Regime Change – 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 Another Regime Change President https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/04/05/another-regime-change-president/ Tue, 05 Apr 2022 19:00:27 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=802591 Speaking about Russia over the weekend, Joe Biden sounded every bit the man who voted for the Iraq war authorization 20 years ago.

By Curt MILLS

At each pivotal moment,” the senator said, warning the worst would not come to pass, “[the president] has chosen a course of moderation and deliberation… I believe he will continue to do so.… The president has made it clear that war is neither imminent nor inevitable.”

Speaking on the floor in October 2002, then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware would proceed to vote to give President George W. Bush the ultimate power: permission to wage war. Bush, of course, took Biden up on his offer—co-signed by Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, and supermajorities in both houses—five months later.

By summer that year, the war in Iraq was a transparent disaster.

American elites, particularly the ruling Republicans, became determined to drown out news of a savage insurgency taking out American men and women almost daily, with a drip-drip that the forces of evil were, actually, losing the day. Pay attention to the miserable fate of the Hussein family, settled by New Year’s 2004, not that the search for the war-justifying weapons of destruction concluded the whole thing was a farce by that January; certainly don’t look too closely at the bodies of American contractors in Fallujah, strung up on a bridge in April 2004.

The idea that the people of the world could actually want an alternative to American-style politics and consumerism, or that we actually didn’t know all that much about conflicts a world away, was laughed off as (to use a 2000s term) noob analysis, loony-bin throwback stuff from capital-H History. An emissary of that perspective, Britney Spears told cable news host Tucker Carlson then, “We should just trust our president in every decision he makes.”

There the parallel to today’s mistake—and that is what the present American course on Russia and Ukraine: a flashing-red-light mistake—in trusting the president, there the parallel to the Noughties collapses for a yard.

Because evidently, contra the advice of Ms. Spears, President Joe Biden’s own team doesn’t “just trust” the president in every decision he makes.

The White House immediately walked back Biden’s clarion call for regime change in the Kremlin this weekend—“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” 46 closed his address in Poland. A senior administration official said, “The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

Donald Trump is frequently reported on as a liar, but outside of “fifteen days to slow a spread,” I’m unsure his White House told a more consequential lie than this world-insulting one the Biden administration just tried out.

As Asia Times Spengler columnist David Goldman noted, “Biden blurted out what Admin officials have been saying in private, as Niall Ferguson leaked in Bloomberg last week. Can’t walk it back.”

Summarizing his reporting, Stanford’s Ferguson said: “As I said last week, the Biden administration has apparently decided to instrumentalize the war in Ukraine to bring about regime change in Russia, rather than trying to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible. Biden just said it out loud. This is a highly risky strategy.”

Here, the Iraq parallel resumes.

For many Republicans, Iraq was “Operation Unfinished Business,” a reprisal for Saddam’s apparent assassination attempt on the retired first President Bush, and an itch-scratch for those who felt the U.S. should have marched to Baghdad in 1991, during the first Gulf War. Vladimir Putin occupies a similar bogeyman position for leading Democrats, many of whom unironically still hold that the Kremlin anointed Trump president.

Biden has cut a contradictory figure throughout his half-century in power—a self-described coat-and-tie Democrat during the year of drippy hippies, a real-deal CIA stan during the Southern progressive years of Jimmy Carter, then against the first Gulf War, then the second Bush’s man early on as Senate Foreign Relations chair, then Machiavellian, anti-war would-be president, then Old Guard vice president, and now a Democratic establishment president who was not the first choice of the Democratic establishment.

Biden’s move last summer on Afghanistan appeared to open up the possibility that the Biden presidency would be a caretaker administration that ended some of America’s wars. Because this was a capstone, or maybe just because he didn’t give a damn at his age, he could get away with it.

There was hope, among the restraint-friendly right and the progressive left, that this was the real Joe Biden, a throwback to when he and then-President Barack Obama were dovish voices of caution within their own administration (how did that kind of staff happen, again?).

He has real Americana charm, but Biden’s career, properly understood, has not been one at the center of the American electorate, but at the center of the Democratic Party establishment. It is, after all, how the scrappy middle class white guy with middling credentials finally ascended to the presidency leading the credentialists’ party.

Though logorrheic—the young version could talk—both the young and old Biden would never, ever rock the boat. And so it is, when America senses (in my view, erroneously) it can surgically wield a killing stroke against the Great Satan of the Democratic Party, Vladimir Putin.

“You don’t have to do this,” Obama once told Biden, trying to talk him out of running for president in 2020. Now as then, Biden evidently feels he does.

The new American president has abandoned one misguided crusade in Central Asia, only to open a new, much more dangerous one in Europe, all while (once again) letting America’s true enemy in Beijing off the hook. Which is, sadly, another hallmark of Biden’s powerful career.

theamericanconservative.com

]]> Biden Confirms Why the U.S. Needed This War https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/28/biden-confirms-why-the-u-s-needed-this-war/ Mon, 28 Mar 2022 19:57:00 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=799937 In a moment of candor, Joe Biden has revealed why the U.S. needed the Russian invasion and why it needs it to continue, writes Joe Lauria.

By Joe LAURIA

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. The White House and the State Dept. have been scrambling to explain away Biden’s remark.

But it is too late.

“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official said. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,” the last words inserted for comic relief.

Biden first gave the game away at his Feb. 24 White House press conference — the first day of the invasion. He was asked why he thought new sanctions would work when the earlier sanctions had not prevented Russia’s invasion. Biden said the sanctions were never designed to prevent Russia’s intervention but to punish it afterward. Therefore the U.S. needed Russia to invade.

“No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” Biden said.  “That has to sh- — this is going to take time.  And we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them.  That’s what this is all about.”  It is all about the Russian people turning on Putin to overthrow him, which would explain Russia’s crackdown on anti-war protestors and the media.

It was no slip of the tongue. Biden repeated himself in Brussels on Thursday: “Let’s get something straight …  I did not say that in fact the sanctions would deter him.  Sanctions never deter.  You keep talking about that. Sanctions never deter.  The maintenance of sanctions — the maintenance of sanctions, the increasing the pain … we will sustain what we’re doing not just next month, the following month, but for the remainder of this entire year.  That’s what will stop him.”

It was the second time that Biden confirmed that the purpose of the draconian U.S. sanctions on Russia was never to prevent the invasion of Ukraine, which the U.S. desperately needed to activate its plans, but to punish Russia and get its people to rise up against Putin and ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow. Without a cause those sanctions could never have been imposed. The cause was Russia’s invasion.

Regime Change in Moscow

Biden’s speech in Warsaw. (Office of the President/Wikimedia Commons)

Once hidden in studies such as this 2019 RAND study, the desire to overthrow the government in Moscow is now out in the open.

One of the earliest threats came from Carl Gersham, the long-time director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Gershman, wrote in 2013, before the Kiev coup: “Ukraine is the biggest prize.” If it could be pulled away from Russia and into the West, then “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post in 1999 that the NED could now practice regime change out in the open, rather than covertly as the C.I.A. had done.

The RAND Corporation on March 18 then published an article titled, “If Regime Change Should Come to Moscow,” the U.S. should be ready for it. Michael McFaul, the hawkish former U.S. ambassador to Russia, has been calling for regime change in Russia for some time.  He tried to finesse Biden’s words by tweeting:

On March 1, Boris Johnson’s spokesperson said the sanctions on Russia “we are introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.” No. 10 tried to walk that back but two days earlier James Heappey, minister for the armed forces, wrote in The Daily Telegraph:

“His failure must be complete; Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored, and the Russian people empowered to see how little he cares for them. In showing them that, Putin’s days as President will surely be numbered and so too will those of the kleptocratic elite that surround him. He’ll lose power and he won’t get to choose his successor.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union and throughout the 1990s Wall Street and the U.S. government dominated Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, asset-stripping former state-owned industries and impoverishing the Russian people.  Putin came to power on New Year’s Eve 1999 and starting restoring Russia’s sovereignty. His 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, in which he blasted Washington’s aggressive unilateralism, alarmed the U.S., which clearly wants a Yeltsin-like figure to return.   The 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Kiev was a first step. Russiagate was another.

Back in 2017, Consortium News saw Russiagate as a prelude to regime change in Moscow. That year I wrote:

“The Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There is substance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for ‘regime change’ in the Kremlin.

Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000 NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as foreign agents.”

The Invasion Was Necessary

The United States could have easily prevented Russia’s military action. It could have stopped Russia’s intervention in Ukraine’s civil war from happening by doing three things:  forcing implementation of the 8-year old Minsk peace accords, dissolving extreme right Ukrainian militias and engaging Russia in serious negotiations about a new security architecture in Europe.

But it didn’t.

The U.S. can still end this war through serious diplomacy with Russia. But it won’t. Blinken has refused to speak with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Instead, Biden announced on March 16 another $800 million in military aid for Ukraine on the same day it was revealed Russia and Ukraine have been working on a 15-point peace plan. It has never been clearer that the U.S. wanted this war and wants it to continue.

NATO troops and missiles in Eastern Europe were evidently so vital to U.S. plans that it would not discuss removing them to stop Russia’s troops from crossing into Ukraine. Russia had threatened a “technical/military” response if NATO and the U.S. did not take seriously Russia’s security interests, presented in December in the form of treaty proposals.

The U.S. knew what would happen if it rejected those proposals calling for Ukraine not to join NATO, for missiles in Poland and Romania to be removed and NATO troops in Eastern Europe withdrawn. That’s why it started screaming about an invasion in December. The U.S. refused to move the missiles and provocatively sent even more NATO forces to Eastern Europe.

MSNBC ran an article on March 4, titled, “Russia’s Ukraine invasion may have been preventable: The U.S. refused to reconsider Ukraine’s NATO status as Putin threatened war. Experts say that was a huge mistake.” The article said:

“The abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent.”

Senator Joe Biden knew as far back as 1997 that NATO expansion, which he supported, could eventually lead to a hostile Russian reaction.

The Excised Background to the Invasion 

It is vital to recall the events of 2014 in Ukraine and what has followed until now because it is routinely whitewashed from Western media coverage. Without that context, it is impossible to understand what is happening in Ukraine.

Both Donetsk and Lugansk had voted for independence from Ukraine in 2014 after a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych.  The new, U.S.-installed Ukrainian government then launched a war against the provinces to crush their resistance to the coup and their bid for independence, a war that is still going on eight years later at the cost of thousands of lives with U.S. support. It is this war that Russia has entered.

Neo-Nazi groups, such as Right Sector and the Azov Battalion, who revere the World War II Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, took part in the coup as well as in the ongoing violence against Lugansk and Donetsk.

Despite reporting in the BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN on the neo-Nazis at the time, their role in the story is now excised by Western media, reducing Putin to a madman hellbent on conquest without reason. As though he woke up one morning and looked at a map to decide what country he would invade next.

The public has been induced to embrace the Western narrative, while being kept in the dark about Washington’s ulterior motives.

The Traps Set for Russia

Six weeks ago, on Feb. 4, I wrote an article, “What a US Trap for Russia in Ukraine Might Look Like,” in which I laid out a scenario in which Ukraine would begin an offensive against ethnic Russian civilians in Donbass, forcing Russia to decide whether to abandon them or to intervene to save them.

If Russia intervened with regular army units, I argued, this would be the “Invasion!” the U.S. needed to attack Russia’s economy, turn the world against Moscow and end Putin’s rule.

In the third week of February, Ukrainian government shelling of Donbass dramatically increased, according to the OSCE, with what appeared to be the new offensive.  Russia was forced to make its decision.

It first recognized the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, a move it put off for eight years. And then on Feb. 24 President Vladimir Putin announced a military operation in Ukraine to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country.

Russia stepped into a trap, which grows more perilous by the day as Russia’s military intervention continues with a second trap in sight.  From Moscow’s perspective, the stakes were too high not to intervene. And if it can induce Kiev to accept a settlement, it might escape the clutches of the United States.

A Planned Insurgency 

Biden and Brzezinski (Collage Cathy Vogan/Photos SEIU Walk a Day in My Shoes 2008/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain/Picryl)

The examples of previous U.S. traps that I gave in the Feb. 4 piece were the U.S. telling Saddam Hussein in 1990 that it would not interfere in its dispute with Kuwait, opening the trap to Iraq’s invasion, allowing the U.S. to destroy Baghdad’s military. The second example is most relevant.

In a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the C.I.A. set a trap four decades ago for Moscow by arming mujahiddin to fight the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan and bring down the Soviet government, much as the U.S. wants today to bring down Putin.  He said:

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. 

He then explained that the reason for the trap was to bring down the Soviet Union. Brzezinski said:

“That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’  Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”

Brzezinski said he had no regrets that financing the mujahideen spawned terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?,” he asked.  The U.S. today is likewise gambling with the world economy and further instability in Europe with its tolerance of neo-Nazism in Ukraine.

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski wrote:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

Thus U.S. “primacy,” or world dominance, which still drives Washington, is not possible without control of Eurasia, as Brzezinski argued, and that’s not possible without control of Ukraine by pushing Russia out (U.S. takeover of Ukraine in the 2014 coup) and controlling the governments in Moscow and Beijing. What Brzezinski and U.S. leaders still view as Russia’s “imperial ambitions” are in Moscow seen as imperative defensive measures against an aggressive West.

Without the Russian invasion the second trap the U.S. is planning would not be possible: an insurgency meant to bog Russia down and give it its “Vietnam.” Europe and the U.S. are flooding more arms into Ukraine, and Kiev has called for volunteer fighters. The way jihadists flocked to Afghanistan, white supremacists from around Europe are traveling to Ukraine to become insurgents.

Just as the Afghanistan insurgency helped bring down the Soviet Union, the insurgency is meant to topple Putin’s Russia.

An article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency” was published Feb. 25, just one day after Russia’s intervention, indicating advanced planning that was dependent on an invasion. The article had to be written and edited before Russia crossed into Ukraine and was published as soon as it did. It said:

“If Russia limits its offensive to the east and south of Ukraine, a sovereign Ukrainian government will not stop fighting. It will enjoy reliable military and economic support from abroad and the backing of a united population. But if Russia pushes on to occupy much of the country and install a Kremlin-appointed puppet regime in Kyiv, a more protracted and thorny conflagration will begin. Putin will face a long, bloody insurgency that could spread across multiple borders, perhaps even reaching into Belarus to challenge Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Putin’s stalwart ally. Widening unrest could destabilize other countries in Russia’s orbit, such as Kazakhstan, and even spill into Russia itself. When conflicts begin, unpredictable and unimaginable outcomes can become all too real. Putin may not be prepared for the insurgency—or insurgencies—to come.

WINNER’S REMORSE

Many a great power has waged war against a weaker one, only to get bogged down as a result of its failure to have a well-considered end game. This lack of foresight has been especially palpable in troubled occupations. It was one thing for the United States to invade Vietnam in 1965, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003; likewise for the Soviet Union to enter Afghanistan in 1979. It was an altogether more difficult task to persevere in those countries in the face of stubborn insurgencies. … As the United States learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan, an insurgency that has reliable supply lines, ample reserves of fighters, and sanctuary over the border can sustain itself indefinitely, sap an occupying army’s will to fight, and exhaust political support for the occupation at home.’”

As far back as Jan. 14, Yahoo! News reported:

“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.

The CIA-trained forces could soon play a critical role on Ukraine’s eastern border, where Russian troops have massed in what many fear is preparation for an invasion. …

The program has involved ‘very specific training on skills that would enhance’ the Ukrainians’ ‘ability to push back against the Russians,’ said the former senior intelligence official.

The training, which has included ‘tactical stuff,’ is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,’ said the former official.

One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. ‘The United States is training an insurgency,’ said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how ‘to kill Russians.’”

In his Warsaw speech, Biden tipped his hand about an insurgency to come. He said nothing about peace talks. Instead he said: “In this battle, we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days or months either. We need to steel ourselves of a long fight ahead.”

Hillary Clinton laid it all out on Feb. 28, just four days into Russia’s operation. She brought up the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, saying “it didn’t end well for Russia” and that in Ukraine “this is the model that people are looking at … that can stymie Russia.”

What neither Maddow nor Clinton mentioned when discussing volunteers going to fight for Ukraine is what The New York Times reported on Feb. 25, a day after the invasion, and before their interview: “Far-right militias in Europe plan to confront Russian forces.”

The Economic War

Along with the quagmire, are the raft of profound economic sanctions on Russia designed to collapse its economy and drive Putin from power.

These are the harshest sanctions the U.S. and Europe have ever imposed on any nation. Sanctions against Russia’s Central Bank sanctions are the most serious, as they were intended to destroy the value of the ruble.  One U.S. dollar was worth 85 rubles on Feb. 24, the day of the invasion and soared to 154 per dollar on March 7.  However the Russian currency strengthened to 101 on Friday.

Putin and other Russian leaders were personally sanctioned, as were Russia’s largest banks. Most Russian transactions are no longer allowed to be settled through the SWIFT international payment system. The German-Russia Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was closed down and become bankrupt.

The U.S. blocked imports of Russian oil, which was about 5 percent of U.S. supply. BP and Shell pulled out of Russian partnerships. European and U.S. airspace for Russian commercial liners was closed. Europe, which depends on Russia gas, is still importing it, and is so far rebuffing U.S. pressure to stop buying Russian oil.

A raft of voluntary sanctions followed: PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and McDonalds have been shut down in Russia. Coca-cola will stop sales to the country. U.S. news organizations have left, Russian artists in the West have been fired and even Russian cats are banned.

It also gave an opportunity for U.S. cable providers to get RT America shut down.  Other Russia media has been de-platformed and Russian government websites hacked. A Yale University professor has drawn up a list to shame U.S. companies that are still operating in Russia.

Russian exports of wheat and fertilizer have been banned, driving the price of food in the West.  Biden admitted as much on Thursday:

“With regard to food shortage … it’s going to be real.  The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia, it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.  And — because both Russia and Ukraine have been the breadbasket of Europe in terms of wheat, for example — just to give you one example.”

The aim is clear: “asphyxiating Russia’s economy”, as French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian put it, even if it damages the West.

The question is whether Russia can extricate itself from the U.S. strategy of insurgency and economic war.

consortiumnews.com

]]> Charade Buster… Biden Goes Off Script With Regime-Change Admission on Russia https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/28/charade-buster-biden-goes-off-script-with-regime-change-admission-on-russia/ Mon, 28 Mar 2022 19:34:27 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=799944 After Biden’s charade-busting admission it will be difficult politically to maintain US-European “unity” over such a flagrant imperial agenda.

U.S. President Joe Biden came to Europe last week riding high on European deference towards America’s leadership. Then he went to Warsaw to make a victory lap speech at the weekend which was billed as marking the high point in galvanizing European and NATO unity towards Russia.

But the climax cratered like a house of cards. As the president was boarding Air Force One to take him home, the much-vaunted transatlantic unity was in disarray from Biden’s cack-handed big moment.

It reminds one of former President Barack Obama’s cautionary words in appraising Biden. “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” said Obama of his former vice president and his gaffe-prone big mouth.

Biden’s speech in Warsaw was a carefully crafted rousing one. It was of course littered with mangled words as is Biden’s rambling style, and laden with the usual banal American arrogance about leading the free world against evil dictators. Nevertheless, he also appeared to succeed in rallying the unity of the U.S. and its allies in facing down alleged Russian aggression. That unity certainly seemed remarkable with regard to NATO’s and the European Union’s response to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. The Europeans have ratcheted up economic sanctions against Russia at the behest of Washington; they are buying up U.S. weapons and set to import American energy instead of Russian.

It was all going swimmingly well until the very end of the speech when Biden suddenly went off script and, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, declared: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

There it is. Regime change, according to Biden. European allies have recoiled in embarrassment over the clumsy admission. Britain, France, Germany and the European Union have all said they repudiate the objective. The distancing from Washington is not so much out of principle but rather out of the bad political look.

After weeks of an intense Western media campaign projecting the policy as supposedly defending Ukraine (and European democracy), the U.S. president was letting it be known that the real endgame is regime change in Moscow.

Just like the Biden order to pull out from Afghanistan last year, the European leaders are left looking like bystanders at a bus stop. Washington calls the shots without even the pretense of consulting its vassals.

At the end of a European tour deemed up to that point to be a stunning success for the American president owing to the fawning deference he was shown days before, and just at the very end of a set-piece address choreographed for the history books, Joe Biden blew it.

The White House immediately swung into damage-limitation mode, urgently clarifying that the president did not actually mean regime change. Biden himself denied that he was referring to regime change when he got back to the U.S. But even sycophantic news outlets admitted the difficulty in trying to spin any other literal meaning.

Biden’s knack for putting his foot in his mouth has been around for a long time during 50 years as a politician. It can’t be simply explained as a sign of senility although the recent frequency of gaffes suggests his mental acuity is waning with his 79-year-old age. During his first year-and-half as 46th president, administration aides have countless times had to clean up sloppy remarks. In one notorious clanger, he appeared to repudiate Washington’s decades-old One China Policy, saying the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion from the mainland.

The laugh is Biden touts himself as a “foreign policy expert” from his many years as a Senator and roving ambassador before he entered the White House, first as vice president under Obama and now as the president.

If this is American expertise, then what does incompetence look like? At a time of extremely sensitive U.S.-Russian relations, Biden has called Putin “a killer” and “war criminal”. On the weekend before his regime-change manifesto was announced, he labeled the Russian president a “butcher” and compared the Kremlin with the Third Reich.

The hypocrisy of Biden is bad enough. He has endorsed endless criminal U.S. wars and regime-change operations that have resulted in millions of deaths and whole nations destroyed. For Biden to call anyone a war criminal and butcher is too nauseating for irony.

But it is contemptible that the Ukraine conflict is reduced by Biden to simplistic caricatures in total denial of how the U.S.-led NATO alliance has largely created the confrontation with Russia.

Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among the damage-limitation squad over the weekend’s incendiary remarks. Blinken had the temerity to say: “We don’t have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else.” That’s from Blinken who helped engineer the regime-change wars in Libya and Syria while Biden was vice president.

The Ukraine conflict is only a part of a bigger picture of U.S. hostility towards Russia. Washington and its European minions have tried to portray NATO’s eastward expansion over the years as an innocent development of a defensive nature.

Moscow has repeatedly denounced NATO’s stance as aggressive and an existential threat to Russian national security. When the Kremlin proposed a security treaty at the end of last year, it was rebuffed by Washington and NATO. That inevitably led to the war in Ukraine as a defensive counter-measure by Russia.

Biden just ripped off the wrapping on the policy. In one fell swoop, he just proved what Russia has been saying. His admission of regime change against Russia is an admission of violating the UN Charter and international law. The European leaders are aghast not because they are against such criminality. Their concern is that they too are exposed as being complicit in a criminal conspiracy. They fear how their public will react to that imperial agenda. Is this what economic sanctions and resulting energy price inflation are for?

Good old Joe, screwing it up – again. Just when Uncle Sam had the Europeans corralled under supposed American leadership, the imperial agenda blows up in their face.

This also explains why the Zelensky regime in Kiev is procrastinating and avoiding political settlement of the conflict. Settlement is not in Washington’s interest. It wants the proxy war to continue because the real aim is to use Ukraine as a cat’s paw to destabilize Russia. Zelensky and Kiev can’t make the peace because that’s not what their handlers in Washington are after. Washington wants and needs permanent tensions and conflict (short of all-out war) with Russia.

After Biden’s charade-busting admission, however, it will be difficult politically to maintain US-European “unity” over such a flagrant imperial agenda.

]]> How Not to Explain the Ukraine Crisis https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/12/24/how-not-to-explain-the-ukraine-crisis/ Fri, 24 Dec 2021 19:13:49 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=772212

The PBS NewsHour invited on just about the worst person in the U.S. government to help Americans understand the crisis in Ukraine, writes Mike Madden.

By Mike MADDEN

U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who choreographed the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected government and set the current crisis in motion, was invited by PBS NewsHour on Dec. 7 to explain the standoff in Ukraine.

Typical of Western media, the story began with Russia’s involvement in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, which took place in March 2014. The crisis actually began a week earlier with the violent overthrow of democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014. While accusations flew of Russian aggression, invasion and annexation, there was not a word about the U.S. instigated coup or Nuland’s role in it.

For the sin of declining a Western aid package loaded with austerity measures, and accepting instead an unencumbered Russian package, Yanukovych became a target for U.S. regime change. Undersecretary Nuland’s role in the coup is essential to the story.

John McCain addressing crowd in Kiev, Dec. 15, 2013. (U.S. Senate/Office of Chris Murphy/Wikimedia Commons)

While Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy appeared on-stage in Kiev with far-right opposition leader Oleh Tyahnybok in support of the coup, Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt passed out cookies to anti-government protesters in Maidan Square. This would be like Russian parliamentarians and diplomats coming to Washington to encourage protesters to overthrow the U.S. government.

Behind the scenes, in an intercepted phone call with Pyatt, Nuland can be heard plotting the make-up of a government to succeed that of Yanukovych. “Yats is the guy” she said, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, America’s preferred leader for the Ukrainian people.

Her plan for the other two opposition leaders, Vitali Klitschko and Oleh Tyahnybok, was to keep them out, saying “I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government” and “What he [Yatsenyuk] needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside.” As for Europe’s competing interests in the outcome of the affair, she infamously said “Fuck the EU.”

Nuland had told the U.S.-Ukrainian Foundation on Dec. 13, 2013, that Washington had spent $5 billion over a decade to support Ukraine’s “European aspirations,” in other words to pull it away from Russia.

To Nick Schifrin, the dutiful PBS reporter interviewing her, this episode was either not relevant, or an impolitic intrusion upon his esteemed guest. Or he was woefully uninformed.

While the United States was issuing stern warnings of restraint to Yanukovych, neo-Nazi tip-of-the-spear insurrectionists were stockpiling clubs, guns and Molotov cocktails in Maidan Square. With violence rapidly escalating, a deal was brokered between the government and the opposition on Feb. 21, 2014. Yanukovych agreed to immediate power sharing and early elections. In exchange, the opposition agreed to de-escalate the situation on the streets.

The opposition did not disarm as agreed. Smelling blood in the water, they went on the offensive again the next day. They overran security forces and ransacked government buildings. Snipers in opposition-occupied buildings shot police and protesters alike. Ultimately, over 100 people died, including more than a dozen police. Yanukovych and many of his Party of Regions allies fled for their lives. Ukraine’s democratically elected government fell on Feb. 22.

U.S.-backed, violent coup in Ukraine, 2014. (Wikipedia)

Neither Nuland nor Schifrin acknowledged this date, or any of the described events as contributing to the current crisis. It all fell outside their timeline.

“Yats” was sworn in as prime minister on Feb. 27, 2014. The U.S. now had its government in place. As violent as the coup had been, the real bloodbath was about to begin.

The Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, populated by a large number of ethnic Russians, did not recognize the coup government, whose first act was to outlaw the public use of the Russian language (which it later reversed). The Donbass immediately sought autonomy from Kiev. It saw the U.S.-installed regime as illegitimate and hostile to its interests and culture. In essence, it was defending a democratic election.

In April 2014, the Kiev regime launched “anti-terrorist” military operations against the breakaway provinces. Worse yet, it turned a blind eye to the real terrorists, neo-Nazi paramilitary squads like the Azov Battalion, that moved into the region. A bloody civil war was now underway, instigated by Kiev’s willingness to kill its own people in the Donbass. To date, the war has claimed 14,000 lives.

‘Invasion’

NATO and U.S. officials said regular units of the Russian military crossed a few kilometers into Ukrainian territory on August 2014, which Russia denied, when the separatist forces had been pushed eastward toward the Russian border and hundreds of civilians had been killed. On Aug. 25, 2014, 10 Russian paratroopers were captured 20 km inside the Ukrainian border.

Nuland called this “Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.” The incursion would be more properly characterized as Russia exercising the liberal interventionists’ favorite Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

As happened in Georgia in 2008, a government militarily attacked its own people and Russia intervened to drive the military forces back and protect the local population. In that 2008 case, a European Union investigation determined that Georgia, not Russia, was the aggressor.

The U.S. had also claimed that Russia “invaded” Crimea in March 2014, when Russia already had troops stationed there under an agreement with Ukraine.  “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text,” said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted in the Senate for what a real invasion looks like: the 2003 U.S. unprovoked attack on Iraq — on a completely trumped-up pretext.

July 7, 2016: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, beside Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv, following a bilateral meeting and news conference. (State Department)

Now there is incessant talk about another Russian invasion, though there was no word when the first one ended. Schifrin told PBS viewers that Russian military drills and a troop build-up today within in its own borders, signals that Russia is “ready for escalation,” though it is questionable how many troops there are where they are based.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s vow to send more U.S. troops to NATO’s eastern allies; NATO exercises near Russia’s borders and the supply of $450 million in weaponry to Ukraine are presented as the proper order of things: neither threatening, aggressive nor escalatory.

Two key demands by Russian President Vladimir Putin, namely, that Ukraine never host U.S. missiles or join NATO, were dismissed by Nuland saying, “Those are decisions for Ukraine to make and for NATO to make, not for the Kremlin to make.”

Schifrin could have reminded Nuland that the United States promised Russia in 1991 that NATO would not expand east of the newly reunified East and West Germany, but he didn’t. He also could have asked her if stationing missiles on the island of Cuba in 1962 was a sovereign decision to be made by Cuba and the Soviet Union, but he did not.

By excising her outsized role, PBS allowed Nuland to blame the entire crisis today on Russia.

It is clearly not the job of establishment media to challenge powerful government figures in any meaningful way. Its job is to build enmity in its audience toward official state adversaries and to cast government actions in the best possible light. PBS NewsHour has demonstrated that it is very good at its job, indeed.

consortiumnews.com

]]> Crusader Victoria Nuland Visited the Camp of the Heretics Leaving With a Clean Sword https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/11/02/crusader-nuland-visited-camp-of-heretics-leaving-with-clean-sword/ Tue, 02 Nov 2021 18:00:17 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=760852 The United States consciously sent someone who is a living embodiment of Russophobic Soft Power to Moscow to somehow “improve” relations, Tim Kirby writes.

“This time, it’s going to happen, they’ve amassed their forces like never before, if Biden wins they’re going to launch the big attack.” These apocalyptic words were uttered to me (in Russian) on the eve of the last presidential elections in the United States. The Russian Media both mainstream and alternative were sure that with the rise of Biden “it would finally happen”. “It” being a major offensive by Kiev’s forces backed either covertly or overtly by NATO. All of the “insider” types I know in the Donbass were willing to bet everything they had that an invasion was imminent. After all, it is the Democrats who have a visceral instinctive hatred of the Russians, whereas only half of the Republicans are just passively stuck in Cold War mode. But none of these dire prophecies came to pass with the “victory” of Biden over #45. The signal never came, Kiev never sent their men in, and WWIII (or a soul crushing defeat for the Russians if they were to blink and not respond) was avoided. It is in this most recent context and Biden’s bafflingly Trump-like foreign policy that we should look at the big visit of Victoria Nuland to Moscow.

The real big issue that never gets discussed in the Western-centric Mainstream Media is that Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland is a baffling choice to send to Moscow if the desired goal is to make better relations with the Russians. The U.S. government is huge, and even within America, let alone Russia, only a handful of political figures stand out enough in any particular way to give themselves serious notoriety. Meaning there are loads of seemingly anonymous human-suits that could have been sent to Moscow, or some “B-listers” that don’t particularly resonate with Russia in a negative way. But instead, they chose to pick Nuland, who although qualified and occupies a position that would justify such an assignment, is a symbol of the “evils” of the U.S. State Department within Russia’s sphere of influence.

Image: Nuland earning her infamy among Russian speakers.

Although many American and EU politicans flew out to show their support for the Liberal Neo-Nazi Maidan freakshow, it was Nuland with her symbolic cookies, that she passed out to protestors, that has granted her infamy within Russia for multiple generations. In both Russia and the West she also became notable for the “F#&! the EU” phone call in which she blatantly worked out the future political structure of the now fully colonized Ukraine.

Meaning, the United States consciously sent someone who is a living embodiment of Russophobic Soft Power to Moscow to somehow “improve” relations. Nuland represents the greatest failure of post-Communist Russia (losing the Ukraine without a shot being fired) and the depths the State Department is willing to go (promoting Neo-Nazis, Apartheid, and the murder of Russian speakers) to get the job done. This would be like sending Bill Clinton to negotiate in Serbia. In fact, in order to allow this meeting to happen, Nuland had to be removed off of Russia’s sanctions blacklist  to enter the country.

Could the State Department be that egotistical to not see that Nuland was a dubious choice? Or perhaps they wanted to send a message to Moscow that “we will break you” or something to that effect. In a way I can respect that type of assertion of pure dominance and it is refreshingly honest, but it also means that very little will change.

Image: For Russian speaking people the war in the Donbass is as serious as a heart attack.

Nuland and the Biden regime supposedly do not like the terms of the Minsk Agreement, because they essentially guarantee that there are now two entities on the territory of today’s Ukraine meaning Russia will get some of not a juicy piece of pork fat. However Russia would never back down from this position so there really is no room to negotiate even if they sent some less heinous individual to Russia’s capital.

The Undersecretary of State described her visit and negotiations with the usual meaningless pleasantries that one would expect. She said it was “productive” which in political double-speak means that nothing happened of any consequence. She also called it “frank” meaning that the Russians actually stuck to their guns about their view of events and said things she did not like.

The overall purpose of such a trip that could only have a negative impact due to Nuland’s reputation is again baffling. In the past the U.S. has employed the tactic of “offering an olive branch” to the other side only to then go forward and stab them in the back. Hillary Clinton’s big red “reset button” is a perfect example of this – publicly talk peace while preparing for war so they look open minded and on the side of what is right. This rotten olive branch strategy is not the case this time, the motivation is something other. There are few possible reasons:

  1. Although the Ukraine is vastly cheaper than Afghanistan, perhaps holding European Zimbabwe above water is getting too tedious and pricey. The global grind down of the post Cold War American Empire seems to be happening and the hegemon has to tighten his belt. The Ukraine being on the periphery of U.S. interests and of vital importance to Russia may mean that it is on the chopping block for geopolitical reasons – too far, too Eastern, too corrupt, too expensive, too hazardous.
  2. The Russian-speaking parts of the Ukraine’s territory would be a massive bargaining chip to get Moscow to sign off on pretty much anything. Perhaps sending this living symbol of the victory at the Maidan was used to sell the Russians on some sort of idea, the payment for which would be getting their lost territory back. What the Holy Land means for Israelis and Palestinians is what the Ukraine means for Russians.
  3. Biden has jumped on Trump’s ego train and wants to quietly keep all scandals linking him and his son to Ukraine out of the spotlight. Some think that Kiev now puts a rotten taste in Biden’s mouth that he wants to wash out.
  4. This was all just pure routine for Washington using the old Russian logic of “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us”. This is just an example of a very low effort autopilot rotten olive branch tactic described above. Sometimes negotiating can happen just to click a bureaucratic check box.

The actual meaning of these meetings will surely reveal itself in the next few months, but the key issue is that getting Biden into the White House, by hook or by crook, did not plant the seed for Armageddon in Ukraine. This was already evident during his first 100 days. And although nothing massive was put on the table by Nuland it would seem that passionate support for Kiev is not going to be a part of the next 4 years. It looks like we are most likely to see more messy and resultless negotiation rooted in the Minsk agreement’s terms over the next few years.

]]> The Strategy Session. Episode 36 https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/10/29/the-strategy-session-episode-36/ Fri, 29 Oct 2021 16:24:07 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=759587

]]> The U.S. Has Placed Itself in Charge Over Which Nations Get to Eat https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/10/18/us-has-placed-itself-in-charge-over-which-nations-get-eat/ Mon, 18 Oct 2021 15:47:26 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=758250 By Caitlin JOHNSTONE

The globally influential propaganda multiplier news agencies AP and AFP have both informed their readers that a “fugitive” has been extradited to the United States.

“Fugitive businessman close to Venezuela’s Maduro extradited to US,” reads the AFP headline.

“Alex Saab, a top fugitive close to Venezuela’s socialist government, has been put on a plane to the U.S. to face money laundering charges,” AP announced on Twitter.

You’d be forgiven for wondering what specifically makes this man a “fugitive”, and what that status has to do with his extradition to a foreign government whose laws should have no bearing on his life. The Colombian-born Venezuelan citizen Alex Saab, as it happens, is a “fugitive” from the US government’s self-appointed authority to decide which populations on our planet are permitted to have ready access to food. His crime is working to circumvent the crushing US sanctions which have been starving Venezuelan civilians to death by the tens of thousands.

Saab is being extradited from the African nation of Cabo Verde where he has been imprisoned since last year under pressure from the US government. In an article published this past May titled “Alex Saab v. The Empire: How the US Is Using Lawfare To Punish a Venezuelan Diplomat”, Roger D Harris explains how the US uses its domination of the international financial system to crush nations which disobey it and outlines the real reasons for Saab’s imprisonment, which has included torture and draconian living conditions. Harris writes:

Special Envoy and Ambassador to the African Union for Venezuela Alex Saab was on a humanitarian mission flying from Caracas to Iran to procure food and gasoline for the Venezuelan CLAP food assistance program. Saab was detained on a refueling stop in the African nation of Cabo Verde and has been held in custody ever since June 12, 2020.

Saab’s “crime” — according to the U.S. government, which ordered the imprisonment — was money laundering. That is, Saab conducted perfectly legal international trade. Still, his circumventing of the U.S. sanctions — which are designed to prevent relief to the Venezuelans — is considered by Washington to be money laundering.

After a two-year investigation into Saab’s transactions with Swiss banks, the Swiss government concluded on March 25 that there was no money laundering. Saab is being prosecuted because he is serving his country’s interest rather than that of the U.S.

News agencies like AP and AFP are well aware that Saab is being extradited not for breaking any actual law but for daring to transgress Washington’s unilateral sanctions. As FAIR’s Joe Emersberger wrote back in July:

Reuters (3/15/21, 3/18/21) has casually reported that Saab “faces extradition to the United States, which accuses him of violating US sanctions,” and that he has been “repeatedly named by the US State Department as an operator who helps Maduro arrange trade deals that Washington is seeking to block through sanctions.” A Reuters article (8/28/20) about Saab’s case in 2020 mentioned in passing that “the United States this month seized four cargoes of Iranian fuel bound for Venezuela, where fuel shortages are once again worsening.”

Critics of the US empire have had harsh words for the extradition.

“Biden, picking up Trump’s baton, has kidnapped Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab for the crime of trying to feed Venezuelans in defiance of US sanctions designed to prevent that,” tweeted journalist Aaron Maté. “Venezuelans aren’t allowed to eat so long as the D.C. Mafia has marked their government for regime change.”

Yes indeed. The US government has appointed itself the authority to unilaterally decide which of the world’s populations get to eat and which do not, and to imprison anyone who tries to facilitate unauthorized eating in a US-sanctioned nation.

“The extradition of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab is a clear signal the Biden Administration has made no break with Trump’s all out assault on international law,” tweeted journalist Anya Parampil. “Also a worrying sign for the case of Julian Assange — another foreign citizen the US has essentially kidnapped and held hostage.”

This is true. It would seem that the primary difference between Assange’s case and Saab’s is that the US empire is working to extradite Assange because he transgressed its self-appointed authority over the world’s access to information, whereas Saab transgressed its self-appointed authority over the world’s access to food.

“The US rogue state just ripped up every international law, after imprisoning and now extraditing Venezuelan DIPLOMAT Alex Saab. Diplomatic immunity is dead; the US empire killed it. Now all foreign diplomats are fair game to be kidnapped and imprisoned, if Washington wants to,” tweeted journalist Ben Norton, adding, “The US accusations of ‘money laundering’ are absurd and politically motivated. The US claims anyone who violates its ILLEGAL sanctions is a ‘criminal’.”

Indeed, “money laundering” is a vague charge which basically just means trying to conceal the source or destination of money that is deemed to have been obtained illegally, and since the US government considers itself the arbiter of what financial transactions are lawful in nations it is sanctioning, it can apply that claim to anyone who tries to get around US sanctions financially.

The US government does not deny that its sanctions hurt Venezuelans by attacking the economy they rely on to feed themselves, in fact it has openly admitted that “sanctions, particularly on the state oil company in 2019, likely contributed to the steeper decline of the Venezuelan economy.”

The US government also does not deny that the starvation sanctions it has inflicted upon Iran are directed at its civilian population, with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo openly admitting in 2019 that Washington’s economic warfare against that nation is designed to pressure Iranian civilians to “change the government,” i.e. make them so miserable that they wage a domestic uprising to topple Tehran.

The US government also does not deny that the starvation sanctions it has inflicted upon Syria are designed to hurt its civilian population, with current Secretary of State Tony Blinken reaffirming just this past Wednesday that it is the Biden administration’s policy to “oppose the reconstruction of Syria” as long as Assad remains in power. In other words the US will not allow Syria the funds to help rebuild itself from the devastating regime change proxy war the US and its allies waged against it, even as the UN reports that 60 percent of the nation’s population is close to starvation.

And of course there’s the US power alliance’s horrific blockade on Yemen which is murdering people by the hundreds of thousands via starvation and disease, with the UN reporting that a further 16 million people are “marching towards starvation.”

Starvation is the only kind of warfare where, because of the continual reframing of mass media propaganda, it is considered perfectly normal and acceptable to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force.

The US empire is entirely open about the fact that it sees itself as the gatekeeper of the world’s food supply. If a population disobeys the empire its people will starve, and anyone who tries to obtain food for them will be arrested by US proxies and extradited to a US jail cell.

This is the imperialist’s vision of heaven on earth. A world where America’s stranglehold over global financial systems allows it to choke off entire populations if their governments disobey imperial decrees, without even firing a shot. A world where the PR nightmares of bombed civilians and destroyed nations are a thing of the past, where disobedient nations can simply be squeezed to death by modern siege warfare tactics while imperial propaganda firms like AP and AFP blame their starvation on their nation’s leaders.

That’s ultimate power right there. That’s total control. Having the world so bent to the will of the almighty dollar and the massive military force with which it is inextricably intertwined to such an extent that disobedience becomes impossible. That’s what’s being fought for in the slow motion third world war that the empire is waging against unabsorbed governments like Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia and China. And that’s why those unabsorbed governments are fast at work moving away from the dollar in response.

It should really go without saying, but a power structure that would openly starve civilians to death to ensure global domination is not the sort of power structure that humanity should want dominating the globe. The willingness to do such monstrous things exposes a depravity and a lack of wisdom which has no business determining what direction our world should take into the future.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

]]> 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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]]> Has the World Been Ignoring an Almost Decade-Long ‘African Spring’? https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/08/28/has-world-been-ignoring-almost-decade-long-african-spring/ Sat, 28 Aug 2021 18:00:05 +0000 https://www.strategic-culture.org/?post_type=article&p=750492 The announcement that Algerian President Bouteflika won’t run for re-election but will instead postpone the upcoming vote until the conclusion of his recently decreed comprehensive constitutional reform process represented the eighth non-electoral regime change in Africa in as many years, making one wonder whether the world has been ignoring an almost decade-long “African Spring” or if something else entirely is going on across the continent.

Inaccurate Assumptions About Algeria

Algerian President Bouteflika’s surprise about-face in going back on his previous decision to run for a fifth consecutive term in office has been the talk of Africa the entire week, with this announcement taking many off guard but nonetheless largely being met with universal applause as the most responsible recourse to avoid an outbreak of violence in this strategically positioned North African state. The country had been experiencing an unprecedented wave of peaceful protests in reaction to his originally declared candidacy fed by the majority-youthful population’s indignation at high unemployment and a stagnant economy, to say nothing of how insulted they felt that an elderly leader who is speculated to be physically and perhaps even mentally incapacitated after suffering a 2013 stroke would be put forth once more as the face of the nation by what are thought to be his powerful military-intelligence “deep state” handlers.

A lot has already been written about what might come next in Algeria, but most observers are either analyzing events in a vacuum or are making predictable comparisons to the 2011 “Arab Spring” theater-wide Color Revolutions, neither of which are entirely accurate because they both miss the fact that Algeria represents the eighth non-electoral regime change in Africa in as many years and is therefore just the latest manifestation of a larger trend that has hitherto not yet been brought to the public’s attention. It’s true that there are shades of the “Arab Spring” in what’s presently taking place in Algeria, but simply stopping there doesn’t do the country justice because it misleadingly implies that foreign powers had a predominant hand in guiding the course of events there. It also overlooks everything else of regime change relevance that took place in the continent over the past eight years and therefore inaccurately assumes that this is a one-off event unrelated to anything prior.

Rolling Regime Changes

For simplicity’s sake, here’s a breakdown of the most pertinent events apart from the Algerian one that was just described, including the two non-electoral regime change attempts that failed, two electoral ones that deserve mention for reasons that will be explained below, and a short international intervention in support of a mostly forgotten regime change operation:

* 2011-2012 “Arab Spring” Events In Tunisia, Egypt, And Libya:

The whole world is aware of what happened during that time so there isn’t much need to rehash it other than to point out the author’s interpretation of those events as an externally provoked theater-wide regime change campaign that was originally intended to replace long-serving secular governments with Turkish-aligned Muslim Brotherhood ones prior to the inevitable leadership transition that would eventually take place after their elderly leaders pass away.

The whole point in preempting this process and artificially accelerating it was to ensure that their successors would remain geopolitically loyal to the US, which couldn’t be guaranteed if this “changing of the guard” was “allowed” to occur “naturally”. Moreover, the US thought that it could weaponize the semi-populist appeal of political Islam in those countries in order to portray its proxies as having the “genuine” support of the public. This nevertheless backfired in Egypt but was ultimately manageable.

* 2014 Burkina Faso:

The sudden onset of progressively violent protests in response to long-serving President Blaise Compaoré’s attempts to change the constitution to run for yet another term quickly resulted in a regime change that was briefly challenged a year later by loyalist special forces in a failed coup. Some observers predicted that the “Burkinabe Revolution” would trigger an “African Spring” against other rulers who had been in office for decades and also were speculated to soon announce their intent to follow in Compaoré’s footsteps and change their own constitutions as well, though this forecast didn’t unfold as expected.

Still, the 2014 Burkina Faso regime change could in hindsight be seen as evidence that genuine (as in, not externally provoked, guided, and/or hijacked) protests are capable of unseating entrenched governments and the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucratic structures (“deep state”) behind them. It should also be noted that the international community recognized Compaoré’s resignation and subsequent decision to go into self-imposed exile (thought to be motivated by his desire to evade justice for his alleged corruption and other crimes by the post-coup authorities) whereas they were against the military coup attempt by his loyalists a year later.

* 2017 The Gambia:

Most of the world has forgotten about it and barely anyone paid much attention to it at the time anyhow, but a Senegalese-led ECOWAS military intervention toppled Gambian President Jammeh at the beginning of the year after he refused to step down from office following his electoral loss a month prior in December 2016. The leader of this tiny sliver of an African state was also becoming internationally reviled by the West even before the 2016 election because of his decision to withdraw from the Commonwealth of Nations and begin the process of doing the same when it came to the International Criminal Court. In addition, his 2015 declaration of an Islamic Republic also earned him the West’s consternation, not that they needed any other excuses given the aforementioned.

The Gambian case study somewhat mirrors the controversial French-led UN intervention that took place in the Ivory Coast in 2011 following a similarly disputed election a few months prior, though the Ivorian leader wasn’t as lucky as his Gambian counterpart in that he was captured by French-backed forces and extradited to The Hague, where he was charged with war crimes but eventually acquitted earlier this year. The lesson to be had from both the Ivory Coast and The Gambia is that international coalitions can be assembled to remove recalcitrant leaders from office who refuse to accept electoral results, though this is less of a “rule” and more of a trend, though one that might gain support at home and/or abroad if it follows highly publicized protests that give the intervention the pretense of legitimacy (whether genuine or not).

* 2017 Angola:

This rising power in Southern Africa experienced a democratic transfer of power that summer from revolutionary leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos to fellow MPLA member and designated successor João Lourenço in what was initially thought by many to be a carefully coordinated “shuffling of the cards” by the Angolan “deep state” but which eventually proved to be a “deep state” coup after Lourenço quickly went to work eradicating the power structure that his predecessor implemented and even going after the former “royal family” (in particular, his daughter [who’s also Africa’s richest woman and its first female billionaire] and son on corruption charges). Suffice to say, this was a shock for many, though generally a pleasant one for most.

The abovementioned events prove that sometimes the “deep state” is the most influential force driving regime change in certain countries, namely those with post-war revolutionary parties that still remain in power. It’ll turn out that Angola might have been an inspiration for what later took place in Ethiopia and just occurred in Algeria, albeit with both unfolding under slightly different circumstances and in varying ways, but the point is that the so-called “powers that be” might either be engaged in serious infighting among themselves and/or decide that the most responsible course of action in the name of national stability is either “shuffle the cards” or carry out a genuine regime change behind the scenes to preemptively or reactively quell (potentially) destabilizing (anti-corruption-driven or election-related) unrest.

* 2017 Zimbabwe:

The tail end of 2017 saw the Zimbabwean military carry out a de-facto coup against nonagenarian revolutionary leader Robert Mugabe during a period of rising civil society unrest in this economically destitute country. Barely anyone disputes that this was indeed a military coup, and one that was possibly partially inspired by Mugabe’s controversial grooming of his wife as his successor at the expense of the ZANU-PF political and military elite, but it wasn’t legally recognized as such abroad because otherwise the African Union and other actors would have been compelled to impose varying degrees of sanctions against the country in response.

This interestingly shows that some military coups are supported by the so-called “international community” while others such as the soon-to-be-described Gabonese attempt earlier this year aren’t, suggesting  that there might be certain criteria involved in determining whether such seizures of power (or attempts thereof) will be (even begrudgingly) accepted abroad or not. The 2005 and 2008 Mauritanian military ones and the 2010 Nigerien one weren’t endorsed by the world but serious actions weren’t taken to isolate them both because they uncontestably succeeded and also out of concern for destabilizing the security situation in the terrorist-afflicted West African region.

* 2018 South Africa:

Jacob Zuma was pressured to resign in early 2018 due to what many have interpreted as being a “deep state” coup against him carried out by a rival faction of the ruling ANC led by his eventual successor Ramaphosa. Party infighting heated up after the BRICS leader found himself ensnared in corruption scandals that may or may not have been tacitly facilitated by his rivals, with all of this occurring against the backdrop of rising anti-government unrest and the increasing appeal of opposition parties. Whether out of the pursuit of pure power and/or sensing that the party needed to change both its external branding and internal policies in order to remain in power, Ramaphosa eventually deposed Zuma and took the reins of this rising African Great Power despite the electorate never voting him into office.

The 2018 situation in South Africa showed that even the most outwardly stable of the continent’s countries and the one most highly regarded by the “international community” (both Western and non-Western alike, the latter in regards to BRICS) can experience a non-electoral regime change, albeit one that was mostly executed behind the scenes following an intertwined pressure campaign by the public and the ruling party’s rival faction that aspired to enter into power. In a sense, South Africa – which is generally considered to be one of Africa’s most vibrant democracies – set the tone for the rest of the continent because the message that it sent was that all of its peers could potentially do the same without any external criticism being levelled against them whatsoever so long as they pulled it off smoothly and labelled it an “internal affair”.

* 2018 Ethiopia:

Ethiopia captivated the world’s imagination after its post-war ruling party decided upon the relatively young 41-year-old former military intelligence officer Abiy Ahmed to be its new leader following the outbreak of violent unrest in 2016 that threatened to return Africa’s second most populous country to civil war. To make a long story short, Abiy is of the Oromo ethnicity that represents the country’s largest plurality but which has traditionally been underrepresented in its ruling class, especially following the rise to power of the Tigray-led EPRDF, but he swiftly got to work dismantling the party’s “old guard” in what can only be described as a “deep state” coup with overwhelming public support. Importantly, he also made peace with neighboring Eritrea and put the two fraternal people’s lingering tensions behind them as they jointly embarked on crafting a new regional future for the Horn of Africa.

Ethiopia set the precedent whereby large-scale unrest might serve as an incentive for responsible factions of the “deep state” to carry out a coup against their ruling rivals, building upon the Angolan antecedent in that the Southern African case didn’t occur in response to any significant protests or outbreak of violence like the one in the Horn of Africa did.  The events in Ethiopia are also evidence that even the most entrenched and militarily powerful “deep states” are comprised of diverse factions, some of which have radically different ideas than the ruling ones, as might turn out to be the case in Algeria too depending on how the situation there unfolds. The main point, however, is that “deep state” factions might use naturally occurring or externally provoked unrest as their pretext for rising to power behind the scenes and ultimately in public.

* 2018 Comoros:

It’s difficult to categorize what exactly took place last year in the island nation, but it can most objectively be summed up as a semi-popular and possibly externally influenced attempt to actively challenge the country’s regional center by a peripheral unit that felt disenfranchised by democratically instituted constitutional reforms that removed the coup-prone state’s rotating presidency clause. There was briefly fear that Anjouan would attempt to secede from the union once more and that this scenario might provoke another international intervention to restore national unity like what took place in 2008, but these were abated after the military quickly restored law and order after dislodging the couple dozen fighters who attempted to take over that part of the country.

What’s important to pay attention to is that intra-state regional disputes could dangerously create the pretext for nationwide or provincial regime changes depending on how the course of escalating political events develops. The Comorian President in this case is thought to have taken advantage of his home region’s demographic (and consequently, electoral) dominance to legitimize his bid to remain in power, demonstrating a variant of other reform methods that have been attempted elsewhere in Africa but custom-tailored to his country’s specific situation. Even though some members of the international community criticized last summer’s referendum, they still accepted it because his initiative did in fact democratically win, even if the odds were stacked in his favor per the demographic factor that was just described.

* 2018-2019 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC):

There was global trepidation for the past year after former President Kabila delayed his country’s first-ever democratic transfer of power for logistical reasons that he would try to change the constitution to remain in power indefinitely, something that his traditional Western  backers pressured him not to do while his new Chinese patron remained silent about on the basis that its political process is an internal affair (though its strategic cobalt interests there might have played a role in its position to stay on the good side of the government). The country gradually slid into an undeclared state of low-level civil war that could more accurately be described as a hybrid one and which could have exploded on command into a much larger conflict had he not unexpectedly reached a speculated deal with one of the opposition leaders to supposedly allow Tshisekedi to replace Kabila while the former strongman would remain the “grey cardinal” after his party came out on top in the parliamentary elections.

International media and local activists decried this stunt as a blatant undermining of what should have been a democratic transfer of power that some observers said would have rightly resulted in Fayulu winning had the vote truly been free and fair, but that candidate posed the greatest threat to the Congolese “deep state” that owes its lucrative existence to Kabila and was – as the narrative goes – sidelined in favor of Tshsekedi, the son of a well-known opposition leader. This can be seen as a hybrid form of both an “internationally recognized” election and a “deep state” coup, the former of which was universally recognized probably because of the multilateral interests involved in retaining stability in the mineral-rich country (at least for the time being) while the latter was suppressed in order not to sully the optics of the DRC’s “first-ever democratic transfer of power” (and consequently the soft power of those who endorsed Kabila’s cunning plan).

* 2019 Gabon:

As was touched upon earlier, there was a failed attempt to stage a military coup in the economically stratified and politically polarized country of Gabon where an ageing and ailing leader continues to rule as part of a political dynasty that’s been in power for over half a century. The regime change operation was quickly put down by the rest of the military forces that didn’t join in the coup, though the event succeeded in shedding global light on the underlying tensions prevalent in this OPEC member country. It also temporarily raised concerns about whether the French would use their in-country military forces to aid the embattled government and “restore democracy” if the rebels succeeded in seizing power from their proxy.

Because of its sudden onset and abrupt end, the international community had no choice but to reactively condemn it like they always usually do whenever something of the sort happens, but it might have been begrudgingly accepted just like the Mauritanian and Nigerien ones that preceded it earlier along this timeline if it succeeded without any serious resistance. That wasn’t the case in Gabon because it seemed like the military faction of the “deep state” is satisfied with President Bongo, possibly due to some behind-the-scenes patronage relationship, and therefore wouldn’t want to sacrifice their own self-interests even in the name of settling a still-lingering electoral dispute that sharply divided the nation a few years prior.

Key Variables

In view of the insight that can be gleaned from the abovementioned ten examples, it’s possible to identify the key variables that pertain to each targeted leader, the trigger event for the non-electoral regime change operation, and the determining factors behind its success or lack thereof:

Targets:

The typical target seems to be a long-serving elderly leader with speculative health concerns who represents a power structure (whether his own or inherited) that increasingly large segments of the population and/or a faction of his “deep state” has come to believe (whether on their own or with foreign infowar and NGO “nudging”) doesn’t support their interests. They’re also usually plagued by accusations of corruption (whether real, exaggerated, or false) that serve to incite unrest during periods of nationwide economic hardship caused by either systemic mismanagement, Hybrid War, and/or a drop in the price of primary exports (oil, commodities, etc.).

Triggers:

It’s usually the case that something directly or indirectly related to an impending “changing of the guard” or political transition triggers the non-electoral regime change movement, be it efforts by the incumbent to change the constitution in order to run for another term, declaring their candidacy for the x-consecutive time after already serving for many years, fears by a “deep state” faction that the incumbent will lose the next election and therefore lead to their successor possibly dismantling the power structure they inherit (usually on “anti-corruption” grounds for populist appeal), a disputed election, or in the case of the “Arab Spring”, the perception of so-called “regional momentum”.

Determinants:

Most non-electoral regime changes succeed because of factors beyond the public’s view, namely the state of affairs within the “deep state” and in particular the loyalty of the military forces that enjoy a legal monopoly on violence by virtue of their being. It’s important, however, that there’s some “plausible” public pretext for the regime change, be it protests, a corruption scandal, or a disputed election, and the unity of the “deep state” is also another important determinant because rival factions might abuse the aforesaid for their own purposes. Sometimes the threat of sanctions against the incumbent and their clique for using force to quell unrest could widen “deep state” divisions and facilitate regime change.

Who’s Next On The Chopping Block?

All of this begs the question of which countries might be next to experience their own non-electoral regime changes, with the following ones most closely aligning with the author’s model elaborated on above and being presented in alphabetical order:

* Cameroon:

President Biya won his sixth term in office late last year following a serious breakdown of law and order in the separatist Anglophone region abutting the Nigerian border, which came on the heels of Cameroon finally seeming to surmount the challenge posed by Boko Haram in the northern part of the country. The primary geostrategic consequence of his ouster under the possible scenario of a nascent Color Revolution in the cities merging with the Unconventional War in the rural periphery might be the destabilization of what the author described as China’s plans to create a “West-Central African CPEC”, though if managed properly by the “deep state”, it might contrarily stabilize this megaproject’s viability if the choreography succeeds in placating the population.

* Republic of the Congo:

The other less-discussed Congo located between the DRC and Gabon, this one is presided over by one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders who recently joined OPEC and also put an end to a simmering insurgency in the Pool region surrounding the capital. Unlike Cameroon, it’s less clear what the geostrategic consequences of a non-electoral regime change here could be, but it might potentially be a factor in whether the country continues to remain within the joint orbit of France and China or decisively pivots to one or the other. In this sense, it could change the “balance of power” in Central Africa and contribute to the gradual retreat of Françafrique in the face of overall Chinese gains in France’s historic “sphere of influence” and Russia’s recent ones in the Central African Republic.

* Chad:

Occupying the pivot space between Saharan and Equatorial Africa, President Idriss Deby came to power on the back of a coup in 1990 and has remained in office ever since, mostly relying on the fact that his country’s military is regarded as one of the strongest in all of the continent and has an operational reach as far west as Mali. He’s not without his domestic detractors, however, some of whom have led large rebel formations towards the capital in several unsuccessful coup attempts that were at times thwarted through the intervention of his French ally, such as last month when Paris bombed an anti-government convoy that crossed into northern Chad from Libya. For all of its faults, Chad seems to be “too big to fail” for France and it’s unlikely that the former colonizer will ever let this prized piece of real estate slip from its grasp.

* Equatorial Guinea:

President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has reigned for nearly four decades and survived numerous coup attempts, some of which were planned by mercenaries in this tiny but oil-rich island-coastal nation in the strategic Gulf of Guinea.  Being located where it is and with the resource wealth that it has, it’s an important piece of the African chessboard that France might want to pry away from its American ally in order to reinforce its policy of Françafrique that’s facing its greatest threat ever from China and Russia in Central Africa. Apart from the “friendly competition” between those two Great Powers, there isn’t really much else that can be said at this time about the possible outcome of any non-electoral regime change in Equatorial Guinea.

* Mozambique:

The incumbent leader has only been in power for a few years, but he represents the corrupt and increasingly reviled FRELIMO party that’s been ruling Mozambique since independence, though to their credit, the authorities have been progressively implementing what appears to be a “phased leadership transition” to incorporate the former RENAMO rebel opposition into the country’s “deep state” as part of a peace deal. That said, this responsible arrangement could always collapse at any time, and the country is nowadays threatened by mysterious jihadists who’ve been wreaking havoc along the northern borderland with Tanzania, so “black swan” developments that might trigger a non-electoral regime change are more likely here than in most of the other predicted targets, which could have an impact on global LNG geopolitics given its sizeable offshore reserves (coincidentally located in close proximity to where the new terrorist threat emerged) and regional security.

* Sudan:

Sudan is undoubtedly in the throes of a multifaceted Hybrid War that the author elaborated upon at length in a previous piece late last year and which should be skimmed for reference if one’s interested in the strategic nuances involved, but the latest update is that its “deep state” might be preparing for a “phased leadership transition” in a manner which seemed to have influenced the Algerian one that suddenly followed soon thereafter. Simply put, Sudan is indispensable to China’s Silk Road vision for Africa and is also Russia’s gateway to the continent, so its destabilization and possible “Balkanization” like President al-Bashir warned about a year and a half ago would inflict very serious damage to multipolar integration processes all across the continent.

* Uganda:

Finally, the country that most closely fits the criteria of the author’s non-electoral regime change model is Uganda, the military heavyweight in the transregional East and Central African space that’s been ruled by President Museveni for the last one-third of a century. During the last few years, however, his mostly-youthful population (which is also one of the fastest growing in Africa, notwithstanding the large amounts of migration [sometimes illegal] that it receives) has become restive and most recently (and one can argue, quite naively) placed their hopes in the singer-turned-politician Bobi Wine because they see in him a comparatively younger face of anti-systemic change. However a non-electoral regime change might unfold in Uganda, its consequences would change the entire “balance of power” in this strategic part of the world at the height of the New Great Game and modern-day “Scramble for Africa” in the New Cold War.

Concluding Thoughts

Using the latest events in Algeria as the lead-in to discussing the other non-electoral regime changes and attempts thereof that took place in Africa since the “Arab Spring”, it’s clear to see that three separate – but sometimes interconnected scenarios – have unfolded, be they Color Revolutions like in the aforementioned 2011 events, genuine non-externally-influenced people’s movements like 2014 Burkina Faso, or “deep state” coups such as what took place in 2017 Angola and which later structurally inspired the subsequent ones in Ethiopia and Algeria (both of which were driven in part by the first two scenarios). All countries have power structures (“deep states”), but some are more flexible than others when confronting bottom-up pressure (which may or may not be externally influenced – and in the future, possibly weaponized against China’s geostrategic interests), which usually makes or breaks the regime change operation and will determine whether the forecasted targets will survive if they end up on the chopping block too.

eurasiafuture.com

]]> 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

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