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Via Postcards from the Revolution
By Eva Golinger
In 1983, the strategy of overthrowing inconvenient governments and calling it ‘democracy promotion’ was born.
Through the creation of a series of quasi-private ‘foundations’, such as Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), Freedom House and later the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC), Washington began to filter funding and strategic aid to political parties and groups abroad that promoted US agenda in nations with insubordinate governments.
Behind all these ‘foundations’ and ‘institutes’ is the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the financial branch of the Department of State. Today, USAID has become a critical part of the security, intelligence and defence axis in Washington. In 2009, the Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative became official doctrine in the US. Now, USAID is the principal entity that promotes the economic and strategic interests of the US across the globe as part of counterinsurgency operations.
Its departments dedicated to transition initiatives, reconstruction, conflict management, economic development, governance and democracy are the main venues through which millions of dollars are filtered from Washington to political parties, NGOs, student organisations and movements that promote US agenda worldwide. Wherever a coup d’etat, a coloured revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there.
How does a coloured revolution work?
The recipe is always the same. Student and youth movements lead the way with a fresh face, attracting others to join in as though it were the fashion, the cool thing to do. There’s always a logo, a colour, a marketing strategy.
In Serbia, the group OTPOR, which led the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, hit the streets with t-shirts, posters and flags boasting a fist in black and white, their symbol of resistance. In Ukraine, the logo remained the same, but the colour changed to orange. In Georgia, it was a rose-colored fist, and in Venezuela, instead of the closed fist, the hands are open, in black and white, to add a little variety.
Coloured revolutions always occur in a nation with strategic, natural resources: gas, oil, military bases and geopolitical interests. And they also always take place in countries with socialist-leaning, anti-imperialist governments. The movements promoted by US agencies in those countries are generally anti-communist, anti-socialist, pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist.
Protests and destabilisation actions are always planned around an electoral campaign and process, to raise tensions and questions of potential fraud, and to discredit the elections in the case of a loss for the opposition, which is generally the case. The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, NED, IRI, NDI, Freedom House, AEI and ICNC. The latter two pride themselves on the expert training and capacitation of youth movements to encourage ‘non-violent’ change.
The strategy seeks to debilitate and disorganise the pillars of state power, neutralising security forces and creating a sensation of chaos and instability. Colonel Robert Helvey, one of the founders of this strategy and a director at AEI, explained that the objective is not to destroy the armed forces and police, but rather “convert them” – convince them to leave the present government and “make them understand that there is a place for them in the government of tomorrow”.
Youth are used to try and debilitate security forces and make it more difficult for them to engage in repression during public protests. Srdja Popovic, founder of OTPOR, revealed that Helvey taught them “how to select people in the system, such as police officers, and send them the message that we are all victims, them and us, because it’s not the job of a police officer to arrest a 13-year-old protestor, for example …”
It’s a well-planned strategy directed towards the security forces, public officials and the public in general, with a psychological warfare component and a street presence that give the impression of a nation on the verge of popular insurrection.
Venezuela
In 2003, AEI touched ground in Venezuela. Colonel Helvey himself gave a nine-day intensive course to the Venezuelan opposition on how to “restore democracy” in the country. According to AEI’s annual report, opposition political parties, NGOs, activists and labor unions participated in the workshop, learning the techniques of how to “overthrow a dictator”. This was a year after the failed coup d’etat – led by those same groups – against President Chavez.
What came right after the AEI intervention was a year of street violence, constant destabilization attempts and a recall referendum against Chavez. The opposition lost 60-40, but cried fraud. Their claims were pointless. Hundreds of international observers, including the Carter Center and the OAS, certified the process as transparent, legitimate and fraud-free.
In March 2005, the Venezuelan opposition and AEI joined forces again, but this time the old political parties and leaders were replaced by a select group of students and young Venezuelans. Two former leaders of OTPOR came from Belgrade, Slobodan Dinovic and Ivan Marovic, to train the Venezuelan students on how to build a movement to overthrow their president. Simultaneously, USAID and NED funding to groups in Venezuela skyrocketed to around $9m.
Freedom House set up shop in Venezuela for the first time ever, working hand in hand with USAID and NED to help consolidate the opposition and prepare it for the 2006 presidential elections. ICNC, led by former Freedom House president Peter Ackerman, also began to train the youth opposition movement, providing intensive courses and seminars in regime change techniques.
That year, the newly-trained students launched their movement. The goal was to impede the electoral process and create a scenario of fraud, but they failed. Chavez won the elections with 64 percent of the vote, a landslide victory. In 2007, the movement was relaunched in reaction to the government’s decision to not renew the broadcasting license of a private television station, RCTV, a voice of the opposition. The students took to the streets with their logo in hand and along with the aid of mainstream media, garnered international attention.
Several were selected by US agencies and sent to train again in Belgrade in October 2007. Student leader Yon Goicochea was awarded $500,000 from the right-wing Washington think tank, Cato Institute, to set up a training center for opposition youth inside Venezuela.
Today, those same students are the faces of the opposition political parties, evidencing not only their clear connection with the politics of the past, but also the deceit of their own movement. The coloured revolutions in Georgia and the Ukraine are fading. Citizens of those nations have become disenchanted with those that took power through an apparent ‘autonomous’ movement and have begun to see they were fooled.
The coloured revolutions are nothing more than the red, white and blue of US agencies, finding new and innovative ways to try and impose Empire’s agenda.
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Bectu members received the following email from their union today:
I am writing to let you know about EXPOSE, a new campaign of media workers and students – journalists, technicians, designers, musicians and actors – that is dedicated to exposing the British National Party as the racists, homophobes, anti-Semites, women-haters and fascists that they are.
BECTU are working with our colleagues from the NUJ to support the launch of ‘EXPOSE’, a campaigning group set up to provide well-researched information and background briefings for reporters, news editors and others in our industry in order to challenge the BNP’s statements and spokespersons, and the racism and criminality at the heart of their organisation.
Below is how one member responded:
It’s not the BNP, but the Labour party that needs exposing. Everyone knows what the BNP is about. And it is Labour’s racism that has created the conditions in which the BNP has grown and thrived.
Labour has dehumanised and massacred millions of innocent people in the Middle East. Labour has demonised British muslims. Labour has built concentration camps for immigrants. Labour has brought in ‘anti-terror’ legislation that it uses against peaceful demonstrators and the entire muslim community. Labour has dismantled British civil liberties. Labour has given billions to the failed banks, while encouraging working people to believe that it is immigrants who are to blame for the lack of health care, child care, education, jobs, pensions and houses. Labour continues to use anti-trade union legislation to crush working peoples’ attempts at resistance to cuts in their pay and conditions.
All these things have helped the BNP to grow. Labour has the blood of millions on its hands and yet our unions try to tell us that voting Labour is the only option if we want to ‘keep the Tories out’ or ‘keep the BNP out’. This campaign has less to do with exposing the BNP, who are already fairly well exposed, than with trying to save the electoral chances of the current government of Labour war criminals. Meanwhile, the side effect is that you will give lots of publicity to the BNP!
The fact is that the capitalists are more than happy for people who feel abandoned by and disillusioned with Labour to turn to the BNP, since the BNP further encourages racism and division between working people. This division is the very thing that keeps workers weak and at the mercy of big corporations and the state. As far as the capitalists are concerned, the BNP is a perfectly acceptable ‘alternative’ vote, since it doesn’t threaten their ability to continue to plunder and exploit at home or abroad. They see it merely as a safety valve in times of economic crisis, when people are becoming more militantly disaffected.
But, despite all the publicity it receives, and the recruiting work that the Labour party and corporate media does for it, the BNP is not currently anywhere near to power. The real threat to working people right now is the Labour party. And the best way to explain that, and to keep people away from the BNP too, is to ditch Labour and become part of a real workers’ movement against the failed system of capitalism and for socialism – the only system that is capable of abolishing all forms of inequality and putting workers’ interests and needs first.
With the bank crisis fresh in people’s minds and the prospect of a fresh assault on workers’ jobs, houses, pay and pensions after the election, no matter which party of capital wins, there has never been a better time to get involved in the real struggle for workers’ rights: the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle for socialism. On the other hand, there is no better way to reveal our uselessness than to go flogging the same old dead horse of trying to bring people back into the Labour party fold, and tie them to the system that has created all the problems we see today: economic meltdown, a gap of 100 times between Britain’s richest and poorest, criminal genocidal wars, stealth privitisation of essential services, spiralling unemployment, racist and anti-immigrant hysteria, the increasing criminalisation of protest, etc.
As media workers, we should be looking a bit closer to home in our battle to fight all this. The propaganda that fuels support for criminal wars and anti-terror and anti-immigrant legislation and demonisation couldn’t be put out without our members’ cooperation. Journalists write this rubbish to order. Technicians print and broadcast it. How about a campaign to stop helping the capitalists to make us complicit in their crimes?
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It is over two years since Cadburys told the workforce on its Somerdale site in Keynsham that their chocolate factory was going to close, with the loss of 500+ jobs. The news that this longstanding operation, dating all the way back to the 1930s, was for the chop at once triggered a community-wide wave of anger and dismay. Workers on the site initiated a campaign to save their jobs, and it seemed for a while that everyone agreed with them. Hundreds of Keep Cadburys Keynsham T-shirts were manufactured, Dan Norris (the local Labour MP) and sundry councillors associated themselves with the campaign, and Bristol Evening Post gave it lots of coverage, with plenty of rose-tinted articles about the “good old days” of Quaker paternalism which today’s hardnosed Cadbury management was betraying. It seemed for a time as if the bandwagon was so stuffed with the “great and the good” that its forward progress could not be resisted.
Two years on, the picture looks very different. The combative spirit of the workforce was allowed slowly to waste away whilst everyone held their breath for Norris and his chums to pull some compromise deal out of the bag. The workforce were encouraged to be “realistic” in their demands. This soon turned out to mean that they should resign themselves to the likely loss of their jobs and concentrate more on petitioning Cadburys to give guarantees that the attached social club and playing fields would be preserved for community use. Then, just as most people were getting resigned to eventual redundancy, US food giant Kraft began its campaign to take over Cadburys. In its effort to win public opinion over to its bid, Kraft dropped heavy hints that the Somerdale site would be retained, to the surprise and gratification of the workforce. No sooner was the deal done, however, than Kraft confirmed that Cadbury’s original plan remained in place: Somerdale is to close and its operation transferred to Poland.
Right on cue, Norris called a local meeting to let people say how “cross” they were about this double betrayal and to decide “how best to move on”, yet again offering himself as an intermediary in further negotiations with Kraft, the local authorities etc. His biggest concern seemed to be that Kraft had come along and stirred things up again just when everyone had been more or less persuaded to give up! Challenged by workers enraged at their treatment at the hands of big business, he offered the opinion: “Well, that’s capitalism”. However, when asked why the government, which had no hesitation in nationalising vast amounts of bank debt, could not also nationalise Cadburys operations and put the workforce to work producing whatever is required to satisfy the needs of society, not the profit-hunger of big business, he ducked the question.
Yes, “that’s capitalism” all right, and Labour imperialists like Dan Norris are its most slavish servants, however plentifully flow the crocodile tears. Workers in Keynsham are dead right to be enraged at the shabby treatment they have had at the hands of first Cadburys and now Kraft, unceremoniously dumping them and relocating the operation to the low-wage economy of Poland. But we need to understand that this vandalism is not something accidental, but is driven by the growing crisis that is central to all modern capitalist development. What we are witnessing in industry after industry is a global battle for markets being fought out between rival bands of capitalists, for whom losing the competitive edge spells not a modest decline in profit share but corporate extinction. Behind the greed lies desperation, and beneath both seethes the overproduction crisis of capitalism.
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This letter was received from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) on 31 January
Our British Correspondent leaves a rich legacy
The world communist movement has lost a great fighter and thinker. Jack Shapiro, known over decades to Vanguard readers as “Our British Correspondent”, died on January 29 at the age of 93. Jack was the Honorary Chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and a much loved friend of our party.
Jack truly embodied what the word ‘communist’ means. He dedicated his entire life to the service of the ordinary people of the world. He knew that if they were led by a working class imbued with Marxism-Leninism, they were an unstoppable force. But he knew that this would not happen spontaneously, that without the guidance of communist parties, organised and steeled in the particular struggles of their own countries, capitalism would continue to triumph.
Jack, alongside his wife and comrade Marie, made an inestimable contribution to the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), through his numerous articles which were a model to other Vanguard contributors in their incisive and thorough analysis of the facts, and in his unwavering commitment to Marxism-Leninism as a science which must be deeply studied and constantly tested against reality in order to be developed.
Comrade Ted Hill, the founding Chairman of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) formed in 1963, deeply respected and drew strength from Jack’s sharp Marxist-Leninist analyses during their discussions on his visits to London.
The CPA (M-L) extends its deepest sympathy to his family and friends, and to the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Jack Shapiro will be long remembered for his great service to the Australian people. May his example inspire us all.
The next issue of Vanguard will contain a more detailed article on Jack’s enormous contribution.
In solidarity,
Central Committee
Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
