NED – Strategic Culture Foundation https://www.strategic-culture.org Strategic Culture Foundation provides a platform for exclusive analysis, research and policy comment on Eurasian and global affairs. We are covering political, economic, social and security issues worldwide. Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:53:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.16 How the U.S. Uses the NED to Export Obedience, with Matt Kennard https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/02/16/how-the-us-uses-ned-to-export-obedience-with-matt-kennard/ Wed, 16 Feb 2022 20:00:15 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=786246 Kennard is deeply concerned about the presupposition that U.S. actions inside Britain are benevolent.

By  LOWKEY

Today, Watchdog host Lowkey is joined by investigative journalist Matt Kennard to discuss how the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has infiltrated foreign media in an attempt to export obedience to the United States government and promote Washington’s interests around the world.

In the late twentieth century, the CIA developed an infamous reputation, both inside and outside the United States, as scandal after scandal hit the agency. COINTELPRO quietly infiltrated and subverted all manner of domestic democratic movements, including the student movement, the civil rights campaign, the hippie movement and the Black Panthers. The Church Committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), revealed to the public that the CIA had also infiltrated hundreds of the largest and most important domestic media outlets in order to shape public discussion. Meanwhile, abroad, the CIA had funded death squads in Central America and organized the overthrow of several foreign leaders.

The National Endowment for Democracy was the Reagan administration’s solution to the storm of negative publicity. Established in 1983 as a semi-private company, the NED’s job was to be the group to which the U.S. government outsourced its dirtiest work. This was done almost completely openly. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein proudly told The Washington Post.

The NED quickly went to work undermining the governments of Eastern Europe in the name of democracy and freedom of speech. Yet, as Kennard told Lowkey, once the Communist-era regimes fell, it actually expanded its scope to act as a worldwide force for projecting U.S. government interests everywhere.

In recent years, the NED has been funneling money to protest leaders in Hong Kong, carrying out dozens of operations against the government of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, attempting to overthrow the Cuban government, and has even organized rock concerts inside Venezuela in an effort to destabilize the country.

But Kennard’s latest research shows that the NED is also conducting influence operations in the United Kingdom. The agency is quietly funding British journalistic outlets and press organizations to the tune of $3.5 million. As Kennard told Lowkey today:

From our research, it is quite clear that democracy and freedom are not the priorities of the NED because we could not find even one grant given in any of the six U.S.-backed Gulf dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait). Not one pro-democracy group in those countries received an NED grant that we could find. So it is effectively about projecting American power rather than freedom and democracy.

A former reporter for The Financial Times, Kennard is now chief investigator at Declassified UK, an investigative journalism outlet concentrating on British foreign policy, military and state power. He is deeply concerned about his findings, and the presupposition that U.S. actions inside Britain are benevolent, telling Lowkey:

If even a tiny percentage of this came out about Russia it would be a massive scandal – that journalists and press freedom groups were being funded by Russia. But because it is the United States, it is assumed that this is OK. It is assumed that we [the U.K.] are a vassal of the U.S. and our discourse can be distorted by the U.S. and it is not a problem. And for me and anyone who cares about the principles of press freedom and journalism, that is not something we should accept.

Lowkey and Kennard also chatted about how British journalists and being fed stories by U.S. intelligence, the shady backgrounds of senior Conservative politicians like Rory Stewart and Boris Johnson, and the treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

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]]> U.S. Writes Belarus Into Its Familiar Regime-Change Script https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/10/17/u-s-writes-belarus-into-its-familiar-regime-change-script/ Sun, 17 Oct 2021 17:17:22 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=758241 The primary reason the U.S. government opposes the Lukashenko administration is not its authoritarianism, real as that might be. Instead, Lukashenko’s steadfast refusal to privatize state assets, join NATO, or open the country up for foreign exploitation are Washington’s principal objections.

By Alan MACLEOD

Quietly, the U.S. national security state is turning up the heat on Belarus, hoping that the ex-Soviet country of 9 million will be the next casualty of its regime-change agenda. This sentiment was made clear in President Joe Biden’s recent speech at the United Nations General Assembly. Biden announced that the U.S. would pursue “relentless diplomacy” finding “new ways of lifting people up around the world, of renewing and defending democracy.” The 46th president was explicit in whom he meant by this: “The democratic world is everywhere. It lives in the anti-corruption activists, the human rights defenders, the journalists, the peace protestors on the frontlines of this struggle in Belarus, Burma, Syria, Cuba [and] Venezuela,” he said, putting Belarus first on the list of states in desperate need of a change in government.

This builds on the back of previous statements the administration has released. In June, a joint announcement by the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom and the European Union essentially pronounced the death penalty on the Lukashenko government, in power since 1994. “We are committed to support the long-suppressed democratic aspirations of the people of Belarus and we stand together to impose costs on the regime for its blatant disregard of international commitments,” they wrote, as they announced new sanctions.

A “modest but significant contribution”

Covertly, Washington is taking far more wide-ranging action. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is spending millions of dollars yearly on Belarus and has 40 active projects inside the state, all with the same goal of overthrowing Alexander Lukashenko and replacing him with a more U.S.-friendly president. Although not a single individual or organization is named, it is clear from the scant public information it reveals that Washington is focusing on three areas: training activists and civil-society organizations in non-violent regime-change tactics; funding anti-government media; and bankrolling election-monitoring groups.

Earlier this year, on a Zoom meeting infiltrated by activists and released to the public, the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted that the groups leading the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko last year — actions that made worldwide headlines — were trained by her organization. “We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight,” she said, noting that the NED had made a “modest but significant contribution” to the protests.

On the same call, NED President Carl Gershman added that “we support many, many groups and we have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the groups obviously have their partners in exile.” Gershman also boasted that the Belarusian government was powerless to intervene and stop them: “We’re not like Freedom House or NDI [the National Democratic Institute] and the IRI [International Republican Institute]; we don’t have offices. So if we’re not there, they can’t kick us out.”

The NED was set up by the Reagan administration as a front group for the CIA, to continue the agency’s work in destabilizing other countries. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Gershman said, explaining its creation. Another NED founder, Allen Weinstein, was perhaps even more blunt: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.

Belarusians are largely ignorant that this is going on beneath the surface. A poll taken by the NED’s sister organization USAID found that around two-thirds of the public were unaware of the actions of any NGOs inside their country, let alone where their funding came from.

The chosen one

The U.S. and Europe have not only decided Lukashenko must go, but have even agreed on his replacement. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a 39-year-old former schoolteacher and wife of anti-government activist Sergei Tikhanovsky, is the D.C. establishment’s clear candidate of choice. Described almost universally in corporate media as a pro-democracy activist, Tsikhanouskaya emerged from obscurity last year after her husband was barred from standing in the 2020 elections. Sergei is currently on trial for his role in organizing the nationwide demonstrations last year, an event the government sees as a coup attempt.

The government reportedly detained tens of thousands of people, and it was this heavy-handed response that added fuel to the flames of protests, turning them into a demonstration against political repression.

If convicted, Tikhanovsky faces up to 15 years in prison. Sviatlana ran in his stead, officially winning 10% of the national vote (although she maintains that she actually won an overwhelming victory and that the contest was rigged). In recent months, she has been doing the rounds in the West, meeting with foreign leaders in an attempt to convince them to support her. In July, she traveled to Washington for a meeting with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who conveyed the U.S.’ “respect for the courage and determination of the opposition” in Belarus.

Later that month, Tsikhanouskaya received what she was looking for: an endorsement from the president of the United States. After an in-depth meeting with Joe Biden, he promoted her as the true leader of her country. “The United States stands with the people of Belarus in their quest for democracy and universal human rights,” he said in a statement. She also received NATO’s blessing, meeting with senior figures from its think tank, the Atlantic Council, on several occasions.

At a recent event with the Council on Foreign Relations, Tsikhanouskaya made it clear that she was dependent on foreign support to continue her campaign. “We don’t have a lot of space inside the country. That’s why we are so [grateful for a large] amount of help from outside,” she said, telling the audience of business figures, state officials and media personalities that she and they “shar[ed] common values.” Perhaps the clearest indication that she had won the favor of the Western establishment were the rumors of a Nobel Peace Prize. At the time of its awarding, she was equal third with the bookmarkers, but ultimately lost out to journalists Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa.

Despite the official endorsements, there are strong indications that Tsikhanouskaya enjoys little public support in Belarus and that her position is largely buoyed by foreign backing. A study conducted by Chatham House and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) found that only 10% of Belarusians believed she would be a good president (as opposed to 25% for Lukashenko). Both Chatham House and RUSI are directly funded by NATO and its member states like the U.S., and both have previously advocated for regime change in Belarus.

More worryingly, Tsikhanouskaya appears to be among the least trusted and most disliked people in the entire country, the poll finding that even among people who supported the 2020 protests her trustworthiness score is negative.

Furthermore, the poll was carried out by an organization that makes blatantly clear throughout the report that it wants Lukashenko overthrown, and was conducted largely online, among tech-savvy, younger Belarusians in large cities — all groups that trend heavily towards being pro-protest and anti-Lukashenko. As such, the survey could barely have been designed any more favorably for Tsikhanouskaya. That even under these circumstances her popularity is so low is telling. Moreover, the polling was carried out before she began touring the West, asking for more crippling economic sanctions on her own country.

Washington’s woman

Why, then, has the West decided to champion her, and not other opposition leaders, many of whom have a far greater support base according to the poll? One explanation is that the Lukashenko administration has already imprisoned them. Viktar Babaryka, for example, was sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony for a host of financial crimes. Amnesty and other Western organizations have described the ruling as “politically motivated.” Other opposition figures, such as Maksim Znak and Maria Kalesnikava have also been jailed.

Another reason could be Tsikhanouskaya’s seeming total willingness to be a representative of the U.S. government in Belarus. Her senior advisor, Franak Viačorka, for example, is a consultant for the U.S. Agency for Global Media; the creative director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, an organization described by The New York Times as a “worldwide propaganda network built by the CIA.” He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council, a NATO-linked organization that boasts no fewer than seven former CIA directors on its board. At an Atlantic Council event in July, Tsikhanouskaya called on the West to do more to overthrow her opponent, saying “I think it’s high time for democratic countries to unite and show their teeth.” According to the NED’s Gershman, the U.S. continues to work “very, very closely” with her.

Tsikhanouskaya’s ascension from obscurity to political stardom mirrors that of Venezuelan politician Juan Guaidó, whom the U.S. contends is the country’s rightful president. According to Cuban intellectual Raul Capote, whom the CIA recruited to become president of the country after what it hoped would be a successful regime-change attempt, the U.S. prefers to work with unknown figures because of their lack of political baggage and Washington’s ability to shape them in a manner it sees fit. Tsikhanouskaya apparently sees herself in the same mold as Guaidó, describing him as “inspiring.” Meanwhile, Venezuelan anti-government demonstrators can be seen flying the flag of the Belarusian opposition at rallies.

Tsikhanouskaya fashions herself merely as a “transition president” who would not run for re-election after Lukashenko falls. This is eerily similar to how Jeanine Añez, the U.S. backed Bolivian leader who came to power after a coup against Evo Morales in 2019, described herself. Like Tsikhanouskaya, Añez was also an obscure political figure held up by the United States as the savior of democracy. Despite describing herself as the “interim president,” she immediately began radically transforming the country’s economy and foreign relations, privatizing state assets and moving Bolivia closer to the U.S. She also suspended elections three times before being forced to concede after a nationwide general strike paralyzed the country.

While in the United States, Tsikhanouskaya made sure to publicly meet with Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland. To those in the know, this was another clear message. Nuland was the brains behind the U.S.-backed Maidan Insurrection in Ukraine that overthrew the government of Viktor Yanukovych, bringing in a far-right, pro-Western administration. Nuland flew to Kiev to personally participate in the demonstrations herself, even handing out cookies in Independence Square in the city center.

At the Council on Foreign Relations, Tsikhanouskaya said she saw “a lot of parallels” between her situation and the Maidan, adding that “the Belarusian people will fight till our victory.”

Journalist or Neo-Nazi paramilitary poster child?

A second Ukrainian connection is the case of the arrest of opposition figure Roman Protasevich. In May, the Belarusian government forced a Ryanair flight between Greece and Lithuania that Protasevich was on to land in Belarus so that they could arrest him. By way of an excuse for the flagrant breach of international law, the government claimed it had received a credible bomb threat.

Western nations strongly condemned the move, imposing sanctions on Belarus in retaliation. Left unreported in Western media, however, were Protasevich’s ties to both the Maidan Revolution and to Western governments. Universally described as a courageous journalist, Protasevich had, in fact, been a member of the infamous Azov Battalion, a Neo-Nazi paramilitary that did much of the heavy lifting to overthrow Yanukovych. He was literally the group’s poster child, appearing on the front cover of its magazine Black Sun in full fatigues and holding a rifle. The Azov Battalion has since been absorbed into the Ukrainian armed forces.

After leaving the Azov Battalion, Protasevich was awarded the Vaclav Havel Journalism Fellowship in Prague and worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Protasevich had traveled to Greece to attend a meeting with Tsikhanouskaya, the president of Greece, and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. Officially, he was there as a photographer. However, these connections certainly suggest there could be more to this story than meets the eye and that perhaps Belarusian authorities suspected something about the meeting, taking a calculated decision to detain him at all costs. What they found out or what information Protasevich was carrying will likely never be made public.

US supports plenty of tyrants, just not those who won’t play ball

The primary reason the U.S. government opposes the Lukashenko administration is not its authoritarianism, real as that might be. Even by its own definitions, the U.S. actively supports around three-quarters of the world’s dictatorships. Instead, Lukashenko’s steadfast refusal to privatize state assets, join NATO, or open the country up for foreign exploitation are Washington’s principal objections. Lukashenko has directly controlled the country since 1994; and, unlike the other former republics of the U.S.S.R., he has retained state control over industry and the comprehensive welfare state built up in previous decades.

As a result, there is essentially no extreme poverty in Belarus; according to a report by the World Bank and European Union, only 0.4% of the population live on less than $5.50 per day, with no one living on less than $3.20. This cannot be said for its neighbors; the number of people per capita living on less than $5.50 per day is 10 times higher in Lithuania and 18 times higher in Russia. In some other ex-Soviet countries that took different paths, such as Armenia and Georgia, the vast majority live in poverty, with fewer than 10% earning $10 or more per day.

Much of this reduction in poverty occurred in the 2000s. As most countries were entering a protracted recession after the 2008 financial crisis, Belarus was going from strength to strength. Between 2003 and 2014, the number of people unable to spend more than $5.50 per day dropped from 38.3% to 0.4%, while those making a middle-class income (defined by the World Bank as being able to spend more than $10 per day) rose from under 20% to over 90% over the same period, a feat the World Bank — no lover of Belarus or the U.S.S.R. — described as “impressive.”

The government continued to provide universal healthcare and socialized housing while developing new industries such as the tech sector. During this time, economic inequality actually decreased, Belarus becoming as equal as the Scandinavian countries much feted for their progressive societies.

Since 2015, however, the economy has struggled. The World Bank’s advice to Belarus was predictable: privatize, cut benefits (particularly heating allowances) and allow business to do its job. The Lukashenko administration has actually partially moved in that direction, a decision the World Bank described as “encouraging.” For the first time, the state now directly employs fewer than half the workforce. However, this has led to increases in poverty and a reduction in support for Lukashenko, who once seemed untouchable. Nevertheless, a survey conducted by hostile neighbor Poland still found the 67-year-old former state farm boss had a 41% approval/ 46% disapproval rating (not dissimilar to that of Trump and Biden).

Hardly helping this have been the U.S. and European sanctions that have targeted the country. While billed as an effort to “get tough” on the Lukashenko “regime,” sanctions, as the United Nations notes, “disproportionately affect the poor and most vulnerable.”

In August of this year, the U.S. announced a new round of sanctions, specifically targeting state-owned businesses in an attempt to make them less profitable. The European Union did likewise, also promising to pull Belarus out of its downturn if it overthrew Lukashenko. “Once Belarus embarks on a democratic transition, the E.U. is committed to help Belarus stabilise its economy, reform its institutions in order to make them resilient and more democratic, create new jobs and improve people’s living standards,” they announced, adding, “The E.U. will continue to support a democratic, independent, sovereign, prosperous and stable Belarus. The voices and the will of the people of Belarus will not be silenced.”

The government heavily restricts polling, so any gauge of the public mood in Belarus is far from precise. However, judging by the Chatham House/RUSI survey, it is clear that significant portions of the country support Lukashenko while other significant portions oppose him, along with some who are unsure. Opposing Lukashenko, however, does not necessarily translate into backing Tsikhanouskaya. Russia is by far the most popular country among Belarusians, 32% of whom want to formally unify with their larger neighbor. Only 9% want to join the E.U. and only 7% wish to join NATO. The U.S. is the most distrusted country, even among the young, urban tech-savvy citizens Chatham House and RUSI polled. Thus, while Tsikhanouskaya consistently claims to be the authentic voice of Belarus, it appears her prime constituency is in Washington and Brussels.

The United States might be able to hurt the Belarusian economy through economic warfare, but it is unable to make the people accept Washington’s chosen candidate. Living under an authoritarian system, Belarusians understandably dream of a more democratic future. However, they should be extremely careful whom they align themselves with: the U.S., NATO and the World Bank’s vision of democracy and prosperity might not align with what they naively had in mind.

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]]> Cuba’s U.S.-Backed Pop-Culture Dissidents https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/08/04/cuba-us-backed-pop-culture-dissidents/ Wed, 04 Aug 2021 16:14:02 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=746804 Over the past decade, Washington has spent millions to cultivate anti-government rappers, rock musicians, artists, and journalists in Cuba, Max Blumenthal reports. 

By Max BLUMENTHAL

“My people need Europe, my people need Europe to point out the abuser,” Yotuel, a Spain-based Cuban rapper, proclaimed in an EU parliament event convened by right-wing legislators before handing the mic over to Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó. Days later, Yotuel held a Zoom call with State Department officials to discuss “Patria y Vida,” the anti-communist rap anthem he helped author.

As the dust clears from a day of protests across Cuban cities, The Wall Street Journal has dubbed “Patria y Vida” the “common rallying cry” of opponents of Cuba’s government, while Rolling Stone touted it as “the anthem of Cuba’s protests.”

Besides Yotuel, two rappers who collaborated on the song are among a collection of artists, musicians and writers called the San Isidro Movement. This collective has been credited by U.S. media with “providing a catalyst for the current unrest.”

Throughout the past three years, as economic conditions worsened under an escalating U.S. economic war while internet access expanded as a result of the Obama administration’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, the San Isidro Movement has invited an open conflict with the state.

With provocative performances that have seen its most prominent figures parade through Old Havana waving American flags, and through flagrant displays of contempt for Cuban national symbols, San Isidro has antagonized the authorities, triggering frequent detentions of its members and international campaigns to free them.

By basing itself in a largely Afro-Cuban area of Old Havana and working through mediums like hip-hop, San Isidro has also maneuvered to upend the racially progressive image Cuba’s leftist government earned through its historic military campaign against apartheid South Africa and the asylum it offered to Black American dissidents. Here, the San Isidro Movement appears to be following a blueprint articulated by the U.S. regime change lobby.

Over the past decade, the U.S. government has spent millions of dollars to cultivate anti-government Cuban rappers, rock musicians, artists, and journalists in an explicit bid to weaponize “de-socialized and marginalized youth.”

The strategy implemented by the U.S. in Cuba is a real-life version of the fantasies anti-Trump Democrats entertained when they fretted that Russia was covertly sponsoring Black Lives Matter and Antifa to spread chaos through North American society.

U.S.-backed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó appeared alongside Yotuel to celebrate the release of “Patria y Vida” in the EU parliament. (The Grayzone)

As this investigation will reveal, leading members of the San Isidro Movement have raked in funding from regime change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy and U.S. Agency for International Development while meeting with State Department officials, U.S. embassy staff in Havana, right-wing European parliamentarians and Latin American coup leaders from Venezuela’s Guaidó to OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.

San Isidro has also welcomed support from a network of free market fundamentalist think tanks which make no secret of their plan to transform Cuba into a colony for multi-national corporations. Days after protests broke out in Cuba, San Isidro’s leadership accepted an award from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a right-wing Republican think tank in Washington that includes Nazi German soldiers in its count of historic deaths at the hands of communism.

Behind their branding as cosmopolitan intellectuals, renegade rappers, and avant garde artists, San Isidro has openly embraced the extremist politics of the Miami Cuban lobby. Indeed, its most prominent members have expressed effusive support for Donald Trump, endorsed U.S. sanctions and clamored for a military invasion of Cuba.

The cultural collective has nonetheless made inroads into progressive circles of North American intelligentsia, working to weaken traditional bonds of solidarity between the Cuban revolution and U.S. left. As we will see, the rise of the San Isidro Movement is the latest chapter in the emerging playbook of intersectional imperialism.

‘Forgotten People’

The scenes of an overturned police car in Havana’s October 10 neighborhood, mobs pelting police officers with Molotov cocktails, and the looting of commercial centers this July 11 ripped the cover off the resentment of a class of citizens that has fallen through the cracks of Cuba’s beleaguered special economy.

Following years of deepening economic deprivation, Cubans have experienced blackouts and food rationing brought on by former President Donald Trump’s intensification of the 60-year-long U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. A sudden collapse in tourism due to the Covid-19 pandemic together with the government’s elimination of Cuba’s dual currency system exacerbated the economic chaos.

Cristina Escobar, a Havana-based journalist and one of the most widely watched news personalities on Cuba’s state broadcasting channel, described the protest rank-and-file to The Grayzone as the byproduct of sustained marginalization.

“There’s a group of people in urban places like Havana that have the following characteristics,” Escobar explained. “They’re usually from rural poor areas and have moved to the city looking for better opportunities; usually not white with all the gradients there, and live at the margins, receiving whatever state benefits that are available. They often work in informal economy, they feel disaffected and don’t have involvement in patriotic ventures because they’re the victims of the special period of poverty.”

While Cuba’s social safety net has prevented this demographic from slipping into the misery familiar to slums of IMF-managed states such as Haiti or Honduras, Escobar says “they are a forgotten group of people, disintegrated, without roots in society. They are expressing the inequality they experience and unfortunately, they are not doing it peacefully anymore.”

U.S. corporate media has seized on the images of Afro-Cuban protesters to paint the demonstrations as an expression of explicitly racialized discontent. In an article headlined, “Afro Cubans at forefront of [Cuba’s] unrest,” The Washington Post quoted anti-government NGO’s and activists associated with the San Isidro Movement denouncing Black Lives Matter for its statement of solidarity with the Cuban revolution.

Left unmentioned by The Washington Post was the role of the U.S. government in backing many of these same NGOs and activists in a bid to weaponize the Cuba’s underclass. At the forefront of Washington’s strategy are two traditional CIA fronts: the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Throughout the Cold War, USAID worked alongside the CIA to liquidate socialist movements across the Global South. More recently, it helped implement a phony CIA vaccination program in Pakistan to track down Osama bin Laden, and instead wound up spawning a massive polio outbreak. Across Latin America, USAID has funded and trained right-wing opposition figures, including Venezuela’s U.S.-appointed pseudo-president Juan Guaidó.

For its part, the NED was established under the watch of former CIA Director William Casey to provide support to opposition activists and media outlets wherever the U.S. has sought regime change. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein told journalist David Ignatius, who celebrated the organization as “the sugar-daddy of overt operations.”

Throughout their history, USAID and NED have worked to exploit the grievances of ethnic minority groups against socialist and non-aligned governments. Their financial and logistical support for the Uyghurs against China, the Tatars against Russia, and indigenous Miskito people against Nicaragua are among many examples.

In recent years in Cuba, Washington’s regime-change specialists have homed in on Afro-Cubans and marginalized youth, harnessing culture to turn social resentment into counter-revolutionary action.

Weaponizing ‘De-socialized’ Youth

A 2009 paper in The Journal of Democracy, the official organ of the NED, outlined an ambitious blueprint for cultivating Cuba’s post-Cold War underclass as an anti-government vanguard.

“Using the principles of democracy and human rights to unite and mobilize this vast, dispossessed majority in the face of a highly repressive regime is the key to peaceful change,” wrote Carl Gershman and Orlando Gutierrez.

Gershman and Gutierrez are influential figures in the world of overt regime change operators. The founding director of the NED, Gershman presided for four decades over U.S. efforts to destabilize governments from Managua to Moscow. Gutierrez, for his part, is an outspoken advocate of a U.S. military invasion of Cuba who serves as national secretary of the USAID and NED-funded Cuban Democratic Directorate.

Gershman and Gutierrez advised a strategy that encouraged “non-cooperation” with Cuba’s revolutionary institutions among those they described as “ ‘desocialized’ and marginal youth – the dropouts, the jobless young people who make up nearly three-quarters of Cuba’s unemployed, and those who are drawn to drugs, crime, and prostitution.”

The two regime-change specialists pointed to music and online media as ideal vehicles for harnessing the frustrations of Cuban youth: “The alienation of the young reaches into the mainstream and expresses itself in the angry lyrics of rock musicians; the bloggers’ depictions of the frustrations and tawdriness of everyday life; the frequent evasion of agricultural work, voluntary service, and neighborhood committee meetings; and the general disengagement from politics that is the fruit of a half-century of coerced participation and force-fed political propaganda,” they wrote.

The year that Gershman and Gutierrez’s influential paper appeared, Washington enacted an audacious covert operation based on the strategy they outlined.

‘Rap is War’

In 2009, USAID initiated a program to spark a youth movement against Cuba’s government by cultivating and promoting local hip-hop artists.

Because of its long history as a CIA front, USAID outsourced the operation to Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C.-based firm with its own track record of covert actions.

Creative Associates found its point man in Rajko Bozic, a veteran of the CIA-backed Otpor! group that helped topple nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic, and whose members moved on to form an “‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a number of color revolutions.”

Posing as a music promoter, Bozic approached a Cuban rap group called Los Aldeanos that was known for its ferociously anti-government anthem, “Rap is War.” The Serbian operative never told Los Aldeanos he was a U.S. intelligence asset; instead, he claimed he was a marketing professional and promised to turn the group’s front man into an international star.

To further the plan, Creative Associates rolled out ZunZuneo, a Twitter-style social media platform that blasted out thousands of automated messages promoting Los Aldeanos to Cuban youth without the rap group’s knowledge.

Within a year, as Los Aldeanos escalated its rhetoric, taunting Cuban police as mindless drones during a local indie music festival, Cuban intelligence discovered contracts linking Bozic to USAID and rolled up the operation.

Embarrassment ensued in Washington, with Sen. Patrick Leahy grumbling, “U.S.AID never informed Congress about this and should never have been associated with anything so incompetent and reckless.”

Danny Shaw, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the City University of New York, encountered Los Aldeanos during several extended visits to Cuba. He also got to know Omni Zona Franca, a collective of poets and Rastafarian-oriented performance artists based in the Alamar neighborhood of Havana which formed the inspiration for the San Isidro Movement.

Shaw said the artists’ hostility towards Cuba’s socialist system was so intense that many of them denied the U.S. blockade’s existence. “I tried to explain to them my understanding of the economic war, and they said, ‘You can come and go as you please, you don’t live here, so it’s easy for you to be a Marxist.’ And they had a point  – if you completely decontextualized the situation,” he told The Grayzone.

According to Shaw, some Omni Zona Franca members began visiting the U.S. and Europe for art festivals and interviews with corporate Spanish-language media. “When the stories about USAID supporting Cuban rappers and artists came out, then it all kind of made sense to me,” he reflected.

In 2014, USAID was exposed again when it tapped Creative Associates to organize a series of phony HIV prevention workshops which were, in fact, political recruitment seminars.

An internal Creative Associates document leaked to the media in 2014 referred to the bogus HIV workshops as the “perfect excuse” to enlist youth into regime change activities on the island.

President Barack Obama introduced his plan to normalize relations with Cuba’s government just as U.S.AID’s latest operation was exposed. As a condition of diplomatic recognition, Obama insisted that Cuba expand internet access.

Venezuelan investigative website Misión Verdad warned at the time,

“We are witnessing an update in the mechanisms, methods and modes of intervention. All the harmony at this time is totally illusory. What is already being placed under the label ‘normalization’ in the Cuban sociopolitical environment provides the minimum operating conditions to facilitate the idea of a ‘Cuban spring,’ a test tube revolution…”

Internet Expansion & US Infiltration

The 3G internet network arrived in Cuba in 2018, enabling young Cubans to access social media on their phones. Now, instead of spinning out social media platform like ZunZuneo, U.S. intelligence focused on developing technology like Psiphon so Cubans could access Facebook and YouTube despite internet blackouts.

The NED and USAID exploited the opening to build a potent online anti-government media apparatus. The new batch of U.S.-backed outlets like CubaNet, Cibercuba and ADN Cuba represented an echo chamber of toxic insurrectionism, mocking President Miguel Diaz-Canel with insulting memes and calling for his prosecution for high crimes including genocide.

ADN Cuba mocks Diaz-Canel by merging his face with that of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. (The Grayzone)

The Dutch Foreign Ministry has advanced the U.S. efforts, helping to set up and fund the anti-government blog, El Toque, through an NGO called RNW Media.

Ted Henken, a U.S. academic and author of Cuba’s Digital Revolution, remarked to Reuters that Cuba’s leadership “miscalculated in that they didn’t realize that [expanded internet access] would very quickly, in two and a half years, blow up in their face.”

“None of [the protests] would have been possible without the nascent 3G network that has allowed millions of Cubans to access the internet via mobile devices since 2018,” the corporate online outlet Quartz declared.

As Cuban access to anti-government media grew, the Trump administration increased NED’s budget by 22 percent in 2018.

That year, NED’s Cuba budget earmarked close to $500,000 for the recruitment and training of anti-government journalists, and to establish new media outlets.

Another NED grant budgeted funds to “promote the inclusion of marginalized populations in Cuban society and to strengthen a network of on-island partners,” implying the targeting of Afro-Cubans.

The NED has placed a heavy emphasis on infiltrating Cuba’s hip-hop scene. In 2018, the U.S. government entity contributed $80,000 to the Cuban Soul Foundation to “empower independent artists to produce, perform, and exhibit their work in uncensored community events,” and $70,000 to a Colombia-based NGO called Fundacion Cartel Urbano for “empowering Cuban hip-hop artists as leaders in society.”

Cartel Urbano publishes an online magazine clearly modeled off of Vice, the premier vehicle for hipster imperialism. Besides keeping readers informed about the latest releases from anti-government Cuban rap artists, the U.S. government-funded magazine dedicates entire sections on its website to drug use, trans culture and the green vegan lifestyle.

In catering to the sensibilities of academically oriented, self-styled radicals, the outlet’s writers routinely deploy the letter “x” to erase gender distinctions, leading to passages like the following: “cuerpxs trans, marikonas, no binarixs, racializadxs, monstruosxs…”

Cartel Urbano is sponsored by the U.S. government to train and promote Cuban hip-hop artists. (The Grayzone)

The startling proliferation of online opposition media, vitriolic anti-government propaganda, and U.S. infiltration of Cuba’s cultural scene that accompanied the expansion of the country’s internet services prompted an unprecedented crackdown by the country’s leadership.

“The years when we had the thawing of relations with the U.S., we had so much tolerance domestically,” Cristina Escobar, the Cuban journalist, reflected. “That’s because the government did not see itself as under siege. But then Trump won. And now the leadership feels like they should have never trusted Obama.”

Just hours after taking office in April 2018, President Diaz-Canel proposed Decree 349. The new measure would require that all artists, musicians and performers obtain prior approval from the Ministry of Culture before publicizing their work.

Put forward in direct response to the recruitment of rap artists and other cultural figures by U.S. intelligence, Decree 349 explicitly forbade the dissemination of audiovisual materials containing “sexist, vulgar or obscene language.” Though the law would never be enforced on a formal basis, the provision was viewed by Cuba’s opposition as a direct attack on the subculture of reggaeton seeping into the country’s urban landscape.

Almost overnight, a collective of artists and musicians mobilized to protest the decree. Named for the hardscrabble San Isidro neighborhood in Old Havana where several of its members lived, the new movement appealed directly to cultural influencers in the Global North, marketing itself as a diverse collection of visual creators and independent rappers struggling for nothing more than artistic freedom.

For perhaps the first time, Cuba’s right-wing opposition had a vehicle for making inroads into progressive circles abroad.

Courting Celebrity

On Nov. 6, 2020, a police officer appeared in the home of Denis Solis, an outspoken anti-government rapper affiliated with the San Isidro Movement. Solis quickly turned his cellphone camera on the cop and livestreamed his defiant encounter on Facebook.

After taunting the officer with anti-gay slurs, Solis proclaimed, “Trump 2020! Trump is my president!”

The police visit was triggered by the excited coverage Solis received from Diario de Cuba, a NED-funded publication, and other anti-government outlets, for a tattoo emblazoned across his chest that read, “Change; Cuba Libre.” He had also taken to Facebook to boast, “Communists, now they’re going to have to tear the skin from my chest.”

The eight-month prison sentence Solis received for “contempt” — a punishment clearly inspired by the spectacle he generated with his livestream – provided the spark for the November 2020 hunger strike that vaulted the San Isidro Movement onto the global stage.

The strike was held inside the Old Havana home of the San Isidro Movement’s coordinator, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. An Afro-Cuban performance artist, Otero has courted the ire of the government by defiling the Cuban flag, wrapping it around his naked torso on the toilet and while brushing his teeth, or by sprawling out on it while clad in underwear bearing the U.S. flag.

The art of San Isidro Movement coordinator Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. (The Grayzone)

In another provocative display, Otero gathered children to run through his neighborhood waving a giant American flag, triggering an immediate police response and his own detention for four days.

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara enlisted Cuban youth to run through Old Havana bearing U.S. flags. (The Grayzone)

The week-long hunger strike at Otero’s home generated an unprecedented international media spectacle, and generated supportive statements from Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s incoming national security adviser, and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

A cleverly staged visit to the site of the hunger strike by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, a high-profile Mexico-based Cuban journalist and literary figure, had helped galvanize international media interest.

Clad in a black turtleneck and hailing from the ranks of Cuba’s educated elite, the bespectacled Álvarez presented a stark contrast to Otero and his rugged wingman, the anti-government rapper Maykel Osorbo. For governing officials tempted to dismiss the protest leaders as a bunch of vulgar street urchins, the figure of the genteel scribe presented serious complications.

Journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez, center, with Luis Miguel Otero, on right, and rapper Maykel Osorbo. (The Grayzone)

Álvarez soon found space in The New York Times opinion section to market San Isidro to a liberal U.S. audience while rattling off literary metaphors about walking over cobblestone in high-heeled shoes to denigrate Cuba’s communist bureaucracy.

“The [San Isidro] movement has become the most representative group of national civil society, bringing together Cubans of different social classes, races, ideological beliefs and generations, both from the exile community and on the island,” the writer claimed.

On Nov. 27, 2020, as the confrontation between Cuban artists and the state deepened, a group of artists initiated a sit-in outside Cuba’s Ministry of Culture. The original demonstrators consisted largely of artists whose work had been sponsored by the Cuban state. And unlike San Isidro, many of them rejected regime change rhetoric, opting instead for a dialogue with the culture minister to resolve the conflict over freedom of expression.

As sociologist Rafael Hernandez explained in a detailed study of the sit-in, the dialogue collapsed when the San Isidro Movement and other U.S.-backed elements imposed their maximalist agenda on the organizing body, which came to be known as N27.

The New York Times and other other Anglo outlets focused their coverage squarely on the anti-communist rabble rousers of San Isidro, while leftist Cuban artists  “remained invisible to the foreign press, which does not consider them news, as it does the veteran and youth dissidents,” Hernandez observed.

The intensive media coverage of the sit-in vaulted the San Isidro Movement onto the international stage, earning them the attention of celebrity artists and writers in the U.S. and Europe.

In May 2021, after Otero was again detained by Cuban security, an open letter to President Diaz-Canel appeared in The New York Review of Books, a leading journal of the liberal U.S. literati, demanding his release.

Signed by a cast of prominent Black and Afro-Latin cultural figures, including Henry Louis-Gates, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz, the missive illustrated the success San Isidro was enjoying in eroding the support of Black American intelligensia for Cuba’s revolution.

With access to the leading liberal organs of U.S. media and support in Latin American studies departments across the country, the cultural collective was breaking Cuba’s anti-communist opposition out of its traditional right-wing Miami base.

But its success was hardly an organic phenomenon. Indeed, San Isidro had been propelled onto the international stage thanks to substantial support from the U.S. State Department, its regime change subsidiaries and right-wing corporate lobbyists eager to see Cuba open up for business.

State Department, OAS & Corporate Lobbyists 

Each day at the El Estornudo magazine he founded, Carlos Manuel Álvarez and his colleagues present the bad news from Cuba. While painting the country as a catastrophically-run communist hellscape overrun with Covid-19 casualties, he markets his outlet as “independent.”

In reality, El Estornudo appears to be one of the many media projects incubated by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

“The collaborators who make the magazine are paid per work produced, with a fixed salary of 400 CUC. Until I left, El Estornudo was financed by the NED and Open Society [foundations],” said Abraham Jiménez Enoa, a former writer for the magazine, referring respectively to the U.S. government’s regime change arm and the foundation of George Soros.

El Estornudo is among a constellation of outlets delegated to criticize Cuba’s Covid response by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), an NGO that received $145,230 from the NED in 2020 to “strengthen collaboration among Cuban independent journalists” and train them in social media.

The anti-government outlets operating under the auspices of IWPR also include Tremenda Nota, an LGBTQ-themed site that routinely accuses the Cuban government of homophobia and transphobia, even as the Diaz-Canel administration has moved to legalize gay marriage, opened the army to gay soldiers and initiated official pride events.

IWPR’s board is comprised of former NATO officials and corporate media figures, including the former chair of The Financial Times. Though the NGO has since scrubbed its list of patrons from its website, an archived page reveals partnerships with the NED and its U.S. government subsidiaries, as well as confirmed British intelligence contractors like Albany Associates and the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Carlos Manuel Álvarez is far from the only San Isidro member close to U.S. regime change entities. Besides him, there is Yaima Pardo, a Cuban filmmaker and tech specialist whose 2015 documentary, Offline, emphasized the need for internet expansion to foment dissent.

Pardo is currently the multi-media director for ADN Cuba, a Florida-based anti-government outlet that received $410,710 from USAID in 2020 alone.

San Isidro’s Esteban Rodríguez, a reporter for ADN Cuba, has celebrated the economically debilitating ban Trump imposed on family remittances to Cuba as “perfect.” “If I was in the U.S., I’d have voted Trump,” Rodríguez told The Guardian.

When San Isidro launched its international campaign against Decree 349, it chose to do so at the Organization of American States (OAS) – the Washington, D.C.-based regional organization derided by former Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa as “the Yankee ministry of the colonies.”

There, San Isidro co-founder Amaury Pacheco was received by Luis Almagro, the OAS secretary-general who would help orchestrate the right-wing military coup in Bolivia later that year. Also on hand to welcome the Cuban artists were State Department officials and Carlos Trujillo, a right-wing Trump loyalist serving as the U.S. representative to the OAS.

“Art in Cuba is more necessary than ever,” Almagro proclaimed. “It is necessary to expose the challenges of repression” by the Cuban state.

OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro with San Isidro Movement co-founder Amaury Pacheco (second from right) and other artists affiliated with the collective. (The Grayzone)

As the Venezuela-based Instituto Samuel Robinson reported, San Isidro has deepened its ties with the international right-wing through the CADAL foundation, which nominated it for the NATO state-sponsored Freemuse Prize for Artistic Expression. CADAL is at the heart of a network of libertarian organizations that leverage corporate money to push free market fundamentalism across Latin America.

Among CADAL’s closest partners is the Atlas Network, a corporate lobbying front established with help from the Koch Brothers to advance libertarian economics and undermine socialist governments across the globe.

The think tank is also sponsored by the U.S. State Department, the NED, and its subsidiaries, including the Center for International Private Enterprise, which devotes itself to “strengthening democracy around the globe through private enterprise and market-oriented reform.”

In January 2021, leading members of San Isidro including Otero and Pardo participated in a webinar hosted by another corporate-backed, right-wing think tank. This time, they were guests of the Latin American Center of Federalism and the Freedom Foundation.

Sponsored by multi-national corporations determined to transform Cuba into a free-market haven, and inspired by the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the Argentina-based foundation is also directly affiliated with the Atlas Network.

Among the participants in the webinar was Iliana Hernandez, a reporter for Cibercuba – one of the many anti-government outlets that cropped up in recent years following the expansion of internet services.

In a November 2020 discussion about the U.S. election on her Facebook page, Hernandez argued that because Trump was “going to take harsher measures against the tyranny… I think that, for Cuba’s freedom, Trump should win.”

She also detailed extensive coordination between the San Isidro Movement and State Department officials serving at the U.S. Embassy in Havana.

Referring to her discussions with the hardline U.S. Charges d’Affaires Timothy Zúñiga-Brown and his predecessor, Mara Tekach, Hernandez remarked, “In this last conversation with Mr. Tim [Zúñiga] Brown, what he told me was, ‘how can we be of help?’ Meaning, what can we do? Because, I mean, he wanted to get orders from me and not the other way around. I told him how he could help.”

Otero has also nurtured close relations with U.S. State Department officials. In July 2019, he and other San Isidro members strutted proudly around the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Havana during an event commemorating U.S. Independence Day.

Otero and Milan of San Isidro celebrating Independence Day inside the U.S. ambassador’s residence. (The Grayzone)

“Viva la anexión,” Milan wrote in a post expressing his “fervent passion for the beautiful gringa.”Adonis Milan, a Havana-based theater director affiliated with San Isidro, posted photos on Facebook of himself, a reggae artist and San Isidro member named Sandor Pérez Pita, and Otero “enjoying a few hour of freedom inside Cuba” while snapping selfies with U.S. Marines.

Asked by a reporter about a meeting he held on a Havana street with former U.S. Chargé d’affaires Tekach, Otero responded, “She is a diplomat. I can meet with Mara Tekach or the French ambassador; my friend, the ambassador from the Netherlands, or the one from the EU. Even with the Cuban President, Miguel Diaz-Canel, if one day he would like to talk to me.”

Adonis Milan captioned his portrait with U.S. Marines: “Long live annexation.” (The Grayzone)

In April 2021, the Cuban government claimed to have uncovered documents revealing payments of $1,000 a month to Otero from the National Democratic Institute, a subsidiary of NED. The accusations surfaced just as the artist planned to exhibit paintings of candy wrappers at his home and invite local children to view them, teasing the kids with the sweet life socialism had denied them. He flatly denied taking any payments from U.S. government regime change outfits.

By this point, Otero had become a star in a collaborative viral anthem that had provided Cuba’s counter-revolution with a unifying slogan and protest soundtrack.

‘Patria y Vida’

San Isidro members Maykel Osorbo, and El Funky, right, flank Otero Alcántara in the video of “Patria y Vida.” (The Grayzone)

The first song directly credited with mobilizing Cubans to protest their government was recorded by a collection of rappers and reggaeton artists that included two members of the San Isidro Movement.

Hailed by U.S. state media outlet NPR as “the song that’s defined the uprising in Cuba,” “Patria y Vida” has racked up over 7 million views since it debuted on YouTube on February 16, 2021

Recorded in Miami, the song features three self-exiled Cuban performers: Yotuel of the Orishas hip-hop group, the reggaeton duo Gente de Zona, and singer-songwriter Descemer Bueno. They were complimented by two Havana-based San Isidro Movement members: hip-hop artists El Funky and Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo.

Osorbo has proclaimed that he would “give [his] life for Trump” if the U.S. president imposed a total blockade on Cuba with “the coasts blocked, that nothing enters in, nor anything goes out… as they did in Venezuela.”

The video for “Patria y Vida” opens with the curious image of anti-colonial Cuban hero Jose Marti merging into that of U.S. founding father and settler-colonial slave owner George Washington.

At the song’s climax, rappers Osorbo and El Funky appear on screen flanked by San Isidro’s Otero. Claiming to have filmed their performance surreptitiously, the rappers nonetheless appear in high-quality video chanting “Patria y Vida!”

This slogan was an overt twist on Cuba’s revolutionary mantra, “Patria o Muerte,” which was first uttered by Fidel Castro at a memorial for dockworkers killed by the CIA’s deadly sabotage of the La Coubre freighter in Havana harbor in 1960. By reversing Castro’s vow to defend Cuba’s sovereignty with his life, the song’s authors take aim at the anti-imperialist political culture instilled in Cubans throughout the course of six decades.

Osorbo and El Funky’s verses mix lacerating attacks on the socialist government with tributes to San Isidro:

“We continue going in circles, security, deflecting with prism
These things make me indignant, the enigma is over
Enough of your evil revolution…”

Just one week after the song’s release, incoming USAID director Samantha Power took to Twitter to trumpet “Patria y Vida” as a reflection of a “new generation of young people in Cuba & how they are pushing back against govt repression.”

While Power is not especially known as a hip-hop connoisseur, she has earned a reputation for creating failed states in places like Libya by orchestrating humanitarian interventionist military campaigns. It is hard to imagine that her sudden interest in a viral Cuban rap anthem was not guided by a dedication to regime change on the island.

The European Parliament’s center-right European People’s Party Group also rallied to promote “Patria y Vida” just one week after its release. In Brussels, EU parliamentarian Leopoldo López-Gil – the oligarchic Spanish father of right-wing Venezuelan putschist Leopoldo López – helped host San Isidro Movement’s Otero, Yotuel, and several other figures behind the creation of “Patria y Vida.”

“I ask you today to condemn the Cuban government, so that my island has the strength to rise up…” Yotuel declared. “My people need Europe, my people need Europe to point out the abuser.”

Also on hand for the EU parliament event was Juan Guaidó, the U.S.-appointed faux “president” of Venezuela who launched a failed military coup alongside his mentor, Leopoldo López Jr.

In the days that followed, the performers of “Patria y Vida” continued to make the regime change rounds. On March 12, Yotuel and Gente de Zona held a Zoom call with State Department officials, briefing them about the success of the song and the demands of the San Isidro Movement.

Three months later, as journalist Alan MacLeod reported, Power’s USAID issued a notice of $2 million in grant opportunities for “civil society” organizations seeking to advance regime change in Cuba.

Highlighting the agency’s longstanding strategy of exploiting the demographics hit hardest by U.S. sanctions, the document emphasized the need for programs that “support marginalized and vulnerable populations, including but not limited to youth, women, LGBTQI+, religious leaders, artists, musicians, and individuals of Afro-Cuban descent.”

In the document, USAID pointed to “Patria y Vida” as a propaganda victory that helped produce a “watershed moment” – and which foreshadowed the protests to come.

A June 2021 USAID appeal for grant proposals in Cuba singles out “Patria y Vida” as a major propaganda victory.

Less than a month later, on July 11, Otero issued a call to take to the streets of Havana on behalf of the San Isidro Movement. Soon, hundreds of protesters had gathered on the city’s seaside Malecon, some with signs reading “Patria y Vida.” The opposition’s vision of a national uprising capable of washing socialism away seemed to be coming into focus.

An array of factors lay behind the protests, from the collapse of an electricity station in the city of Holguin, to the government’s sputtering attempts at currency unification, to the economic wounds opened by the U.S. blockade and kept festering by the special period of deprivation.

But through the culture warriors of San Isidro, now delegated by Washington as the official faces and voices of Cuba’s opposition, the demands of the demonstrators were interpreted as a maximalist cry for Washington to escalate its efforts at regime change.

San Isidro Movement Goes to Washington

Though the protests quickly fizzled out, remarks by President Joe Biden denigrating U.S.-embargoed Cuba as a “failed state,” and vowing to add new crushing sanctions to those imposed by Trump suggested the Democratic administration would not return to Obama’s process of normalization. A key short-term objective of the Miami regime change lobby was therefore achieved.

July 20 congressional hearings on Cuba in the House Foreign Affairs Committee highlighted the pivotal role San Isidro has played in the renewed push to topple Cuba’s government.

There, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a right-wing Democrat from South Florida, cited commentary by liberal academic Amalia Dache assailing Black Lives Matter for its statement of solidarity with the Cuban revolution. She then pointed to Afro-Cubans as an emerging base of anti-communist ferment on the island.

Several feet away sat Rep. Mark Green, a pro-Trump Republican, sporting a shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “Patria y Vida,” beneath his suit jacket.

U.S. Rep. Mark Green sports a “Patria y Vida” during a July 20 House Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Cuba. (The Grayzone)

That same day on Capitol Hill, the right-wing Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation honored the San Isidro Movement during its Captive Nations Week Summit.

In his remarks presenting the Dissident Human Rights award to the San Isidro Movement, Victims of Communism founder and veteran conservative movement operative Lee Edwards declared, “it isn’t always politics, but culture, which is so important in the battle we’re engaged in right now.”

Maykel Osorbo, the hip-hop artist who starred in “Patria y Vida,” accepted the award on behalf of San Isidro. “My brother, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he exclaimed in a pre-recorded message to the crowd of silver-haired, right-wing Republicans.

The Grayzone via consortiumnews.com

]]> The Bay of Tweets: Documents Point to U.S. Hand in Cuba Protests https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/07/17/bay-tweets-documents-point-to-us-hand-in-cuba-protests/ Sat, 17 Jul 2021 19:00:17 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=745071 The U.S. government can cause economic misery for the Cuban people, but it cannot, it appears, convince them to overthrow their government.

By Alan MACLEOD

Cuba was rocked by a series of anti-government street protests earlier this week. The U.S. establishment immediately hailed the events, putting its full weight behind the protestors. Yet documents suggest that Washington might be more involved in the events than it cares to publicly divulge.

As many have reported, the protests, which started on Sunday in the town of San Antonio de los Baños in the west of the island, were led and vocally supported by artists and musicians, particularly from its vibrant hip-hop scene.

“For those new to the issue of Cuba, the protests we are witnessing were started by artists, not politicians. This song ‘Patria y Vida’ powerfully explains how young Cubans feel. And its release was so impactful, you will go to jail if caught playing it in Cuba,” said Florida Senator Marco Rubio, referencing a track by rapper Yotuel.

Both NPR and The New York Times published in-depth features about the song and how it was galvanizing the movement. “The Hip-Hop Song That’s Driving Cuba’s Unprecedented Protests,” ran NPR’s headline. Yotuel himself led a sympathy demonstration in Miami.

But what these accounts did not mention was the remarkable extent to which Cuban rappers like Yotuel have been recruited by the American government in order to sow discontent in the Caribbean nation. The latest grant publications of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — an organization established by the Reagan administration as a front group for the CIA — show that Washington is trying to infiltrate the Cuban arts scene in order to bring about regime change. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein once told The Washington Post.

Yotuel Romero

Yotuel poses with workers, July 14, 2021, at at a Cuban restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. Wilfredo Lee | AP

For instance, one project, entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society,” states that its goal is to “promote citizen participation and social change,” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Another, called “Promoting Freedom of Expression in Cuba through the Arts,” claims it is helping local artists on projects related to “democracy, human rights, and historical memory,” and to help “increase awareness about the Cuban reality.” This “reality,” as President Joe Biden himself stated this week, is that the Cuban government is an “authoritarian regime” that has meted out “decades of repression” while leaders only “enrich themselves.”

Other operations the NED is currently funding include enhancing Cuban civil society’s ability to “propose political alternatives” and to “transition to democracy.” The agency never divulges with whom it works inside Cuba, nor any more information beyond a couple of anodyne blurbs, leaving Cubans to wonder whether any group even vaguely challenging political or societal norms is secretly bankrolled by Washington.

“The State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the U.S. Agency for Global Media have all financed programs to support Cuban artists, journalists, bloggers and musicians,” Tracey Eaton, a journalist who runs The Cuba Money Project, told MintPress. “It’s impossible to say how many U.S. tax dollars have gone toward these programs over the years because details of many projects are kept secret,” he added.

A currently active grant offer from the NED’s sister organization, USAID, is offering $2 million worth of funding to groups that use culture to bring about social change in Cuba. Applicants have until July 30 to ask for up to $1 million each. The announcement itself references Yotuel’s song, noting, “Artists and musicians have taken to the streets to protest government repression, producing anthems such as ‘Patria y Vida,’ which has not only brought greater global awareness to the plight of the Cuban people but also served as a rallying cry for change on the island.”

The hip-hop scene in particular has long been a target for American agencies like the NED and USAID. Gaining popularity in the late 1990s, local rappers had a considerable impact on society, helping bring to the fore many previously under-discussed topics. The U.S. saw their biting critiques of racism as a wedge they could exploit, and attempted to recruit them into their ranks, although it is far from clear how far they got in this endeavor, as few in the rap community wanted to be part of such an operation.

MintPress also spoke with Professor Sujatha Fernandes, a sociologist at the University of Sydney and an expert in Cuban music culture. Fernandes stated:

For many years, under the banner of regime change, organizations like USAID have tried to infiltrate Cuban rap groups and fund covert operations to provoke youth protests. These programs have involved a frightening level of manipulation of Cuban artists, have put Cubans at risk, and threatened a closure of the critical spaces of artistic dialogue many worked hard to build.”

Other areas in which U.S. organizations are focussing resources include sports journalism — which the NED hopes to use as a “vehicle to narrate the political, social, and cultural realities of Cuban society” — and gender and LGBTQ+ groups, the intersectional empire apparently seeing an opportunity to also use these issues to increase fissures in Cuban society.

The House Appropriations Budget, published earlier this month, also sets aside up to $20 million for “democracy programs” in Cuba, including those that support “free enterprise and private business organizations.” What is meant by “democracy” is made clear in the document, which states in no uncertain terms that “none of the funds made available under such paragraph may be used for assistance for the government of Cuba.” Thus, any mention of “democracy” in Cuba is all but synonymous with regime change.

Capitalizing on a battered economy

The protests began on Sunday after a power outage left residents in San Antonio de los Baños without electricity during the summer heat. That appeared to be the spark that led to hundreds of people marching in the street. However, Cuba’s economy has also taken a nosedive of late. As Professor Aviva Chomsky of Salem State University, author of “A History of the Cuban Revolution,” told MintPress:

Cuba’s current economic situation is pretty dire (as is, I should point out, almost all of the Third World’s). The U.S. embargo (or, as Cubans call it, blockade) has been yet another obstacle (on top of the obstacles faced by all poor countries) in Cuba’s fight against COVID-19. The collapse of tourism has been devastating to Cuba’s economy — again, as it has been in pretty much all tourism-heavy places.”

However, Chomsky also noted that it could be a mistake to label all the protestors as yearning for free-market shock therapy. “It’s interesting to note that many of the protesters are actually protesting Cuba’s capitalist reforms, rather than socialism. ‘They have money to build hotels but we have no money for food, we are starving,’ said one protester. That’s capitalism in a nutshell!” Chomsky said.

Rick Scott Cuba protests

Florida Sen. Rick Scott holds a photo of Cuban protesters during a press conference in DC, July 13, 2021. J. Scott Applewhite | AP

Eaton was skeptical of the idea that all those marching were in the pay of the U.S. “Certainly, much of the uprising was organic, driven by Cubans who are desperate, poor, hungry and fed up with their government’s inability to meet their basic needs,” he said. Yet there were signs that at least some were not simply making a point about the lack of food in stores or medicines in pharmacies. A number of demonstrators marched underneath the American flag and the events were immediately endorsed by the U.S. government.

“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom,” read an official statement from the White House. Julie Chung, Biden’s Acting Assistant Secretary for U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, added:

Cuba’s people continue to bravely express yearning for freedom in the face of repression. We call on Cuba’s government to: refrain from violence, listen to their citizens’ demands, respect protestor and journalist rights. The Cuban people have waited long enough for ¡Libertad!”

Republicans went much further. Mayor of Miami Francis Suarez demanded that the United States intervene militarily, telling Fox News that the U.S. should put together a “coalition of potential military action in Cuba.” Meanwhile, Florida Congressman Anthony Sabbatini called for regime change on the island, tweeting:

The corporate media cheering section

Corporate media were also extremely interested in the protests, devoting a great deal of column inches and air time to the demonstrations. This is extremely unusual for such actions in Latin America. Colombia has been living through months of general strikes against a repressive government, while there have been three years of near-daily protests in Haiti that were almost completely ignored until earlier this month, when U.S.-backed President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated.

The effect of U.S. sanctions was constantly downplayed or not even mentioned in reporting. For example, The Washington Post’s editorial board came out in favor of the protestors, claiming Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel was reacting “with predictable thuggishness…blaming everything on the United States and the U.S. trade embargo.” Other outlets did not even mention the embargo, leaving readers with the impression that the events could only be understood as a democratic uprising against a decaying dictatorship.

This is particularly pernicious because government documents explicitly state that the goal of the U.S. sanctions is to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and [the] overthrow of [the] government” — exactly the conditions brewing in Cuba right now. Professor Chomsky noted:

The U.S. embargo/blockade is one (not the only) cause of Cuba’s economic crisis. The U.S. has overtly and continuously said that the goal of the embargo is to destroy Cuba’s economy so that the government will collapse. So it’s not just reasonable, it’s obvious that the U.S. has some kind of hand in this.”

Chomsky also took issue with the media’s explanation of events, stating:

Look at coverage of Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street protests in this country. One thing that we see consistently is that when people protest in capitalist countries, the media never explains the problems they are protesting as caused by capitalism. When people protest in communist or socialist countries, the media attributes the problems to communism or socialism.”

Media were at pains to emphasize how large and widespread the anti-government demonstrations were, insisting that the pro-government counter-demonstrations were smaller in number, despite images from the protests suggesting that the opposite might be true. As Reuters reported, “Thousands took to the streets in various parts of Havana on Sunday including the historic centre, drowning out groups of government supporters waving the Cuban flag and chanting Fidel.”

If this were the case, it is odd indeed that so many outlets used images of pro-government movements to illustrate the supposed size and scope of the anti-government action. The Guardian, Fox News, The Financial Times, NBC and Yahoo! News all falsely claimed a picture of a large socialist gathering was, in fact, an anti-government demo. The large red and black banners emblazoned with the words “26 Julio” (the name of Fidel Castro’s political party) should have been a dead giveaway to any editors or fact checkers. Meanwhile, CNN and National Geographic illustrated articles on the protests in Cuba with images of gatherings in Miami — gatherings that looked far better attended than any similar ones 90 miles to the south.

Social media meltdown

Social media also played a pivotal role in turning what was a localized protest into a nationwide event. NBC’s Director of Latin America, Mary Murray, noted that it was only when live streams of the events were picked up and signal-boosted by the expat community in Miami that it “started to catch fire,” something that suggests the growth of the movement was partially artificial. After the government blocked the internet, the protests died down.

The hashtag #SOSCuba trended for over a day. There are currently over 120,000 photos on Instagram using the hashtag. But as Arnold August, the writer of a host of books on Cuba and Cuban-American relations, told MintPress, much of the attention the protests was getting was the result of inauthentic activity:

The latest attempt of regime change also has its roots in Spain. Historically, the former colonizer of Cuba plays its role in all major attempts of regime change, not only for Cuba, but also, for example, in Venezuela. The July operation made intensive use of robots, algorithms and accounts recently created for the occasion.”

#soscuba hashtag

Within days the #SOSCUBA hashtag generated over 120,000 images on Instagram

August noted that the first account using #SOSCuba on Twitter was actually located in Spain. This account posted nearly 1,300 tweets on July 11. The hashtag was also buoyed by hundreds of accounts tweeting the exact same phrases in Spanish, replete with the same small typos. One common message read (translated from Spanish), “Cuba is going through the greatest humanitarian crisis since the start of the pandemic. Anyone who posts the hashtag #SOSCuba would help us a lot. Everyone who sees this should help with the hashtag.” Another text, reading “We Cubans don’t want the end of the embargo if that means the regime and dictatorship stays, we want them gone, no more communism,” was so overused that it became a meme in itself, with social media users parodying it, posting the text alongside pictures of demonstrations beside the Eiffel Tower, crowds at Disneyland, or pictures of Trump’s inauguration. Spanish journalist Julian Macías Tovar also cataloged the suspicious number of brand new accounts using the hashtag.

Much of the operation was so crude that it could not have failed to be discovered, and many of the accounts, including the first user of the #SOSCuba hashtag, have now been suspended for inauthentic behavior. Yet Twitter itself still chose to put the protests at the top of its “What’s Happening” for over 24 hours, meaning that every user would be notified, a decision that further amplified the astroturfed movement.

Twitter leadership has long displayed open hostility towards the Cuban government. In 2019, it took coordinated action to suspend virtually every Cuban state media account, as well as those belonging to the Communist Party. This was part of a wider trend of deleting or banning accounts favorable to governments the U.S. State Department considers enemies, including Venezuela, China and Russia.

In 2010, USAID secretly created a Cuban social media app called Zunzuneo, often described as Cuba’s Twitter. At its peak, it had 40,000 Cuban users — a very large number for that time on the famously Internet-sparse island. None of these users were aware that the app had been secretly designed and marketed to them by the U.S. government. The point was to create a great service that would slowly start to feed Cubans regime-change propaganda and direct them to protests and “smart mobs” aimed at triggering a color-style revolution.

In an effort to hide its ownership of the project, the U.S. government held a secret meeting with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, aimed at getting him to invest in the project. It is unclear to what extent, if any, Dorsey helped, as he has declined to speak on the matter. This is not the only anti-government app the U.S. has funded in Cuba. Yet, considering both what happened this week and the increasingly close ties between Silicon Valley and the National Security State, it is possible the U.S. government considers further cloak-and-dagger apps unnecessary: Twitter already acts as an instrument for regime change.

Cuba in perennial crosshairs

By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had effectively conquered its entire contiguous landmass; the frontier was declared closed in 1890. Almost immediately, it began to look for opportunities to expand westwards into the Pacific — to Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam. It also began looking southwards. In 1898, the U.S. intervened in the Cuban Independence War against Spain, using the mysterious sinking of the U.S.S. Maine as a pretext to invade and occupy Cuba. The U.S. operated Cuba as a client state for decades, until the Batista regime was overthrown in the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.

The U.S. launched a botched invasion of the island in 1961, the Bay of Pigs event driving Castro closer to the Soviet Union, laying the groundwork for the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. The U.S. reportedly attempted to kill Castro hundreds of times, all without any luck. It did, however, carry out a bitter and protracted terroristic war against Cuba and its infrastructure, including using biological weapons against the island. Along with this came a long-standing economic war, the 60-year U.S. blockade of the island that throttled its development. In addition to this, it has attempted to bombard the Caribbean nation with anti-communist propaganda. TV Martí, a Florida-based media network, has cost the U.S. taxpayer well over half a billion dollars since its creation in 1990, despite the fact that the Cuban government successfully jams the signal, meaning virtually nobody watches its content.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba was left without its main trading partner, to which it had geared its economy. Without a guaranteed buyer for its sugar, and without subsidized Russian oil imports, the economy crashed. Sensing blood, the U.S. intensified the sanctions. Yet Cuba pulled through the grim time collectively known as the “Special Period.”

After a wave of left-wing, anti-imperialist governments came to power across Latin America in the 2000s, the Obama administration was forced to move towards normalizing diplomatic relations with the island. However, once in office, President Donald Trump reversed these actions, intensifying the blockade and halting vital remittances from Cuban-Americans to the island. Trump advisor John Bolton labeled Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua a “troika of tyranny” — a clear reference to George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, implying that these three nations could expect military action against them soon. In its last days, the Trump administration also declared Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism.

While Biden had intimated that he might turn the U.S. Cuba policy back to the Obama days, he has, so far, done little to move away from the Trump line, his unequivocal endorsement of this week’s actions the latest example of this.

Despite monumental worldwide media coverage, encouragement and legitimation from world leaders, including the president of the United States himself, the recent action petered out after barely 24 hours. In most cases, counter-protests effectively diluted the protests, without the need for repressive forces to be deployed.

The U.S. government can cause economic misery for the Cuban people, but it cannot, it appears, convince them to overthrow their government. “The current events in Cuba constitute in reality the U.S.S. Maine of 2021,” August said. If this really was an attempted color revolution, as August is implying, it was not a very successful one, amounting to little more than a Bay of Tweets.

mintpressnews.com

]]> U.S. Govt-Funded Coda Story Smears American Journalists Who Undermine New Cold War Propaganda https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/24/u-s-govt-funded-coda-story-smears-american-journalists-who-undermine-new-cold-war-propaganda/ Mon, 24 Aug 2020 17:03:48 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=498897 With backing from the US government’s regime-change arm, an Operation Mockingbird-style website called Coda Story is attacking American journalists who have punctured Washington’s sensationalist narratives against China.

Ben NORTON

A shadowy neoconservative website called Coda Story has launched a smear campaign against American journalists who challenge new cold war propaganda. But what this publication has not disclosed is that it is funded by the US government, backed by the European Union, linked to the NATO war alliance, and part of a larger network of regime-change outfits that are bankrolled by Western governments and corporate oligarchs.

Launched in 2016, Coda Story markets itself as a brave counterweight to Chinese and Russian state-backed “disinformation.” This is quite ironic, because the website is itself financed by the regime-change arms of the US government and the European Union, and peddles disinformation of its own in support of Washington’s new cold war on Beijing and Moscow.

A case study of Coda Story’s deceptive smear tactics came in the form of a malicious hatchet job the site published in July, maligning The Grayzone for exposing the extremely dubious sources and methodology of Western government propaganda against China.

The Coda Story hit piece did not dispute a single fact in The Grayzone’s thoroughly documented reporting. Instead, the diatribe relied on superficial insinuations and misleading guilt-by-association tactics, implying that The Grayzone is “fringe” and untrustworthy because its contributors have given interviews to Russian and Chinese state-backed media outlets, and because foreign government officials have occasionally tweeted links to The Grayzone articles.

Despite the patent lack of facts, the Coda Story smear piece inspired a similarly McCarthyite article by an avowedly anti-China blogger at the corporate-run outlet Axios, which also failed to challenge any of The Grayzone’s factual journalism. Instead, Axios writer Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian quoted the ranking Republican co-chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, to vilify The Grayzone as “deeply disturbing” and reinforce the Donald Trump administration’s attack on the World Health Organization.

Allen-Ebrahimian also cited the US government-funded Alliance for Securing Democracy, an intelligence agency and State Department cutout, to defame The Grayzone and try to link it to the Chinese government. Not only did she fail to inform readers about the Alliance’s US government backing, Allen-Ebrahimian was unable to point to any data buttressing her dubious claim, despite repeated challenges to do so.

While Coda Story and Axios went to great lengths to imply this outlet is somehow connected to Beijing, the institution attacking The Grayzone is, in fact, sponsored by the same Western governments responsible for igniting a new cold war with China.

Unlike Coda Story, The Grayzone is totally independent; it does not accept funding from any government or any state-backed group.

Coda Story cannot say the same about itself. Although the neoconservative website markets itself as independent and its editor has claimed “we don’t take money from governments,” it is actually financed by the US government’s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED is a CIA cutout established by the Ronald Reagan administration during the last decade of the first cold war. One of its primary goals, stated clearly on the NED website, is to promote “free markets.” To do so, the putative “democracy promotion” organization finances right-wing opposition groups, NGOs, and media outlets in countries the US government has targeted for regime change.

A co-founder of the NED, Allen Weinstein, gloated in the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

In 2019, the Coda Network that presides over Coda Story reaped a $180,130 grant from the NED. The ostensible mission of the funding was to “bring together journalists and independent media outlets from throughout Eurasia to create high-quality narrative journalism, focusing on a set of key themes related to disinformation.”

NED Coda Network Coda Story

The description of the 2019 NED grant for Coda Network

This June, the NED’s blog Democracy Digest celebrated its grantee Coda Story winning the European Press Prize for its anti-China content.

Coda Story is funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

The National Endowment for Democracy appears to believe it is getting its money’s worth, because the US government regime-change organization followed up with a post on the official NED website a few days later that again praised grantee Coda Story for its work.

Coda Story is funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

Democracy Digest, the NED blog, frequently promotes Coda Story. It cites the neoconservative website’s articles to portray China and Russia as evil “totalitarian” regimes and “threats to democracy” that spread constant “disinformation.”

The NED also invited Coda Story’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, Natalia Antelava, on its “Power 3.0 Podcast” to discuss “authoritarian technology and disinformation.”

In its description accompanying the podcast episode, the NED misleadingly portrayed Coda Story as an indie underdog operation, selling it as an “award-winning media start-up” — curiously failing to mention that the website was swimming in money from powerful interests like the NED.

Anne Applebaum, a neoconservative pundit and anti-Russian fanatic who frequents hawkish Western think tanks, is also listed as a member of the board of advisers of Coda Story. Applebaum also happens to sit on the board of directors of the NED.

Applebaum’s husband Radoslaw Sikorski is a conservative Polish politician who has filled top roles in Poland’s government, including minister of defense and foreign affairs.

But the NED is not the only Western government regime-change organization that bankrolls Coda Story.

The European Union has a regime-change arm as well, which also funds the website. This EU soft-power organization, founded in 2013, was explicitly modeled after the NED, and shares almost the same name: the European Endowment for Democracy (EED).

Like the NED, the EED uses the cover of “democracy promotion” to destabilize foreign adversaries and advance Brussels’ foreign policy interests.

In the “About” section of its website, Coda Story lists a series of organizations as “partners” and supporters. The first financial sponsor listed is the EED.

Organizations that Coda Story lists as “partners” and “supporters”

The money that the European Endowment for Democracy gives to Coda Story in turn is provided by European countries – making it another form of indirect state sponsorship.

The EED website makes it clear that 23 European governments are responsible for its budget.

Coda Story’s NATO links and mysterious office in Georgia

The US government’s National Endowment for Democracy emphasized in materials praising Coda Story that the media outlet has two offices: one in New York, typical for Western news organizations; and another in the country of Georgia, a former member of the Soviet Union that since the end of the first cold war has become a major hub for Western intelligence operations and “color revolution” coup-plotting.

Following a Western-backed 2003 regime-change operation dubbed the “Rose Revolution,” Georgia effectively became a client state of the United States, NATO, and European Union. Georgia has actively sought to become a member of NATO, and the US-led military alliance boasts on its official website that “Georgia is one of the Alliance’s closest partners.”

Georgia represents a central friction point with Russia, and waged a brief war with Moscow in 2008. Some members of Georgia’s special forces who were trained by the US military to battle Russia in that conflict later went on to join the genocidal Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, including top ISIS commander Omar al-Shishani.

Mikheil Saakashvili, the strongly pro-Western president who assumed power as a result of the color revolution, had been carefully cultivated for a leadership role by US intelligence officials, and was so subservient that he was described as a “Washington pet.”

This son of this loyal US asset, Eduard Saakashvili, landed a job at Coda Story after he graduated from college in the United States.

Eduard Saakashvili worked as an associate managing editor of Coda Story from 2018 to 2019, writing about his personal experiences with “disinformation” concerning his father and Georgian politics. He also oversaw the creation of the blog’s section on “Authoritarian Tech” – by which the neoconservative website means technology largely originating from China, Russia, and their allies, not the West.

Coda Story publishes some of its articles in the Georgian language. The website also translates pieces into Russian.

Natalia Antelava, the co-founder of Coda Story, is an overtly pro-Western journalist originally from Tbilisi, Georgia. Before becoming the neoconservative site’s editor-in-chief, Antelava worked as the Caucasus correspondent for the UK government-backed BBC, and covered the 2008 Russo-Georgian War from a hardline anti-Moscow perspective.

NATO has taken notice, and has found utility in Antelava’s viewpoint. In 2018, the Coda Story editor was invited to speak at the NATO-Georgia Public Diplomacy Forum in Tbilsi.

The NATO conference featured Georgia’s prime minister and president, alongside top US government officials. It was organized by Tbilisi’s NATO and EU Information Center, along with the Georgian foreign and defense ministries.

Antelava participated in a panel titled “The Era of Post-Truth and Fake News.” Joining Antelava on the stage was Oleksiy Makukhin, the director of the Hybrid Warfare Analytical Group of the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, an anti-Russian organization funded by a long list of Western governments, including the United States, NATO, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands, along with the European Endowment for Democracy.

The other panelist sitting next to Antelava at the NATO conference was Anna Nemtsova, a correspondent for neoconservative website The Daily Beast whose willingness to propagate the most lurid narratives of the new Cold War has made her a favorite at Western confabs.

The moderator of the event was Mark Laity, a NATO spokesperson who directs strategic communications at the military alliance’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

Like Antelava, Laity is a veteran of the UK government’s BBC, which is closely linked to British intelligence and was used by MI6 during the first cold war to spread propaganda.

Coda Story provides neoconservative disinformation warriors with a new home

Natalia Antelava founded Coda Story with a little-known professor of journalism named Ilan Greenberg. Greenberg, who serves as publisher and editorial director of the website, states on his bio that he began discussing the idea for Coda Story with Antelava when he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center is a US government-funded think tank whose offices are located in the government’s Ronald Reagan Building. The organization is dedicated to producing research that advances Washington’s foreign policy interests. It is directed by hawkish former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, whose congressional campaigns were heavily funded by the arms industry, and whose husband, Sidney Harman, was a longtime Pentagon contractor.

Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo is a member of the board of trustees of the Wilson Center. Other members of the board of the elite organization – which claims to be the most-quoted think tank in the corporate media – include Trump’s education secretary, billionaire privatization enthusiast Betsy DeVos, and Trump’s health secretary, the former Big Pharma lobbyist and corporate executive Alex Azar.

In February 2018, Greenberg announced that Coda Story had merged with The Interpreter, an anti-Russian blog that has also relied on US government backing.

The two neocon websites proudly stated they had “entered into a strategic partnership to closely cooperate, share resources, and expand the scope of their journalism.”

Greenberg proclaimed in a press release, “The bridging of Coda’s storytelling and The Interpreter’s approach to explaining Russian politics and anatomizing disinformation campaigns is the beginning of what we hope will be a long and fruitful partnership.”

The Interpreter is a pet project of neoconservative operative Michael Weiss. The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal published an exposé on Weiss, showing how the fanatical war hawk has undergone a series of rebrandings, while always pushing the most belligerent line on US foreign policy.

Weiss kicked off his career as an anti-Muslim agitator and moderate Republican who organized rallies with far-right Islamophobe Pamela Geller. Once the Syria proxy war kicked off, he fashioned himself a supposed “Russia expert” and friend of the Islamist Syrian opposition, lobbying for more Western military support for Salafi-jihadist rebels in Syria while demanding the most aggressive policies possible against Moscow.

Weiss has attacked The Grayzone with obsessive fury, and has sponsored less distinguished henchmen to spin out smear pieces.

In fact, when Coda Story asked him for a comment for its hit piece on The Grayzone, editor Max Blumenthal pointed to the editorial role Weiss plays in the neoconservative website. But Coda Story edited Blumenthal’s quote, removing this salient piece of information.

The Interpreter was created by Weiss in 2013 with the backing of former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a staunch opponent of President Vladimir Putin, who was one of a group of men who plundered Russia’s economy in the 1990’s, quickly becoming billionaires as millions were reduced to paupers.

In its early years, the Interpreter blog was overseen by the Institute of Modern Russia, a think tank run by the powerful Khodorkovsky family to push anti-Russia propaganda. Additionally, the blog stated that it was the recipient of a “seed grant” from the London-based Herzen Foundation. Strangely, there are no references online to Herzen outside of its association with The Interpreter.

In 2015, The Interpreter announced that it was being sponsored as a special project of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a US government propaganda outlet founded by the CIA during the first cold war to spread disinformation against the Soviet Union.

Then in 2017, The Interpreter became a “media partner” of NATO’s de facto think tank, the Atlantic Council. This notoriously hawkish organization, which is funded by NATO, the governments of the US and Britain, corporate weapons manufacturers, and the fossil fuels industry, has also benefited from huge sums of money from the Burisma Group, the scandalously corrupt Ukrainian gas company that paid former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter $83,000 per month to sit on its board.

The 2018 “strategic partnership” stipulated that Michael Weiss would still remain editor-in-chief of The Interpreter, while also serving as “Consulting Executive Editor” for Coda Story. The press release noted that Weiss “will provide guidance and thought leadership to Coda’s senior editorial management and will contribute his own journalism to both publications.”

But The Interpreter is not the only neoconservative US organization that enjoys a close relationship with Coda Story. The website also lists hawkish think tank the Center for European Policy Analysis as a “partner.”

Despite its name, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) is not based in Europe but rather in Washington. The neoconservative group is made up of a who’s who of anti-Russian, pro-NATO hawks, including Coda Story advisor Anne Applebaum and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

This Coda Story partner is also bankrolled by Western governments, NATO, and the weapons industry. CEPA states clearly on its website that past donors include the NED, the US State Department, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, and the arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Bell Helicopter.

Coda Story did not respond to The Grayzone’s request for comment inquiring about its exact relationship with CEPA.

Coda Story’s singular fixation on non-Western ‘disinformation’

Coda Story’s extensive links to Western governments and neoconservative organizations might explain its obsessive, almost singular focus on China and Russia, portraying them as the roots of all evil in the world.

The website says its bloggers “exclusively cover three subjects: disinformation, authoritarian tech, and the war on science.” Its interest in these topics scarcely extends beyond the realm of Moscow and Beijing to places like Washington or Brussels.

Coda Story offers appetizing fellowships to journalists, pledging to subsidize their reporting with tens of thousands of dollars, as long as they cover one of the blog’s three approved topics.

The Coda Story smear piece attacking The Grayzone was filed under “disinformation.” This is ironic, because the NED-funded blog has demonstrated itself to be in essence an instrument of US and NATO propaganda.

On Twitter, Antelava claimed that Coda Story doesn’t “take money from governments, oligarchs, and tech platforms.” That statement is simply false, as the NED that provides her outfit with grants is an arm of the US government that is funded by Congress.

Coda Story has other notable sources of financing. When the neoconservative website launched its “Authoritarian Tech” channel under the editorial guidance of the son of Georgia’s pro-Western president, the blog acknowledged that it was provided seed funding by a foundation called Access Now.

Access Now is a pass-through that uses millions of dollars from Western governments and massive corporations to fund “open technology” initiatives targeting countries where the US and EU want regime change.

Coda Story did not reveal who gave Access Now the money to create its “Authoritarian Tech” channel, but in 2019, the year it launched, the foundation reported millions of dollars in funding from the governments of Britain, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as corporate tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Facebook, and Twitter.

Access Now also gets significant pass-through money from other foundation giants, which have historic ties to the CIA and the regime-change industry, such as the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations of billionaire George Soros, and the Omidyar Network and Luminate Group of tech oligarch Pierre Omidyar.

On its website, Coda Story also lists the Content Fund as a financial supporter. The Content Fund describes itself as “a private law foundation based in Brussels with its office in Kyiv.” Its mission is to spread pro-Western, anti-Moscow messaging in the Russian-language media.

The Content Fund discloses on its website, “Our funding comes from voluntary contributions of like-minded governments, private foundations and international organisations.” Which specific governments bankroll it is not revealed.

Coda Story did not respond to a request for comment from The Grayzone, including a detailed series of questions about its funding sources.

The website is part of a larger constellation of pro-NATO Eastern European media outlets called Coda Network. Other members include the pro-Western Ukrainian website Ukrayinska Pravda, which holds friendly interviews with the US ambassador and is also funded by avowed anti-communist billionaire George Soros, a generous sponsor of regime-change campaigns from Venezuela to Syria.

Coda Story enjoys crossover with another pro-Western website bankrolled by US government-linked regime-change billionaire George Soros: Eurasianet, a project spun out of the Open Society Foundations (OSF) that was created as the media arm of the oligarch’s Eurasia Program, which is aimed at strengthening NATO and the EU and weakening any independent countries that refuse to join the hegemonic US-led imperial bloc.

Eurasianet was in 2016 transferred from OSF over to Columbia University’s hawkish Harriman Institute, a relic of the first cold war that was created by the Rockefeller Foundation to produce anti-communist scholarship on the Soviet Union. Today, the Rockefeller Foundation is headed by the former director of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and is historically linked to US intelligence as a CIA pass-through.

In 2018, editor Antelava tweeted, “many thanks to Eurasianet for allowing us to commission” Joshua Kucera, the Turkey/Caucasus editor at the pro-Western website, who produced a lengthy article for Coda Story bashing Russia’s attempt to create a Eurasian Economic Union.

Coda Story’s articles are also very frequently reprinted by Rappler, another media outlet funded by the US government’s NED. These pieces, naturally, portray China and Russia as dystopian authoritarian hellscapes, and even try to blame racial tensions in the United States on Moscow. Rappler’s primary funder is Omidyar, the big tech billionaire who also sponsors Access Now.

In fact, editor Natalia Atelava stated that Rappler is an “editorial partner” of Coda Story.

These extensive ties reveal Coda Story’s location in the center of an ecosystem of online publications sponsored by Western governments and oligarchs that were established to wage information warfare on Washington’s designated adversaries. And those enemies not only include Russia and China, but also independent US journalists who challenge the hegemonic political line.

Coda Story cites US government-backed Uyghur separatist to smear The Grayzone

Coda Story’s defamatory hatchet job attacking The Grayzone’s independent investigative journalism demonstrate the deceptive tactics that have become a hallmark of the outlet.

Notably, Coda Story did not challenge any of The Grayzone’s factual reporting on its merits. Instead, the neocon US government proxy site resorted to defaming The Grayzone by citing highly partisan anti-China separatist activists who are themselves funded by the US government.

Caitlin Thompson, the Coda Story staffer who authored the article, previously worked at Foreign Policy, another hawkish pro-war website that is closely linked to the US national security establishment. Edited until recently by David Rothkopf, who has moved on to a lucrative gig lobbying for the United Arab Emirates, Foreign Policy is itself supported by the UAE, an absolute monarchy that practices modern-day slavery.

The main source Thompson relied on to smear The Grayzone was Nury Turkel, whom she identified simply as a “Uyghur lawyer and the Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.”

What the neoconservative blog curiously failed to mention is that Turkel is a separatist leader whose anti-China organization is, like Coda Story, substantially funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy.

A fan of Turkey’s authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkel has also collaborated with the Trump administration to ratchet up pressure on Beijing, successfully lobbying for US sanctions on China.

Coda Story used Turkel to maliciously accuse The Grayzone of “providing talking points to the Chinese propaganda machine.” To support this defamatory claim, Coda Story pointed to Chinese diplomats posting a link to The Grayzone’s factual reporting on Twitter.

Turkel, for his part, is a key figure in a network of US government-funded anti-China groups that provide talking points to the Trump administration and corporate media.

Separatist leader Nury Turkel, co-founder of the US government-funded Uyghur Human Rights Project, meets with Mike Pompeo in July 2020

Nury Turkel is a co-founder and chairman of the board of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), one of the most influential separatist groups in the US. The Grayzone has reported on UHRP’s role in the new cold war on China, documenting how Western corporate media reports on Xinjiang and repression of the Uyghur minority rely overwhelmingly on unsubstantiated, hyperbolic claims made by the organization.

Through the National Endowment for Democracy and other regime-change organs, the US government has poured many millions of dollars into Uyghur separatist groups, who explicitly say that they want to break off China’s western Xinjiang province and turn it into a new state they call East Turkestan.

This is part of Washington’s new cold war strategy against China, which seeks to carve up the country on ethno-sectarian lines, much as the United States and NATO did when they balkanized the former Yugoslavia.

The NED has been bankrolling UHRP since it was founded in 2004. Turkel praised the US government’s regime-change arm in a 2005 press release, which noted that the NED is the UHRP’s main source of funding, providing $126,000 in that year alone.

Since then, US government funding for the Uyghur separatist organization has only increased. A search on the NED grants database shows that the CIA cutout gave UHRP more than $1.2 million in funding in the four years from 2016 to 2019, at an average of approximately $310,000 per year.

The Uyghur Human Rights Project gave its stamp of approval to the Coda Story article attacking The Grayzone by republishing the hatchet job on its website. The UHRP has also reposted other smear pieces against The Grayzone, which never dispute facts and instead rely on baseless insinuations.

As a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkel is part of an organization notorious for politicizing religion to advance Washington’s geopolitical goals.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has been widely criticized for racism and bias. Its current vice chair, Tony Perkins, is a far-right Christian extremist who, as The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal first reported, purchased a mailing list from neo-Nazi and former KKK grand wizard David Duke and delivered a speech to the white supremacist Council on Conservative Citizens.

Perkins and other Christian dominionists such as Johnnie Moore and Gary Bauer are seated beside Turkel on this hyper-partisan commission. This July, Turkel hammed it up with Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo – a notorious Islamophobe who once proclaimed that politics is “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”

Following his meeting with Pompeo, Turkel lavished praise on the Trump administration for “elevating human rights as a centerpiece on China policy above anything we’ve seen for at least 4 decades.”

Turkel has also actively lobbied for US government sanctions on China. He has published op-eds writing explicitly, “I urge President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to impose sanctions on [China].”

When the Trump administration did impose sanctions on top Chinese officials under the Global Magnitsky Act, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom quoted Turkel, insisting the new punitive measures “represent a major victory for religious freedom and an important step toward holding Communist China accountable for its crimes against humanity.”

While painting China as a dystopian nightmare, Turkel has celebrated Turkey’s repressive leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government has jailed more journalists than any country on earth (including more than China, a country 17 times larger than Turkey). In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Turkel portrayed Erdogan as a “rock star,” claiming “Ankara’s concern for the Uighurs has set an example for other democracies.”

Coda Story’s reliance on a right-wing, US-backed separatist figure to attack The Grayzone only proved the point that this outlet elucidated in its reports on Xinjiang: The campaign of new cold war propaganda against China relies almost entirely on opposition groups cultivated and bankrolled by Western governments.

This information warfare is also dependent on a media echo chamber nurtured by Washington, which has been deployed to attack any journalist or public figure that threatens the hostile narrative of the new cold war. Despite its claims of independence, Coda Story is little more than a gear in this vast network.

thegrayzone.com

]]> With Help From US Media Allies, Nicaragua’s Coup-Mongers Are Aiming for Western Hearts and Minds https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/02/27/with-help-from-us-media-allies-nicaraguas-coup-mongers-are-aiming-for-western-hearts-and-minds/ Thu, 27 Feb 2020 19:24:57 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=319845 With its support tanking at home, Nicaragua’s opposition is seeking to win over public opinion in the West. A factually challenged, distortion laden article in Vox by a familiar anti-Sandinista activist exhibited the campaign’s strategy.

By Nan McCURDY and Nora MITCHELL

Having failed to depose Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega in their coup attempt in 2018, and having lost most of the support they briefly enjoyed within Nicaragua itself, opponents of the Sandinista government have changed their tactics. They’ve embarked on a long campaign aimed at governments and public opinion in the United States and in Europe to portray Ortega as a dictator who is supposedly curbing press freedoms and free speech, assaulting human rights, murdering opponents, and maintaining “a general environment of threat and insecurity.”

The most recent example of the campaign was an article at Vox by Carl David Goette-Luciak and Caroline Houck, titled “Inside the slow culling of Nicaragua’s free press.” Houck is an editor at Vox and was previously a reporter for Defense One, a news source for the arms industry.

Goette Luciak is a long-time anti-Ortega activist and friend of US-backed Nicaraguan opposition leaders. He was escorted out of Nicaragua by police and border officials after claiming to be a journalist and having written freelance articles for the Washington Post and the Guardian, without the press visa required in Nicaragua (an obligation in many countries, including the United States).

Despite recently posing as a journalist, Goette Luciak initially came to Nicaragua to support anti-canal activists and later formed a close working relationship with the leaders of the violent opposition that drove the attempted coup. He can be seen in multiple photos with them and with their armed lackeys. One of the photos was used for the cover of the book we contributed to, Nicaragua 2018: Uprising or Coup?

The novice reporter, who never had a byline before the coup began, listed himself as “director of investigations” for an obscure outlet run by Azucena “Chena” Castillo, an outspoken member of the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS) party who was directly involved in the regime change attempt. 

Goette-Luciak is also captured on video taking photos of an old man being tortured by the opposition in the documentary March of the Flowers. In this short video from the June 30th 2018 march, the reporter appears beginning at 13 seconds.

We began to write about Goette-Luciak because he did nothing after witnessing the torture of the man by violent coup-mongers – his footage of the shocking incident never appeared anywhere.

When he began his journalist career, writing for the Washington Post and the Guardian in 2018, Goette-Luciak never once mentioned the opposition violence he witnessed, the opposition-armed-and-paid thugs he posed for photos with or the torture he witnessed at the Flowers March. The least he could have done in the course of his pro-coup coverage was report the opposition’s brutality that unfolded before his eyes.

Factual errors about the coup and misrepresentations of Nicaragua’s current reality

Goette-Luciak and Houck opened their most recent article by hinting at government limits on the internet, curiously overlook the healthy commercial internet enterprises that populate Nicaragua as well as the audacious government programs providing free internet in parks throughout the country for the population, even in the most isolated parts of the nation.

In the second and twenty-second paragraphs, they claim that government supporters burned down radio stations, for which there is not a shred of evidence. In fact, opposition burned down the private pro-Sandinista Tu Nueva Radio Ya, located in front of the Central American University, one of the seats, then and now, of the opposition. They actually attempted to burn it down twice, succeeding the third time with twenty employees who barely made it out alive. They also burned down Radio Nicaragua and the National Autonomous University Student Center and Radio Station in Leon killing Sandinista student, Christian Cardenas.

The authors went on to claim that the government has restricted free press by blocking newsprint and ink to the newspaper, La Prensa. Few people read newspapers in Nicaragua and slowly print versions have gone by the wayside. La Prensa fired two hundred employees in mid-2018.

The Miami Herald is shutting down because it doesn’t sell enough papers but nobody blames the US government. It’s a tough market for print newspapers all over the world.

The right-wing, US-backed media empire driving the regime change narrative

La Prensa is owned by the right-wing Chamorro family, which fiercely opposes Sandinista rule. Members of this oligarchic dynasty also own Confidencial and direct the nongovernmental organizations CINCO, Invermedia and La Fundacion Violeta Barrios, which serve as intermediaries to channel USAID and National Endowment for Democracy money to other organizations and media.

The Chamorro media empire generates a constant stream of pro-coup propaganda that helps drive the case for US sanctions and intervention. The Chamorro family are known historically for having a monopoly on the US-financed media.

La Prensa owner Jaime Chamorro in his Trump Shirt

La Prensa had long overdue debts with the customs’ office (Direcion General de Aduana, DGA). Rather than pay the debts, the newspaper has accused the government of blocking their paper and ink supply, and requested help from the US press.

La Prensa also has a long record of abusing the custom’s tax exemptions for newspaper printing materials by using the supplies for other print businesses, and also importing luxury cars and even yachts. The exemption was only for a legitimate work vehicle. 

But the onslaught of negative press from the international media prompted the government to release La Prensa’s materials, relieving the paper of its financial obligation to the customs office.

The international press has been relentless in printing and reprinting deceptive claims that echo the opposition narrative. The Nicaraguan population is overall savvy enough to see through the opposition’s propaganda campaign. Claims of repression against La Prensa have failed to sway the public in large part because it has seen the US use this paper for over fifty years as its main media vehicle against the population, most notably during the US-backed Contra war of the 1980’s.

La Prensa has received funds from the US government since the 1980s, and most openly through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Confidencial is funded through the same source.

Of all the US-backed media personalities who participated directly in Nicaragua’s 2018 coup, inciting a campaign of nationwide violence that saw Sandinistas and unarmed police officers burned and tortured on camera, only Miguel Mora and Lucia Pineda of 100% Noticias faced prison time.

Miguel Mora was convicted of threatening a young policeman, Gabriel de Jesus Vado Ruiz, who was kidnapped, tortured, killed and burned at a roadblock soon after. Mora also threatened a municipal worker, Bismark Martinez, who  was disappeared and found dead a year later after being tortured on camera.  Pineda, for her part, gleefully appeared on camera beside masked bandits who burned down government buildings in the city of Granada, while the fires raged behind them.

Lucia Pineda and Miguel Mora met with US Vice President Mike Pence where he assured them he “would not leave the Nicaraguan people alone.”

Under heavy pressure from the US and Organization for American States, and out of a desire to quell the country’s simmering tensions, the Sandinista government gave amnesty to Mora and Pineda in June 2019.

Knowing what Goette-Luciak did in Nicaragua, for which he was deported on October 1, 2018 and with numerous articles and photos attesting to his behavior, it is more than a little surprising that a media outlet like VOX would publish him.

thegrayzone.com

]]> Behind a Made-For-TV Hong Kong Protest Narrative, Washington Is Backing Nativism and Mob Violence https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/19/behind-a-made-for-tv-hong-kong-protest-narrative-washington-is-backing-nativism-and-mob-violence/ Mon, 19 Aug 2019 11:25:59 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=169777 Hong Kong’s increasingly xenophobic protests are devolving into chaos with help from US government regime change outfits and a right-wing local media tycoon with close ties to hardliners in Washington.

Dan COHEN

President Donald Trump tweeted on August 13 that he “can’t imagine why” the United States has been blamed for the chaotic protests that have gripped Hong Kong.

Trump’s befuddlement might be understandable considering the carefully managed narrative of the US government and its unofficial media apparatus, which have portrayed the protests as an organic “pro-democracy” expression of grassroots youth. However, a look beneath the surface of this oversimplified, made-for-television script reveals that the ferociously anti-Chinese network behind the demonstrations has been cultivated with the help of millions of dollars from the US government, as well as a Washington-linked local media tycoon.

Since March, raucous protests have gripped Hong Kong. In July and August, these demonstrations transformed into ugly displays of xenophobia and mob violence.

The protests ostensibly began in opposition to a proposed amendment to the extradition law between Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and Macau, which would have allowed Taiwanese authorities to prosecute a Hong Kong man for murdering his pregnant girlfriend and dumping her body in the bushes during a vacation to Taiwan.

Highly organized networks of anti-China protesters quickly mobilized against the law, compelling Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam to withdraw the bill.

But the protests continued even after the extradition law was taken off the table — and these demonstrations degenerated into disturbing scenes. In recent days, hundreds of masked rioters have occupied the Hong Kong airport, forcing the cancellation of inbound flights while harassing travelers and viciously assaulting journalists and police.

The protesters’ stated goals remain vague. Joshua Wong, one of the most well known figures in the movement, has put forward a call for the Chinese government to “retract the proclamation that the protests were riots,” and restated the consensus demand for universal suffrage.

Wong is a bespectacled 22-year-old who has been trumpeted in Western media as a “freedom campaigner,” promoted to the English-speaking world through his own Netflix documentary, and rewarded with the backing of the US government.

But behind telegenic spokespeople like Wong are more extreme elements such as the Hong Kong National Party, whose members have appeared at protests waving the Stars and Stripes and belting out cacophonous renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner. The leadership of this officially banned party helped popularize the call for the full independence of Hong Kong, a radical goal that is music to the ears of hardliners in Washington.

Xenophobic resentment has defined the sensibility of the protesters, who vow to “retake Hong Kong” from Chinese mainlanders they depict as a horde of locusts. The demonstrators have even adopted one of the most widely recognized symbols of the alt-right, emblazoning images of Pepe the Frog on their protest literature. While it’s unclear that Hong Kong residents see Pepe the same way American white nationalists do, members of the US far-right have embraced the protest movement as their own, and even personally joined their ranks.

Among the most central influencers of the demonstrations is a local tycoon named Jimmy Lai. The self-described“head of opposition media,” Lai is widely described as the Rupert Murdoch of Asia. For the masses of protesters, Lai is a transcendent figure. They clamor for photos with him and applaud the oligarch wildly when he walks by their encampments.

Lai established his credentials by pouring millions of dollars into the 2014 Occupy Central protest, which is known popularly as the Umbrella Movement. He has since used his massive fortune to fund local anti-China political movers and shakers while injecting the protests with a virulent brand of Sinophobia through his media empire.

Though Western media has depicted the Hong Kong protesters as the voice of an entire people yearning for freedom, the island is deeply divided. This August, a group of protesters mobilized outside Jimmy Lai’s house, denouncing him as a “running dog” of Washington and accusing him of national betrayal by unleashing chaos on the island.

Days earlier, Lai was in Washington, coordinating with hardline members of Trump’s national security team, including John Bolton. His ties to Washington run deep — and so do those of the front-line protest leaders.

Millions of dollars have flowed from US regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) into civil society and political organizations that form the backbone of the anti-China mobilization. And Lai has supplemented it with his own fortune while instructing protesters on tactics through his various media organs.

With Donald Trump in the White House, Lai is convinced that his moment may be on the horizon. Trump “understands the Chinese like no president understood,” the tycoon told the Wall Street Journal. “I think he’s very good at dealing with gangsters.”

‘Stop unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women!’

Born in the mainland in 1948 to wealthy parents, whose fortune was expropriated by the Communist Party during the revolution the following year, Jimmy Lai began working at 9 years old, carrying bags for train travelers during the hard years of the Great Chinese Famine.

Inspired by the taste of a piece of chocolate gifted to him by a wealthy man, he decided to smuggle himself to Hong Kong to discover a future of wealth and luxury. There, Lai worked his way up the ranks of the garment industry, growing enamored with the libertarian theories of economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the latter of whom became his close friend.

Friedman is famous for developing the neoliberal shock therapy doctrine that the US has imposed on numerous countries, resulting in the excess deaths of millions. For his part, Hayek is the godfather of the Austrian economic school that forms the foundation of libertarian political movements across the West.

Lai built his business empire on Giordano, a garment label that became one of Asia’s most recognizable brands. In 1989, he threw his weight behind the Tiananmen Square protests, hawking t-shirts on the streets of Beijing calling for Deng Xiaoping to “step down.”

Lai’s actions provoked the Chinese government to ban his company from operating on the mainland. A year later, he founded Next Weekly magazine, initiating a process that would revolutionize the mediascape in Hong Kong with a blend of smutty tabloid-style journalism, celebrity gossip and a heavy dose of anti-China spin.

The vociferously anti-communist baron soon became Hong Kong’s media kingpin, worth a whopping $660 million in 2009.

Today, Lai is the founder and majority stakeholder of Next Digital, the largest listed media company in Hong Kong, which he uses to agitate for the end of what he calls the Chinese “dictatorship.”

His flagship outlet is the popular tabloid Apple Daily, employing the trademark mix of raunchy material with a heavy dose of xenophobic, nativist propaganda.

In 2012, Apple Daily carried a full page advertisement depicting mainland Chinese citizens as invading locusts draining Hong Kong’s resources. The advertisement called for a stop to the “unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women in Hong Kong.” (This was a crude reference to the Chinese citizens who had flocked to the island while pregnant to ensure that their children could earn Hong Kong residency, and resembled the resentment among the US right-wing of immigrant “anchor babies.”)

Ad in Lai’s Apple Daily: “That’s enough! Stop unlimited invasion of mainland pregnant women!”

The transformation of Hong Kong’s economy has provided fertile soil for Lai’s brand of demagoguery. As the country’s manufacturing base moved to mainland China after the golden years of the 1980s and ‘90s, the economy was rapidly financialized, enriching oligarchs like Lai. Left with rising debt and dimming career prospects, Hong Kong’s youth became easy prey to the demagogic politics of nativism.

Many protesters have been seen waving British Union Jacks in recent weeks, expressing a yearning for an imaginary past under colonial control which they never personally experienced.

In July, protesters vandalized the Hong Kong Liaison Office, spray-painting the word, “Shina” on its facade. This term is a xenophobic slur some in Hong Kong and Taiwan use to refer to mainland China. The anti-Chinese phenomenon was visible during the 2014 Umbrella movement protests as well, with signs plastered around the city reading, “Hong Kong for Hong Kongers.”

Besides Lai, a large part of the credit for mobilizing latent xenophobia goes to the right-wing Hong Kong Indigenous party leader Edward Leung. Under the direction of the 28-year-old Leung, his pro-independence party has brandished British colonial flags and publicly harassed Chinese mainland tourists. In 2016, Leung was exposed for meeting with US diplomatic officials at a local restaurant.

Though he is currently in jail for leading a 2016 riot where police were bombarded with bricks and pavement – and where he admitted to attacking an officer – Leung’s rightist politics and his slogan, “Retake Hong Kong,” have helped define the ongoing protests.

A local legislator and protest leader described Leung to the New York Times as “the Che Guevara of Hong Kong’s revolution,” referring without a hint of irony to the Latin American communist revolutionary killed in a CIA-backed operation. According to the Times, Leung is “the closest thing Hong Kong’s tumultuous and leaderless protest movement has to a guiding light.”

The xenophobic sensibility of the protesters has provided fertile soil for Hong Kong National Party to recruit. Founded by the pro-independence activist Andy Chan, the officially banned party combines anti-Chinese resentment with calls for the US to intervene. Images and videos have surfaced of HKNP members waving the flags of the US and UK, singing the Star Spangled Banner, and carrying flags emblazoned with images of Pepe the Frog, the most recognizable symbol of the US alt-right.

While the party lacks a wide base of popular support, it is perhaps the most outspoken within the protest ranks, and has attracted disproportionate international attention as a result. Chan has called for Trump to escalate the trade war and accused China of carrying out a “national cleansing” against Hong Kong. “We were once colonised by the Brits, and now we are by the Chinese,” he declared.

Displays of pro-American jingoism in the streets of Hong Kong have been like catnip for the international far-right.

Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson recently appeared at an anti-extradition protest in Hong Kong, livestreaming the event to his tens of thousands of followers. A month earlier, Gibson was seen roughing up antifa activists alongside ranks of club wielding fascists. In Hong Kong, the alt-right organizer marveled at the crowds.

“They love our flag here more than they do in America!” Gibson exclaimed as marchers passed by, flashing him a thumbs up sign while he waved the Stars and Stripes.

‘British colonial past gave us the instinct to revolt’

Such xenophobic propaganda is consistent with the clash of civilizations theory that Jimmy Lai has promulgated through his media empire.

“You have to understand the Hong Kong people – a very tiny 7 million or 0.5 percent of the Chinese population – are very different from the rest of Chinese in China, because we grow up in the Western values, which was the legacy of the British colonial past, which gave us the instinct to revolt once this extradition law was threatening our freedom,” Lai told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. “Even America has to look at the world 20 years from now, whether you want the Chinese dictatorial values to dominate this world, or you want the values that you treasure [to] continue.”

During a panel discussion at the neoconservative Washington-based think tank, the Foundation For Defense of Democracies, Lai told the pro-Israel lobbyist Jonathan Schanzer, “We need to know that America is behind us. By backing us, America is also sowing to the will of their moral authority because we are the only place in China, a tiny island in China, which is sharing your values, which is fighting the same war you have with China.”

While Lai makes no attempt to conceal his political agenda, his bankrolling of central figures in the 2014 Occupy Central, or Umbrella movement protests, was not always public.

Leaked emails revealed that Lai poured more than $1.2 million to anti-China political parties including  $637,000 USD to the Democratic Party and $382,000 USD to the Civic Party. Lai also gave $115,000 USD to the Hong Kong Civic Education Foundation and Hong Kong Democratic Development Network, both of which were co-founded by Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Lai also spent $446,000 USD on Occupy Central’s 2014 unofficial referendum.

Lai’s US consigliere is a former Navy intelligence analyst who interned with the CIA and leveraged his intelligence connections to build his boss’s business empire. Named Mark Simon, the veteran spook arranged for former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin to meet with a group in the anti-China camp during a 2009 visit to Hong Kong. Five years later, Lai paid $75,000 to neoconservative Iraq war author and US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to organize a meeting with top military figures in Myanmar.

This July, as the Hong Kong protests gathered steam, Lai was junketed to Washington, DC for meetings with Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Republican Senators Ted Cruz, Cory Gardner, and Rick Scott. Bloomberg News correspondent Nicholas Wadhams remarked on Lai’s visit, “Very unusual for a [non-government] visitor to get that kind of access.”

One of Lai’s closest allies, Martin Lee, was also granted an audience with Pompeo, and has held court with US leaders including Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Joseph Biden.

Among the most prominent figures in Hong Kong’s pro-US political parties, Lee began collaborating with Lai during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A recipient of the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy’s “Democracy Award” in 1997, Lee is the founding chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, now considered part of the pro-US camp’s old guard.

While Martin Lee has long been highly visible on the pro-western Hong Kong scene, a younger generation of activists emerged during the 2014 Occupy Central protests with a new brand of localized politics.

Teenager Vs. Superpower, with help from a bigger superpower

Joshua Wong meets with Sen. Marco Rubio in Washington on May 8, 2017

Joshua Wong was just 17 years old when the Umbrella Movement took form in 2014. After emerging in the protest ranks as one of the more charismatic voices, he was steadily groomed as the pro-West camp’s teenage poster child. Wong received lavish praised in Time magazine, Fortune, and Foreign Policy as a “freedom campaigner,” and became the subject of an award-winning Netflix documentary called “Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower.”

Unsurprisingly, these puff pieces have overlooked Wong’s ties to the United States government’s regime-change apparatus. For instance, National Endowment for Democracy’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) maintains a close relationship with Demosistō, the political party Wong founded in 2016 with fellow Umbrella movement alumnus Nathan Law.

In August, a candid photo surfaced of Wong and Law meeting with Julie Eadeh, the political counselor at the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong, raising questions about the content of the meeting and setting off a diplomatic showdown between Washington and Beijing.

The Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong submitted a formal complaint with the US consulate general, calling on the US “to immediately make a clean break from anti-China forces who stir up trouble in Hong Kong, stop sending out wrong signals to violent offenders, refrain from meddling with Hong Kong affairs and avoid going further down the wrong path.”

The pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao published personal details about Eadeh, including the names of her children and her address. State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus lashed out, accusing the Chinese government of being behind the leak but offering no evidence. “I don’t think that leaking an American diplomat’s private information, pictures, names of their children, I don’t think that is a formal protest, that is what a thuggish regime would do,” she said at a State Department briefing.

But the photo underscored the close relationship between Hong Kong’s pro-west movement and the US government. Since the 2014 Occupy Central protests that vaulted Wong into prominence, he and his peers have been assiduously cultivated by the elite Washington institutions to act as the faces and voices of Hong Kong’s burgeoning anti-China movement.

In September 2015, Wong, Martin Lee, and University of Hong Kong law professor Benny Tai Lee were honored by Freedom House, a right-wing soft-power organization that is heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and other arms of the US government.

Just days after Trump’s election as president in November 2016, Wong was back in Washington to appeal for more US support. “Being a businessman, I hope Donald Trump could know the dynamics in Hong Kong and know that to maintain the business sector benefits in Hong Kong, it’s necessary to fully support human rights in Hong Kong to maintain the judicial independence and the rule of law,” he said.

Wong’s visit provided occasion for the Senate’s two most aggressively neoconservative members, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton, to introduce the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act,” which would “identify those responsible for abduction, surveillance, detention and forced confessions, and the perpetrators will have their US assets, if any… frozen and their entry to the country denied.”

Wong was then taken on a junket of elite US institutions including the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank and the newsrooms of the New York Times and Financial Times. He then held court with Rubio, Cotton, Pelosi, and Sen. Ben Sasse.

In September 2017, Rubio, Ben Cardin, Tom Cotton, Sherrod Brown, and Cory Gardner signed off on a letter to Wong, Law and fellow anti-China activist Alex Chow, praising them for their “efforts to build a genuinely autonomous Hong Kong.” The bipartisan cast of senators proclaimed that “the United States cannot stand idly by.”

A year later, Rubio and his colleagues nominated the trio of Wong, Law, and Chow for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

Washington’s support for the designated spokesmen of the “retake Hong Kong movement” was supplement with untold sums of money from US regime-change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and subsidiaries like the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to civil society, media and political groups.

As journalist Alex Rubinstein reported, the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, a key member of the coalition that organized against the now-defunct extradition law, has received more than $2 million in NED funds since 1995. And other groups in the coalition reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NED and NDI last year alone.

While US lawmakers nominate Hong Kong protest leaders for peace prizes and pump their organizations with money to “promote democracy,” the demonstrations have begun to spiral out of control.

From the “Marginal Violence Theory” to the mob violence reality

After the extradition law was scrapped, the protests moved into a more aggressive phase, launching “hit and run attacks” against government targets, erecting roadblocks, besieging police stations, and generally embracing the extreme modalities put on display during US-backed regime-change operations from Ukraine to Venezuela to Nicaragua.

The techniques clearly reflected the training many activists have received from Western soft-power outfits. But they also bore the mark of Jimmy Lai’s media operation.

In addition to the vast sums Lai spent on political parties directly involved in the protests, his media group created an animated video “showing how to resist police in case force was used to disperse people in a mass protest.”

While dumping money into the Hong Kong’s pro-US political camp in 2013, Lai traveled to Taiwan for a secret roundtable consultation with Shih Ming-teh, a key figure in Taiwan’s social movement that forced then-president Chen Shui-bian to resign in 2008. Shih reportedly instructed Lai on non-violent tactics to bring the government to heel, emphasizing the importance of a commitment to go to jail.

According to journalist Peter Lee, “Shih supposedly gave Lai advice on putting students, young girls, and mothers with children in the vanguard of the street protests, in order to attract the support of the international community and press, and to sustain the movement with continual activities to keep it dynamic and fresh.” Lai reportedly turned off his recording device during multiple sections of Shih’s tutorial.

One protester explained to the New York Times how the movement attempted to embrace a strategy called, “Marginal Violence Theory”: By using “mild force” to provoke security services into attacking the protesters, the protesters aimed to shift international sympathy away from the state.

But as the protest movement intensifies, its rank-and-file are doing away with tactical restraint and lashing out at their targets with full fury. They have thrown molotov cocktails into intersections to block traffic; attacked vehicles and their drivers for attempting to break through roadblocks; beaten opponents with truncheons; attacked a wounded man with a US flag; menaced a reporter into deleting her photos; kidnapped and beat a journalist senseless; beat a mainland traveler unconscious and prevented paramedics from reaching the victim; and hurled petrol bombs at police officers.

The charged atmosphere has provided a shot in the arm to Lai’s media empire, which had been suffering heavy losses since the last round of national protests in 2014. After the mass marches against the extradition bill on June 9, which Lai’s Apple Daily aggressively promoted, his Next Digital doubled in value, according to Eji Insight.

Meanwhile, the protest leaders show no sign of backing down. Nathan Law, the youth activist celebrated in Washington and photographed meeting with US officials in Hong Kong, took to Twitter to urge his peers to soldier on: “We have to persist and keep the faith no matter how devastated the reality seems to be,” he wrote.

Law was tweeting from New Haven, Connecticut, where he was enrolled with a full scholarship at Yale University. While the young activist basked in the adulation of his US patrons thousands of miles from the chaos he helped spark, a movement that defined itself as a “leaderless resistance” forged ahead back home.

thegrayzone.com

]]> The Anglo-American Origins of Color Revolutions & NED https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/17/the-anglo-american-origins-of-color-revolutions-ned/ Sat, 17 Aug 2019 10:44:16 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=169721 A few years ago, very few people understood the concept behind color revolutions.

Had Russia and China’s leadership not decided to unite in solidarity in 2012 when they began vetoing the overthrow of Bashar al Assad in Syria- followed by their alliance around the Belt and Road Initiative, then it is doubtful that the color revolution concept would be as well-known as it has become today.

At that time, Russia and China realized that they had no choice but to go on the counter offensive, since the regime change operations and colour revolutions orchestrated by such organizations as the CIA-affiliated National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and Soros Open Society Foundations were ultimately designed to target them as those rose, orange, green or yellow revolution efforts in Georgia, Ukraine, Iran or Hong Kong were always recognized as weak points on the periphery of the threatened formation of a great power alliance of sovereign Eurasian nations that would have the collective power to challenge the power of the Anglo-American elite based in London and Wall Street.

Russia’s 2015 expulsion of 12 major conduits of color revolution included Soros’ Open Society Foundation as well as the NED was a powerful calling out of the enemy with the Foreign Ministry calling them “a threat to the foundations of Russia’s Constitutional order and national security”. This resulted in such fanatical calls by George Soros for a $50 billion fund to counteract Russia’s interference in defense of Ukraine’s democracy. Apparently the $5 billion spent by the NED in Ukraine was not nearly enough (1).

In spite of the light falling upon these cockroaches, NED and Open Society operations continued in full force focusing on the weakest links the Grand Chessboard unleashing what has become known as a “strategy of tension”. Venezuela, Kashmir, Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjian (dubbed East Turkistan by NED) have all been targeted in recent years with millions of NED dollars pouring into separatist groups, labour unions, student movements and fake news “opinion shapers” under the guise of “democracy building”. $1.7 million in grants was spent by NED in Hong Kong since 2017 which was a significant increase from their $400 000 spent to coordinate the failed “Occupy HK” protest in 2014.

The Case of China

In response to over two months of controlled chaos, the Chinese government has kept a remarkably restrained posture, allowing the Hong Kong authorities to manage the situation with their police deprived of use of lethal weapons and even giving into the protestors’ demand that the changes to the extradition treaty that nominally sparked this mess be annulled. In spite of this patient tone, the rioters who have run havoc on airports and public buildings have created lists of demands that are all but impossible for mainland China to meet including 1) an “independent committee to investigate the abuses of Chinese authorities”, 2) for china to stop referring to rioters as “rioters”, 3) for all charges against rioters to be dropped, and 4) universal suffrage- including candidates promoting independence or rejoining the British Empire.

As violence continues to grow, and as it has become an increasing reality that some form of intervention from the mainland may occur to restore order, the British Foreign Office has taken an aggressive tone threatening China with “severe consequences” unless “a fully independent investigation” into police Brutality were permitted. The former Colonial Governor of China Christopher Patten attacked China by saying “Since president Xi has been in office, there’s been a crackdown on dissent and dissidents everywhere, the party has been in control of everything”.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded saying “the UK has no sovereign jurisdiction or right of supervision over Hong Kong… it is simply wrong for the British Government to exert pressure. The Chinese side seriously urges the UK to stop its interference in China’s internal affairs and stop making random and inflammatory accusations on Hong Kong.”

The British have not been able to conduct their manipulation of Hong Kong without the vital role of America’s NGO dirty ops, and in true imperial fashion, the political class from both sides of the aisle have attacked China with Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi making the loudest noise driving the American House Foreign Affairs Committee to threaten “universal condemnation and swift consequences” if Beijing intervenes. This has only made the photographs of Julie Eadeh, the head of Political Office at the American Consulate in Hong Kong meeting with leaders of the Hong Kong demonstrations that much more disgusting to any onlooker.

While both Britain and America have been caught red handed organizing this colour revolution, it is important to keep in mind who is controlling who.

The Foreign Origins of the NED

Contrary to popular opinion, the British Empire did not go away after WWII, nor did it hand over the “keys to the kingdom” to America. It didn’t even become America’s Junior Partner in a new Anglo-American special relationship. Contrary to popular belief, it stayed in the drivers’ seat.

The post WWII order was largely shaped by a British coup which didn’t take over America without a fight. Nests of Oxford-trained Rhodes Scholars, Fabians and other ideologues embedded within the American establishment had a lot of work ahead of them as they struggled to purge all nationalist impulses from the American intelligence community. While the most aggressive purging of patriotic Americans from the intelligence community occurred during the dissolution of the OSS and creation of CIA in 1947 and the Communist witch hunt that followed, there were other purges that were less well known.

As an organization which was beginning to take form which was to become known as the Trilateral Commission organized by Britain’s “hand in America” called the Council on Foreign Relations and international Bilderberg Group, another purge occurred in 1970 under the direction of James Schlesinger during his six month stint as CIA director. At that time 1000 top CIA officials deemed “unfit” were fired. This was followed nine years later as another 800 were fired under a list drafted by CIA “spymaster” Ted Shackley. Both Schlesinger and Shackley were high level Trilateral Commission members who took part in the group’s 1973 formation and fully took power of America during Jimmy Carter’s 1977-1981 presidency which unleashed a dystopian reorganization of American foreign and internal policy outlined in my previous report.

Project Democracy Takes Over

By the 1970s, the CIA’s dirty hand funding anarchist operations both within America and abroad had become too well known as media coverage of their dirty operations at home and abroad spoiled the patriotic image which the intelligence community then desired. While the internal resistance to fascist behaviour from within the intelligence Community itself was dealt with through purges, the reality was that a new agency had to be created to take over those functions of covert destabilization of foreign governments.

What became Project Democracy herein originated with a Trilateral Commission meeting in May 31, 1975 in Kyoto Japan as a protégé of Trilateral Commission director Zbigniew Brzezinski named Samuel (Clash of Civilizations) Huntington delivered the results of his Task Force on the Governability of Democracies. This project was supervised by Schlesinger and Brzezinski and presented the notion that democracies could not function adequately in the crisis conditions which the Trilateral Commission was preparing to impose onto America and the world through a process dubbed “the Controlled Disintegration of Society”.

The Huntington report featured at the Trilateral meeting stated: “One might consider… means of securing support and resources from foundations, business corporations, labor unions, political parties, civic associations, and, where possible and appropriate, governmental agencies for the creation of an institute for the strengthening of democratic institutions.”

It took 4 years for this blueprint to become reality. In 1979 three Trilateral Commission members named William Brock (RNC Chairman), Charles Manatt (DNC Chairman) and George Agree (head of Freedom House) established an organization called the American Political Foundation (APF) which attempted to fulfil the objective laid out by Huntington in 1975.

The APF was used to set up a program using federal funds called the Democracy Program which issued an interim report “The Commitment to Democracy” which said: “No theme requires more sustained attention in our time than the necessity for strengthening the future chances of democratic societies in a world that remains predominantly unfree or partially fettered by repressive governments. … There has never been a comprehensive structure for a non-governmental effort through which the resources of America’s pluralistic constituencies . .. could be mobilized effectively.”

In May 1981, Henry Kissinger who had replaced Brzezinski as head of the Trilateral Commission and had many operatives planted around President Reagan, gave a speech at Britain’s Chatham House (the controlling hand behind the Council on Foreign Relations) where he described his work as Secretary of State saying that the British “became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never practiced between sovereign nations… In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department… It was symptomatic”. In his speech, Kissinger outlined the battle between Churchill vs FDR during WWII and made the point that he favored the Churchill worldview for the post war world (And ironically also that of Prince Metternich who ran the Congress of Vienna that snuffed out democratic movements across Europe in 1815).

In June 1982, Reagan’s Westminster Palace speech officially inaugurated the NED and by November 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy Act was passed bringing this new covert organization into reality with $31 million of funding under four subsidiary organizations (AFL-CIO Free Trade Union Institute, The US Chamber of Commerce’s Center for International Private Enterprise, the International Republican Institute and the International Democratic Institute) (2).

Throughout the 1980s, this organization went to work managing Iran-Contra, destabilizing Soviet states and unleashing the first “official” modern color revolution in the form of the Yellow revolution that ousted Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. Speaking more candidly than usual, NED President David Ignatius said in 1991 “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the NED was instrumental in bringing former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO/WTO system and the New World Order was announced by Bush Sr. and Kissinger- both of whom were rewarded with knighthoods for their service to the Crown in 1992 and 1995 respectively.

Of course, the vast web of NGOs permeating the geopolitical terrain can only be effective as long as no one says the truth and “names the game”. The very act of calling out their nefarious motives renders them impotent and this simple fact has made the recently announced China-Russia arrangement to formulate a proper strategic response to color revolutions so important in the current fight.

___________________________

(1) Undoubtedly President Trump’s gutting of NED funding by two thirds in 2018 only re-enforced Soros’ accusations that Putin is the guiding hand in America while pouring millions into anti-Trump regime change operations in America. While neocons such as Bolton, Pompeo and Senate leader Mitch Mcconnell have taken a hardline stance against China in support of the color revolution, it should be noted that Trump has continuously taken an opposite line Tweeting on August 14 that “China is not our problem” and that “the problem is with the FED”.

(2) At the beginning of 1984, a similar re-organization had occurred in Canada under the guidance of Privy Council Clerk/Trilateral Commission member Michael Pitfield who created CSIS when the RCMP’s “dirty operations” during the FLQ crisis were made known in a series of newspaper reports.

]]> Facebook Allies with US Regime-Change Orgs for ‘Fact Checking’ In Foreign Countries https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/09/23/facebook-allies-with-us-regime-change-orgs-fact-checking-foreign-countries/ Sun, 23 Sep 2018 10:25:00 +0000 https://strategic-culture.lo/news/2018/09/23/facebook-allies-with-us-regime-change-orgs-fact-checking-foreign-countries/ Moon of Alabama

As this outlet concluded yesterday:

Unfortunately the anti-Russian and anti-Trump propaganda campaign has had serious consequences. Censorship in social media increased drastically…

In consequence of the alleged manipulation of new and opinions during the 2016 election, Congress threatened to regulate social media. It demanded testimony by the owners of social media companies – Facebook, Twitter and Google – about their plans to weed out so called "fake news" distributed through their systems. Instead of defending the freedom of individuals and organizations to publish opinions deviating from the mainstream, the companies promised to increase their censorship capabilities. To avoid to make judgments themselves, they decided to outsource these to 'independent' fact checking organizations. Anything those deem "fake news" will then be censored.

Facebook Inc just gave such powers to two well known U.S. government regime change operators. These will now have the capabilities to censor content in foreign countries:

Facebook Inc on Wednesday said it would team with two U.S. non-profits to slow the global spread of misinformation that could influence elections,…

The largest social network, under intense pressure to combat propaganda, said it would work abroad with the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, created in the 1980s and funded by the U.S. government to promote democratic processes.

The IRI and the NDI are sub-organizations of the infamous National Endowment for Democracy. They "promote democratic processes" to achieve regime change of governments the U.S. dislikes. The NED is an offshoot of the CIA:

The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s…

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities…

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

The Trump administration attempted to gut the NED but failed. In its 2019 appropriations Congress increased the "democracy promotion" budget that is used to "regime change" governments the U.S. does not like. The highlights of the bill include:

$2.4 billion for democracy programs, and an additional $170 million for the National Endowment for Democracy. This amount is $91.5 million above the FY2018 enacted level.

The NED, through its sub-organizations, finances and controls local entities that promote regime change.

From Poland's Solidarnosc to the anti-Chinese Tibetan Youth Congress, from the fascist Maidan Coup in Ukraine to regime change attempts in Venezuela – the NED had and has its fingers in each of these destabilization operations:

In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of numerous foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational materials, computers, faxes, copiers, automobiles, and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, etc. NED typically refers to the media it supports as “independent” despite the fact that these media are on the US payroll.

In 2015 the Russian government shut down dozens of NED front groups in its country that were trying to subvert its elected institutions. But Russian language content as well as other content presented to Russian users on Facebook, will now be shaped by these organizations.

By giving "fact checking" capabilities to these organizations, Facebook hands a global censorship tool to the U.S. government 'regime change' operatives.

All fact checking organization are already a dubious endeavor. Third-party fact-checking organizations accepted by Facebook Inc for the United States are the Associated Press, Factcheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes.com and the Weekly Standard Fact Check.

PolitiFact once labeled obvious satire, published by the well known satirical Duffel Blog, as "fake news".

Snopes, a for profit fact checking organization, attacked Eva Bartlett for some of her well founded statements about the White Helmets propaganda organizations. In April 2018 Snopes attacked official Russian government assertions that no chemical incident took place in Douma, Syria. Snopes headlined the Russian statements as "Disinformation and Conspiracy Trolling". But the Russians were proven right. The OPCW went to Douma, took samples and found no nerve gas in them. Hospital personal as well as people living in the area were interviewed by several reporters. None of them had noticed a chemical incident. The opposition outlet Syrian Observatory did not report a chemical attack, but said that people died of suffocation after their shelter collapsed. There was no 'chemical incident' in Douma. The "fact checkers" were wrong. Moreover – when the OPCW report came out mainstream media lied about it, claiming that the OPCW found chlorine was used. The OPCW said no such thing. It found some chlorinated chemicals that can be found in any household cleaning agent. Some outlets, like the BBC and Reuters, had to correct their false claims. Snopes did not correct its false claims about the factual Russian assertions.

The Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative outlet edited by Bill Kristol played an important role in promoting war on Iraq, is now accepted by Facebook as fact checker. The Weekly Standard promptly rated a piece by Think Progress which was promoted on Facebook as "false" because of a slightly ambiguous wording in the headline of completely factual and truthful report.

Such "false" or "fake new" ratings by Facebook approved "fact checkers" have serious consequences:

Q: WHAT HAPPENS IF CONTENT I CREATED OR SHARED IS RATED “FALSE” or “MIXTURE” BY A FACT-CHECKER?

A: First, that content's distribution is reduced. It will appear lower in News Feed, and will be accompanied by Related Articles from fact-checkers. If people try to share the content, they will be notified of the additional reporting. They will also be notified if content they have shared in the past has since been rated by a fact-checker.

Second, in order to more effectively fight false news, we also take action against Pages and domains that share, and domains that repeatedly publish content which is rated “False.” Such Pages and domains will see their distribution reduced as the number of offenses increases. Their ability to monetize and advertise will be removed after repeated offenses. Over time, Pages and domains can restore their distribution and ability to monetize and advertise if they stop sharing false news.

Third, Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will also lose their ability to register as a news Page on Facebook. If a registered news Page repeatedly shares false news, its news Page registration will be revoked.

Smaller news outlets like Think Progress depend on the traffic they receive through Facebook and other social media. Being falsely labeled as "fake news" outlet threatens their existence.

For foreign countries Facebook engaged with the Agence France Presse (AFP) and local organizations to check the validity of news sources. This is already a dubious choice. AFP tends to promote the French government's view. Its Beirut bureau is, for example, known to have deep relation with Jihadi 'reporters' in 'rebel' held areas of Syria and tends to promote their views. But now Facebook is handing censorship powers over foreign news to the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, organizations which were founded and are funded by the U.S. to promote regime change of governments the U.S. dislikes. It is obvious that they will mark reports on Facebook that reflect the view of the government of Venezuela as "fake news", while they will promote those 'independent' Venezuelan organizations the NED itself finances.

The fact checking Facebook uses is snake oil. Such fact checking promotes a one sided view on issues and events. At the same time no fact checking is able to prevent well organized influence operations by domestic or foreign organizations. There are for example Facebook groups with thousands of members who use a special application to secretly spread pro-Zionist propaganda in cooperation with the Israeli government:

The campaign, which targeted dozens of prominent international outlets, was organized through Act.IL, a smartphone app and website developed by former Israeli intelligence officers in collaboration with the Israeli government, and with financial backing from conservative American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson…

Anyone can join Act.IL, and the platform is available on the web and as a smartphone app in the Apple and Google app stores. While it’s unclear how many active users there are, an affiliated Facebook group has more than 3,000 members worldwide. Once logged in to Act.IL, users are presented with a series of active “missions” they can take part in. Users earn participation points that can be redeemed to "get cool prizes,” according to an introductory video.

Act.IL is part of a larger Israel Lobby effort to secretly subvert and influence the content of Facebook and other social media sites.

The best way to avoid such campaigns and censorship of so called social media is to avoid them entirely. One can still get an objective view of the world by looking for original news sources and by applying a skeptical view towards presented "facts". It on us to teach others how to do this.

moonofalabama.org

]]> Beware of the American Political Snake Oil Salesmen https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/09/08/beware-of-american-political-snake-oil-salesmen/ Sat, 08 Sep 2018 08:55:00 +0000 https://strategic-culture.lo/news/2018/09/08/beware-of-american-political-snake-oil-salesmen/ The election engineering merchants of George Soros and other “one-size-fits-all” democracy templates may have been vanquished in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Myanmar, but they are, by no means, down and out. International non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have simply borrowed a page from international consultancies and gone quasi-private, racking up lucrative contracts as political advisers to pro-capitalist candidates around the world.

With the US Foreign Service largely neutered under President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, there is virtually no one left at various US embassies in far-flung diplomatic posts to warn host governments about the modern version of American “snake oil salesmen” pitching their election assistance wares to unsuspecting candidates for office.

Take Vanguard Africa, a Washington, DC-based election campaign consultancy that seeks public contributions under the aegis of the Democratic Party’s fundraising organization, ActBlue. During a time when there are complaints in the United States of foreign interference in American elections, why is an outfit like Vanguard America involved in elections in The Gambia and Niger? What is good for the goose should be good for the gander.

If someone donates to ActBlue to elect more Democrats to the US Congress, state legislatures, and mayors’ offices, why is ActBlue, working with Vanguard Africa, involved in helping to elect in January 2017, Adama Barrow as president of The Gambia in West Africa? Vanguard Africa’s US leadership includes Joe Trippi, former Vermont Democratic Governor Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign chairman, and former Democratic US Representative Al Wynn of Maryland.

Vanguard Africa unabashedly admits on its website that it mixes election engineering with lobbying in Washington: “Access to Influential Leaders – Opening lines of communication and building trusted, long-term relationships with key pro-democracy groups, civic leaders, elected officials and policymakers – in Washington, DC and internationally.” While such a service helps line the pockets of Washington lobbyists and increases the profiles of certain African leaders, such as Barrow in The Gambia, it does little to alleviate the extreme poverty of Africans in The Gambia or anywhere else on the continent.

It is not merely the connections of outfits like Vanguard Africa to the Central Intelligence Agency-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that should ring alarm bells, but also its connection to the Washington lobbying organization Sanitas International, whose partner, Christopher Harvin, is a co-founder of Vanguard Africa. Sanitas has a contract with Tzvika Brot, of Delaware-incorporated BSI Public Affairs, Brot ran the 2016 get-out-the-vote campaign targeting US voters in Israel on behalf of Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. Washington deal-making does not get any “swampier” than this. And Mr. Trump, who rants and raves about “draining the swamp,” is one of its chief scaly denizens.

Perhaps it is time for an international convention, either through the auspices of the United Nations or regional supranational organizations, like the African Union, European Union, and others, to prohibit all foreign government or corporate interference in elections in other countries. If narcotics and human trafficking, as well as weapons smuggling, can be banned internationally, why not foreign election interference?

Such a regime would stop Vanguard Africa from providing advice to clients like Daher Ahmed Farah, the president of the of the Movement for Democratic Renewal and Development opposition in the militarily-strategic country of Djibouti on the Red Sea, or Ibrahim Yacouba, a 2021 presidential candidate in Niger and Biram Dah Abeid, a failed 2014 presidential candidate in Mauritania. Questions have been raised about how Abeid became one of the richest men in Mauritania after receiving huge “human rights” grants from foreign NGOs. Apparently, promoting “democracy” on behalf of foreign masters can be a very lucrative business.

Vanguard receives funding from Tony O. Elumelu, one of Nigeria’s richest men and chairman of Heirs Holdings, the United Bank for Africa, Transcorp, as well as the founder of the Africacapitalism Institute. While Barack Obama may have supported the “entrepreneurship” notions of “Africacapitalism,” the quasi-libertarian gobbledygook of a “rising tide lifts all boats” espoused as part of such policies represents a slap in the face of the pan-African socialism of the founders of modern independent Africa. These include Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, and Patrice Lumumba, and later, Muammar Qaddafi and Thomas Sankara.

The Guardian newspaper spelled out the problems associated with the “do-gooder capitalism” of those like Elumelu in a July 12, 2013 piece. The article quotes University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan as asserting that schemes like that of Elumelu parrot the rhetoric often used as a “smokescreen for big business to push towards deregulation.” Bakan believes that such “shared value” business models distort the public's relationship with mega-businesses. In Africa and Latin America, where state ownership of key industries and foreign government economic assistance programs helped advance national economies from Third World to Second and First World status, the arrival of snake oil salesmen selling “beneficial capitalism” led to crippling austerity imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

Another snake oil merchant, Avenue Strategies Global – co-founded by Trump 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Barry Bennett, manager of current Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s presidential run – is also selling political advice abroad. The firm, which is situated on a corner across from the White House, recently signed a lucrative contract with former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. It is obvious that Avenue Strategies is helping Tymosheno position herself for a future presidential run in Ukraine. And it is quite convenient that the firm, which Lewandowski has departed, is close, both geographically and politically, to the offices of Trump administration key officials, including National Security Adviser John Bolton.

Lewandowski is associated with another political advice consultancy, Turnberry Solutions, LLC of Washington, DC. Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump Turnberry is the name of Trump’s Scottish golf resort. Yet another Lewandowski-linked firm, Washington East West Political Strategies LLC, which dissolved in 2017, had been advising political candidates in Albania and Kosovo, as well as others in the Middle East, Canada, and Central America. Lewandowski’s links with the Amsterdam Group, another Washington lobbying firm, puts him in the same orbit as former YUKOS oil head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a client of Amsterdam Group and someone who has been working from the United States, Europe, and Israel to oust Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government.

Of more concern is Lewandowski’s links to the Boston, Massachusetts-based social media analytics firm, Crimson Hexagon, which stands accused of manipulating Facebook data to affect election outcomes. The threat posed by the intersection of political advisory firms, “big data” manipulators, and NGOs cannot be underestimated.

Big Brother is now a reality and he does not want your vote, he wants to cast your vote. One of the most sinister buildings on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC is the inaptly-named US Institute of Peace. Its election manipulation activities, conducted in concert with consultancies, data analytics firms, and NGOs, often result in wars and civil strife.

As the weeping over the death of Senator John McCain subsides, it should be remembered that his pride and joy, the election-meddling International Republican Institute, and his former campaign manager, Rick Davis, had longstanding organizational ties to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager. Manafort now sits in a jail cell in Alexandria, Virginia, convicted on eight counts of fraud, and awaiting trial in Washington, DC on additional criminal counts. The Trump administration wasted no time in immersing itself deep into this political swamp and help market American political snake oil to unsuspecting countries around the world.

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