Instead of there being the U.S.-Government-promised ‘peace dividend’ after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, there has been soaring militarism by the U.S., and also soaring profits for the American producers of war-weapons. Both the profits on this, and the escalation in America’s aggressiveness following after 1991, have been stunning. Whereas there were 53 “Instances of United States Use of Armed Forces Abroad” (U.S. invasions) during the 46 years of 1945-1991, there were 244 such instances during the 31 years of 1991-2022, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. From a rate of 1.15 U.S. invasions per year during Cold War One (1945-1991), it rose to 7.87 per year during Cold War Two (1991-2022).
Furthermore: the U.S. Government began in 1948 its many dozens of coups (starting with Thailand in that year) to overthrow the leaders of its targeted-for-takeover countries, and its replacement of those by U.S.-chosen dictators. Ever since 25 July 1945, the U.S. Government has been aiming to take control over the entire world — to create the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire.
Cold War Two is the years when Russia had ended its side of the Cold War in 1991 while the U.S. secretly has continued its side of the Cold War. This deceit by America was done during the start of Russia’s Yeltsin years, when the G.H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton Administrations sent the Harvard economics department into Russia to teach Yeltsin’s people how to become capitalists by partnering U.S. billionaires with whomever Russia would privatize its assets to, and so created an incredibly corrupt economy there, which would be dependent upon decisions by America’s billionaires — Russia was then in the process of becoming the U.S. Government’s biggest colony or ‘ally’ after it would be trapped fully in the thrall of America’s billionaires, which was the U.S. regime’s objective. Then, while getting its claws into Russia’s Government that way, Clinton lowered the boom against Russia, by blatantly violating the promises that Bush’s team had made (but which violation by Bush’s successors had been planned by Bush — Bush secretly told his stooges (Kohl, Mitterand, etc.) that the promises he had told them to make to Gorbachev, that NATO wouldn’t expand toward Russia, were to be lies) to Gorbachev, and that NATO actually would expand toward Russia and would exclude Russia from ever being considered as a possible NATO member-nation (i.e., Russia wasn’t to be another vassal nation, but instead a conquered nation, to be exploited by the entire U.S. empire). The expansion of America’s NATO toward Russia was begun by Clinton — on 12 March 1999 near the end of his Presidency — bringing Czechia, Hungary, and Poland, into NATO, blatantly in violation of what Bush’s team had promised to Gorbachev’s team.
Russia’s top leadership now knew that America’s top leadership intended to conquer Russia, not merely for Russia to become yet another vassal-nation in the U.S. empire; and, so, Yeltsin resigned as President on 31 December 1999, and passed the nation’s leadership (and Russia’s then seemingly insuperable problems from it) to Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who promptly began to clean house and to inform Russia’s billionaires that either they would do what he asks them to do, or else he would make sure that Russia would pursue whatever legal means were then available in order to get them into compliance with Russia’s tax-laws and other laws, so as for them not to continue to rip-off the Russian nation (as they had been doing). Even the post-2012 solidly neoconservative British newspaper Guardian headlined on 6 March 2022 “How London became the place to be for Putin’s oligarchs” and touched upon the surface of the escape of “Russian oligarchs” to London (and elsewhere in America’s EU-NATO portion of the U.S. empire), but their article didn’t mention the worst cases, such as Mikhail Khordorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky. Each of these were individuals who had absconded with billions in Russia’s wealth. (I previously posted to the Web my “Private Investigations Find America’s Magnitsky Act to Be Based on Frauds”, presenting in-depth the case of the American-in-Russia financial operator Bill Browder’s theft of $232 million from Russia, and documenting Browder’s lies on the basis of which President Obama got passed in the U.S. Congress the Magnitsky Act protecting Browder and sanctioning Russia on fake charges that were cooked up by Browder and by the billionaire George Soros’s ’non-profits’. Not all of the American skimmers from Russia were billionaires; some, such as Browder, weren’t that big. But their shared target was to win control over Russia; and this was the U.S. Government’s objective, too.)
The U.S. regime also changed its entire strategy for expanding its empire (its list of colonies or ‘allies’ — vassal-nations) after 1991, in a number of significant ways, such as by creating front-organizations, an example being Transparency International, to downgrade creditworthiness of the U.S. regime’s targeted countries (so as to force up their borrowing-costs, and thus weaken the targeted nation’s Government), and there were also a wide range of other ‘non-profits’, some of which took over (privatized) much of the preparatory work for the U.S. regime’s “regime-change” operations (coups) that formerly had been done by the by-now-infamous CIA.
One of these ‘non-profits’, for example, is CANVAS, Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which “was founded in 2004 by Srđa Popović, and the CEO of Orion Telecom, Slobodan Đinović.” Just about all that is online about Đinović is this, this, this, this and this. It’s not much, for allegedly the 50% donor to CANVAS. Actually, that organization’s major funding is entirely secret, and is almost certainly from the U.S. Government or conduits therefrom (including U.S. billionaires such as Soros), since CANVAS is always aiding the overthrow of Governments that the U.S. regime aims to overthrow.
Both Popović and Đinović had earlier, since 1998, been among the leading members of another U.S. astroturf ‘revolution for democracy’ organization, Otpor! (“Resistance!”), which had helped to overthrow Milosevic and break up Yugoslavia. Otpor! ended successfully in 2004, at which time Popović and Đinović founded their own CANVAS, which they designed to institutionalize and spread to Ukraine and other countries the techniques that Otpor! had used and which had been taught to Otpor! by the U.S. regime under Bill Clinton. These were techniques which had been formalized by the American political scientist Gene Sharp.
Even well before Popovic and Dinovic had joined in 1998 (during the U.S-NATO’s prior overthrow-Milosevic campaign to break up the former Yugoslavia) the Otpor student movement to overthrow Yugoslavia’s President Slobodan Milošević, the American Gene Sharp had created the detailed program to do this. Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute published and promoted Sharp’s books advocating pacifism as the best way to force a ‘dictatorship’ (i.e., any Government that the U.S. regime wants to overthrow) to be overthrown. Sharp presented himself as being an advocate of ’non-violent resistance’ as practiced by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other actual anti-imperialists, but Sharp himself was no anti-imperialist (quite the contrary!); he was instead purely a pacifist, and not at all anti-imperialist. Einstein, like Gandhi, had been no pacifist, but didn’t know that Sharp, whom Einstein never met, accepted imperialism, which Sharp’s claimed hero, Gandhi, detested. So, Einstein unfortunately accepted the cunning Sharp’s request to write a Foreword for Sharp’s first book praising Gandhi, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, and Sharp then used that Foreword as ‘proof’ that Sharp was a follower of Einstein (even naming his Institute after the by-then deceased physicist) — which was as false as Sharp’s claimed advocacy of Gandhi’s philosophy was. Sharp was a master self-publicist and deceiver. Einstein’s 321-word, 1.3-page-long, Foreword praised the work and its young author, but he might just have cursorily skimmed the manuscript. He probably would have have been appalled at what followed from Sharp.
Sharp, thus, carefully avoided clarifying that, for example, he would have been a pacifist if he had been in America during the U.S. Revolutionary War, or even perhaps if he had been a northerner during the Civil War, or else been an anti-Nazi partisan during WW II (a pacifist ‘anti-Nazi’). Sharp’s recommendations are useful for the U.S. regime’s coups, because Sharp’s recommendations provide a way to make as difficult as possible for a head-of-state that the U.S. regime has targeted for removal, to remain in office. Sharp’s recommendations are for such a head-of-state to need to employ so much — and ever-increasing — violence against so many of his domestic opponents (fooled non-violent resistors — ‘martyrs’), as to become forced to resign, simply in order not to become himself a casualty of the resultant soaring backlash against himself as being viewed by his own public as simply a ruthless tyrannical dictator, for imprisoning or even killing those ‘democracy protesters’ who had been fooled by agents of the U.S. empire. So: Sharp’s methods are ideal to use so as to increase the public’s support for what is actually a U.S. coup. And that’s their real purpose: to facilitate coups, instead of to create any actual revolution. (As the commentator at the opening there noted, “Missing from Gene Sharp’s list are ‘Constructive actions’ – actions you take to build the alternative society you hope to create.” Sharp’s entire system is for destroying a Government — nothing to create a new one except that it should be ‘democratic’ — whatever that supposedly meant to his fools.) And, then, the coup itself is carried out, by the U.S. professionals at that, once the targeted head-of-state has become hated by a majority of his population. That’s the Sharp method, for coups.
This is an alternative to what had been the U.S. regime’s method during 1945-1991, which was simply CIA-run coups, which relied mainly upon bribing local officials and oligarchs, and hiring rent-a-mobs so as to show photographic ‘mass-support’ for overthrowing a ruler, in order to replace the local ruler with one that the U.S. regime has selected (like this).
On 12 November 2012, the pacifist John Horgan headlined at Scientific American, “Should Scientists and Engineers Resist Taking Military Money?,” and he wrote:
Defense-funded research has led to advances in civilian health care, transportation, communication and other industries that have improved our lives. My favorite example of well-spent Pentagon money was a 1968 Darpa grant to the political scientist Gene Sharp. That money helped Sharp research and write the first of a series of books on how nonviolent activism can bring about political change.
Sharp’s writings have reportedly inspired nonviolent opposition movements around the world, including ones that toppled corrupt regimes in Serbia, Ukraine [he was referring here to the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’, but Sharp’s methods were also used in the 2014 ‘Maidan Revolution’], Georgia–and, more recently, Tunisia and Egypt [the ‘Arab Spring’]. Sharp, who has not received any federal support since 1968, has defended his acceptance of Darpa funds. In the preface of his classic 1972 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, he argued that “governments and defense departments — as well as other groups — should finance and conduct research into alternatives to violence in politics.” I couldn’t agree more.
So: Sharp’s pacifists are the opposite of anti-imperialists; they are neocons: agents to expand the U.S. empire, by means of (i.e., now preferring) coups instead of military invasions.
On 11 December 2000, the Washington Post headlined “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,” and reported:
The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).
While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution’s ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.
During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.
“What was most amazing to us was to discover that what we were trying to do spontaneously in Serbia was supported by a whole nonviolent system that we knew nothing about,” said Srdja Popovic, a former biology student. “This was the first time we thought about this in a systematic, scientific way. We said to ourselves, ‘We will go back and apply this.’ ”
Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharpe, whom he describes as “the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement,” referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist. Six months later, Popovic can recite Helvey’s lectures almost word for word, beginning with the dictum, “Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle.”
“Those Serbs really impressed me,” Helvey said in an interview from his West Virginia home. “They were very bright, very committed.”
Back in Serbia, Otpor activists set about undermining Milosevic’s authority by all means available. Rather than simply daubing slogans on walls, they used a wide range of sophisticated public relations techniques, including polling, leafleting and paid advertising. “The poll results were very important,” recalled Ivo Andric, a marketing student at Belgrade University. “At every moment, we knew what to say to the people.”
The poll results pointed to a paradox that went to the heart of Milosevic’s grip on power. On one hand, the Yugoslav president was detested by 70 percent of the electorate. On the other, a majority of Serbs believed he would continue to remain in power, even after an election. To topple Milosevic, opposition leaders first had to convince their fellow Serbs that he could be overthrown.
At a brainstorming session last July, Otpor activist Srdjan Milivojevic murmured the words “Gotov je,” or “He’s finished.”
“We realized immediately that it summed up our entire campaign,” said Dejan Randjic, who ran the Otpor marketing operation. “It was very simple, very powerful. It focused on Milosevic, but did not even mention him by name.”
Over the next three months, millions of “Gotov je” stickers were printed on 80 tons of imported adhesive paper–paid for by USAID and delivered by the Washington-based Ronco Consulting Corp.–and plastered all over Serbia on walls, inside elevators and across Milosevic’s campaign posters. Printed in black and white and accompanied by Otpor’s clenched-fist emblem, they became the symbol of the revolution.
However, a WikiLeaked email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton on 26 July 2011, about the Subject “Gene Sharp,” discussed Egypt’s “April 6 movement,” which had overthrown Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Sullivan told her that “In order to assess … the role of Gene Sharp’s ideas in the January 25 revolution, several members of the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) looked into the issue during a recent fact-finding trip to Egypt. They met with representatives of a wide range of protest groups — including the April 6 movement — major civil society organizations, and political parties.” And Sullivan concluded that “ the earlier reporting on these purported ties to Gene Sharp now seems somewhat overblown. … Most other analysts … credit this to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Sullivan wrote from ignorance. On 3 March 2018, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper headlined “The Resistance Guide That Inspired Jewish Settlers and Muslim Brothers Alike: Opponents of Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and anti-government protesters in Iran have adopted the civil disobedience principles of the late Prof. Gene Sharp,” and recounted that, “Participants in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 also owe many of their achievements to Sharp’s ideas. In Egypt it’s known that at least four groups of activists were influenced by them. Even the Muslim Brotherhood [the group that Sullivan said was NOT influenced by Sharp’s ideas], whose tradition of violence struck fear into the hearts of many, viewed Sharp’s book as a manual and posted it in Arabic translation on its website.” And, for example, even Wikipedia, in its article on the “April 6 Youth Movement,” says: “The April 6 movement is using the same raised fist symbol as the Otpor! movement from Serbia, that helped bring down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and whose nonviolent tactics were later used in Ukraine and Georgia. Mohammed Adel, a leader in the April 6 movement, studied at the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, an organization founded by former Otpor! members.”
Jake Sullivan was stunningly ignorant — not merely arrogant. The U.S. intelligence community has intimately cooperated with Otpor, CANVAS, and other such astroturf ‘revolution’-generators for American billionaires. For example, Ruaridh Arrow, the writer and director of a eulogistic biopic on Gene Sharp, “How to Start a Revolution,” headlined “Did Gene Sharp work for the CIA? Correcting the Conspiracies.” He wrote: “Funds were provided by the NED and IRI to activists for Albert Einstein Institution projects, for example in Burma, but the Institution was never able to fund groups in its own right.” (And what is that “but”-clause supposed to mean?) However, Arrow also wrote there: “Gene Sharp never worked for the CIA, in fact he was highly critical of them and advised activists not to take money from intelligence services. He argued that reliance on outsiders could weaken their movement and make them reliant on a foreign state which could suddenly cut off money and support, causing serious damage to their cause. It’s one thing to deny involvement with the CIA, it’s quite another to go around the world giving convincing arguments NOT to take money from them. … See below for a video of Gene Sharp telling people NOT to take money from the CIA.”
Sharp’s operation, and that of the other ’non-profits’ such as CANVAS that adhere to it, don’t need money from the CIA, because they can get plenty of money from the billionaires who benefit from America’s coups. On 26 January 2001, David Holley in the Los Angeles Times headlined “The Seed Money for Democracy: Financier George Soros has put out $2.8 billion since 1990 to promote a global open society. His efforts include funding the student movement that helped oust Milosevic in Yugoslavia.” He wrote:
Yugoslavia was a case where everything democrats had worried about–extreme nationalism, ethnic conflict, corruption, media controls and bickering among opposition political parties–were at their worst. Yet, just as Soros had calculated, it was a grass-roots surge by strong citizen organizations that won the battle for democracy.
Soros’ branch in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, was among the earliest backers of Otpor, which grew under young and decentralized leadership to strengthen the fractured opposition to Milosevic. “We gave them their first grant back in 1998, when they appeared as a student organization,” said Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, the network’s branch here.
Foreign financial support helped Otpor surreptitiously print about 60 tons of posters and leaflets in the months before the Sept. 24 election that led to Milosevic’s ouster, said Miljana Jovanovic, a student who is one of the movement’s leaders. …
The vast majority of groups funded by Soros are not nearly as powerful as Otpor, nor do they play for such huge stakes.
More typical are efforts such as “horse-riding therapy” for disabled children, funded by the network’s Polish branch, the Stefan Batory Foundation.
I found that article only recently. On 18 April 2022, I had headlined “History of the Ukrainian War” and here was a passage in it that included the Stafan Battory Foundation, but I didn’t know, at the time, that this organization was actually Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Poland. Here is the relevant portion from that history of the Ukrainian war:
*****
On 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing. Simultaneously, under Polish Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military Right Sector leaders how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians.” The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:
An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE” editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters from the then prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw University of Technology and the National University of Technology in Kiev. But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days. The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three times with sniper rifles!), tactical and practical training in the assault on buildings. …
Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.
The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …
Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz – he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.
Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE news-report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole reason given was: “The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of state).” No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?
Miszczuk’s article’s mention of “the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz” referred to the key person (Dmitriy Yarosh) and the key group (his Right Sector paramilitary organization and political party) that has actually been running Ukraine behind the scenes ever since the coup, and they also were the key people who had led the snipers who were firing down from tall buildings upon the Ukrainian Government’s police and upon the anti-Government demonstrators at Kiev’s Maidan Square — the violence simultaneously against both sides — that the newly installed post-coup government immediately blamed against the just-ousted democratically elected President, so that the new top officials were all blaming the ones that they had replaced.
*****
On 4 October 2017, the historian F. William Engdahl, who unfortunately leaves many of his allegations not linked to his alleged sources, wrote:
Goldman Sachs and Stratfor
Even more interesting details recently came to light on the intimate links between the US “intelligence consultancy”, Stratfor — known as the ”Shadow CIA” for its corporate clients which include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and U.S. government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
It was revealed in a huge release of internal memos from Stratfor in 2012, some five million emails provided them by the hacker community Anonymous, that Popović, after creating CANVAS also cultivated very close relations with Stratfor. According to the Stratfor internal emails, Popović worked for Stratfor to spy on opposition groups. So intimate was the relationship between Popović and Stratfor that he got his wife a job with the company and invited several Stratfor people to his Belgrade wedding.
Revealed in the same Stratfor emails by Wikileaks was the intriguing information that one of the “golden geese” funders of the mysterious CANVAS was a Wall Street bank named Goldman Sachs. Satter Muneer, a Goldman Sachs partner, is cited by Stratfor’s then-Eurasia Analyst Marko Papic. Papic, asked by a Stratfor colleague whether Muneer was the “golden goose” money behind CANVAS, writes back, “They have several golden gooses I believe. He is for sure one of them.”
Now the very remarkable Mr Popović brings his dishonest career to Hungary where, not a dictator, but a very popular true democrat who offers his voters choices, is the target for Popović’ peculiar brand of US State Department fake democracy. This will not at all be as easy as toppling Milošević, even if he has the help of student activists being trained at Soros’ Central European University in Budapest.
If he had linked to those WikiLeaks documents, then copies of his article that were made before the U.S. regime removed some WikiLeaks files from the Web would have archived those files, but that didn’t happen; and, so, today, a Web-search for the 3-word string
Stratfor Popović wikileaks
produces finds such as
https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1773778_meeting-canvas-stratfor-.html
https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1792423_information-on-canvas-.html
of which no copies were saved at any of the Web archives.
However, a prior article, by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn of Occuy.com, on 2 December 2013, was headlined “Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Intelligence Firm Stratfor,” and it has links to the WikiLeaks documents. From all of this, it’s clear that the obscure Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović, are each well-connected to wealth, if not themselves quite wealthy, from their business, of fomenting coups for the U.S. regime, in the names of ‘peace’ and of ‘democracy’.
Apparently, CANVAS remains quite active today:
On 6 October 2023, Kit Klarenberg, at The Grayzone, headlined “A Maidan 2.0 color revolution looms in Georgia,” and reported that:
The arrest of US regime change operatives in Tbilisi suggests a coup against Georgia’s government could be in the works. As Ukraine’s counteroffensive fails, the West appears eager to open a new front in its proxy war.
On September 29, in a disclosure ignored by the entire Western media, the US government-run Radio Free Europe’s Russian-language portal Slobodna Evropa revealed that three foreign operatives had been summoned for questioning by the Georgian Security Service, for allegedly assisting opposition elements prepare a Maidan-style regime change scenario in Tbilisi.
The operatives were staffers of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies. …
The ruling Georgian dream [NO — it’s the Georgian Dream Party] has been portrayed in the west as a pro-Kremlin government. In reality, it’s simply reverted to a longstanding policy of balancing between East and West. For the neoconservative establishment, its true sin is being insufficiently supportive of the Ukraine proxy war. Thus Ukrainian elements are set to be involved in a possible color revolution. If such an operation succeeds, it would open a second front in that war on Russia’s Western flank.
The development seemingly confirms warnings from local security officials earlier this September. They cautioned “a coup a la Euromaidan is being prepared in Georgia,” referring to the 2014 US-backed color revolution which toppled Ukraine’s elected president and ushered in a pro-NATO government. The purported lead plotters are ethnic Georgians working for the Ukrainian government: Giorgi Lortkipanidze, Kiev’s deputy military intelligence chief; Mikhail Baturin, the bodyguard of former President Mikheil Saakashvili; and Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the notorious Georgian Legion.
A September 6 investigation by The Grayzone revealed that Georgian Legion chief Mamulashvili is centrally implicated in a false flag massacre of Maidan protesters, which was pivotal in unseating elected President Viktor Yanukovych. He apparently brought the shooters to Maidan Square to “sow some chaos” by opening fire on crowds, and provided sniper rifles for the purpose.
Georgian officials say that now they’ve uncovered evidence that young anti-government activists are undergoing training near Ukraine’s border with Poland to enact a similar scheme, which would feature a deadly bombing during planned riots meant to take place in Tbilisi between October and December, when the European Commission is expected to rule on whether Georgia can formally become an EU candidate country.
The Wikipedia article “Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies” says:
CANVAS’ training and methodology has been successfully applied by groups in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Lebanon (2005), The Maldives (2008)?, Egypt (2011)?, Syria (2011)? and Ukraine (2014). It works only in response to requests for assistance.
However: anyone who participates in such ‘Revolutions’ is placing oneself at severe personal risk, in order to facilitate a coup by the U.S. Government and its controlling owners, who are billionaires. People such as Sharp, Popović, and Đinović, are merely well-paid and maintained servants to America’s billionaires.
Here’s how they market their operation, to peaceniks:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230521063855/https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CANVAS-Core-Curriculum_EN4.pdf
https://canvasopedia.org/2023/01/05/examining-non-state-stakeholders-role-in-modern-nonviolent-conflict-2/
https://web.archive.org/web/20231025015004/https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/canvas_presentation.pdf
They open by paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is mocking them — aping their influence, not spreading it.
And here is how the neoconservative Tina Rosenberg, in the neoconservative Donald Graham’s Foreign Policy magazine, promotes CANVAS, as being “Revolution U“:
As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world’s attention has been drawn to the causes — generations of repressive rule — and tools — social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter — animating the wave of revolt. But as the members of the April 6 movement learned, these elements alone do not a revolution make. What does? In the past, the discontented availed themselves of the sweeping forces of geopolitics: the fall of regimes in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc was largely a product of the withdrawal of superpower support for dictatorships and the consolidation of liberal democracy as a global ideal. But the global clash of ideologies is over, and plenty of dictators remain — so what do we do?
The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning — tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not enough — it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use such moments to bring down a government.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Many years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
