να κερδίζεις με το να φοβερίζεις παρά με ο να πολεμάς: «you better win by fright instead of fighting».

 

Ενόσω υπάρχουν αίτια πολέμου σ’ ένα διεθνές σύστημα όπου απουσιάζει μια κυβέρνηση των κυβερνήσεων (δηλαδή ένα σύστημα αποτελεσματικής συλλογικής ασφάλειας που θα διασφαλίζει την ανεξαρτησία των μελών-κρατών) η ισχύς θα συνεχίζει να είναι διαμορφωτικής και διανεμητικής σημασίας.

 

Η στρατηγική εξοικονόμησης πόρων με επηρεασμό της βούλησης των αντιπάλων ούτως ώστε να επιφέρεις το ίδιο αποτέλεσμα που σε διαφορετική περίπτωση θα απαιτούσε πολλαπλάσιους σπάνιους πόρους και μεγάλα πολεμικά μέσα –κύριος σκοπός της στρατηγικής του soft power–, δεν είναι κάτι νέο στις σχέσεις των κρατών.

[Χωρίς να υπεισέλθω σε ζητήματα ελληνικού ενδιαφέροντος που αφορούν την εξώθηση της Ελλάδας προς μια κατευναστική στρατηγική ή υπόνοιες που ακόμη δεν μπορούν να τεκμηριωθούν για τα αίτια κάποιων πρόσφατων γεγονότων στην Ελλάδα, θα εστιάσω τώρα με συντομία το ενδιαφέρον στις ακαδημαϊκές πληροφορίες για το ζήτημα της μαλακής ισχύος].

 

Οι περισσότεροι γνωρίζουν τις αναλύσεις των Robert Keohane και Joseph Nye και αρκετά άρθρα και βιβλία του τελευταίου για την μαλακή ισχύ. Αυτό που θα ήθελα να τονίσω για αυτά τα πολύ διαδεδομένα και πολύ παρεξηγημένα κείμενα είναι δύο πτυχές.

          Η πρώτη είναι ότι εντάσσονταν στην λανθασμένη και σήμερα ολοκληρωτικά αναιρεμένης αντίληψης περί δυνατότητας ύπαρξης ενός νομιμοποιημένου ήπιου ηγεμονισμού.

          Τα μέσα, υποστήριζαν στις παλιές καλές φιλελεύθερες γραμμές περί «παγκόσμιας αρμονίας συμφερόντων» που αναιρέθηκαν από τον Edward H. Carr εδώ και μισό αιώνα, μπορεί να είναι τα μέσα ορθολογιστών εμπόρων ενός μεγάλου πλανητικού πλέγματος αλληλεξάρτησης που διερεύνησαν με θαυμαστή ακρίβεια τις δεκαετίες του 1970 και 1980.

          Ο ήπιος ηγεμονισμός βασικά ήταν οι επεμβάσεις των δεκαετιών του 1990 και του 2000 στις οποίες οι αμερικανοί συνάδελφοι διαδραμάτισαν σημαντικό επιτελικό ρόλο ως ανώτατοι κυβερνητικοί αξιωματούχοι. Το φιάσκο του  Αφγανιστάν και του Ιράκ νομίζω μιλά από μόνο του.

 

Η δεύτερη, είναι οι λανθασμένες χρήσεις που έκαναν όσον αφορά τον ρόλο της διεθνούς πολιτικής οικονομίας. Ενάντια σε θέσεις αναλυτών όπως ο Robert Gilpin που τόνιζαν τον ρόλο των διεθνών θεσμών οι νεοφιλελεύθεροι ανάμειξαν τις γνωστές διαπιστώσεις περί ηγεμονικής σταθερότητας και των συνεπειών που προκύπτουν από τις οικονομικές κυμάνσεις με τα ίδια ιδεολογήματα περί ήπιου ηγεμονισμού και με τις λανθασμένες απόψεις τους για τον ρόλο της διεθνούς πολιτικής οικονομίας[1].

          Όπως πολύ χαρακτηριστικά γράφει ο John Mearsheimer παραπέμποντας στον ίδιο τον Nye που έγραψε: «Τέτοιου είδους κλισέ δείχνουν ελλιπή και στενόμυαλη ανάλυση … Η πολιτική και η οικονομία συνδέονται. Τα διεθνή οικονομικά συστήματα εδράζονται στην διεθνή πολιτική τάξη»[2].

          Και όμως, αυτά που ακούσαμε εδώ στην Ελλάδα περί τέλους της γεωπολιτικής και έλευσης της γεωοικονομίας δεν έχουν προηγούμενο.

 

Οι Keohane, Nye, et al, όμως είναι «ήπιες περιπτώσεις» αξιολογικών θέσεων περί «μαλακής ισχύος» και με θέσεις υπέρ μιας όπως την έλεγα ήπια ηγεμονική στάση που θα εκπλήρωνε τους σκοπούς των ΗΠΑ αλλά και που θα έφερνε μεγαλύτερη σταθερότητα. Οι σκληρές θέσεις για την μαλακή ισχύ εντοπίζονται σε άλλους αναλυτές πολλοί από τους οποίους είναι βαθιά αναμεμιγμένοι με την εθνική στρατηγική των ΗΠΑ.

 

 

Το βασικό σκεπτικό όπως διακηρύσσεται σε δηλώσεις, άρθρα και βιβλία που συγκροτούν πλέον μια επιστημονικά πολύ αξιόλογη βιβλιογραφία που παραθέτει θέσεις και περιπτωσιολογικές θεμελιώσεις, είναι ότι ο σκληρός πυρήνας χάραξης και εφαρμογής της στρατηγικής των ηγεμονικών δυνάμεων εμπεριέχει ισχυρές δόσεις επηρεασμού της θέλησης τρίτων κοινωνιών που μεθοδεύεται κάτω από την ομπρέλα του όρου «soft power».

 

Το κεντρικό αιτούμενο είναι: Εκπλήρωση του ίδιου σκοπού που θα επιτυγχανόταν με στρατιωτικά μέσα με τρόπους που ελέγχουν την βούληση και την θέληση της κοινωνίας, της ηγεσίας και των ηγετών μιας χώρας και την εκπλήρωση των πολιτικών στόχων με όσο το δυνατό λιγότερο κόστος.

          Όπως μαθαίνουμε από περιπτωσιολογικές μελέτες της μεταψυχροπολεμικής εποχής αλλά και από αναλυτές και αξιωματούχους της μαλακής ισχύος που ειδικεύονται στο λεγόμενο «non violent conflict», ή πιο εκλαϊκευμένα στα «μεταμοντέρνα πραξικοπήματα», υιοθετούνται όλα τα μέσα όπως κινητά τηλέφωνα, ηλεκτρονικά μηνύματα, ηλεκτρονική παραπληροφόρηση με exit polls που δημιουργούν εικόνα νοθείας σε εθνικές εκλογές ενός κράτους-στόχου[3], αρθρογραφία που παραπλανεί για τους πραγματικούς σκοπούς, ελεγχόμενη διείσδυση σε ομάδες διανοουμένων, ελεγχόμενη διείσδυση σε αναρχικές ομάδες, ελεγχόμενη διείσδυση στα μέσα ενημέρωσης και ελεγχόμενη στα πανεπιστημιακά ιδρύματα κοινωνικών επιστημών.

 

Το σημαντικότερο όμως μέσο είναι πλέον οι διεθνικοί μη κυβερνητικοί δρώντες. Όπως χαρακτηριστικά παρατηρούν οι Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler στο κλασικό πλέον κείμενό τους Strategic Nonviolent Conflict που προλογίζεται από τον Thomas Schelling, ότι οι ΜΚΟ διαδραματίζουν πλέον πρωτεύοντα ρόλο στην παραγωγή στρατηγικής ισχύος μιας δυνάμεως και ότι «έχουν ιδιότητες οι οποίες τους καθιστά εξαιρετικά κατάλληλους για να προωθηθούν επ’ αμοιβή με μη βίαιο τρόπο διενέξεις» οι οποίες θα λειτουργήσουν διανεμητικά και θα εκπληρώσουν συγκεκριμένους στρατηγικούς σκοπούς[4].

 

Η πρόκληση επί τόπου σε μια ξένη χώρα αντίστασης και επεισοδίων, γράφουν επίσης, έχει ως συνέπεια να κινητοποιούνται οι πολίτες κατά μιας πιθανής εισβολής ή το αντίθετο.

          Παραθέτουν ένα πραγματικά πλούσιο ρεπερτόριο μέσων, σκοπών, μεθοδεύσεων, κλιμακώσεων συνδυασμών με χρήση εξωτερικής βίας και εξωτερικών παρεμβάσεων που διανθίζουν με άφθονες περιπτωσιολογικές αναφορές παλαιότερες και πιο σύγχρονες.

          Οι πιο σύγχρονες ονομάζονται πλέον στην βιβλιογραφία ως μεταμοντέρνες πρακτικές με περιπτωσιολογικά πλαίσια αναφοράς την Σερβία μετά τον Ψυχρό Πόλεμο[5], την πορτοκαλί επανάσταση και τα επεισόδια στο Τιαν Μεν στην Κίνα.

 

Στους θεσμούς που είναι απόλυτα ενσωματωμένοι στην εθνική στρατηγική των ΗΠΑ συμπεριλαμβάνεται μια πολύ μεγάλη αλυσίδα ιδρυμάτων στις ΗΠΑ και στο εξωτερικό.

          Τα ανά τον κόσμο ιδρύματα Σόρος διαδραματίζουν ένα από τους πιο μυστήριους αλλά πασίδηλους ως προς τα αποτελέσματά τους ρόλους. Στο εσωτερικό των ΗΠΑ τα ιδρύματα που δεδηλωμένα συνεργάζονται με το Πεντάγωνο είναι εκατοντάδες και στενά ενορχηστρωμένα ως μηχανισμοί προπαγάνδας και προτάσεων πολιτικής στις ΗΠΑ και στο εξωτερικό.

          Ο Δρ Ackerman, για παράδειγμα, είναι ιδρυτής του  International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts of Washington, DC, του οποίου πρόεδρος ήταν ο πρώην αξιωματικός Jack DuVall και ο οποίος μαζί με τον πρώην διευθυντή της CIA James Woolsey, διεύθυναν το Arlington Institute of Washington, το οποίο δημιουργήθηκε από τον σύμβουλο ναυτικών επιχειρήσεων John L. Peterson  με σκοπό επαναδιατυπωθεί το δόγμα εθνικής ασφάλειας με πιο διευρυμένο τρόπο και συγκεκριμένα με προώθηση κοινωνικών πεποιθήσεων σχετικών με τον αμυντικό σχεδιασμό[6].

            Τόσο στην Βρετανία όσο και στις ΗΠΑ, επίσης, αναλυτές συχνά συνεργάζονται με τις υπηρεσίες της χώρας τους και επεξεργάζονται μεθόδους πρόκλησης πολιτικών αποτελεσμάτων με κείμενα που αφορούν την ψυχολογία των μαζών, την επιστράτευση της τέχνης και της μουσικής για την πρόκληση εξεγέρσεων και την δημιουργία ψευδών παραστάσεων περί παγκοσμιότητας[7].

            Η Madeleine Albright που έγινε πρόεδρος του National Democratic Institute σε δήλωσή της το 2000 παραδέχθηκε σχετικά με την Σερβία: "Your work with the National Democratic Institute and the Yugoslav opposition contributed directly and decisively to the recent breakthrough for democracy in that country . . . This may be one of the first instances where polling has played such an important role in setting and securing foreign policy objectives[8]"

 

Υπό ένα γενικότερο πρίσμα, μετά τον Δεύτερο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, η στρατηγική μαλακή ισχύς (soft power) απέκτησε εξαιρετικά μεγάλη σημασία και ενσωματώθηκε πλήρως στην εθνική στρατηγική των ηγεμονικών δυνάμεων.

          Η πτώση της Σοβιετικής Ένωσης δεν τερμάτισε αυτές τις πολιτικές. Το αντίθετο, τις εντατικοποίησε.

          Επιπλέον, η ανάπτυξη των τεχνολογιών και της αλληλεξάρτησης αύξησε τις δυνατότητες των ισχυρών δυνάμεων για διείσδυση, απόκτηση ερεισμάτων, απόκτηση πληροφοριών και  στήσιμο μηχανισμών ελέγχου κρατών-στόχων.

          Οι μηχανισμοί αυτοί απέκτησαν ένα τεράστιο χώρο ελιγμών και εμπέδωσης παραστάσεων που συμφέρουν την στρατηγική μεγάλων κρατών τις τελευταίες δεκαετίες λόγω αλματώδους αύξησης των λεγόμενων «κοινωνικών» «επιστημών» («ιστορία», «διεθνείς σχέσεις», «κοινωνιολογία», «κοινωνική» ψυχολογία, «εθνολογία» κτλ) και των εξω-ακαδημαϊκών «ιδρυμάτων» «προτάσεων πολιτικής» (δηλαδή προπαγάνδας).

          Τόσο τα πρώτα όσο και τα δεύτερα μπορούν να γίνουν βιομηχανίες πολιτικής επιρροής και απόλυτου πολιτικού ελέγχου μιας κοινωνίας.

          Ενώ δεν αποκλείεται σε αυτά τα ιδρύματα να υπάρξουν μελέτες υψηλών προδιαγραφών μπορούν εύκολα να μετατραπούν σε μηχανισμό κοσμοθεωρητικής αποδόμησης και συνειδησιακής απονεύρωσης των κοινωνιών-στόχων.

 

Αυτές οι πολιτικές βρίσκονται πλέον στον πυρήνα της στρατηγικής των μεγάλων δυνάμεων και η θεωρία διεθνών σχέσεων –ιδιαίτερα η στρατηγική ανάλυση– απαιτείται να τις συνεκτιμήσει δεόντως.

          Πολύ περισσότερο θα πρέπει να τις κατανοήσουν, βεβαίως, τα θεσμικά και πολιτικά ελίτ ενός κράτους.

 

Ίσως αρκεί για τις ανάγκες της σύντομης παρουσίασής μου η παράθεση εδαφίου από ανάλυση των αμερικανών διεθνολόγων Katzenstein, Keohane και Krasner , όταν γράφουν ότι «Iσχυρότερα κράτη είναι δυνατό να κατορθώσουν να αλλάξουν τις παραστάσεις με βάση τις οποίες οριοθετούνται οι ιδεολογικές πεποιθήσεις σε λιγότερο ισχυρά κράτη ή ηττημένες πολιτείες. Oι Hνωμένες Πολιτείες, για παράδειγμα, πίεσαν συστηματικά και επίμονα για τη διάδοση συγκεκριμένων πεποιθήσεων ως προς το πώς πρέπει να είναι το όραμα της διεθνούς κοινωνίας [που τις συνέφερε] μετά τον B΄ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο και ανανέωσαν και το αναζωογόνησαν την  μεταψυχροπολεμική εποχή. O σκοπός δεν ήταν απλώς να προωθήσουν συγκεκριμένους στόχους, αλλά να αλλάξουν τον τρόπο με τον οποίο οι συγκεκριμένες κοινωνίες βλέπουν τα οικεία συμφέροντα. H έμφαση αυτού που ο Nye ονομάζει “μαλακή ισχύς” σχετίζεται τόσο με ρεαλιστικούς φόβους [κατανομής ισχύος] για τη σχετική ισχύ όσο και με την [“κριτική”] κονστρουκτιβιστική ανάλυση για συλλογικά πιστεύω, πεποιθήσεις και ταυτότητες»[9].

 

Ολοκληρώνοντας και σε αναφορά με τους κριτικούς κονστρουκτιβιστές θα έλεγα ότι η σημαντικότερη περίπτωση εγχειρήματος των αγγγλοαμερικανών για ολοκληρωτική κατάληψη ενός κράτους είναι η Κυπριακή Δημοκρατία και η πλεκτάνη Αναν για την οποία οι αμερικανοί διέθεσαν δεκάδες εκατομμύρια δολάρια. Οι προγενέστερες περιπτώσεις της Σερβίας, Ουκρανίας, Κοσόβου και αλλού έχουν διερευνηθεί αρκετά. Η περίπτωση της Κύπρου όχι, αν και υπάρχει αφθονία δημόσιων πηγών και εγγράφων που διέρρευσαν.

          Αρκεί μόνο να πω ότι στελέχη του λεγόμενου πνευματικού χώρου που κηρύττουν ότι είναι «κριτικοί κονστρουκτιβιστές» βρέθηκαν στην επιστρατευμένη ουρά των υπηρετών σε επιμορφωτικά-συμμορφωτικά «σεμινάρια πολιτειότητας», σε διεθνικά παρασυνέδρια στην Ελλάδα και στο εξωτερικό που προετοίμαζαν το σχέδιο Αναν, με επιφυλλίδες, με διεθνικούς ΜΚΟ που διέθεταν άφθονα λεφτά για προπαγάνδα και με μελέτες που έστηναν ένα ψεύτικο ωραιοποιητικό σκηνικό του επερχόμενου φασισμού.

 

Καταληκτικά, νομίζω ότι όποιος προχωρεί στην εμπειρική θεμελίωση της θεωρίας διεθνών σχέσεων και ιδιαίτερα την εξέταση στρατηγικών πτυχών της διπλωματίας μιας χώρας δεν έχει την πολυτέλεια, πλέον, να μην συμπεριλάβει αυτές τις πτυχές που είναι σημαντικό μέρος της εθνικής στρατηγικής των δυνάμεων και που επενεργεί διανεμητικά εξοικονομώντας χρήμα και αίματα.

 

Το παλιό “win by fight” έγινε με την καλλιέργεια της αποτρεπτικής στρατηγικής “win by fright” και τα τελευταία χρόνια: in order to win without fight or fight you should win by fraud, deception and bribe.

          Είναι αποδοτικό. Επιπλέον είναι χρηματικά πολύ οικονομικό γιατί τα μέσα πλέον αφθονούν και είναι διάσπαρτα και εύκολα διάσπαρτα: Υπάρχουν μερικές δεκάδες χιλιάδες δήθεν διεθνολόγοι, ιστορικοί, πολιτειολόγοι, κριτικοί κονστρουκτιβιστές και διεθνικοί περιπατητές που ευκόλως για μια χούφτα δολάρια μεταμφιέζουν την έξυπνη ηγεμονική ισχύ με μεγαλόστομους και σπουδαιοφανείς όρους και έννοιες και την πουλούν ως έγκυρη και αξιόπιστη επιστημονική ανάλυση.

          Σ’ αυτούς δεν συμπεριλαμβάνω τους Πολιτικούς  Ρεαλιστές, την μόνη δηλαδή επιστημονική και μη προπαγανδιστική ανάλυση των διεθνών σχέσεων.


[1] Η γεωοικονομία ήταν και συνεχίζει να είναι πάντοτε μέρος της γεωπολιτικής ανάλυσης. Έλληνες συγγραφείς εντυπωσιασμένοι από τους όρους αυτούς αλλά άσχετοι με το επιστημονικό κεκτημένο αμέσως έσπευσαν να υιοθετήσουν τα αμερικανικά προπαγανδιστικά ιδεολογήματα περί γεωοικονομίας για να πουν περίπου ότι η πολιτική της ισχύος στον «σύγχρονο κόσμο» τελείωσε. Μόνο κατευνασμός και οικονομικές συναλλαγές φτάνουν.

[2] Joseph Nye, στο East Asian Security, Foreign Affairs, 74, no 4, July-August 1995 σ. 90-1. Το εντός εισαγωγικών μεταφρασμένο εδάφιο στα ελληνικά από την ελληνική μετάφραση του βιβλίου του John Mearsheimer, Η τραγωδία της πολιτικής των μεγάλων δυνάμεων (Ποιότητα, Αθήνα 2007), σ. 727.

[3]

[4] Βλ. Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, (Westport,Connecticut: Praeger, 1994) σ. xxi. Για μια προσβάσιμη βιβλιοκριτική βλ.  Σε ομιλία του στο State Department stiw 29 Ιουνίου 2004 ο Ackerman είπε ότι «youth movements, such as those used to bring down Serbia, could bring down Iran and North Korea, and could have been used to bring down Iraq -- thereby accomplishing all of Bush's objectives without relying on military means. And he reported that he has been working with the top US weapons designer, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, on developing new communications technologies that could be used in other youth movement insurgencies. "There is no question that these technologies are democratizing" αναφερόμενος στην Κίνα. Παρατιθέμενος στο J. Mowat, www.onlinejournal.com , http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_308.shtml

[5] Για την Σερβία ο Ackerman γράφει χαρακτηριστικά «πώς οι φοιτητές έριξαν τον δικτάτορα χωρίς ούτε ένα πυροβολισμό». By PETER ACKERMAN, How Serbian students brought dictator down without a shot fired, http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/042602/042602y.htm.  

[6] Βλ. J. Mowat, www.onlinejournal.com, http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_308.shtml.

[7] Βλ. Dr. Emery reported in "The next thirty years: concepts, methods and anticipations,'' στην διεύθυνση http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/%20klu/hure/1997/00000050/00000008/00298053, για την προσπάθεια ανατροπής του ντε Γκολ το 1967. Ο Dr. Howard Perlmutter, καθηγητής κοινωνικής αρχιτεκτονικής στο Wharton School λέει χαρακτηριστικά το 1991 ότι το βίντεο "rock in Katmandu" είναι ένα κατάλληλο παράδειγμα για το πώς κράτη με παραδοσιακές κουλτούρες θα μπορούσαν να αποσταθεροποιηθούν. Χαρακτηριστικά:  There are two requirements, "building internationally committed networks of international and locally committed organizations,'' and "creating global events" through "the transformation of a local event into one having virtually instantaneous international implications through mass-media". Παρατίθεται στο www.onlinejournal.com , http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_308.shtml.

[8] Madeline Albright, αναρτημένο στην ιστοσελίδα του ινστιτούτου τον Οκτώβριο 2000 http://www.ndi.org/about/newsletter/2002/1326_ww_newdemocs301.pdf , βλ. επίσης Mowat ό.π.

[9] “More powerful states may be in position to alter the conceptions that the weaker actors have of their own self interests, especially when economic and military power has delegitimated ideological convictions in weaker or defeated societies. The United States, for instance, pressed for a particular vision of the international society should be ordered after World War II and renewed and reinvigorated this project after the en of the Cold War. The goal was not simply to promote a particular set of objectives, but to alter how other societies conceived of their own goals. The emphasis on what Nye has called soft power engages both realist concerns about relative capabilities and constructivism’s focus on beliefs and identity”. [Katzenstein/Keohane/Krasner , International Organization, vol. 52. 4 1998 p. 673]

 

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Για μετάβαση σε αρχείο Word που περιέχει αναλύσεις που αναφέρονται στα λινκς της ανάλυσης του Mowat που ακολουθεί, κλικ εδώ.

Special Report  -- www.onlinejournal.com , http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_308.shtml

By Jonathan Mowat, The new Gladio in action?, http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_308.shtml

Last Updated: Jan 4th, 2007 - 01:08:31
The new Gladio in action?
By Jonathan Mowat
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Mar 19, 2005, 02:34

 
 

"Gene Sharp started out the seminar by saying 'Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power.' And I thought, 'Boy is this guy speaking my language,' that is what armed struggle is about." -- Col. Robert Helvey

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government and allied forces' year-end installation of Victor Yushchenko as president of Ukraine have completed the field-testing of the "Postmodern Coup." Employing and fine-tuning the same sophisticated techniques used in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003 (and unsuccessfully in Belarus in 2001), it is widely expected that the United States will attempt to apply the same methods throughout the former Soviet Union.

"We have to confront those forces that are committed to reproduce a Georgian or Ukrainian scenario," Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev stated on December 26, the day of the coup, "we'll not allow the import of Rose [Georgian] and Orange [Ukrainian] revolutions in our country." One day later, the Kazakh government launched a criminal case against the Soros Foundation for tax evasion, one of the coups' financiers. And last spring, Uzbek President Islam Karimov accused Soros of overseeing the revolution in Georgia, and condemning his efforts to "fool and brainwash" young intelligentsia in his own country, banned the group. The same networks are also increasingly active in South America, Africa, and Asia. Top targets include Venezuela, Mozambique, and Iran, among others.

The method employed is usefully described by The Guardian's Ian Traynor in a November 26, 2004, article entitled "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," during the first phase of the coup.

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory -- whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

[T]he campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections

Much of the coup apparatus is the same that was used in the overthrow of President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, the Tiananmen Square destabilization in 1989, and Vaclav Havel's "Velvet revolution" in Czechoslavakia in 1989. As in these early operations, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its primary arms, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI), played a central role. The NED was established by the Reagan Administration in 1983, to do overtly what the CIA had done covertly, in the words of one its legislative drafters, Allen Weinstein. The Cold War propaganda and operations center, Freedom House, now chaired by former CIA director James Woolsey, has also been involved, as were billionaire George Soros' foundations, whose donations always dovetail those of the NED.

What is new about the template bears on the use of the Internet (in particular chat rooms, instant messaging, and blogs) and cell phones (including text-messaging), to rapidly steer angry and suggestible "Generation X" youth into and out of mass demonstrations and the like -- a capability that only emerged in the mid-1990s. "With the crushing ubiquity of cell phones, satellite phones, PCs, modems and the Internet," Laura Rosen emphasized in Salon Magazine on February 3, 2001,"the information age is shifting the advantage from authoritarian leaders to civic groups." She might have mentioned the video games that helped create the deranged mindset of these "civic groups." The repeatedly emphasized role played by so-called "Discoshaman" and his girlfriend "Tulipgirl," in assisting the "Orange Revolution" through their aptly named blog, "Le Sabot Post-Modern," is indicative of the technical and sociological components involved.

A Civilian Revolution in Military Affairs

The emphasis on the use of new communication technologies to rapidly deploy small groups, suggests what we are seeing is civilian application of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs" doctrine, which depends on highly mobile small group deployments "enabled" by "real time" intelligence and communications. Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of "intelligence helmet" video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones constitute the doctrine's civilian application.

This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and National Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet, cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The "revolution" in warfare that such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians have been working in high places (for example the RAND Corporation) for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of the most important command structures of the US military apparatus with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld.

The new techniques of warfare include the use of both lethal (violent) and nonlethal (nonviolent) tactics. Both ways are conducted using the same philosophy, infrastructure, and modus operandi. It is what is known as Cyberwar. For example, the tactic of swarming is a fundamental element in both violent and nonviolent forms of warfare. This new philosophy of war, which is supposed to replicate the strategy of Genghis Khan as enhanced by modern technologies, is intended to aid both military and non-military assaults against targeted states through what are, in effect, "high tech" hordes. In that sense there is no difference, from the standpoint of the plotters, between Iraq or Ukraine, if only that many think the Ukraine-like coup is more effective and easier.

Indicative of the common objective are the comments of the theoreticians of the post modern coup, for example, Dr. Peter Ackerman, the author of "Strategic Nonviolent Conflict" (Praeger 1994). Writing in the "National Catholic Reporter" on April 26, 2002, Dr. Ackerman offered the following corrective to Bush's Axis of Evil speech targeting Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, which he otherwise approved: "It is not true that the only way to 'take out' such regimes is through U.S. military action."

Speaking at the "Secretary's Open Forum" at the State Department on June 29, 2004, in a speech entitled, "Between Hard and Soft Power:The Rise of Civilian-Based Struggle and Democratic Change," Ackerman elaborated on the concept involved. He proposed that youth movements, such as those used to bring down Serbia, could bring down Iran and North Korea, and could have been used to bring down Iraq -- thereby accomplishing all of Bush's objectives without relying on military means. And he reported that he has been working with the top US weapons designer, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, on developing new communications technologies that could be used in other youth movement insurgencies. "There is no question that these technologies are democratizing," he stressed, in reference to their potential use in bringing down China, "they enable decentralized activity. They create, if you will, a digital concept of the right of assembly."

Dr. Ackerman is the founding chairman of International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts of Washington, DC, of which former US Air Force officer Jack DuVall is president. Together with former CIA director James Woolsey, DuVall also directs the Arlington Institute of Washington, DC, which was created by former Chief of Naval Operations advisor John L. Peterson in 1989 " to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms" it reports, through introducing "social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation."

"Swarming Adolescents" and "Rebellious Hysteria"

As in the case of the new communication technologies, the potential effectiveness of angry youth in postmodern coups has long been under study. As far back as 1967, Dr. Fred Emery, then director of the Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the "hypnotic effects" of television, specified that the then new phenomenon of "swarming adolescents" found at rock concerts could be effectively used to bring down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s. This was particularly the case, as Dr. Emery reported in "The next thirty years: concepts, methods and anticipations,'' in the group's "Human Relations," because the phenomena was associated with "rebellious hysteria." The British military created the Tavistock Institute as its psychological warfare arm following World War I; it has been the forerunner of such strategic planning ever since. Dr. Emery's concept saw immediate application in NATO's use of "swarming adolescents" in toppling French President Charles De Gaulle in 1967.

In November 1989, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, under the aegis of that university's "Program for Social Innovations in Global Management," began a series of conferences to review progress towards that strategic objective, which was reported on in "Human Relations" in 1991. There, Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a professor of "Social Architecture'' at the Wharton School, and a follower of Dr. Emery, stressed that "rock video in Katmandu," was an appropriate image of how states with traditional cultures could be destabilized, thereby creating the possibility of a "global civilization." There are two requirements for such a transformation, he added, "building internationally committed networks of international and locally committed organizations,'' and "creating global events" through "the transformation of a local event into one having virtually instantaneous international implications through mass-media."

(Perlmutter on the origin of the concept of globalization: see quote.)

This brings us to the final ingredient of these new coups -- the deployment of polling agencies' "exit polls" broadcast on international television to give the false (or sometimes accurate) impression of massive vote-fraud by the ruling party, to put targeted states on the defensive. Polling operations in the recent coups have been overseen by such outfits as Penn, Schoen and Berland, top advisors to Microsoft and Bill Clinton. Praising their role in subverting Serbia, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (and later Chairman of NDI) , in an October 2000 letter to the firm quoted on its website, stated: "Your work with the National Democratic Institute and the Yugoslav opposition contributed directly and decisively to the recent breakthrough for democracy in that country . . . This may be one of the first instances where polling has played such an important role in setting and securing foreign policy objectives." Penn, Schoen, together with the OSCE, also ran the widely televised "exit poll" operations in the Ukrainian elections.

In the aftermath of such youth deployments and media operations, more traditional elements come to the fore. That is, the forceful, if covert, intervention by international institutions and governments threatening the targeted regime, and using well placed operatives within the targeted regime's military and intelligence services to ensure no countermeasures can be effectively deployed. Without these traditional elements, of course, no postmodern coup could ever work. Or, as Jack DuVall put it in Jesse Walker's "Carnival and conspiracy in Ukraine," in Reason Online, November 30, 2004, "You can't simply parachute Karl Rove into a country and manufacture a revolution."

Gladio and James Bond Get a Youth Group

The creation and deployment of coups of any kind requires agents on the ground. The main handler of these coups on the "street side" has been the Albert Einstein Institution, which was formed in 1983 as an offshot of Harvard University under the impetus of Dr. Gene Sharp, and which specializes in "nonviolence as a form of warfare." Dr. Sharp had been the executive secretary of A.J. Muste, the famous U.S. Trotskyite labor organizer and peacenik. The group is funded by Soros and the NED. Albert Einstein's president is Col. Robert Helvey, a former US Army officer with 30 years of experience in Southeast Asia. He has served as the case officer for youth groups active in the Balkans and Eastern Europe since at least 1999.

Col. Helvey reports, in a January 29, 2001, interview with film producer Steve York in Belgrade, that he first got involved in "strategic nonviolence" upon seeing the failure of military approaches to toppling dictators -- especially in Myanmar, where he had been stationed as military attachι -- and seeing the potential of Sharp's alternative approach. According to B. Raman, the former director of India's foreign intelligence agency, RAW, in a December 2001 paper published by his institute entitled, "The USA's National Endowment For Democracy (NED): An Update," Helvey "was an officer of the Defence Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon, who had served in Vietnam and, subsequently, as the US Defence Attache in Yangon, Myanmar (1983 to 85), during which he clandestinely organised the Myanmarese students to work behind Aung San Suu Kyi and in collaboration with Bo Mya's Karen insurgent group. . . . He also trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989" and "is now believed to be acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong, the religious sect of China, in similar civil disobedience techniques." Col. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been working with Albert Einstein and Soros long before then.

Reflecting Albert Einstein's patronage, one of its first books was Dr. Sharp's "Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-Based Deterrence and Defense," published in 1985 with a forward by George Kennan, the famous "Mr. X" 1940's architect of the Cold War who was also a founder of the CIA's Operations division. There, Sharp reports that "civilian-based defense" could counter the Soviet threat through its ability "to deter and defeat attacks by making a society ungovernable by would be oppressors" and "by maintaining a capacity for orderly self-rule even in the face of extreme threats and actual aggression." He illustrates its feasibility by discussing the examples of the Algerian independence in 1961 and the Czechoslovakian resistance to Soviet invasion in 1968-9. In his forward, Kennan praises Sharp for showing the "possibilities of deterrence and resistance by civilians" as a "partial alternative to the traditional, purely military concepts of national defense." The book was promptly translated into German, Norwegian, Italian, Danish, and other NATO country languages. See the link to the Italian translation of the book (Verso un'Europa Inconquistabile. 190 pp. 1989 Introduction by Gianfranco Pasquino) that sports a series of fashionable sociologists and "politologists" prefacing the book and calling for a civil resistance to a possible Soviet invasion of Italy.

Such formulations suggest that Albert Einstein activities were, ironically, coherent (or, possibly updating) the infamous NATO's "Gladio" stay-behind network, whose purpose was to combat possible Soviet occupation through a panoply of military and nonmilitary means. The investigations into Gladio, and those following the 1978 assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, also shed some light (immediately switched off) on a professional apparatus of destabilization that had been invisible for several decades to the public.

It is noteworthy that the former deputy chief of intelligence for the US Army in Europe, Major General Edward Atkeson, first "suggested the name 'civilian based defense' to Sharp," John M. Mecartney, Coordinator of the Nonviolent Action for National Defense Institute, reports in his group's CBD News and Opinion of March 1991. By 1985, Gen. Atkeson, then retired from the US Army, was giving seminars at Harvard entitled "Civilian-based Defense and the Art of War.

The Albert Einstein Institution reports, in its "1994-99 Report on Activities," that Gen. Atkeson also served on Einstein's advisory board in those years. Following his posting as the head of US Army intelligence in Europe, and possibly concurrently with his position at the Albert Einstein Institution, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reports that Gen. Atkeson, who also advised CSIS on "international security." served as "national intelligence officer for general purpose forces on the staff of the director of Central Intelligence."

A 1990 variant of Sharp's book, "Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System," the Albert Einstein Institution reports, "was used in 1991 and 1992 by the new independent governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in planning their defense against Soviet efforts to regain control."

As we shall see below, with such backing, Col. Helvey and his colleagues have created a series of youth movements including Otpor! in Serbia, Kmara! in Georgia, Pora! in Ukraine, and the like, which are already virally replicating other sects throughout the former Soviet Union, achieving in civilian form what had not been possible militarily in the 1980s. The groups are also spreading to Africa and South America.

And Dope Too?

Col. Helvey's long experience in Myanmar in training insurgent ethnic minorities in a region that is the center of world opium production raises another question of great bearing on "post modern coups." That is: what is the role of narcotic mafias in facilitating "regime change?" Law enforcement agencies from many nations, including the United States, have long reported that the Balkans is the major narcotics pipeline into Western Europe. Ukraine is said to be a top conduit, as is Georgia. Kyrghyzstan, now at the top of the hit list, is another opium conduit. And George Soros "the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization," has been the top "private" funder of all the Eastern European and Central Asian insurgent groups, as well as those in Myamar. The spread of such mafias, is, of course, one of the most efficient ways of infiltrating and corrupting government agencies of targeted states.

Col. Helvey is not the only operator with such a background. The head of the OSCE's vote monitoring operation in Ukraine, for example, Geert-Hinrich Ahrens, was German Ambassador to Colombia in the late 1990s, when German secret agent Werner Mauss was arrested for working closely with the narco-terrorist ELN, whose bombings are financed by the cocaine trade. Ahrens was also on the scene in Albania and Macedonia, when the narcotics smuggling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was created with US and German patronage. And Michael Kozak, the US ambassador whose 2001 effort to overthrow Belarus' Lukachenko failed, had been a top handler of the cocaine-smuggling Contras.

The Serbian Virus

The networks and methods used in the Serbian through Ukraine sequence were first publicly revealed in a Washington Post article on Dec. 11, 2000, by Michael Dobbs, entitled. "U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition: Political Consultants Helped Yugoslav Opposition Topple Authoritarian Leader." He reports that:

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.

Some Americans involved in the anti-Milosevic effort said they were aware of CIA activity at the fringes of the campaign, but had trouble finding out what the agency was up to. Whatever it was, they concluded it was not particularly effective. The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution's ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.

Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharp, whom he describes as "the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement," referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist.

Peter Ackerman, the above-mentioned coup expert, analyzed and popularized the methods involved in a 2001 PBS documentary-series and book, "A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict," together with retired US Airforce officer Jack DuVall. Focusing on youth organizing, they report:

After the NATO bombing, which had helped the regime suppress opposition, Otpor's organizing took hold with a quiet vengeance. It was built in some places around clubhouses where young people could go and hang out, exercise, and party on the weekends, or more often it was run out of dining rooms and bedrooms in activists' homes. These were "boys and girls 18 and 19 years old" who had lived "in absolute poverty compared to other teenagers around the world," according to Stanko Lazendic, an Otpor activist in Novi Sad. "Otpor offered these kids a place to gather, a place where they could express their creative ideas." In a word, it showed them how to empower themselves.

Otpor's leaders knew that they "couldn't use force on someone who . . . had three times more force and weapons than we did," in the words of Lazendic. "We knew what had happened in. Tiananmen, where the army plowed over students with tanks." So violence wouldn't work -- and besides, it was the trademark of Milosevic, and Otpor had to stand for something different. Serbia "was a country in which violence was used too many times in daily politics," noted Srdja Popovic, a 27 year-old who called himself Otpor's "ideological commissar." The young activists had to use nonviolent methods "to show how superior, how advanced, how civilized" they were.

This relatively sophisticated knowledge of how to develop nonviolent power was not intuitive. Miljenko Dereta, the director of a private group in Belgrade called Civic Initiatives, got funding from Freedom House in the U.S. to print and distribute 5,000 copies of Gene Sharp's book, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation." Otpor got hold of Sharp's main three-volume work, "The Politics of Nonviolent Action," freely adapting sections of it into a Serbian-language notebook they dubbed the "Otpor User Manual." Consciously using this "ideology of nonviolent, individual resistance," in Popovic's words, activists also received direct training from Col. Robert Helvey, a colleague of Sharp, at the Budapest Hilton in March 2000.

Helvey emphasized how to break the people's habits of subservience to authority, and also how to subvert: the regime's "pillars of support," including the police and armed forces. Crucially, he warned them against "contaminants to a nonviolent struggle," especially violent action, which would deter ordinary people from joining the movement: and alienate the international community, from which material and financial assistance could be drawn. As Popovic put it: "Stay nonviolent and you will get the support of the third party."

That support, largely denied to the Serbian opposition before, now began to flow. Otpor and other dissident groups received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, affiliated with the U.S. government, and Otpor leaders sat down with Daniel Serwer, the program director for the Balkans at the U.S. Institute for Peace, whose story of having been tear-gassed during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration gave him special credibility in their eyes. The International Republican Institute, also financed by the U.S. government, channeled funding to the opposition and met with Otpor leaders several times. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the wellspring for most of this financing, was also the source of money that went for materials like t-shirts and stickers.

No Lack of Opportunities for Employment

In the aftermath of the Serbian revolution, the National Endowment for Democracy, Albert Einstein Institution, and related outfits helped establish several Otpor-modeled youth groups in Eastern Europe, notably Zubr in Belarus in January 2001; Kmara in Georgia, in April 2003; and Pora in Ukraine in June 2004. Efforts to overthrow Belarus President Alexsander Luschenko failed in 2001, while the US overthrow of Georgian President Eduard Schevardnadze was successfully accomplished in 2003, using Kmara as part of its operation.

Commenting on that expansion, Albert Einstein staffer Chris Miller, in his report on a 2001 trip to Serbia found on the group's website, reports:

Since the ousting of Milosevic, several members of Otpor have met with members of the Belarusian group Zubr (Bison). In following developments in Belarus since early this year, It is clear that Zubr was developed or at least conceptualized, using Otpor as a model. Also, [Albert Einstein's report] From Dictatorship to Democracy is available in English on the Zubr website at www.zubr-belarus.com. Of course, success will not be achieved in Belarus or anywhere else, simply by mimicking the actions taken in Serbia. However the successful Serbian nonviolent struggle was highly influenced and aided by the availability of knowledge and information on strategic nonviolent struggle and both successful and unsuccessful past cases, which is transferable.

Otpor focused on building their human resources, especially among youth. An Otpor training manual to "train future trainers" was developed, which contained excerpts from The Politics of Nonviolent Action, provided to Otpor by Robert Helvey during his workshop in Budapest for Serbs in early 2000. It may be applicable for other countries.

And with funding provided by Freedom House and the US government, Otpor established the Center for Nonviolent Resistance, in Budapest, to train these groups. Describing the deployment of this youth movement, Ian Trainor, in the above cited Guardian November 2004 article, reports:

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary -- Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US State Department and USAID are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute.

An Associated Press article by Dusan Stojanovic, on November 2, 2004, entitled "Serbia's export: Peaceful Revolution," elaborates:

"We knew there would be work for us after Milosevic," said Danijela Nenadic, a program coordinator of the Belgrade-based Center for Nonviolent Resistance. The nongovernmental group emerged from Otpor, the pro-democracy movement that helped sweep Milosevic from power by organizing massive and colorful protests that drew crowds who never previously had the courage to oppose the former Yugoslav president. In Ukraine and Belarus, tens of thousands of people have been staging daily protests -- carbon copies of the anti-Milosevic rallies -- with "training" provided by the Serbian group.

The group says it has "well-trained" followers in Ukraine and Belarus. In Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, anti-government activists "saw what we did in Serbia and they contacted us for professional training," group member Sinisa Sikman said. Last year, Otpor's clenched fist was flying high on white flags again -- this time in Georgia, when protesters stormed the parliament in an action that led to the toppling of Shevardnadze.

Last month, Ukrainian border authorities denied entry to Alexandar Maric, a member of Otpor and an adviser with the U.S.-based democracy watchdog Freedom House. A Ukrainian student group called Pora was following the strategies of Otpor.

James Woolsey's Freedom House "expressed concern" over Maric's deportation, in an October 14, 2004, press release which reported that he was traveling to Ukraine as part of "an initiative run by Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute to promote civic participation and oversight during the 2004 presidential and 2006 parliamentary elections in Ukraine." In a related statement, it added that it hoped the deportation was not a sign of the Ukrainian government's "unwillingness to allow the free flow of information and learning across borders that is an integral and accepted part of programs to encourage democratic progress in diverse societies around the world."

Timeline:

Who Is Col. Bob Helvey?

Who is Col. Bob Helvey, who personally, and through his Albert Einstein Institution, played such a key role in the Serbian and Ukrainian coups?

According to his own account, Helvey first got involved in "strategic nonviolence" upon seeing the failures of military approaches to toppling dictators, especially in Myanmar (also known as Burma). In a January 29, 2001, interview with Steve York in Belgrade, Helvey stated:

My career has been that of a professional soldier. And one of my last assignments was to be the defense attachι in Rangoon [Myanmar]. And I really had an opportunity -- two years living in Rangoon and getting around the country -- to really see first hand what happens when a people are oppressed to the point that they're absolutely terrorized.

And, you know, there was no future for people and there was a struggle for democracy going on, but it was an armed struggle on the periphery of the country and in the border regions. And it was very clear that that armed struggle was never going to succeed.

So, when I got back [to the US], I kept Burma in the back of my mind. Here were a people that really wanted democracy, really wanted political reform, but the only option they had was armed struggle. And that was really a nonstarter, so there was really a sense of helplessness.

Back in the US, he reports, he was selected as senior fellow at the Harvard Center for International Affairs -- while still an active duty officer, where he attended a meeting on a "Program for Nonviolent Sanctions."

Dr. Gene Sharp happened to be there. And he started out the seminar by saying, "Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power. How to seize political power and how to deny it to others." And I thought, "Boy, this guy's talking my language." And, you know, that's what armed struggle is about. So I got interested in this approach because I saw immediately that there may be an opportunity here for the Burmese.

And how did he get involved in Serbia?

I had done some work along the Thai-Burmese border with the International Republican Institute. So when they were looking for someone to present information on strategic nonviolent struggle to a Serb group, they called me.

The Albert Einstein Institution repeatedly emphasizes Col. Helvey's role in training the Myanmar opposition, and a substantial amount of the group's web page stresses the group's involvement there. Reflecting this preoccupation, Albert Einstein's writings have repeatedly been translated not only into Burmen, but also into Karen, Chin, Mon, Jingphaw and several other ethnic minority languages and dialects in that country.

The Albert Einstein Institute does not emphasize, however, that even the US State Department and Drug Enforcement Agency identify the ethnic minority opposition to the Myanmar government as comprising the world's largest producers of opium and heroin.

The DEA's 2002 "Drug Intelligence Brief: Burma: Country Brief," for example, states:

Armed ethnic minority groups who have been in conflict with the GOB [Government of Burma, aka Myanmar ed] for decades control cultivation, production, and trafficking in Burma. . . . The drug trafficking groups operating within Burma are mostly insurgent factions that have been warring with the GOB and among themselves for many years.

Special note should be made here of Bo Mya and his Karen group, which Col. Helvey has advised for years. Bo Mya, now retired, has admitted to have held meetings with Burmese drug king pin Khun Sa, that Khun Sa said were held in an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate opium and heroin routes of Myanmar and Thailand. (Bo Mya has denied Myanmar government allegations of his involvement in the narcotics trade.)

According to Khun Sa's statements -- later made famous by the US military "Missing in Action" investigator "Bo" Gritz -- his opium trafficking was done under the coordination of Richard Armitage, currently US Undersecretary of State. (See references here, here and here)

While Col. Helvey's precise relations with former CIA deputy director Theodore Shackley, who had been widely accused of overseeing this narcotics trafficking, remain unknown, such reports do lend credence to claims that narcotics syndicates have played a pivotal role in the recent coups in the Balkans, and now Ukraine, which comprise an important route for Southeast Asian heroin entering Western Europe.

Myanmar Operations

In its "Report on Activities, 1993-1999," the Albert Einstein Institution laid great stress on the importance of Helvey's operations to subvert the Myanmar regime as a centerpiece of their activities. In fact, the first paragraph of the introduction of the report reads:

Colonel Kyaw Thein was clearly unhappy with our workshop on nonviolent struggle held along the Thai-Burma border. At a September 1996 press briefing in Rangoon, the spokesman for the military dictatorship charged that "aliens and mercenaries" were trying to "disrupt the peace and tranquility" in Burma -- as if widespread torture, forced labor, and other human rights atrocities constitute "tranquility." The military official was incensed by an ever increasing global phenomenon: direct transnational assistance and cooperation between nongovernmental organizations and pro-democracy groups around the world, in this case of course, in Burma. The Albert Einstein Institution's groundbreaking outreach on strategic nonviolent struggle is but one example of this growing trend that moves beyond traditional humanitarian and human rights efforts.

 . . . The impetus for our intensive workshops on nonviolent struggle for Burmese groups came in November 1991, when Robert Helvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former U.S. military attachι in Burma, requested that we assist in reviewing lesson plans for an introductory course in nonviolent struggle. Mr. Helvey designed the course for Burmese opposition groups in part by relying on Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The May 1992 course, conducted inside Burma at the opposition headquarters at Manerplaw, was extremely well received. In fact, when leading Burmese opposition groups formed the umbrella organization National Council of the Union of Burma in August 1992, they also established a "Political Defiance Committee" to educate activists and to organize strategic nonviolent struggle inside Burma ("political defiance" is the term adopted in Burma to connote nonviolent struggle). Senior pro-democracy leaders requested additional workshops from Robert Helvey and the Albert Einstein Institution.

A Fall 1992 article in "Nonviolent Sanctions" by Gene Sharp, entitled "Exploring Nonviolent Struggle in Thailand and Burma," and found on Albert Einstein's website, describes their role in Myanmar, and in particular Col. Helvey's role:

Gene Sharp traveled to Thailand and Burma in the fall, October 20–November 8, 1992, in response to two invitations. The American Friends of Democracy in Burma (headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia) asked him to help evaluate a course on "Political Defiance" that had been taught in Mannerplaw by Robert Helvey for the Democratic Alliance of Burma.

"After two days rest and orientation in Bangkok, I traveled to Mannerplaw, a base camp for the Burmese democratic opposition located along the Thai-Burma border. . . . During my four days in Mannerplaw I participated in a variety of meetings and discussions about nonviolent struggle (or political defiance as it is more often called there). These included meetings with top political officials, military officers, and leaders of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front, the National League for Democracy, the Karen Youth Organization Leadership Seminar, the Democratic Alliance of Burma, and the Political Defiance Committee."

Robert Helvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel and an expert on Burma, began offering a course on political defiance to groups in Mannerplaw last spring. The aim of this intensive course is to give participants a basic understanding of the technique of nonviolent struggle. At the end of the course, students are expected to understand the insights into political power on which political defiance is based, and also to have developed an understanding of the technique's multiple methods, its dynamics of conflict against a repressive regime, the mechanisms of change, and the principles of strategy in nonviolent struggle.

Peace Magazine, in its April June 2003 issue, contains further details on Helvey's career, in a laudatory article entitled "Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance."

From 1983 until 1985 Helvey was a US military attachι at the American Embassy in Rangoon, where he was dismayed by the futility of armed resistance to the brutal dictatorship of Burma. An armed struggle had continued without success for over two decades.

After retiring from the army in 1991, Helvey gave a speech in Washington, using Sharp's insights and adding his own. A member of the audience later offered to pay his way to Burma to spread his message. With this funding, from 1992 to 1998, he made 15 trips to the Thai-Burmese border to meet with more than 500 members of the National Council Union of Burma, a pro-democracy umbrella group. On eight occasions, Helvey taught a six-week course, seeking to build confidence, identify the dictatorship's major weaknesses, and form pressure groups.

Many of those attending Helvey's course had been officers in armed resistance groups for many years and were skeptical about nonviolence. For example, Auun Nang Oo, who is now a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Nonviolence, was astonished that a career soldier could hold such views. Another unbeliever was General Bo Mya, the leader of the Karens, the biggest national minority. At first he would just grumble and grunt that he "wasn't interested in doing the work of cowards." To change such attitudes, Helvey coined the more militant-sounding phrase, "political defiance," which won Bo over and caused him to ask Helvey to train more Karen leaders.

The Myamar government has also commented on Col. Helvey's career. For example, at a June 27, 1997 press conference entitled "How some Western powers have been aiding and abetting terrorism committed by certain organizations operating under the guise of democracy and human rights by giving them assistance in both cash and kind." There, Lt-Gen Khin Nyunt, at the time Secretary-1 of the State Law and Order Restoration Council of Myanmar, said of Helvey:

He was assigned to Myanmar as Defense Attache (Army) at the U.S. embassy in Myanmar from 1982 to 1984 with the rank of full colonel. On conclusion of his assignment in Myanmar he went home, retired immediately from the US Army and returned to the Myanmar-Thai border. He is military advisor to the KNU, KNPP and the Democratic Party for New Society, personally giving military training and manipulating the armed groups in various ways right up till now.

The Myamar government newspaper, New Light of Myanmar, on February 4, 1995, also reported on Helvey's involvement with insurgent groups then working with opium kingpin Khun Sa.

As the second strategy of the NCUB [National Coalition Union of Burma], it formed the Political Defiance Committee with the objective to use all sorts of subversive acts so that the people will have wrong impressions of the Government and lose their respect on it and so disturbances and upheavals will break out in the country. Thus, they made contacts with underground elements within the country and distributed agitative pamphlets, set off bombs in townships to disturb peace and tranquility and cause disturbances and resorted to other disruptive acts. Those who gave training in political defiance (PD) activities were a former retired US Defence Attache Robert Helvey and one Gene Sharp. It was seen that during the three-year period of extending invitation for peace, the KNU were bent on undermining the interest of the people. KNU Bo Mya sent KNU Lt-Col Law Wadi, demolition expert Lt-Col Saw Isaac, to drug warlord Khun Sa at Homein Camp and had discussions from 10 to 12 April 1994 on cooperation between KNU and MTA, assisting in making land mines and arms and ammunition and other economic cooperation.

The Coup Plotters

The Albert Einstein Institution

The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) has played the key role in recent years in training and deploying youth movements to help prepare the conditions for coups through fostering the impression that the targeted regimes are deeply unpopular, and through destabilizing those regimes through their demonstrations and the like. The group, which is funded by the Soros foundations and the US government, is led by former DIA officer Col. Robert Helvey, and Harvard University's Dr. Gene Sharp.

According to the Albert Einstein Institution's report, Dr Gene Sharp (curriculum vitae and Biographical Profile) "founded the Albert Einstein Institution in 1983 to promote research, policy studies, and education on the strategic uses of nonviolent struggle in face of dictatorship, war, genocide, and oppression."

Dr. Sharp has held research appointments in Harvard University's Center for International Affairs for nearly 30 years. His writings, which on the strategic use of nonviolence in overturning states, have been translated into 27 languages. Through funding provided by the Soros foundations, and through the National Endowment of Democracy and other US government conduits, Sharp and his associates have regularly traveled to targeted regions to facilitate revolutions, since the group's creation.

According to Sharp, "If the issue is to bring down a dictatorship, then it is not good enough to say, 'we want freedom.' It's necessary to develop a strategy, or a super-plan, to weaken a dictatorship and that can only be done by identifying its sources of power. These [sources of power] include: authority, human resources skills, knowledge, tangible factors, economic and material resources and sanctions like police and troops."

For this reason, Sharp reports, he has written numerous books on nonviolent struggle to help oppressed peoples develop a "superplan." These works, of which the major one is "The Politics of Nonviolent Action," have been translated into 27 languages. Among these languages are Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian, Macedonian, Arabic, Tamil, Burmese, Karen (and several other Burmese minority languages), Thai, Chinese, Korean, as well as French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian, and other European languages still spoken in former colonies.

While Sharp is the main theoretician of the group (and officially its senior scholar), its more practical work is overseen by its president, Colonel Robert Helvey, who began working with the center even before officially retiring from the US Army in 1991. A 30-year veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Helvey had practical experience in subversive operations throughout Southeast Asia prior to his work with the institution. According to numerous reports, Helvey was the case officer for the US-sponsored coup in Serbia, was deeply involved in similar operations in Georgia, and according to at least on report, was on the ground in the recent coup in Ukraine.  (Ukrainian translation of From Dictatorship to Democracy  by Sharp has just been announced by The Albert Einstein Institution)

According to the Albert Einstein Institution's report for the years 2000 to 2004, its mission is to "advance the worldwide study and strategic use of nonviolent action in conflict."

Numerous individuals and organizations interested in the potential of nonviolent struggle contact the Albert Einstein Institution. In recent years, requests for information or advice have come from people involved in conflicts in Albania, Kosovo, Moldova, Serbia, Slovakia, Cyprus, the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Lebanon, the Occupied Territories, Vietnam, China, Tibet, West Papua, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Aceh (Indonesia), Kashmir, Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Angola, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Togo, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

AEI's translation program has been instrumental in expanding our global reach. In the last four years alone, the Albert Einstein Institution's publications have appeared in Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Tibetan, and several ethnic Burmese languages. Additional translations are currently underway in Chinese and Kurdish.

In his letter from the president, Col. Helvey reports:

Strategic nonviolent struggle must be recognized as a subject that can be understood and applied by all who seek to throw off the yoke of governmental oppression.

 . . . The assumption that there is no realistic alternative to violence in extreme situations is contradicted by various cases of important nonviolent struggles in several countries in recent decades. These include Norway, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, and others. Many earlier cases of improvised nonviolent struggle occurred and are also relevant. Usually the importance of these history-making nonviolent struggles has been trivialized or ignored. Although there have also been some failures in nonviolent struggle, such as in China and Burma, the fact that these cases could have been waged at all, and that numerous nonviolent struggles have succeeded, is highly important.

International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts

The International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts has been heavily involved in the new Postmodern Coups, especially through its top figures, Dr. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall.

According to its website, the center "develops and encourages the use of civilian-based, nonmilitary strategies to establish and defend democracy and human rights worldwide." It "provides assistance in the training and deployment of field advisors, to deepen the conceptual knowledge and practical skills of applying nonviolent strategies in conflicts throughout the world where progress toward democracy and human rights is possible."

The most significant nonviolent conflicts in the world today, which may lead to "regime changes," it reports, are occurring in Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Chinese Tibet, Belarus, Ukraine [now nearing completion], Palestine, Iran, and Cuba.

Dr. Peter Ackerman is the founding chairman of the center. He is currently the chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, an important US intelligence recruitment center, and is on the Executive Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Dr Ackerman was also a founding director of the Albert Einstein Institution.

Dr. Ackerman was the executive producer of the PBS-TV documentary, "Bringing Down a Dictator," on the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, which has since been translated into Arabic, Farsi, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish. He was also the series editor and principal content advisor behind the PBS-TV series, "A Force More Powerful," which documents the use of nonviolence in regime changes. It has been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish. Ackerman is the co-author of two books on nonviolent resistance: A Force More Powerful (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press 2001), which is a companion book to the television series, and Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century (Praeger 1994). He regularly lectures on the use of the nonviolence in toppling targets states, including at the State Department.

Former Air Force officer Jack DuVall, is the president of the center, and was one of its founders. Like Dr. Ackerman, DuVall gives frequent lectures nationally and internationally on the strategic use of nonviolence.

The center's vice chairman, Berel Rodal, is the former director-general of the Policy Secretariat of the Canadian Department of National Defence.

The Arlington Institute

The Arlington Institute (TAI), is an apparent strategist in the use of postmodern coups. It was founded in 1989 by John L. Petersen, in order, in his own words, " to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms by introducing the rapidly evolving global trends of population growth, environmental degradation, and science and technology explosion, and social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation." Among its board members are Jack DuVall, the former Air Force officer who is director of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, DC and James Woolsey, the former Clinton administration CIA director and neocon spokesman who is currently the chairman of Freedom House.

The need for an organization like the Arlington Institute, its website reports, "evolved from the bipartisan, eighteen-month long National Security Group project that Petersen co-founded and jointly led in Washington, DC, in 1986-7. That ad-hoc group of national security experts was brought together to explore and map the security environment that the successful candidate would have to operate within after the 1988 presidential campaign. Petersen also wrote the final report for the group, 'The Diffusion of Power: An Era of Realignment,' which became a strategy document used at the highest levels of the Department of Defense."

"In the early part of the 90s," it adds, "Petersen was engaged in a number of projects for the Department of Defense which functioned to build a systematic understanding of the major approaches that were then being used to study and anticipate futures. One notable project for the Office of the Secretary of Defense involved traveling throughout the world visiting the foremost practitioners of futures research to assess each methodology and attempt to develop a new, synthetic approach that drew from the best of the then current processes." Petersen became an advisor to a number of senior defense officials during this time, serving in various personal support roles to the undersecretary of the Navy and the chief of Naval Operations, among others.

Midway through the 1990s, it adds, "Petersen became convinced that humanity was living in an extraordinary time of change that would necessarily result in a major global shift within the following two decades. TAI committed itself to playing a significant role in facilitating a global transition to a new world that operates in a fundamentally different way from the past."

Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates

Penn, Schoen and Berland (PSB) has played a pioneering role in the use of polling operations, especially "exit polls," in facilitating coups. Its primary mission is to shape the perception that the group installed into power in a targeted country has broad popular support. The group began work in Serbia during the period that its principle, Mark Penn, was President Clinton's top political advisor.

PSB was founded in 1975, with offices in Washington, DC, Denver, and New York. It reports it has conducted research in over 65 countries for Fortune 500 companies and major political campaigns.

"PSB is perhaps best known for our work as long-term strategic advisors to Bill Gates and Microsoft," it reports, while in the political world, "the firm is best known for being the long-time strategic advisors to President Bill Clinton and to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others."

The firm reports that it has conducted "a wide variety of government research projects, including recent work for the U.S. State Department in troubled countries overseas." Its business clients have included Siemens, American Express, Eli Lilly, Fleet, Boston Financial, Texaco, BP, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, ING Group, DeBeers, and KMG, among others.

The groups touts its role in Serbia. In an article, entitled "Defeating dictators at the ballot box: Lessons on how to develop successful electoral strategy in an authoritarian society," posted on their website, coauthors Penn and Schoen report:

International strategists, political and media consultants -- such as ourselves have played critical roles behind the scenes of the elections in Serbia and Zimbabwe, helping the opposition parties craft strategies, messages and organize a credible and effective campaign that has enabled them to weaken the dictator, his political party, and eventually throw him out of power..

The introduction of cutting edge political and communications techniques is as well as the advise of the best Western political consultants and image makers, is as potent a weapon as the planes, bombs, and intelligence technology used in such conflicts as the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, most recently Afghanistan.

The firm's role in subverting Serbia was first detailed in a December 11, 2000, Washington Post article by Michael Dobbs, US Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition.

In a softly lit conference room, American pollster Doug Schoen flashed the results of an in-depth opinion poll of 840 Serbian voters onto an overhead projection screen, sketching a strategy for toppling Europe's last remaining communist-era ruler.

His message, delivered to leaders of Serbia's traditionally fractious opposition, was simple and powerful. Slobodan Milosevic -- survivor of four lost wars, two major street uprisings, 78 days of NATO bombing and a decade of international sanctions -- was "completely vulnerable" to a well-organized electoral challenge. The key, the poll results showed, was opposition unity.

Held in a luxury hotel in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, in October 1999, the closed-door briefing by Schoen, a Democrat, turned out to be a seminal event, pointing the way to the electoral revolution that brought down Milosevic a year later. It also marked the start of an extraordinary U.S. effort to unseat a foreign head of state, not through covert action of the kind the CIA once employed in such places as Iran and Guatemala, but by modern election campaign techniques.

Milosevic's strongest political card was the disarray and ineffectiveness of his opponents. The opposition consisted of nearly two dozen political parties, some of whose leaders were barely on speaking terms with one another.

It was against this background that 20 opposition leaders accepted an invitation from the Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) in October 1999 to a seminar at the Marriott Hotel in Budapest, overlooking the Danube River. The key item on the agenda: an opinion poll commissioned by the U.S. polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates.

The poll reported that Milosevic had a 70 percent unfavorable rating among Serbian voters. But it also showed that the big names in the opposition -- men such as Zoran Djindjic and Vuk Draskovic -- were burdened with negative poll ratings almost as high as Milosevic's.

Among the candidates best placed to challenge Milosevic, the poll suggested, was a moderate Serbian nationalist named Vojislav Kostunica, who had a favorable rating of 49 percent and an unfavorable rating of only 29 percent.

Schoen, who had provided polling advice to former Yugoslav prime minister Milan Panic during his unsuccessful 1992 campaign to depose Milosevic, drew several conclusions from these and other findings of the poll. . . . Most important, only a united opposition had a chance of deposing Milosevic. "If you take one word from this conference," Schoen told the delegates, "I urge it to be unity."

Mark Penn has been president of the firm since its founding in 1975. He served as President Clinton's pollster and political adviser for the 1996 re-election campaign and throughout the second term of the administration, including during the period he oversaw the Serbian election campaign which toppled President Milosevic. His influence over the Clinton administration was such that the Washington Post called him perhaps "the most powerful man in Washington you've never heard of". According to the firm's website, Penn helped elect 15 overseas Presidents in the Far East, Latin America, and Europe.

Doug Schoen is the firm's founding partner and a principal strategist. According to the firm, Schoen has, for the last 20 years "created winning messages and provided strategic advice to numerous political clients in the United States and to heads of state in countries around the world, including Greece, Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda and Yugoslavia." Additionally, he was "President William Jefferson Clinton's research and strategic consultant during the 1996 reelection, and has been widely credited with creating and effectively communicating the message that turned around the president's political fortunes between 1994 and 1996."

Alan Fleischmann, who runs the firm's Washington offices, is described as a "specialist in strategic and crisis communications who has served in domestic and overseas senior management posts in the private and public sectors, specializing in finance, public and foreign policy, marketing, communications, negotiation, mediation, and strategy. Prior to joining the firm, Fleischmann been staff director of the Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the United States Congress, and a senior advisor to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Fleischmann has also been a legislative aide to the late German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the German Bundestag.
 

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"Gene Sharp started out the seminar by saying 'Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power.' And I thought, 'Boy is this guy speaking my language,' that is what armed struggle is about."—Col. Robert Helvey

WASHINGTON, March 19, 2005—The U.S. government and allied forces' year-end installation of Victor Yushchenko as president of Ukraine have completed the field-testing of the "Postmodern Coup." Employing and fine-tuning the same sophisticated techniques used in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003 (and unsuccessfully in Belarus in 2001), it is widely expected that the United States will attempt to apply the same methods throughout the former Soviet Union.

"We have to confront those forces that are committed to reproduce a Georgian or Ukrainian scenario," Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev stated on December 26, the day of the coup, "we'll not allow the import of Rose [Georgian] and Orange [Ukrainian] revolutions in our country." One day later, the Kazakh government launched a criminal case against the Soros Foundation for tax evasion, one of the coups' financiers. And last spring, Uzbek President Islam Karimov accused Soros of overseeing the revolution in Georgia, and condemning his efforts to "fool and brainwash" young intelligentsia in his own country, banned the group. The same networks are also increasingly active in South America, Africa, and Asia. Top targets include Venezuela, Mozambique, and Iran, among others.

The method employed is usefully described by The Guardian's Ian Traynor in a November 26, 2004, article entitled "US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev," during the first phase of the coup.

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory—whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

[T]he campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections

Much of the coup apparatus is the same that was used in the overthrow of President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, the Tiananmen Square destabilization in 1989, and Vaclav Havel's "Velvet revolution" in Czechoslavakia in 1989. As in these early operations, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its primary arms, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI), played a central role. The NED was established by the Reagan Administration in 1983, to do overtly what the CIA had done covertly, in the words of one its legislative drafters, Allen Weinstein. The Cold War propaganda and operations center, Freedom House, now chaired by former CIA director James Woolsey, has also been involved, as were billionaire George Soros' foundations, whose donations always dovetail those of the NED.

What is new about the template bears on the use of the Internet (in particular chat rooms, instant messaging, and blogs) and cell phones (including text-messaging), to rapidly steer angry and suggestible "Generation X" youth into and out of mass demonstrations and the like—a capability that only emerged in the mid-1990s. "With the crushing ubiquity of cell phones, satellite phones, PCs, modems and the Internet," Laura Rosen emphasized in Salon Magazine on February 3, 2001,"the information age is shifting the advantage from authoritarian leaders to civic groups." She might have mentioned the video games that helped create the deranged mindset of these "civic groups." The repeatedly emphasized role played by so-called "Discoshaman" and his girlfriend "Tulipgirl," in assisting the "Orange Revolution" through their aptly named blog, "Le Sabot Post-Modern," is indicative of the technical and sociological components involved.

A Civilian Revolution in Military Affairs

The emphasis on the use of new communication technologies to rapidly deploy small groups, suggests what we are seeing is civilian application of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs" doctrine, which depends on highly mobile small group deployments "enabled" by "real time" intelligence and communications. Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of "intelligence helmet" video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones constitute the doctrine's civilian application.

This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and National Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet, cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The "revolution" in warfare that such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians have been working in high places (for example the RAND Corporation) for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of the most important command structures of the US military apparatus with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld.

The new techniques of warfare include the use of both lethal (violent) and nonlethal (nonviolent) tactics. Both ways are conducted using the same philosophy, infrastructure, and modus operandi. It is what is known as Cyberwar. For example, the tactic of swarming is a fundamental element in both violent and nonviolent forms of warfare. This new philosophy of war, which is supposed to replicate the strategy of Genghis Khan as enhanced by modern technologies, is intended to aid both military and non-military assaults against targeted states through what are, in effect, "high tech" hordes. In that sense there is no difference, from the standpoint of the plotters, between Iraq or Ukraine, if only that many think the Ukraine-like coup is more effective and easier.

Indicative of the common objective are the comments of the theoreticians of the post modern coup, for example, Dr. Peter Ackerman, the author of "Strategic Nonviolent Conflict" (Praeger 1994). Writing in the "National Catholic Reporter" on April 26, 2002, Dr. Ackerman offered the following corrective to Bush's Axis of Evil speech targeting Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, which he otherwise approved: "It is not true that the only way to 'take out' such regimes is through U.S. military action."

Speaking at the "Secretary's Open Forum" at the State Department on June 29, 2004, in a speech entitled, "Between Hard and Soft Power:The Rise of Civilian-Based Struggle and Democratic Change," Ackerman elaborated on the concept involved. He proposed that youth movements, such as those used to bring down Serbia, could bring down Iran and North Korea, and could have been used to bring down Iraq—thereby accomplishing all of Bush's objectives without relying on military means. And he reported that he has been working with the top US weapons designer, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, on developing new communications technologies that could be used in other youth movement insurgencies. "There is no question that these technologies are democratizing," he stressed, in reference to their potential use in bringing down China, "they enable decentralized activity. They create, if you will, a digital concept of the right of assembly."

Dr. Ackerman is the founding chairman of International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts of Washington, DC, of which former US Air Force officer Jack DuVall is president. Together with former CIA director James Woolsey, DuVall also directs the Arlington Institute of Washington, DC, which was created by former Chief of Naval Operations advisor John L. Peterson in 1989 " to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms" it reports, through introducing "social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation."

"Swarming Adolescents" and "Rebellious Hysteria"

As in the case of the new communication technologies, the potential effectiveness of angry youth in postmodern coups has long been under study. As far back as 1967, Dr. Fred Emery, then director of the Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the "hypnotic effects" of television, specified that the then new phenomenon of "swarming adolescents" found at rock concerts could be effectively used to bring down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s. This was particularly the case, as Dr. Emery reported in "The next thirty years: concepts, methods and anticipations,'' in the group's "Human Relations," because the phenomena was associated with "rebellious hysteria." The British military created the Tavistock Institute as its psychological warfare arm following World War I; it has been the forerunner of such strategic planning ever since. Dr. Emery's concept saw immediate application in NATO's use of "swarming adolescents" in toppling French President Charles De Gaulle in 1967.

In November 1989, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, under the aegis of that university's "Program for Social Innovations in Global Management," began a series of conferences to review progress towards that strategic objective, which was reported on in "Human Relations" in 1991. There, Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a professor of "Social Architecture'' at the Wharton School, and a follower of Dr. Emery, stressed that "rock video in Katmandu," was an appropriate image of how states with traditional cultures could be destabilized, thereby creating the possibility of a "global civilization." There are two requirements for such a transformation, he added, "building internationally committed networks of international and locally committed organizations,'' and "creating global events" through "the transformation of a local event into one having virtually instantaneous international implications through mass-media."

(Perlmutter on the origin of the concept of globalization: see quote.)

This brings us to the final ingredient of these new coups—the deployment of polling agencies' "exit polls" broadcast on international television to give the false (or sometimes accurate) impression of massive vote-fraud by the ruling party, to put targeted states on the defensive. Polling operations in the recent coups have been overseen by such outfits as Penn, Schoen and Berland, top advisors to Microsoft and Bill Clinton. Praising their role in subverting Serbia, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (and later Chairman of NDI) , in an October 2000 letter to the firm quoted on its website, stated: "Your work with the National Democratic Institute and the Yugoslav opposition contributed directly and decisively to the recent breakthrough for democracy in that country . . . This may be one of the first instances where polling has played such an important role in setting and securing foreign policy objectives." Penn, Schoen, together with the OSCE, also ran the widely televised "exit poll" operations in the Ukrainian elections.

In the aftermath of such youth deployments and media operations, more traditional elements come to the fore. That is, the forceful, if covert, intervention by international institutions and governments threatening the targeted regime, and using well placed operatives within the targeted regime's military and intelligence services to ensure no countermeasures can be effectively deployed. Without these traditional elements, of course, no postmodern coup could ever work. Or, as Jack DuVall put it in Jesse Walker's "Carnival and conspiracy in Ukraine," in Reason Online, November 30, 2004, "You can't simply parachute Karl Rove into a country and manufacture a revolution."

Gladio and James Bond Get a Youth Group

The creation and deployment of coups of any kind requires agents on the ground. The main handler of these coups on the "street side" has been the Albert Einstein Institution, which was formed in 1983 as an offshot of Harvard University under the impetus of Dr. Gene Sharp, and which specializes in "nonviolence as a form of warfare." Dr. Sharp had been the executive secretary of A.J. Muste, the famous U.S. Trotskyite labor organizer and peacenik. The group is funded by Soros and the NED. Albert Einstein's president is Col. Robert Helvey, a former US Army officer with 30 years of experience in Southeast Asia. He has served as the case officer for youth groups active in the Balkans and Eastern Europe since at least 1999.

Col. Helvey reports, in a January 29, 2001, interview with film producer Steve York in Belgrade, that he first got involved in "strategic nonviolence" upon seeing the failure of military approaches to toppling dictators—especially in Myanmar, where he had been stationed as military attaché—and seeing the potential of Sharp's alternative approach. According to B. Raman, the former director of India's foreign intelligence agency, RAW, in a December 2001 paper published by his institute entitled, "The USA's National Endowment For Democracy (NED): An Update," Helvey "was an officer of the Defence Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon, who had served in Vietnam and, subsequently, as the US Defence Attache in Yangon, Myanmar (1983 to 85), during which he clandestinely organised the Myanmarese students to work behind Aung San Suu Kyi and in collaboration with Bo Mya's Karen insurgent group. . . . He also trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989" and "is now believed to be acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong, the religious sect of China, in similar civil disobedience techniques." Col. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been working with Albert Einstein and Soros long before then.

Reflecting Albert Einstein's patronage, one of its first books was Dr. Sharp's "Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-Based Deterrence and Defense," published in 1985 with a forward by George Kennan, the famous "Mr. X" 1940's architect of the Cold War who was also a founder of the CIA's Operations division. There, Sharp reports that "civilian-based defense" could counter the Soviet threat through its ability "to deter and defeat attacks by making a society ungovernable by would be oppressors" and "by maintaining a capacity for orderly self-rule even in the face of extreme threats and actual aggression." He illustrates its feasibility by discussing the examples of the Algerian independence in 1961 and the Czechoslovakian resistance to Soviet invasion in 1968-9. In his forward, Kennan praises Sharp for showing the "possibilities of deterrence and resistance by civilians" as a "partial alternative to the traditional, purely military concepts of national defense." The book was promptly translated into German, Norwegian, Italian, Danish, and other NATO country languages. See the link to the Italian translation of the book (Verso un'Europa Inconquistabile. 190 pp. 1989 Introduction by Gianfranco Pasquino) that sports a series of fashionable sociologists and "politologists" prefacing the book and calling for a civil resistance to a possible Soviet invasion of Italy.

Such formulations suggest that Albert Einstein activities were, ironically, coherent (or, possibly updating) the infamous NATO's "Gladio" stay-behind network, whose purpose was to combat possible Soviet occupation through a panoply of military and nonmilitary means. The investigations into Gladio, and those following the 1978 assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, also shed some light (immediately switched off) on a professional apparatus of destabilization that had been invisible for several decades to the public.

It is noteworthy that the former deputy chief of intelligence for the US Army in Europe, Major General Edward Atkeson, first "suggested the name 'civilian based defense' to Sharp," John M. Mecartney, Coordinator of the Nonviolent Action for National Defense Institute, reports in his group's CBD News and Opinion of March 1991. By 1985, Gen. Atkeson, then retired from the US Army, was giving seminars at Harvard entitled "Civilian-based Defense and the Art of War.

The Albert Einstein Institution reports, in its "1994-99 Report on Activities," that Gen. Atkeson also served on Einstein's advisory board in those years. Following his posting as the head of US Army intelligence in Europe, and possibly concurrently with his position at the Albert Einstein Institution, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reports that Gen. Atkeson, who also advised CSIS on "international security." served as "national intelligence officer for general purpose forces on the staff of the director of Central Intelligence."

A 1990 variant of Sharp's book, "Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System," the Albert Einstein Institution reports, "was used in 1991 and 1992 by the new independent governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in planning their defense against Soviet efforts to regain control."

As we shall see below, with such backing, Col. Helvey and his colleagues have created a series of youth movements including Otpor! in Serbia, Kmara! in Georgia, Pora! in Ukraine, and the like, which are already virally replicating other sects throughout the former Soviet Union, achieving in civilian form what had not been possible militarily in the 1980s. The groups are also spreading to Africa and South America.

And Dope Too?

Col. Helvey's long experience in Myanmar in training insurgent ethnic minorities in a region that is the center of world opium production raises another question of great bearing on "post modern coups." That is: what is the role of narcotic mafias in facilitating "regime change?" Law enforcement agencies from many nations, including the United States, have long reported that the Balkans is the major narcotics pipeline into Western Europe. Ukraine is said to be a top conduit, as is Georgia. Kyrghyzstan, now at the top of the hit list, is another opium conduit. And George Soros "the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization," has been the top "private" funder of all the Eastern European and Central Asian insurgent groups, as well as those in Myamar. The spread of such mafias, is, of course, one of the most efficient ways of infiltrating and corrupting government agencies of targeted states.

Col. Helvey is not the only operator with such a background. The head of the OSCE's vote monitoring operation in Ukraine, for example, Geert-Hinrich Ahrens, was German Ambassador to Colombia in the late 1990s, when German secret agent Werner Mauss was arrested for working closely with the narco-terrorist ELN, whose bombings are financed by the cocaine trade. Ahrens was also on the scene in Albania and Macedonia, when the narcotics smuggling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was created with US and German patronage. And Michael Kozak, the US ambassador whose 2001 effort to overthrow Belarus' Lukachenko failed, had been a top handler of the cocaine-smuggling Contras.

The Serbian Virus

The networks and methods used in the Serbian through Ukraine sequence were first publicly revealed in a Washington Post article on Dec. 11, 2000, by Michael Dobbs, entitled. "U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition: Political Consultants Helped Yugoslav Opposition Topple Authoritarian Leader." He reports that:

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.

Some Americans involved in the anti-Milosevic effort said they were aware of CIA activity at the fringes of the campaign, but had trouble finding out what the agency was up to. Whatever it was, they concluded it was not particularly effective. The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution's ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.

Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharp, whom he describes as "the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement," referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist.

Peter Ackerman, the above-mentioned coup expert, analyzed and popularized the methods involved in a 2001 PBS documentary-series and book, "A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict," together with retired US Airforce officer Jack DuVall. Focusing on youth organizing, they report:

After the NATO bombing, which had helped the regime suppress opposition, Otpor's organizing took hold with a quiet vengeance. It was built in some places around clubhouses where young people could go and hang out, exercise, and party on the weekends, or more often it was run out of dining rooms and bedrooms in activists' homes. These were "boys and girls 18 and 19 years old" who had lived "in absolute poverty compared to other teenagers around the world," according to Stanko Lazendic, an Otpor activist in Novi Sad. "Otpor offered these kids a place to gather, a place where they could express their creative ideas." In a word, it showed them how to empower themselves.

Otpor's leaders knew that they "couldn't use force on someone who . . . had three times more force and weapons than we did," in the words of Lazendic. "We knew what had happened in. Tiananmen, where the army plowed over students with tanks." So violence wouldn't work—and besides, it was the trademark of Milosevic, and Otpor had to stand for something different. Serbia "was a country in which violence was used too many times in daily politics," noted Srdja Popovic, a 27 year-old who called himself Otpor's "ideological commissar." The young activists had to use nonviolent methods "to show how superior, how advanced, how civilized" they were.

This relatively sophisticated knowledge of how to develop nonviolent power was not intuitive. Miljenko Dereta, the director of a private group in Belgrade called Civic Initiatives, got funding from Freedom HouseFreedom House in the U.S. to print and distribute 5,000 copies of Gene Sharp's book, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation." Otpor got hold of Sharp's main three-volume work, "The Politics of Nonviolent Action," freely adapting sections of it into a Serbian-language notebook they dubbed the "Otpor User Manual." Consciously using this "ideology of nonviolent, individual resistance," in Popovic's words, activists also received direct training from Col. Robert Helvey, a colleague of Sharp, at the Budapest Hilton in March 2000.

Helvey emphasized how to break the people's habits of subservience to authority, and also how to subvert: the regime's "pillars of support," including the police and armed forces. Crucially, he warned them against "contaminants to a nonviolent struggle," especially violent action, which would deter ordinary people from joining the movement: and alienate the international community, from which material and financial assistance could be drawn. As Popovic put it: "Stay nonviolent and you will get the support of the third party."

That support, largely denied to the Serbian opposition before, now began to flow. Otpor and other dissident groups received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, affiliated with the U.S. government, and Otpor leaders sat down with Daniel Serwer, the program director for the Balkans at the U.S. Institute for Peace, whose story of having been tear-gassed during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration gave him special credibility in their eyes. The International Republican Institute, also financed by the U.S. government, channeled funding to the opposition and met with Otpor leaders several times. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the wellspring for most of this financing, was also the source of money that went for materials like t-shirts and stickers.

No Lack of Opportunities for Employment

In the aftermath of the Serbian revolution, the National Endowment for Democracy, Albert Einstein Institution, and related outfits helped establish several Otpor-modeled youth groups in Eastern Europe, notably Zubr in Belarus in January 2001; Kmara in Georgia, in April 2003; and Pora in Ukraine in June 2004. Efforts to overthrow Belarus President Alexsander Luschenko failed in 2001, while the US overthrow of Georgian President Eduard Schevardnadze was successfully accomplished in 2003, using Kmara as part of its operation.

Commenting on that expansion, Albert Einstein staffer Chris Miller, in his report on a 2001 trip to Serbia found on the group's website, reports:

Since the ousting of Milosevic, several members of Otpor have met with members of the Belarusian group Zubr (Bison). In following developments in Belarus since early this year, It is clear that Zubr was developed or at least conceptualized, using Otpor as a model. Also, [Albert Einstein's report] From Dictatorship to Democracy is available in English on the Zubr website at www.zubr-belarus.com. Of course, success will not be achieved in Belarus or anywhere else, simply by mimicking the actions taken in Serbia. However the successful Serbian nonviolent struggle was highly influenced and aided by the availability of knowledge and information on strategic nonviolent struggle and both successful and unsuccessful past cases, which is transferable.

Otpor focused on building their human resources, especially among youth. An Otpor training manual to "train future trainers" was developed, which contained excerpts from The Politics of Nonviolent Action, provided to Otpor by Robert Helvey during his workshop in Budapest for Serbs in early 2000. It may be applicable for other countries.

And with funding provided by Freedom HouseFreedom House and the US government, Otpor established the Center for Nonviolent Resistance, in Budapest, to train these groups. Describing the deployment of this youth movement, Ian Trainor, in the above cited Guardian November 2004 article, reports:

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary—Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US State Department and USAID are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom HouseFreedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute.

·  An Associated Press article by Dusan Stojanovic, on November 2, 2004, entitled "Serbia's export: Peaceful Revolution," elaborates:

"We knew there would be work for us after Milosevic," said Danijela Nenadic, a program coordinator of the Belgrade-based Center for Nonviolent Resistance. The nongovernmental group emerged from Otpor, the pro-democracy movement that helped sweep Milosevic from power by organizing massive and colorful protests that drew crowds who never previously had the courage to oppose the former Yugoslav president. In Ukraine and Belarus, tens of thousands of people have been staging daily protests—carbon copies of the anti-Milosevic rallies—with "training" provided by the Serbian group.

The group says it has "well-trained" followers in Ukraine and Belarus. In Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, anti-government activists "saw what we did in Serbia and they contacted us for professional training," group member Sinisa Sikman said. Last year, Otpor's clenched fist was flying high on white flags again—this time in Georgia, when protesters stormed the parliament in an action that led to the toppling of Shevardnadze.

Last month, Ukrainian border authorities denied entry to Alexandar Maric, a member of Otpor and an adviser with the U.S.-based democracy watchdog Freedom House. A Ukrainian student group called Pora was following the strategies of Otpor.

James Woolsey's Freedom House "expressed concern" over Maric's deportation, in an October 14, 2004, press release which reported that he was traveling to Ukraine as part of "an initiative run by Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute to promote civic participation and oversight during the 2004 presidential and 2006 parliamentary elections in Ukraine." In a related statement, it added that it hoped the deportation was not a sign of the Ukrainian government's "unwillingness to allow the free flow of information and learning across borders that is an integral and accepted part of programs to encourage democratic progress in diverse societies around the world."

Timeline:

Page 2: Who Is Col. Bob Helvey?

Page 3: The Coup Plotters

Who is Col. Bob Helvey?

Who is Col. Bob Helvey, who personally, and through his Albert Einstein Institution, played such a key role in the Serbian and Ukrainian coups?

According to his own account, Helvey first got involved in "strategic nonviolence" upon seeing the failures of military approaches to toppling dictators, especially in Myanmar (also known as Burma). In a January 29, 2001, interview with Steve York in Belgrade, Helvey stated:

My career has been that of a professional soldier. And one of my last assignments was to be the defense attaché in Rangoon [Myanmar]. And I really had an opportunity—two years living in Rangoon and getting around the country—to really see first hand what happens when a people are oppressed to the point that they're absolutely terrorized.

And, you know, there was no future for people and there was a struggle for democracy going on, but it was an armed struggle on the periphery of the country and in the border regions. And it was very clear that that armed struggle was never going to succeed.

So, when I got back [to the US], I kept Burma in the back of my mind. Here were a people that really wanted democracy, really wanted political reform, but the only option they had was armed struggle. And that was really a nonstarter, so there was really a sense of helplessness.

Back in the US, he reports, he was selected as senior fellow at the Harvard Center for International Affairs—while still an active duty officer, where he attended a meeting on a "Program for Nonviolent Sanctions."

Dr. Gene Sharp happened to be there. And he started out the seminar by saying, "Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power. How to seize political power and how to deny it to others." And I thought, "Boy, this guy's talking my language." And, you know, that's what armed struggle is about. So I got interested in this approach because I saw immediately that there may be an opportunity here for the Burmese.

And how did he get involved in Serbia?

I had done some work along the Thai-Burmese border with the International Republican Institute. So when they were looking for someone to present information on strategic nonviolent struggle to a Serb group, they called me.

The Albert Einstein Institution repeatedly emphasizes Col. Helvey's role in training the Myanmar opposition, and a substantial amount of the group's web page stresses the group's involvement there. Reflecting this preoccupation, Albert Einstein's writings have repeatedly been translated not only into Burmen, but also into Karen, Chin, Mon, Jingphaw and several other ethnic minority languages and dialects in that country.

The Albert Einstein Institute does not emphasize, however, that even the US State Department and Drug Enforcement Agency identify the ethnic minority opposition to the Myanmar government as comprising the world's largest producers of opium and heroin.

The DEA's 2002 "Drug Intelligence Brief: Burma: Country Brief," for example, states:

Armed ethnic minority groups who have been in conflict with the GOB [Government of Burma, aka Myanmar ed] for decades control cultivation, production, and trafficking in Burma. . . . The drug trafficking groups operating within Burma are mostly insurgent factions that have been warring with the GOB and among themselves for many years.

Special note should be made here of Bo Mya and his Karen group, which Col. Helvey has advised for years. Bo Mya, now retired, has admitted to have held meetings with Burmese drug king pin Khun Sa, that Khun Sa said were held in an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate opium and heroin routes of Myanmar and Thailand. (Bo Mya has denied Myanmar government allegations of his involvement in the narcotics trade.)

According to Khun Sa's statements—later made famous by the US military "Missing in Action" investigator "Bo" Gritz—his opium trafficking was done under the coordination of Richard Armitage, currently US Undersecretary of State. (See references here, here and here)

While Col. Helvey's precise relations with former CIA deputy director Theodore Shackley, who had been widely accused of overseeing this narcotics trafficking, remain unknown, such reports do lend credence to claims that narcotics syndicates have played a pivotal role in the recent coups in the Balkans, and now Ukraine, which comprise an important route for Southeast Asian heroin entering Western Europe.

Myanmar Operations

In its "Report on Activities, 1993-1999," the Albert Einstein Institution laid great stress on the importance of Helvey's operations to subvert the Myanmar regime as a centerpiece of their activities. In fact, the first paragraph of the introduction of the report reads:

Colonel Kyaw Thein was clearly unhappy with our workshop on nonviolent struggle held along the Thai-Burma border. At a September 1996 press briefing in Rangoon, the spokesman for the military dictatorship charged that "aliens and mercenaries" were trying to "disrupt the peace and tranquility" in Burma—as if widespread torture, forced labor, and other human rights atrocities constitute "tranquility." The military official was incensed by an ever increasing global phenomenon: direct transnational assistance and cooperation between nongovernmental organizations and pro-democracy groups around the world, in this case of course, in Burma. The Albert Einstein Institution's groundbreaking outreach on strategic nonviolent struggle is but one example of this growing trend that moves beyond traditional humanitarian and human rights efforts.

 . . . The impetus for our intensive workshops on nonviolent struggle for Burmese groups came in November 1991, when Robert Helvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former U.S. military attaché in Burma, requested that we assist in reviewing lesson plans for an introductory course in nonviolent struggle. Mr. Helvey designed the course for Burmese opposition groups in part by relying on Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The May 1992 course, conducted inside Burma at the opposition headquarters at Manerplaw, was extremely well received. In fact, when leading Burmese opposition groups formed the umbrella organization National Council of the Union of Burma in August 1992, they also established a "Political Defiance Committee" to educate activists and to organize strategic nonviolent struggle inside Burma ("political defiance" is the term adopted in Burma to connote nonviolent struggle). Senior pro-democracy leaders requested additional workshops from Robert Helvey and the Albert Einstein Institution.

A Fall 1992 article in "Nonviolent Sanctions" by Gene Sharp, entitled "Exploring Nonviolent Struggle in Thailand and Burma," and found on Albert Einstein's website, describes their role in Myanmar, and in particular Col. Helvey's role:

Gene Sharp traveled to Thailand and Burma in the fall, October 20–November 8, 1992, in response to two invitations. The American Friends of Democracy in Burma (headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia) asked him to help evaluate a course on "Political Defiance" that had been taught in Mannerplaw by Robert Helvey for the Democratic Alliance of Burma.

"After two days rest and orientation in Bangkok, I traveled to Mannerplaw, a base camp for the Burmese democratic opposition located along the Thai-Burma border. . . . During my four days in Mannerplaw I participated in a variety of meetings and discussions about nonviolent struggle (or political defiance as it is more often called there). These included meetings with top political officials, military officers, and leaders of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front, the National League for Democracy, the Karen Youth Organization Leadership Seminar, the Democratic Alliance of Burma, and the Political Defiance Committee."

Robert Helvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel and an expert on Burma, began offering a course on political defiance to groups in Mannerplaw last spring. The aim of this intensive course is to give participants a basic understanding of the technique of nonviolent struggle. At the end of the course, students are expected to understand the insights into political power on which political defiance is based, and also to have developed an understanding of the technique's multiple methods, its dynamics of conflict against a repressive regime, the mechanisms of change, and the principles of strategy in nonviolent struggle.

Peace Magazine, in its April June 2003 issue, contains further details on Helvey's career, in a laudatory article entitled "Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance."

From 1983 until 1985 Helvey was a US military attaché at the American Embassy in Rangoon, where he was dismayed by the futility of armed resistance to the brutal dictatorship of Burma. An armed struggle had continued without success for over two decades.

After retiring from the army in 1991, Helvey gave a speech in Washington, using Sharp's insights and adding his own. A member of the audience later offered to pay his way to Burma to spread his message. With this funding, from 1992 to 1998, he made 15 trips to the Thai-Burmese border to meet with more than 500 members of the National Council Union of Burma, a pro-democracy umbrella group. On eight occasions, Helvey taught a six-week course, seeking to build confidence, identify the dictatorship's major weaknesses, and form pressure groups.

Many of those attending Helvey's course had been officers in armed resistance groups for many years and were skeptical about nonviolence. For example, Auun Nang Oo, who is now a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Nonviolence, was astonished that a career soldier could hold such views. Another unbeliever was General Bo Mya, the leader of the Karens, the biggest national minority. At first he would just grumble and grunt that he "wasn't interested in doing the work of cowards." To change such attitudes, Helvey coined the more militant-sounding phrase, "political defiance," which won Bo over and caused him to ask Helvey to train more Karen leaders.

The Myamar government has also commented on Col. Helvey's career. For example, at a June 27, 1997 press conference entitled "How some Western powers have been aiding and abetting terrorism committed by certain organizations operating under the guise of democracy and human rights by giving them assistance in both cash and kind." There, Lt-Gen Khin Nyunt, at the time Secretary-1 of the State Law and Order Restoration Council of Myanmar, said of Helvey:

He was assigned to Myanmar as Defense Attache (Army) at the U.S. embassy in Myanmar from 1982 to 1984 with the rank of full colonel. On conclusion of his assignment in Myanmar he went home, retired immediately from the US Army and returned to the Myanmar-Thai border. He is military advisor to the KNU, KNPP and the Democratic Party for New Society, personally giving military training and manipulating the armed groups in various ways right up till now.

The Myamar government newspaper, New Light of Myanmar, on February 4, 1995, also reported on Helvey's involvement with insurgent groups then working with opium kingpin Khun Sa.

As the second strategy of the NCUB [National Coalition Union of Burma], it formed the Political Defiance Committee with the objective to use all sorts of subversive acts so that the people will have wrong impressions of the Government and lose their respect on it and so disturbances and upheavals will break out in the country. Thus, they made contacts with underground elements within the country and distributed agitative pamphlets, set off bombs in townships to disturb peace and tranquility and cause disturbances and resorted to other disruptive acts. Those who gave training in political defiance (PD) activities were a former retired US Defence Attache Robert Helvey and one Gene Sharp. It was seen that during the three-year period of extending invitation for peace, the KNU were bent on undermining the interest of the people. KNU Bo Mya sent KNU Lt-Col Law Wadi, demolition expert Lt-Col Saw Isaac, to drug warlord Khun Sa at Homein Camp and had discussions from 10 to 12 April 1994 on cooperation between KNU and MTA, assisting in making land mines and arms and ammunition and other economic cooperation.

Page 3: The Coup Plotters

Page 1: Ukrainian postmodern coup completes testing of new template

The Coup Plotters

The Albert Einstein Institution

The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) has played the key role in recent years in training and deploying youth movements to help prepare the conditions for coups through fostering the impression that the targeted regimes are deeply unpopular, and through destabilizing those regimes through their demonstrations and the like. The group, which is funded by the Soros foundations and the US government, is led by former DIA officer Col. Robert Helvey, and Harvard University's Dr. Gene Sharp.

According to the Albert Einstein Institution's report, Dr Gene Sharp (curriculum vitae and Biographical Profile) "founded the Albert Einstein Institution in 1983 to promote research, policy studies, and education on the strategic uses of nonviolent struggle in face of dictatorship, war, genocide, and oppression."

Dr. Sharp has held research appointments in Harvard University's Center for International Affairs for nearly 30 years. His writings, which on the strategic use of nonviolence in overturning states, have been translated into 27 languages. Through funding provided by the Soros foundations, and through the National Endowment of Democracy and other US government conduits, Sharp and his associates have regularly traveled to targeted regions to facilitate revolutions, since the group's creation.

According to Sharp, "If the issue is to bring down a dictatorship, then it is not good enough to say, 'we want freedom.' It's necessary to develop a strategy, or a super-plan, to weaken a dictatorship and that can only be done by identifying its sources of power. These [sources of power] include: authority, human resources skills, knowledge, tangible factors, economic and material resources and sanctions like police and troops."

For this reason, Sharp reports, he has written numerous books on nonviolent struggle to help oppressed peoples develop a "superplan." These works, of which the major one is "The Politics of Nonviolent Action," have been translated into 27 languages. Among these languages are Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian, Macedonian, Arabic, Tamil, Burmese, Karen (and several other Burmese minority languages), Thai, Chinese, Korean, as well as French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian, and other European languages still spoken in former colonies.

While Sharp is the main theoretician of the group (and officially its senior scholar), its more practical work is overseen by its president, Colonel Robert Helvey, who began working with the center even before officially retiring from the US Army in 1991. A 30-year veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Helvey had practical experience in subversive operations throughout Southeast Asia prior to his work with the institution. According to numerous reports, Helvey was the case officer for the US-sponsored coup in Serbia, was deeply involved in similar operations in Georgia, and according to at least on report, was on the ground in the recent coup in Ukraine. (Ukrainian translation of From Dictatorship to Democracy by Sharp has just been announced by The Albert Einstein Institution)

According to the Albert Einstein Institution's report for the years 2000 to 2004, its mission is to "advance the worldwide study and strategic use of nonviolent action in conflict."

Numerous individuals and organizations interested in the potential of nonviolent struggle contact the Albert Einstein Institution. In recent years, requests for information or advice have come from people involved in conflicts in Albania, Kosovo, Moldova, Serbia, Slovakia, Cyprus, the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Lebanon, the Occupied Territories, Vietnam, China, Tibet, West Papua, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Aceh (Indonesia), Kashmir, Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Angola, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Togo, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

AEI's translation program has been instrumental in expanding our global reach. In the last four years alone, the Albert Einstein Institution's publications have appeared in Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Tibetan, and several ethnic Burmese languages. Additional translations are currently underway in Chinese and Kurdish.

In his letter from the president, Col. Helvey reports:

Strategic nonviolent struggle must be recognized as a subject that can be understood and applied by all who seek to throw off the yoke of governmental oppression.

 . . . The assumption that there is no realistic alternative to violence in extreme situations is contradicted by various cases of important nonviolent struggles in several countries in recent decades. These include Norway, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, and others. Many earlier cases of improvised nonviolent struggle occurred and are also relevant. Usually the importance of these history-making nonviolent struggles has been trivialized or ignored. Although there have also been some failures in nonviolent struggle, such as in China and Burma, the fact that these cases could have been waged at all, and that numerous nonviolent struggles have succeeded, is highly important.

International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts

The International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts has been heavily involved in the new Postmodern Coups, especially through its top figures, Dr. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall.

According to its website, the center "develops and encourages the use of civilian-based, nonmilitary strategies to establish and defend democracy and human rights worldwide." It "provides assistance in the training and deployment of field advisors, to deepen the conceptual knowledge and practical skills of applying nonviolent strategies in conflicts throughout the world where progress toward democracy and human rights is possible."

The most significant nonviolent conflicts in the world today, which may lead to "regime changes," it reports, are occurring in Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Chinese Tibet, Belarus, Ukraine [now nearing completion], Palestine, Iran, and Cuba.

Dr. Peter Ackerman is the founding chairman of the center. He is currently the chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, an important US intelligence recruitment center, and is on the Executive Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Dr Ackerman was also a founding director of the Albert Einstein Institution.

Dr. Ackerman was the executive producer of the PBS-TV documentary, "Bringing Down a Dictator," on the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, which has since been translated into Arabic, Farsi, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish. He was also the series editor and principal content advisor behind the PBS-TV series, "A Force More Powerful," which documents the use of nonviolence in regime changes. It has been translated into Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish. Ackerman is the co-author of two books on nonviolent resistance: A Force More Powerful (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press 2001), which is a companion book to the television series, and Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century (Praeger 1994). He regularly lectures on the use of the nonviolence in toppling targets states, including at the State Department.

Former Air Force officer Jack DuVall, is the president of the center, and was one of its founders. Like Dr. Ackerman, DuVall gives frequent lectures nationally and internationally on the strategic use of nonviolence.

The center's vice chairman, Berel Rodal, is the former director-general of the Policy Secretariat of the Canadian Department of National Defence.

The Arlington Institute

The Arlington Institute (TAI), is an apparent strategist in the use of postmodern coups. It was founded in 1989 by John L. Petersen, in order, in his own words, " to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms by introducing the rapidly evolving global trends of population growth, environmental degradation, and science and technology explosion, and social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation." Among its board members are Jack DuVall, the former Air Force officer who is director of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, DC and James Woolsey, the former Clinton administration CIA director and neocon spokesman who is currently the chairman of Freedom House.

The need for an organization like the Arlington Institute, its website reports, "evolved from the bipartisan, eighteen-month long National Security Group project that Petersen co-founded and jointly led in Washington, DC, in 1986-7. That ad-hoc group of national security experts was brought together to explore and map the security environment that the successful candidate would have to operate within after the 1988 presidential campaign. Petersen also wrote the final report for the group, 'The Diffusion of Power: An Era of Realignment,' which became a strategy document used at the highest levels of the Department of Defense."

"In the early part of the 90s," it adds, "Petersen was engaged in a number of projects for the Department of Defense which functioned to build a systematic understanding of the major approaches that were then being used to study and anticipate futures. One notable project for the Office of the Secretary of Defense involved traveling throughout the world visiting the foremost practitioners of futures research to assess each methodology and attempt to develop a new, synthetic approach that drew from the best of the then current processes." Petersen became an advisor to a number of senior defense officials during this time, serving in various personal support roles to the undersecretary of the Navy and the chief of Naval Operations, among others.

Midway through the 1990s, it adds, "Petersen became convinced that humanity was living in an extraordinary time of change that would necessarily result in a major global shift within the following two decades. TAI committed itself to playing a significant role in facilitating a global transition to a new world that operates in a fundamentally different way from the past."

Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates

Penn, Schoen and Berland (PSB) has played a pioneering role in the use of polling operations, especially "exit polls," in facilitating coups. Its primary mission is to shape the perception that the group installed into power in a targeted country has broad popular support. The group began work in Serbia during the period that its principle, Mark Penn, was President Clinton's top political advisor.

PSB was founded in 1975, with offices in Washington, DC, Denver, and New York. It reports it has conducted research in over 65 countries for Fortune 500 companies and major political campaigns.

"PSB is perhaps best known for our work as long-term strategic advisors to Bill Gates and Microsoft," it reports, while in the political world, "the firm is best known for being the long-time strategic advisors to President Bill Clinton and to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others."

The firm reports that it has conducted "a wide variety of government research projects, including recent work for the U.S. State Department in troubled countries overseas." Its business clients have included Siemens, American Express, Eli Lilly, Fleet, Boston Financial, Texaco, BP, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, ING Group, DeBeers, and KMG, among others.

The groups touts its role in Serbia. In an article, entitled "Defeating dictators at the ballot box: Lessons on how to develop successful electoral strategy in an authoritarian society," posted on their website, coauthors Penn and Schoen report:

International strategists, political and media consultants—such as ourselves have played critical roles behind the scenes of the elections in Serbia and Zimbabwe, helping the opposition parties craft strategies, messages and organize a credible and effective campaign that has enabled them to weaken the dictator, his political party, and eventually throw him out of power..

The introduction of cutting edge political and communications techniques is as well as the advise of the best Western political consultants and image makers, is as potent a weapon as the planes, bombs, and intelligence technology used in such conflicts as the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, most recently Afghanistan.

The firm's role in subverting Serbia was first detailed in a December 11, 2000, Washington Post article by Michael Dobbs, US Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition.

In a softly lit conference room, American pollster Doug Schoen flashed the results of an in-depth opinion poll of 840 Serbian voters onto an overhead projection screen, sketching a strategy for toppling Europe's last remaining communist-era ruler.

His message, delivered to leaders of Serbia's traditionally fractious opposition, was simple and powerful. Slobodan Milosevic—survivor of four lost wars, two major street uprisings, 78 days of NATO bombing and a decade of international sanctions—was "completely vulnerable" to a well-organized electoral challenge. The key, the poll results showed, was opposition unity.

Held in a luxury hotel in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, in October 1999, the closed-door briefing by Schoen, a Democrat, turned out to be a seminal event, pointing the way to the electoral revolution that brought down Milosevic a year later. It also marked the start of an extraordinary U.S. effort to unseat a foreign head of state, not through covert action of the kind the CIA once employed in such places as Iran and Guatemala, but by modern election campaign techniques.

Milosevic's strongest political card was the disarray and ineffectiveness of his opponents. The opposition consisted of nearly two dozen political parties, some of whose leaders were barely on speaking terms with one another.

It was against this background that 20 opposition leaders accepted an invitation from the Washington-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) in October 1999 to a seminar at the Marriott Hotel in Budapest, overlooking the Danube River. The key item on the agenda: an opinion poll commissioned by the U.S. polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates.

The poll reported that Milosevic had a 70 percent unfavorable rating among Serbian voters. But it also showed that the big names in the opposition—men such as Zoran Djindjic and Vuk Draskovic—were burdened with negative poll ratings almost as high as Milosevic's.

Among the candidates best placed to challenge Milosevic, the poll suggested, was a moderate Serbian nationalist named Vojislav Kostunica, who had a favorable rating of 49 percent and an unfavorable rating of only 29 percent.

Schoen, who had provided polling advice to former Yugoslav prime minister Milan Panic during his unsuccessful 1992 campaign to depose Milosevic, drew several conclusions from these and other findings of the poll. . . . Most important, only a united opposition had a chance of deposing Milosevic. "If you take one word from this conference," Schoen told the delegates, "I urge it to be unity."

Mark Penn has been president of the firm since its founding in 1975. He served as President Clinton's pollster and political adviser for the 1996 re-election campaign and throughout the second term of the administration, including during the period he oversaw the Serbian election campaign which toppled President Milosevic. His influence over the Clinton administration was such that the Washington Post called him perhaps "the most powerful man in Washington you've never heard of". According to the firm's website, Penn helped elect 15 overseas Presidents in the Far East, Latin America, and Europe.

Doug Schoen is the firm's founding partner and a principal strategist. According to the firm, Schoen has, for the last 20 years "created winning messages and provided strategic advice to numerous political clients in the United States and to heads of state in countries around the world, including Greece, Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda and Yugoslavia." Additionally, he was "President William Jefferson Clinton's research and strategic consultant during the 1996 reelection, and has been widely credited with creating and effectively communicating the message that turned around the president's political fortunes between 1994 and 1996."

Alan Fleischmann, who runs the firm's Washington offices, is described as a "specialist in strategic and crisis communications who has served in domestic and overseas senior management posts in the private and public sectors, specializing in finance, public and foreign policy, marketing, communications, negotiation, mediation, and strategy. Prior to joining the firm, Fleischmann been staff director of the Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the United States Congress, and a senior advisor to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Fleischmann has also been a legislative aide to the late German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the German Bundestag.

Page 1: Ukrainian postmodern coup completes testing of new template

Page 2: Who Is Col. Bob Helvey?

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 Heather Coffin on George Soros: George Soros, Imperial Wizard

http://www.abbc2.com/islam/english/jewishp/finance/sorosempire.htm

 Το κείμενο που ακολουθεί της Heather Coffin βρίσκεται δημοσιευμένο σε ελληνική μετάφραση στο τεύχος 58 του περιοδικού Άρδην Μαρτίου – Απριλίου 2006. Εκτιμώ ότι πρόκειται για μια εξαιρετικά θεμελιωμένη ανάλυση που δείχνει τον δρόμο για περαιτέρω διερεύνηση του σημαντικού ζητήματος των διεθνικών δρώντων και των διανεμητικών συνεπειών των δράσεών τους, ιδιαίτερα όταν επιστρατεύονται από κυβερνητικούς ή παρακρατικούς δρώντες της αχανούς διεθνούς πολιτικής.

Π.Ήφ. 8.4.2006

 

George Soros, Imperial Wizard

"Yes, I do have a foreign policy...my goal is to become the conscience of the world."'

This is not a case of narcissistic personality disorder; this is how George Soros exercises the authority of United States hegemony in the world today. Soros foundations and financial machinations are partly responsible for the destruction of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. He has set his sights on China. He was part of the full court press that dismantled Yugoslavia. Calling himself a philanthropist, billionaire George Soros' role is to tighten the ideological stranglehold of globalization and the New World Order while promoting his own financial gain. Soros' commercial and "philanthropic" operations are clandestine, contradictory and coactive. And as far as his economic activities are concerned, by his own admission, he is without conscience; a capitalist who functions with absolute amorality.  

 

 

Master-builder of the new bribe sector systematically bilking the world

 

He thrusts himself upon world statesmen and they respond. He has been close to Henry Kissinger, Vaclav Havel and Poland's General Wojciech Jaruzelski. 4 He supports the Dalai Lama, whose institute is housed in the Presidio in San Francisco, also home to the foundation run by Soros' friend, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. 5

Soros is a leading figure on the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum, and Human Rights Watch (HRW). In 1994, after a meeting with his philosophical guru, Sir Karl Popper, Soros ordered his companies to start investing in Central and Eastern European communications. The Federal Radio Television Administration of the Czech Republic accepted his offer to take over and fund the archives of Radio Free Europe. Soros moved the archives to Prague and spent over $15 million on their maintenance. 2 A Soros foundation now runs CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty jointly with the U.S. and RFE/RL, which has expanded into the Caucasus and Asia. 3 Soros is the founder and funder of the Open Society Institute. He created and maintains the International Crisis Group (ICG) which, among other things, has been active in the Balkans since the destruction of Yugoslavia. Soros works openly with the United States Institute of Peace-an overt arm of the CIA.

He thrusts himself upon world statesmen and they respond. He has been close to Henry Kissinger, Vaclav Havel and Poland's General Wojciech Jaruzelski. 4 He supports the Dalai Lama, whose institute is housed in the Presidio in San Francisco, also home to the foundation run by Soros' friend, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. 5

When anti-globalization forces were freezing in the streets outside New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel in February 2002, George Soros was inside addressing the World Economic Forum. As the police forced protesters into metal cages on Park Avenue, Soros was extolling the virtues of the "Open Society" and joined Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and others.

 WHO IS THIS GUY?

George Soros was born in Hungary in 1930 to Jewish parents so removed from their roots that they once vacationed in Nazi Germany. 6 Soros lived under the Nazis, but with the triumph of the Communists moved to England in 1947. There, Soros came under the sway of the philosopher Karl Popper, at the London School of Economics. Popper was a lionized anti-communist ideologue and his teachings formed the basis for Soros' political tendencies. There is hardly a speech, book or article that Soros writes that does not pay obeisance to Popper's influence.

Knighted in 1965, Popper coined the slogan "Open Society," which eventually manifested in Soros' Open Society Fund and Institute. Followers of Popper repeat his words like true believers. Popperian philosophy epitomizes Western individual ism. Soros left England in 1956, and found work on Wall Street where, in the 1960s, he invented the "hedge fund."

"...hedge funds catered to very wealthy individuals... The largely secretive funds, usually trading in offshore locations. . produced astronomically superior results. The size of the "bets" often became self fulfilling prophecies: 'rumors of a position taken by the big hedge funds prompted other investors to follow suit,' which would in turn force up the price the hedgers were betting on to begin with." 7

Soros organized the Quantum Fund in 1969 and began to dabble in currency manipulation. In the 1970s, his financial activities turned to:

"Alternating long and short positions... Soros won big both on the rise of real estate investment trusts and on their subsequent collapse. Under his 20-year stewardship, Quantum returned an amazing 34.5% a year. Soros is best known (and feared) for currency speculation.. . In 1997 he earned the rare distinction of being singled out as a villain by a head of state, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, for taking part in a highly profitable attack on that nation's currency." 8

Through such clandestine financial scheming, Soros became a multibillionaire. His companies control real estate in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico; banking in Venezuela; and are some of the most profitable currency traders in the world, giving rise to the general belief that his highly placed friends assisted him in his financial endeavors, for political as well as financial gain. 9

George Soros has been blamed for the destruction of the Thai economy in 1997.10 One Thai activist said, "We regard George Soros as a kind of Dracula. He sucks the blood from the people." 11 The Chinese call him "the crocodile," because his economic and ideological efforts in China were so insatiate, and because his financial speculation created millions of dollars in profits as it ravished the Thai and Malaysian economies. 12

Soros once made a billion dollars in one day by speculating (a word he abhors) on the British pound. Accused of taking "money from every British taxpayer when he speculated against sterling," he said, "When you speculate in the financial markets you are free of most of the moral concerns that confront an ordinary businessman.. .I did not have to concern myself with moral issues in the financial markets." 13

Soros has a schizophrenic craving for unlimited personal wealth and a desire to be thought well of by others:

"Currency traders sitting at their desks buy and sell currencies of Third World countries in large quantities. The effect of the currency fluctuations on the people who live in those countries is a matter that does not enter their minds. Nor should it; they have a job to do. Yet if we pause to think, we must ask ourselves whether currency traders.. .should regulate the lives of millions." 14

It was Soros who saved George W. Bush's bacon when his management of an oil exploration company was ending in failure. Soros was the owner of Harken Energy Corporation, and it was he who bought the rapidly depreciating stocks just prior to the company's collapse. The future president cashed out at almost one million dollars. Soros said he did it to buy "political influence." 15 Soros is also a partner in the infamous Carlyle Group. Organized in 1987, "the world's largest private equity firm" with over twelve billion dollars under management, is run by "a veritable who's who of former Republican leaders," from CIA man Frank Carlucci to CIA head George Bush, Sr. The Carlyle Group makes most of its money from weapons expenditures.

 THE PHILANTHROPIST SPOOK

In 1980, Soros began to use his millions to attack socialism in Eastern Europe. He financed individuals who would cooperate with him. His first success was in Hungary. He took over the Hungarian educational and cultural establishment, incapacitating socialist institutions throughout the country. He made his way right inside the Hungarian government. Soros next moved on to Poland, aiding the CIA-funded Solidarity operation and in that same year, he became active in China. The USSR came next.

It is not coincidental that the Central Intelligence Agency had operations in all of those countries. The goal of the Agency was exactly the same as that of the Open Society Fund: to dismantle socialism. In South Africa, the CIA sought out dissidents who were anticommunist. In Hungary, Poland and the USSR, the CIA, with overt intervention from the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, USAID and other institutions, supported and organized anticommunists, the very type of individuals recruited by Soros' Open Society Fund. The CIA would have called them "assets." As Soros said, "In each country I identified a group of people - some leading personalities, others less well known - who share my belief..."16 Soros' Open Society organized conferences with anticommunist Czechs, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians, Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars. 17 His ever-expanding influence gave rise to suspicions that he was operating as part of the U.S. intelligence complex. In 1989, the Washington Post reported charges first made in 1987 by the Chinese government officials that Soros' Fund for the Reform and Opening of China had CIA connections. 18

 TAKING ON MOSCOW

After 1990, Soros funds targeted the Russian educational system, providing the entire nation with textbooks. 19 In effect, Soros ensured the indoctrination of an entire generation of Russian youth with OSI propaganda. Soros foundations were accused of engineering a strategy to take control of the Russian financial system, privatization schemes, and the process of foreign investment in that country. Russians reacted angrily to Soros' legislative meddlings. Critics of Soros and other U.S. foundations said the goal of these maneuvers was to "thwart Russia as a state, which has the potential to compete with the world's only superpower." 20 Russians began to suspect Soros and the CIA were interconnected. Business tycoon Boris Berezovsky said, "I nearly fainted when I heard a couple of years ago that George Soros was a CIA agent." 21 Berezovsky's opinion was that Soros, and the West, were "afraid of Russian capital becoming strong."

If the economic and political establishment in the United States fear an economic rivalry from Russia, what better way to control it than to dominate Russian media, education, research centers and science? After spending $250 million for the "transformation of education of humanities and economics at the high school and university levels," Soros created the International Science Foundation for another $100 million. 22 The Russian Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK) accused Soros foundations in Russia of "espionage." They noted that Soros was not operating alone; he was part of a full court press that included financing from the Ford and Heritage Foundations; Harvard, Duke, and Columbia universities, and assistance from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services. 23 The FSK criticized Soros' payouts to 50,000 Russian scientists, saying that Soros advanced his own interests by gaining control of thousands of Russian scientific discoveries and new technologies to collect state and commercial secrets. 24

In 1995, Russians were infuriated by the insinuation of State Department operative Fred Cuny into the conflict in Chechnya. Cuny's cover was disaster relief, but his history of involvement in international conflict zones of interest to the U.S., plus FBI and CIA search parties, made clear his government connections. At the time of his disappearance, Cuny was working under contract to a Soros foundation. 25 It is not widely known in the U.S. that the violence in Chechnya, a province in the heart of Russia, is generally perceived as the result of a political destabilization campaign on which Washington looks favorably, and may actually be directing. This assessment of the situation is clear enough to writer Tom Clancy that he felt free to include it as an assertion of fact in his best-seller, The Sum of All Fears. The Russians accused Cuny of being a CIA operative, and part of an intelligence operation to support the Chechen uprising. 26 Soros' Open Society Institute is still active in Chechnya, as are other Soros-sponsored organizations.

Russia was the site of at least one joint endeavor to enhance Soros' balance sheet, arranged with diplomatic assistance from the Clinton administration. In 1999, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright blocked a $500 million loan guarantee by the U.S. Export-Import Bank to the Russian company, Tyumen Oil, on the grounds that it was contrary to U.S. national interests. Tyumen wanted to buy American-made oil equipment and services from Dick Cheney's Halliburton Company and ABB Lummus Global of Bloomfield, New Jersey. 27 George Soros was an investor in a company that Tyumen had been trying to acquire. Both Soros and BP Amoco lobbied to prevent this transaction, and Albright obliged. 28

 NURTURING LEFT ANTI-SOCIALISM

Soros' Open Society Institute has a finger in every pot. Its board of directors reads like a "Who's Who" of Cold War and New World Order pundits. Paul Goble is Communications Director; 'he was the major political commentator at Radio Free Europe. Herbert Okun served in the Nixon State Department as an intelligence adviser to Henry Kissinger. Kati Marton is the wife of former Clinton administration UN ambassador and envoy to Yugoslavia, Richard Holbrooke. Marton lobbied for the Soros-funded radio station B-92, also a project of' the National Endowment for Democracy (another overt arm of the CIA), which was instrumental in bringing down the Yugoslav government.

When Soros founded the Open Society Fund he picked liberal pundit Aryeh Neier to lead it. Neier was the head of Helsinki Watch, a putative human rights organization with an anticommunist bent. In 1993, the Open Society Fund became the Open Society Institute.

Helsinki Watch became Human Rights Watch in 1975. Soros is currently on its Advisory Board, both for the Americas and the Eastern Europe-Central Asia Committees, and his Open Society Fund/Soros/OSI is listed as a funder. 29 Soros is intimately connected to HRW, and Neier wrote columns for The Nation magazine without mentioning that he was on Soros' payroll. 30

Soros is intimately involved in HRW, although he does his best to hide it. 31 He says he just funds and sets up these programs and lets them run. But they do not stray from the philosophy of the funder. HRW and OSI are close. Their views do not diverge. Of course, other foundations fund these institutions as well, but Soros' influence dominates their ideology.

George Soros' activities fall into the construct developed in 1983 and enunciated by Allen Weinstein, founder of the National Endowment for Democracy. Weinstein said, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."32 Soros is operating exactly within the confines of the intelligence complex. He is little different from CIA drug runners in Laos in the 1960s, or the mujahedin who profited from the opium trade while carrying out CIA operations against socialist Afghanistan in the 1980s. He simply funnels (and takes home) a whole lot more money than those pawns, and he does much of his business in the light of day. His candor insofar as he expresses it is a sort of spook damage control that serves to legitimize the strategies of U.S. foreign policy.

The majority of people in the U.S. today who consider themselves politically left-of-center are undoubtedly pessimistic about the chances for a socialist transformation of society. Thus the Soros 'Decentralization" model, or the "piecemeal" approach to "negative utilitarianism, the attempt to minimize the amount of misery," which was Popper's philosophy, appeals to them. 33 Soros funded an HRW study that was used to back California and Arizona legislation relaxing drug laws. 34 Soros favors the legalization of drugs - one way of temporarily reducing awareness of one's misery. Soros is an equal-opportunity bribester. At a loftier rung of the socioeconomic ladder, one finds Social Democrats who accept Soros funding and believe in civil liberties within the context of capitalism. 35 For these folks, the evil consequences of Soros' business activities (impoverishing people all over the world) are mitigated by his philanthropic activities. Similarly, liberal/left intellectuals, both in the U.S. and abroad, have been drawn in by the "Open Society" philosophy, not to mention the occasional funding plum.

The New Left in the United States was a social democratic movement. It was resolutely anti-Soviet, and when Eastern Europe and the USSR fell, few in the New Left opposed the destruction of the socialist systems. The New Left did not mourn or protest when the hundreds of millions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia lost their right to jobs, housing at reasonable and legally protected rents, free education through graduate school, health care and cultural enhancement. Most belittled any suggestion that the CIA and certain NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy or the Open Society Fund had actively participated in the annihilation of socialism. These people felt that the Western determination to destroy the USSR since 1917 was barely connected to the fall of the USSR. For them, socialism failed of its own accord, because it was flawed.

As revolutions, such as the ones in Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua or El Salvador were destroyed by proxy forces or were stalled by demonstration "elections," New Left pragmatists shrugged their shoulders and turned away. The New Left sometimes seemed to deliberately ignore the post-Soviet machinations of U.S. foreign policy.

Bogdan Denitch, who had political aspirations in Croatia, was active within the Open Society Institute, and received OSI funding. 36 Denitch favored the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatia, NATO bombing of Bosnia and then Yugoslavia, and even a ground invasion of Yugoslavia. 37 Denitch was a founder and chair for many years of the Democratic Socialists of America, a leading liberal-left group in the U.S. He has also long chaired the prestigious Socialist Scholars Conference, through which he was key to manipulating the sympathies of many toward support for NATO expansion. 38 Other Soros targets for support include Refuse and Resist the ACLU, and a host of other liberal causes. 39 Soros added another unlikely trophy when he became involved in the New School for Social Research in New York, long an academy of choice for left intellectuals. He now funds the East and Central Europe Program there. 40

Many leftists who were inspired by the revolution in Nicaragua sadly accepted the election of Violetta Chamorro and the defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990. Most of the Nicaragua support network faded thereafter. Perhaps the New Left could have learned from the rising star of Michael Kozak. He was a veteran of Washington's campaigns to install sympathetic leaders in Nicaragua, Panama and Haiti, and to undermine Cuba - he headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

After organizing the Chamorro victory in Nicaragua, Kozak moved on to become U.S. Ambassador to Belarus. Kozak worked with the Soros-sponsored "Internet Access and Training Program" (IATP), which was busy "creating future leaders" in Belarus. 41 This program was simultaneously imposed upon Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. IATP operates openly with the support of the U.S. Department of State. To its credit, Belarus expelled Kozak and the Soros-Open Society/U.S. State Department crowd. The government of Aleksandr Lukashenko found that for four years before moving to Minsk, Kozak was instrumental in engineering the flow of tens of millions of dollars to the Belarus opposition. Kozak was creating a united opposition coalition, funding web-sites, newspapers and opinion polls, and tutoring a student resistance movement similar to Yugoslavia's Otpor. Kozak brought in Otpor leaders to instruct dissidents in Belarus. 42 Just before September 11, 2001, the U.S. was revving up a demonization campaign against President Aleksandr Lukashenko. Demonizing Lukashenko has temporarily taken a back burner to the "war on terrorism."

Through OSI and HRW, Soros was a major supporter of the B-92 radio station in Belgrade. Soros funded Otpor, the organization that received those "suitcases of money" in support of the October 5, 2000 coup that toppled the Yugoslav government. 43 Human Rights Watch helped legitimize the subsequent kidnapping and show trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague by saying nothing about his rights." 44 Louise Arbour, who served as judge at that illegal tribunal, is presently on the Board of Soros' International Crisis Group. 45 The Open Society/Human Rights Watch gang has been working on Macedonia, calling it part of their "civilizing mission." 46 Expect that republic to be "saved" to finish the total disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.

 DEPUTIES OF POWER

Soros has actually stated that he considers his philanthropy moral and his money management business amoral. 47 Yet those in charge of Soros-funded NGOs have a clear and consistent agenda. One of Soros' most influential institutions is the International Crisis Group, founded in 1986. ICG is headed by individuals from the very center of political and corporate power. Its board includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, Morton Abramowitz, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State; Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe; and Richard Allen, former U.S. National Security Adviser, Allen is noteworthy for quitting Nixon's National Security Council out of disgust with the liberal tendencies of Henry Kissinger; recruiting Oliver North to Reagan's National Security Council, and negotiating missiles for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal. For these individuals, "containing conflict" boils down to U.S. control over the people and resources of the world.

In the 1980s and 1990s, under the aegis of the Reagan Doctrine, U.S. covert and overt operations in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia were in the works. Soros was openly active in most of these places, working to buy off would-be revolutionaries, or subsidize politicians, intellectuals and anyone else who might come to power when the revolutionary moment had passed. According to James Petras:

"By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neoliberal ruling classes realized that their policies were polarizing the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neoliberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy 'from below,' the promotion of 'grassroots' organizations with an 'anti-statist' ideology to intervene among potentially conflictory classes, to create a "social cushion." These organizations were financially dependent on neoliberal sources and were directly involved in competing with sociopolitical movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1 990s these organizations, described as "nongovernmental," numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to four billion dollars world-wide." 48

In Underwriting Democracy, Soros boasts about the "Americanization of Eastern Europe." According to his account, through his education programs he began to establish a young cadre of Sorosian leaders. These Soros Foundation-educated young men and women are prepared to fulfill the functions of so-called "influence agents." Thanks to their fluent knowledge of languages and their insertion into the emerging bureaucracies in target countries, these recruits would philosophically smooth the inroads for Western multinational corporations.

Career diplomat Herbert Okun, on the Europe Committee of Human Rights Watch, along with George Soros, is connected to a host of State Department-linked institutions, from USAID to the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission. From 1990 to 1997, Okun was executive director of something called the Financial Services Volunteer Corps, part of USAID, "to help establish free market financial systems in former communist countries." 49 George Soros is in complete accord with the capitalists who are in the process of taking control of the global economy.

 NON-PROFIT PROFITEERING

Soros claims not to do philanthropy in the countries in which he is involved as a currency trader. 50 But Soros has often taken advantage of his connections to make key investments. Armed with a study by ICC, and with the support of Bernard Kouchner, chief of the UN Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK), Soros attempted to acquire the most profitable mining complex in the Balkans.

In September 2000, in a hurry to take the Trepca mines before the Yugoslavian election, Kouchner stated that pollution from the mining complex was raising lead levels in the environment. 51 This is incredible considering that he cheered when the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia rained depleted uranium on the country and released more than 100,000 tons of carcinogens into the air, water and soil. 52 But Kouchner had his way, and the mines were closed for "health reasons." Soros invested $150 million in an effort to gain control of Trepca's gold, silver, lead, zinc and cadmium, which make the property worth $5 billion. 53

As Bulgaria was imploding into "free-market" chaos, Soros was busy scavenging through the wreckage, as Reuters reported in early 2001:

"The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) invested $3.0 million in [Bulgarian high-tech company] Rila, the first firm to benefit from a new $30 million facility set up by the EBRD to support IT firms in central and eastern Europe.... Another $3. 0 million came from U.S private investment fund Argus Capital Partners, sponsored by Prudential Insurance Company of America and opera ting in central and eastern Europe... Soros, who had invested around $3.0 million in Rila and in 2001 invested another $1.0 million...remained its majority owner. " 54

 FRAMING THE ISSUES

His pose as a philanthropist gives Soros the power to shape international public opinion when social conflict raises the question of who are the victims and who are the malefactors. Like other NGOs, Human Rights Watch, Soros' mouthpiece on human rights, avoids or ignores most organized and independent working class struggles.

In Colombia, labor leaders are routinely killed by paramilitaries working in concert with the U.S.-sponsored government. Because those unions oppose neoliberal economics, HRW is relatively silent. In April of this year, HRW's Jose Vivanco testified before the U.S. Senate in favor of Plan Colombia: 55

"Colombians remain committed to human rights and democracy They need help. Human Rights Watch has no fundamental problem with the United States providing that help." 56

HRW equates the actions of the Colombian guerrilla fighters struggling to free themselves from the oppression of state terror, poverty and exploitation with the repression of the U.S-sponsored armed forces and paramilitary death squads, the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia). HRW validated the Pastrana government and its military, whose role was to protect property rights and maintain the economic and political status quo. According to HRW, 50% of civilian deaths are the work of the government-tolerated death squads. 57 The correct number is 80%. 58

HRW essentially certified the election and ascendancy of the Uribe government in 2002 as well. Uribe is a throwback to the Latin American dictators the U.S. supported in the past, although he was "elected." HRW had no comment about the fact that the majority boycotted the election. 59

In the Caribbean Basin, Cuba is another opponent of neoliberalism that has been demonized by Human Rights Watch. In nearby Haiti, Soros-funded activities have worked to defeat popular aspirations following the end of the Duvalier dictatorship by undermining Haiti's first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. HRW's Ken Roth helpfully chimed in with U.S. denunciations of Aristide as "undemocratic." To demonstrate his idea of "democracy," Soros foundations were commencing operations in Haiti complimentary to such unseemly U.S. activities as USAID's promotion of persons associated with FRAPH, the notorious CIA-sponsored death squads which have terrorized the country since the fall of 'Baby Doc' Duvalier. 60

On HRW's web site, Director Roth criticized the U.S. for not opposing China more vigorously. Roth's activities include the creation of the Tibetan Freedom Concert, a traveling propaganda project that toured the U.S. with major rock musicians, urging young people to support Tibet against China. 61 Tibet has been a pet project of the CIA for many years. 62

Roth has recently pressed for opposition to Chinese control over its oil-rich western province of Xinjiang. With the colonialist "divide and conquer" approach, Roth has tried to convince some of the Uighur religious minority in Xinjiang that the U.S/NATO intervention in Kosovo holds promise as a model for them. As late as August 2002, the U.S. government has given some support in this endeavor as well.

U.S. designs on this region were signaled clearly when a New York Times article on Xinjiang Province in western China described the Uighurs as a "Muslim majority, [which] lives restively under Chinese rule." They "are well versed in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last year which some celebrate for liberating the Muslims in Kosovo; they fantasize about a similar rescue' here." 63 The New York Times Magazine noted "Recent discoveries of oil have made Xinjiang extremely attractive to international trade," while comparing the conditions for its indigenous population to those in Tibet. 64

 INNUMERACY

When Sorosian organizations count, they seem to lose track of the truth. Human Rights Watch asserted that 500 people, not over 2,000, were killed by NATO bombers in the 1999 war in Yugoslavia. 65 They said only 350, not over 4,000, died as a result of U.S. attacks on Afghanistan. 66 When the U.S. bombed Panama in 1989, HRW prefaced its report by saying that the "ouster of Manuel Noriega.. and installation of the democratically-elected government of President Guillermo Endara brought high hopes in Panama..." The report neglected to mention the number of casualties.

Human Rights Watch prepared the groundwork for the NATO attack on Bosnia in 1993 by the false rape-of-thousands and "genocide" stories. 67 This tactic of creating political hysteria was necessary for the United States to carry out its Balkan policy. It was repeated in 1999 when HRW functioned as the shock troops of indoctrination for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. All of Soros' blather about the rule of law was forgotten. The U.S. and NATO made their own law, and the institutions of George Soros stood behind it.

Massaging of numbers to provoke a response was a major part of a Council on Foreign Relations campaign after September 11,2001. This time it was the 2,801 killed in the World Trade Center. The CFR met on November 6, 2001, to plan a "major public diplomacy campaign." CFR created an "Independent Task Force on America's Response to Terrorism." Soros joined Richard C. Holbrooke, Newton L. Gingrich, John M. Shalikashvili (former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and other powerful individuals on a campaign to make the Trade Center dead into tools for U.S. foreign policy. The CFR report set out to make the case for a war on terrorism. George Soros' fingerprints were all over the campaign:

"Have senior-level U.S. officials press friendly Arab and other Muslim governments not only to publicly condemn the 9/11 attacks, but also to back the rationale and goals of the U.S. anti-terror campaign. We are never going to convince the publics in the Middle East and South Asia of the nghteousness of our cause if their governments remain silent. We need to help them to deflect any blow-hack from such statements, but we must have them vocally on board.... Encourage Bosnian, Albanian, and Turkish Muslims to educate foreign audiences regarding the U.S. role in saving the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo in 1995-99, and our long-standing, close ties to Muslims around the world. Engage regional intellectuals and journalists across the board, regardless of their views. Routinely monitor the regional press in real time to enable prompt responses... Stress references to the victims (and ideally named victims to personalize them) whenever we discuss our cause and goals." 68

Sorosian innumeracy: counting to bolster and defend U.S. foreign policy.

Soros is very worried about the decline in the world capitalist system and he wants to do something about it, now. He recently said: "I can already discern the makings of the final crisis.... Indigenous political movements are likely to arise that will seek to expropriate the multinational corporations and recapture the 'national' wealth." 69

Soros is seriously suggesting a plan to circumvent the United Nations. He proposes that the "democracies of the world ought to take the lead and forge a global network of alliances that could work with or without the United Nations." If he were psychotic, one might think he was having an episode. But the fact is, Soros' assertion that "The United Nations is constitutionally incapable of fulfilling the promises contained in the preamble of its charter," reflects the thinking of such reactionary institutions as the American Enterprise Institute. 70 Though many conservatives refer to the Soros network as left-wing, on the question of U.S. affiliation with the United Nations Soros is on the same page as the likes of John R. Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, who, with "[M]any Republicans in Congress-believe that nothing more should be paid to the UN system." 71 There has been a decades-long rightwing campaign against the UN. Now Soros is leading it. On various Soros web sites one may read criticism of the United Nations as too rich, unwilling to share information, or flawed in ways that make it unfit for the way the world should run according to George Soros.

Even writers at The Nation, writers who clearly ought to know better, have been influenced by Soros' ideas. William Greider, for instance, recently found some validity in Soros' criticism that the United Nations should not be a venue for "tin-pot dictators and totalitarians. . treated as equal partners." 72 This kind of Eurocentric racism is at the heart of Soros' hubris. His assumption that the United States can and should run the world is a prescription for fascism on a global scale. For much too long, Western "progressives" have been giving Soros a pass. Probably Greider and others will find the reference to fascism excessive, unjustified, even outrageous.

But just listen closely to what Soros himself has to say: "In old Rome, the Romans only voted. In the modern global capitalism, the Americans only vote. The Brazilians do not vote." 73

 NOTES

1. Dan Seligman, "Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire," commentary, April 2002.
2. "Sir Karl Popper in Prague, Summary of Relevant Facts Without Comment,"
http://www.lf3.cuni.cz/aff/p1_e.html.
3. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Transcaucasia/Central Asia, www.rferl.org.
4. Seligman.
5. Lee Penn, "1999, A Year of Growth for the United Religions Initiative." http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/N1684.TMP3/B103O723.3;sz=720x300;ord=6249?.
6. George Soros, Soros on Soros, Staying Ahead of the Curve (New York: John Wiley, 1995), p. 26.
7. "Hedge Funds Get Trimmed," Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2000.
8. Theodore Spencer, "Investors of the Century," Fortune, December 1999.
9. Jim Freer, "Most International Trader George Soros," Latin Tradecom, October 1998, http://www.latintrade.com/newsite/content/archives.cfm?StoryID=473.
10. Busaba Sivasomboon, "Soros Speech in Thailand Canceled," AP wire, January 28, 2001.
11. Sivasomboon.
12. George Soros, The Asia Society Hong Kong Center Speech, www.asiasociety.org/speeches/soros.
13. Soros on Soros, pill.
14. George Soros, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2000).
15. David Corn, "Bush and the Billionaire, How Insider Capitalism Benefited
W," The Nation, July 17, 2002.
16. Soros on Soros, pp. 122-25.
17. Agence France-Presse, October 8,1993.
18. Marianne Yen, "Fund's Representatives Arrested in China," Washington Post, August 8, 1989, p. A4.
19. Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1994, p. ASS.
20. Chrystia Freeland, "Moscow Suspicion Grows: Kremlin Factions Are at Odds Over Policy," Financial Times (London), January 19, 1995.
21. Interfax Russian News, November 6,1999.
22. Irma Dezhina, "U.S. Non-profit Foundations in Russia, Impact on Research and Education" www.jhu.edu/~istr/conferences/dublin/workingpapers/dezhina.pdf.
23. "FSK Suspects Financing of Espionage on Russia's Territory," AP wire, January 18, 1995.
24. David Hoffman, "Proliferation of Parties Gives Russia a Fractured Democratic System," Washington Post, October 1, 1995, p. A27; Margaret Shapiro, "Russian Agency Said to Accuse Americans of Spying," Washington Post, January 14, 1995, p. A17.
25. Allan Turner, "Looking For Trouble," Houston chronicle, May 28, 1995, p. E1; Kim Masters, "Where Is Fred Cuny," Washington Post, June 19, 1995, p. D1; Patrick Anderson, "The Disaster Expert Who Met His Match," Washington Post, September 6, 1999, p. C9; Scott Anderson, "What Happened to Fred Cuny?" New York Times Magazine, February 25, 1996, p. 44.
26. Scott Anderson, "The Man Who Tried to Save the World: the Dangerous Life and Disappearance of Fred Cuny," Philanthropy Roundtable, March/April 2002, www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/2000-01/hedges.
27. "U.S. Blocks $500M Aid Deal for Russians" Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1999.
28. Bob Djurdjevic, "Letters to the Editor," Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1999.
29. "Open Society Institute," www.soros.org/osi/newyork.
30. Connie Bruck, "The World According to Soros," New Yorker, January 23, 1995.
31. Olga M. Lazin, "The Rise of the U.S. Decentralized Model for Philanthropy, George Soros' Open Society and National Foundations in Europe," http://www.isop.ucla.edu/profmex/volume6/1winter01/01lazin1.htm.
32. David Ignatius, "Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups," Washington Post, September 22, 1991, p. C1.
33. Patrick McCartney, "Study Suggests Drug Laws Resemble Notorious Passbook Laws," www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n861/a06.
34. McCartney.
35. See Sean Gervasi, "Western Intervention in the USSR," CovertAction Information Bulletin, no. 39, Winter 1991-92.
36. "The Cenasia Discussion List," http://www.eurasianet.org/resource/cenasia/hypermail/200102/0052.html.
37. Bogdan Denitch, "The Case Against Inaction," The Nation, April 26, 1999.
38. "Biographies, 2002 Socialist Scholars Conference," www.socialistscholar.org/biographies.
39. "Grants," www.soros.org/repro/grants.
40. "East and Central Europe Program," www.newschool.edu/centers/ecep.
41. Oxana Popovitch, "IREX Belarus Opens a New IATP Site in Molodechno." www.iatp.net/archive/belarus.
42. lan Traynor, "Belarussian Foils Dictator-buster...For Now," Guardian, September 14, 2001, www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,551533,00.html
43. Steven Erlanger, "Kostunica Says Some Backers 'Unconsciously Work for American Imperial Goals,"' New York Times, September 20, 2000; and "Bringing Down a Dictator, Serbia Calling." PBS, http://www.pbs.org/weta/dictator/rock/serbiacalling.html
44. Milosevic in the Hague, Focus on Human Rights, "In-Depth Report Documents Milosevic Crimes," April 2001, http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/10/milocroat1029.htm.
45. "About ICG," May 2002, http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/annual/2002/ICG2002.pdf.
46. Macedonia Crimes Against Civilians: Abuses by Macedonian Forces in Lluboten, August 10-12, 2001,
47. Andrew Leonard. "The Man Who Bought the World," February 28, 2002, Salon.com. http://archive.salon.com/tech/books/2002/02/28/soros/
48. James Petras, "Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America," Monthly Review, vol. 49, no. 7, December 1997.
49. International Security Studies, "Herbert Okun," www.yale.edu/iss/peopleadvisoryboard1.
50. Leonard.
51. Edward W. Miller, "Brigandage," Coastal Post Monthly, Mann County, CA, September 2000.
52. Mirjan Nadrljanski, "Eco-Disaster in Pancevo: Consequences on the Health of the Population," July 19, 1999, www.gci.ch/GreenCrossPrograms/legacy/yugoslavia/Nadrljanski.html
53. "Soros Fund Launches $150 MIn U.S.Backed Balkans Investment," Bloomberg Business News, July 26, 2000; Chris Hedges, "Below It All in Kosovo," New York limes, July 8,1998, p. A4.
54. Galina Sabeva, "Soros' Sofia IT Firm Gets $9 Million Equity Investment," Reuters, January 23, 2001.
55. On Plan Colombia see: Manuel Salgado Tamayo, "The Geostrategy of Plan Colombia CovertAction Quarterly no. 71, Winter 2001.
56. "Colombia: Human Rights Watch Testifies Before the Senate," Human Rights Watch Backgrounder, April 24, 2002, http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/americas/colombia-testimony0424.htm.
57. "Colombia: Bush/Pastrana Meeting, HRW World Report 2001, Human Rights News" (New York, November 6, 2001).
58. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Action Alert," New York limes Covering for Colombian Death Squads," February 9, 2001.
59. Doug Stokes "Colombia Primer Q&A on the Conflict and U.S. Role," April 16, 2002. Znet, http://www.zmag.org/content/Colombia/stokes_col-primer.cfm.
60. Interpress Service, January 18, 1995. For additional background see Jane Regan, "AIDing U.S. Interests In Haiti," CovertAction Quarterly no. 51, Winter 1994-95; and Noam Chomsky, "Haiti, The Uncivil Society," CovertAction Quarterly no. 57, Summer 1996.
61. Sam Tucker, Human Rights Watch, www.webactive.com/webactive/sotw/hrw.
62. John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War (New York, BBS Public Affairs 1999), p. 236.
63. Elisabeth Rosenthal, "Defiant Chinese Muslims Keep Their Own Time," New York limes, November 19, 2000, p. 3.
64. Jonathan Reynolds (pseudonym), "The Clandestine Chef," New York Times Magazine, December 3, 2000.
65. "Lessons of War," Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2000; Peter Phillips, "Untold Stories of U.S./NATO's War and Media Complacency," http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/suntold.htm
66. Marc W. Herold, "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting," www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/civiDeaths.html
67. "Rape as a crime against humanity," www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/rape.html
68. "Improving the Public Diplomacy Campaign in the War Against Terrorism," Independent Task Force on America's Response to Terrorism, Council on Foreign Relations, November 6, 2001.
69. William Greider, "Curious George Talks the Market, The Nation, February 15, 1999.
70. "Oppose John Bolton's Nomination as State Department's Arms Control Leader," Council for a Livable World , April 11, 2001, http://www.clw.org/bush/opposebolton.html
71. Ibid.
72. Greider.
73. "The Dictatorship of Financial Capital," Federation of Social and Educational Assistance (FASE), Brail, 2002, www.fase.org.br

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Heather Cottin is a writer, lifelong political activist, and recently retired high school history teacher She lives in Free port, NY and was for many years married to the late scholar and activist Sean Gervasi.

 

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Katzenstein/Keohane/Krasner , International Organization, vol. 52. 4 1998 p. 673

“More powerful states may be in position to alter the conceptions that the weaker actors have of their own self interests, especially when economic and military power has delegitimated ideological convictions in weaker or defeated societies. The United States, for instance, pressed for a particular vision of the international society should be ordered after World War II and renewed and reinvigorated this project after the en of the Cold War. The goal was not simply to promote a particular set of objectives, but to alter how other societies conceived of their own goals. The emphasis on what Nye has called soft power engages both realist concerns about relative capabilities and constructivism’s focus on beliefs and identity”. [Katzenstein/Keohane/Krasner , International Organization, vol. 52. 4 1998 p. 673]

Μετάφραση: "«Iσχυρότερα κράτη είναι δυνατό να κατορθώσουν να αλλάξουν τις παραστάσεις με βάση τις οποίες οριοθετούνται οι ιδεολογικές πεποιθήσεις σε λιγότερο ισχυρά κράτη ή ηττημένες πολιτείες. Oι Hνωμένες Πολιτείες, για παράδειγμα, πίεσαν συστηματικά και επίμονα για τη διάδοση συγκεκριμένων πεποιθήσεων ως προς το πώς πρέπει να είναι το όραμα της διεθνούς κοινωνίας [που τις συνέφερε] μετά τον B΄ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο και ανανέωσαν και το αναζωογόνησαν την  μεταψυχροπολεμική εποχή. O σκοπός δεν ήταν απλώς να προωθήσουν συγκεκριμένους στόχους, αλλά να αλλάξουν τον τρόπο με τον οποίο οι συγκεκριμένες κοινωνίες βλέπουν τα οικεία συμφέροντα. H έμφαση αυτού που ο Nye ονομάζει “μαλακή ισχύς” σχετίζεται τόσο με ρεαλιστικούς φόβους [κατανομής ισχύος] για τη σχετική ισχύ όσο και με την [“κριτική”] κονστρουκτιβιστική ανάλυση για συλλογικά πιστεύω, πεποιθήσεις και ταυτότητες» (έμφαση δική μου)

Σημείωση: Βασικά, οι διακεκριμένοι συνάδελφοι επισημαίνουν το γεγονός ότι κατά την διάρκεια της μεταπολεμικής εποχής, κυρίως λόγω της επιρροής «κριτικών» κονστρουκτιβιστών και αναλυτών νεοφιλελεύθερων παραδοχών η φιλελεύθερη θεωρία και κάποιοι στοχαστές (οι οποίοι ταυτόχρονα υπήρξαν ανώτατα στελέχη της αμερικανικής διπλωματίας μετά τον Ψυχρό Πόλεμο, (όπως οι Nye, Lake και Ikenberry) αναζητούν μεθόδους και ιδέες οι οποίες εργαλειακά χρησιμοποιούμενες θα μπορούσαν να εξυπηρετήσουν τα εθνικά τους συμφέροντα με το να αλλάξουν τις ιδεολογικές πεποιθήσεις σε λιγότερο ισχυρά ή «ηττημένα» κράτη. Ο Nye, σε άλλη περίπτωση είπε: «Εάν καταφέρω να σε κάνω να θέλεις αυτό που θέλω, τότε δεν χρειάζεται να σε αναγκάσω να κάνεις αυτό που δεν επιθυμείς» (Nye) Καθημερινή, «Κ», τεύχος 127 6.11.2005. Το εξαιρετικά θεμελιωμένο δοκίμιο του Jonathan Mowat  που παραθέτω στην αγγλική γλώσσα στην παρούσα σελίδα θεμελιώνει το γεγονός ότι οι νεοφιλελεύθεροι αναλυτές είναι περίπου αμέριμνοι στοχαστές μπροστά στην δομημένη και κάθετα-εγκάρσια εκτεινόμενη ομάδα αναλυτών που στελεχώνουν το αμερικανικό σύστημα αποφάσεων. Οι μίζερες ιθαγενείς υπάρξεις που συσπειρώνονται σε διεθνικά "ιδρύματα" για να προσπορίζονται ψίχουλα του μεγάλου φαγοποτιού είναι είτε οι κατά Λένιν "χρήσιμοι ηλιθιοι" είτε όπως πολλοί άλλοι στην ιστορία των λαών, απλά δοσίλογοι. 

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