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The Late Gene Sharp’s Color Revolutions

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By Richard Hugus | February 3, 2018

Recent newspaper obituaries and articles on the late Gene Sharp are a classic case of misinformation, and a good example of why so many people don’t trust the mainstream news.

Far from being a promoter of democracy through Gandhian non-violence, Gene Sharp made an entire career out of US/CIA regime change operations, from Yugoslavia to Venezuela to Ukraine to Syria.

His “color revolutions” all had the same formula — phony grass roots organizations, funded and advised by US government aid, suddenly appearing in public squares; covert operations making it look like the demonstrators were being attacked by government forces, and lavish coverage from Western news outlets calling for the toppling of the “evil dictator” responsible for killing his own people.

Gandhi would have rolled over in his grave if he saw the ends to which his philosophy was perverted by Gene Sharp.

Violence always lurked beneath his high-sounding but underhanded destabilization and coup campaigns.

Sharp was an agent and accomplice of the CIA in grossly illegal attacks on sovereign nations all around the world. He should be condemned, not praised.

via Gene Sharp, agent provocateur

For more in-depth analysis of Sharp’s life and work see The CIA and Nonviolence

 

For mor

The CIA and Nonviolence

[Big thanks to Norman Pilon for re-editing this article which was first published at:Wake Up The World, July 18, 2014]

As a longtime activist, I have always been puzzled (and frustrated) by the dogmatic attitude towards violence among American progressives. In European countries, the working class has organized itself into a militant anti-austerity movement, particularly in Spain, Greece and Italy. They smash windows, burn cars and corporate property, set up barricades and defend themselves against police brutality.

In the US, in contrast, there is no cohesive anti-austerity movement. You see occasional anti-austerity rallies and protest marches. However the participants are nearly always middle class students, academics and professionals. Even though they suffer the brunt of state and federal austerity cuts, there is virtually no participation by the low income and unemployed Americans who are most affected by federal and state austerity cuts.

Moreover protest organizers are always quite adamant that protesters must not damage corporate or police property. And if the police kick, punch or club you over the head, you are absolutely forbidden to fight back. As Peter Gelderloos describes in The Failure of Nonviolent: From the Arab Spring to Occupy, activists who violate these stringent rules may be subject to violent attack by fellow protesters.

All this struck me as quite odd, until I learned that the CIA has been funding so-called “left gate keeping foundations” for nearly sixty years. Frances Stonor Saunders outlines the strategy in her 2000 Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.

According to Sanders, right wing corporate-backed foundations and the CIA have been funding the non-communist left since the late sixties. The clear purpose here is to drown out and marginalize more militant leftists.

The CIA, along with the Pentagon and more recently the State Department, has also invested heavily in institutions promoting non-violent resistance. By far the most prominent are the Albert Einstein Institution and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC).

Both receive major corporate and/or government funding, mainly through CIA “pass-through” foundations. While the ICNC is funded mainly by the private fortune of hedge fund multimillionaire (junk bond king Michael Milken’s second in command) Peter Ackerman, the AEI has received funding from the Rand Corporation and the Department of Defense, as well as various CIA-linked foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the US Institute of Peace and the Ford Foundation (see Does the CIA Fund Both the Right and the Left and The Cointelpro Role of Left Gatekeeping Foundations).

All of these foundations have a long history of collaborating with the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA in destabilizing governments unfriendly to US interests.

Gene Sharp: Godfather of Institutional Nonviolence 

Gene Sharp

The unquestioned godfather of nonviolent resistance is an 85-year-old Bostonian named Gene Sharp, founder and director of the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI). The AEI bills itself as a “nonprofit organization dedicated to the study of non-violent action.”

Sharp is most famous for his 1993 book From Dictatorship to Democracy. This and other Sharp handbooks on nonviolent protest were widely disseminated in the Eastern Europe Color Revolutions, in the Arab spring revolutions and in the Occupy movement in the US (see Nonviolence in the Service of Imperialism).

More recently Sharp has passed the baton to his disciple Peter Ackerman. It was Ackerman who conducted nonviolence trainings in Cairo and Tunisia in 2009-2010 (see Bloomberg Markets, Foreign Policy Journal and New York Times).

The institutional nonviolence clique has cleverly refocused the debate on

Peter Ackerman, head of ‘Overthrow, Inc.’

whether 85 year old Sharp is a CIA agent and whether he actively participated in US-funded destabilization efforts in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and elsewhere that resulted in so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions. The obvious answer to both questions is no. The more important question is why the alternative media and “official” progressive movement embrace Sharp unconditionally as a fellow progressive without a careful look at his past or his ideological beliefs.

Sharp has never made any secret of his fervent anticommunist views. He also makes no secret of the funding he has received from the Defense Department; the Rand Corporation; CIA-linked foundations, such as NED, the IRI and the US Institute of Peace; and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. All this information is readily available from the AEI website.

Thierry Meyssan’s 2005 Expose

Thierry Meyssan first exposed Gene Sharp’s extensive CIA and Pentagon links in an article The Albert Einstein Institution: Nonviolence According to the CIA  he published on Voltaire Net in October 2005.  Meyssan, a French intellectual and political activist, first gained international prominence in 2002 by publishing a French best seller entitled L’effroyable imposteur (English title: The Big Lie). The book claimed that the 9-11 attacks were directed by right-wingers in the U.S. government and the military industrial complex, who were seeking justification for military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Meyssan’s 2005 article on the Albert Einstein Institutes enumerates a long list of collaborations between Sharp and opposition groups receiving covert US support in campaigns to bring down unfriendly Asian and Eastern European governments.

Iran and Venezuela Denounce Sharp

The article was widely reposted on leftist and libertarian websites. In 2008, it resulted in a formal denunciation of Sharp by the Iranian government and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, both targets of AEI destabilization activities. In June 2008, Stephen Zunes, chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Peter Ackerman’s International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) issued a rebuttal, Sharp Attack Unwarranted, in Foreign Policy in Focus. The latter is an on-line magazine of the Institute for Policy Studies, where Zunes serves as Middle East Editor. The article was simultaneously reprinted in the Huffington Post.

Zunes subsequently persuaded Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Code Pink and other high profile progressives to help launch an on-line petition defending Sharp’s progressive credentials. However, as numerous critics point out, he never addressed Meyssan’s most important concerns: the military/intelligence backgrounds of many of the Albert Einstein Institution’s (AEI’s) directors and advisory board members; their documented collaboration, together with Sharp, with the opposition groups who led the “color” revolutions in Eastern Europe; and their work with Venezuelan opposition groups in an effort to topple president Hugo Chavez.

AEI Links with the State Department and the Military-Intelligence Complex

Australian researcher Michael Barker, Canadian activist Stephen Gowans and CIA watchers wrote detailed critiques defending Meyssan’s 2005 expose. Barker’s rebuttal is entitled Sharp Reflection Warranted. Barker’s main argument is that the problem of elite manipulation of ostensibly progressive groups isn’t at all new. He also points readers to excellent links regarding collaboration between the CIA and the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and others.

Gowans argues that Zunes, a paid adviser to the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), is hardly a neutral or objective party, given his involvement with Peter Ackerman and the ICNC.  Ackerman, hardly the progressive peace activist, is a Wall Street investment banker, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and head of Freedom House. The latter, according to Noam Chomsky (in Manufacturing Consent), is “interlocked” with the CIA and a “virtual propaganda arm of the (US) government and international right wing.” According to Louis Proyect, Ackerman is also on the advisory board of the ultraconservative Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Choice. Not surprisingly, this group strongly advocates for privatizing Social Security.

A Close Look at Sharp’s Past

There is no question that Thierry Meyssan’s 2005 article on Gene Sharp’s extensive links to the US military-intelligence complex is one of the most important exposes of the 21st century. Its only weakness is Meyssan’s failure to cite many of his sources. The following is the best publicly verifiable chronology of Sharp’s life (based on Meyssan’s article with sources added):

1953 – conscientious objector during Korean War, imprisoned for nine months for refusing to report for alternative duty. Imprisoned for refusing to fight in Korean War (People and The Progressive).

1973 – publishes The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973) with an introduction by Thomas C. Shelling. Shelling was a well-known economist and professor of foreign affairs, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control. After working with US ambassador Averel Harriman in Paris in 1948 to implement the Marshall Plan, Shelling had a fifty year affiliation with the Rand Corporation (US military think tank) and is widely credited as the theoretician behind military escalation in Vietnam.

1983 – founds the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in Boston, with the assistance of Major General Edward B Atkeson, who was on the first AEI advisory board. The AEI website identifies Atkeson as Senior Fellow at the Institute of Land Warfare Association of the US Army. According to the CIA website, during the 1980s Atkeson was also a National Intelligence Officer for General Purpose Forces.

1985 – publishes a book entitled Making Europe Unconquerable: the Potential of Civilian-base Deterrence and Defense. The second edition includes a preface by George Kennan, historian and State Department senior diplomat whose writings influenced Truman in the creation of the Truman Doctrine. Kennan is viewed as the father of the US foreign policy of “containment” (by force) of Soviet expansion.

1986, 1988 and 1989 – travels to Israel/Palestine to bolster support for the Palestinian Center for the History of Non-Violence, founded in 1983 by one of Sharp’s disciples. It’s a matter of public record that Sharp met with Colonel Reuvan Gal, who directed the Israel Defense Force (IDF) Psychological Action Division. Meyssan claims the two conspired to create a split in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) by creating a dissident “nonviolent” group. Gal and Sharp claim the purpose of their meetings were to devise ways to dissuade IDF commanders from using tanks and excessive military force against Palestinian settlers (see The Jerusalem Fund, Mubarak Award, and Nonviolence).

1987 – receives funding from the US Institute of Peace to host seminars instructing US allies on defense based on civil disobedience. By law, the US Institute of Peace is an extension of US intelligence.

1989 – assists Colonel Robert Helvey in training anticommunist Burmese opposition groups concerned about the growing strength of the Burmese Communist Party. The AEI website refers to Helvey as a retired US military officer and ex-military attaché in Burma. He was actually a thirty year veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) with extensive experience in overseeing clandestine and subversive operations in Southeast Asia (see A Force More Powerful and Peace Magazine Archive). Following his retirement from the DIA, he became chairman of the board of the Albert Einstein Institution.

1990 – with his AEI team (according to AEI website), assists Lithuanian opposition leaders in organizing popular resistance against the Red Army. According to the website, the AEI also did trainings with anticommunist opposition groups in Tibet, Estonia, and Belarus.

1998 – travels, with Helvey, to Eastern Europe to train Otpor, a group of Serbian youth opposed to Slobodan Milosevic and Europe’s last communist government. Milosevic was immensely popular with Serbian people for standing up to NATO and for his generous social policies. The trainings were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). (See 2000 New York Times interview with NED officer Paul B. McCarthy).

2003 – assists, with AEI staff, in the launch of the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia (see The Secrets of the Georgian Coup).

2004 – Helvey and other AEI members meet with the Ukrainian resistance in Kiev (see Mowat’s The Coup Plotters).

2003-2004 – travels, with Helvey and other AEI team members to Venezuela to meet with wealthy Venezuelan opposition leaders, following the failed 2002 CIA-sponsored coup against Chavez. The AEI advises them in organizing a recall referendum against Chavez. They also train the leaders of Súmate during the August 2004 demonstrations and assist in the formulation of “Operation Guarimba”, a series of often-violent street blockades that result in several deaths. According to an analysis published by Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor), Venezuelan student leaders traveled to Belgrade in 2005 to meet with representatives of AEI-trained OTPOR/CANVAS, before traveling to Boston to consult directly with Sharp himself.

Fast Forward to the “Arab Spring”

As I mention above, Peter Ackerman and the ICNC seem to have taken over from Sharp in the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011.  As others have documented elsewhere, the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa were neither spontaneous nor indigenous.

Many of the individuals and groups who helped organize them received training (in the US) sponsored by the State Department and CIA-linked democracy manipulating foundations (see L’Arabesque Americaine by French-Canadian analyst Ahmed Bensada and Tony Cartalucci’s Soros Celebrates the Fall of Tunisia). The New York Times lends further credibility to these claims in their April 2011 U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.

 

via The CIA And Nonviolence — Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

“Black People, Please DON’T Take Your Children To See The New ‘Black Panther’ Movie For Black History Month!”

Everything you need to know about the new movie Black Panther.

shelbycourtland

First of all, let me start off by saying that this movie would NOT be in theaters this month if it were based on the REAL Black Panthers.

The Black Panthers, also known as the Black Panther Party, was a political organization founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to challenge police brutality against the African American community. Dressed in black berets and black leather jackets, the Black Panthers organized armed citizen patrols of Oakland and other U.S. cities. At its peak in 1968, the Black Panther Party had roughly 2,000 members. The organization later declined as a result of internal tensions, deadly shootouts and FBI counterintelligence activities aimed at weakening the organization.

The Black Panthers were not solely focused on violence. One notable program was Free Breakfast for Children. They fed as many as 20,000 children in the 1968-69 school year. This was portrayed…

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Ted Kennedy: What Really Happened at Chappaquiddick

Chappaquiddick

Directed by John Curran (1994)

Film Review

This documentary re-examines the 1969 inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Kopechne was a campaign worker for late Senator Ted Kennedy, who allegedly drowned when a rental car he was driving went off an unlit bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts. At the time Kennedy came under heavy criticism for fleeing the scene and leaving Kopechne to drown. He ultimately pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, for which he received a two-month suspended sentence and one year of probation.

The film attempts to resolve longstanding inconsistencies in Kennedy’s version of events. When the evidence presented at the inquest is re-examined, key analysts come up with a surprising conclusion: that Kopechne (driving) was alone in the car when it dove off the bridge.

The lead police investigator at beleives Kennedy got out of the parked car after they were spotted on a secluded road by a sheriff’s deputy – that he didn’t learn about Kopechne’s fatal accident until the next morning. After consulting with his lawyer and political advisor, he would concoct a lie about being the vehicle’s driver.

His goal, according to the investigator, was to forestall a full investigation into an incident which presumably involved extramarital sexual activity. After watching the film, this conclusion makes sense to me.

 

Findings raise new concerns about birth control safety

Research shows hormonal contraception increases breast cancer risk.

SOMEONE SOMEWHERE

Since the 1960s, when the birth control pill made its debut, contraceptives have played a major role in family planning. So when researchers discovered that women taking hormone-based birth control had a higher incidence of breast cancer, making the contraceptives safer became an important public health priority. Many experts believed they found a solution in options with far lower doses of estrogen, a hormone long linked to breast cancer occurrence. But a new study suggests that low-dose contraceptives have not had the impact doctors expected, and experts are urging women to talk to their doctors about the implications for their breast health, even though the overall risk remains relatively small.

The study, published in December in The New England Journal of Medicine, followed 1.8 million women for an average of about 11 years, finding that those on hormonal contraception had a 20 percent higher risk of…

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10,000 pages of Monsanto’s long term, damning studies buried by the EPA & their products still approved by government

EPA colludes with Monsanto to conceal research from public.

Rangitikei Enviromental Health Watch

Elaine McFadden, MPH, RD

Published on Dec 8, 2015

Dr. Stephanie Seneff and host Elaine McFadden, MPH, RD go through disturbing research information uncovered in the 10,000 pages of Monsanto long term studies done decades ago before it was buried by the EPA. A colleague of Dr. Seneff repeatedly petitioned the EPA for the information. Monsanto did long term studies back then, and it is frightening that the cumulative and destructive results of those studies did not stop the government from approving its use, but instead choose to hide the information from the public. Monsanto learned that if they did studies longer than 3 months the truth starts to reveal itself. Seralini did not start to see the abnormalities until after 4 months and then large tumors after two years: http://www.smarthealthtalk.com/gmo-fr…. Join us as we go through many of those results and break it down on how it can…

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Republicans Announce Plans For Drastic Cuts To Social Security, Raise Retirement Age

A new Republican bill would deeply cut Social Security.

AGR Daily 60 Second News Bites

Now that Republicans retain control of the Executive Branch and both the House and the Senate, sweeping changes are about to be voted on.

Chairman Sam Johnson, the Republican Chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee of Ways and Means, just introduced a bill that would deeply cut Social Security as we today know it, not to mention his intention to raise the retirement age from 67 to 69.

via Republicans Announce Plans For Drastic Cuts To Social Security, Raise Retirement Age

Remember Trump promising not to touch Social Security Or Medicare?

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Climate risks weigh heavily upon business elite

Aw, pity the poor billionaires. Maybe we should pass the hat.

A greener life, a greener world

By Soumya Sarkar

As the World Economic Forum met in Davos last month, the world’s economic leadership thinks environmental disasters and climate-related impacts are the biggest risks to global business in 2018.

The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season inflicted losses of more than USD 200 billion. Photo credit: Michelle Maria.

Global business and political leaders have said extreme weather events would likely pose the greatest threat to business and commerce in 2018, which marks a major departure from what they thought even 10 years ago when economic factors such as asset price collapses and oil and gas price hikes were perceived as major risks.

For the second year running, the economic leadership has rated extreme weather as the world’s biggest threat, according to the Global Risks Report 2018 released last month by the World Economic Forum (WEF) which started its annual meeting at the alpine resort of Davos in…

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Dystopian Warnings of How Sports are Used to Control the Masses

Aldous Huxley foresaw a future where the populace was drugged and sedated, never able to break through the mental fog of forced medication. H.G Wells spoke of the rise of arenas and the distraction of mass sports, suggesting that this type of foolishness was anathema to a free society.

Openhearted Rebel

By Isaac Davis, Waking Times 

The Superbowl is coming, and although the NFL has had a rough season, it is predicted to be the biggest television event of the year. In 2017, almost 112 million people tuned in to the annual event, a full third of the population of America. It’s big business.

In many ways, the dystopian nightmares of 20th century literature have become manifest in the 21st century.

Aldous Huxley foresaw a future where the populace was drugged and sedated, never able to break through the mental fog of forced medication. H.G Wells spoke of the rise of arenas and the distraction of mass sports, suggesting that this type of foolishness was anathema to a free society.

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Insult To Injury: When Urgent Health Care Is Based On Your Race

February is National Heart Disease Awareness Month. Not all patients with heart disease are treated equally.

For my mother, healing is less of an action and more of an instinct. As a stay at home mom, she was a caretaker for her family— nuclear and extended— for nearly ten years. For as long as I can remember, there had been no cut left without a Band-Aid, no fever left unsettled and no trip to the hospital without her ready at the bedside.

Some years down the road, she finally decided to do something for herself. When she was 38 years old, she made one of her biggest lifelong dreams come true by getting her nursing degree. I still remember crying tears of joy and pride as she walked up the aisle at her pinning ceremony and took an oath to keep her patients’ health her top priority. A promise so personal, but still so selfless — this is the epitome of who she is and what every health care provider should be.

44 million American women are living with some form of heart disease. One thing doctors always comment on is how young she is for her health to deteriorate at such an unnatural rate. But statistics from the American Heart Association show that Latinas are likely to develop heart disease ten years earlier than white women. To quite literally add insult to injury, she was diagnosed with two types — coronary artery disease and peripheral artery disease.

Having a loved one with a chronic disease is scary no matter how you cut it. For the next five years, our visits to the hospital would become more frequent, as stents placements (and replacements) were a fearful, tri-annual event. But without a doubt, some of the most terrifying and frustrating moments came when the doctors who claimed to have her best interest at heart tried to tell her that she was exaggerating the amount of pain that she had.

I attend doctor’s appointments with my mom sometimes when I can take off work. Almost every occurrence is heartbreakingly similar. I listen to my mom list off every symptom concurrent with an artery blockage, tell them she’s doing everything right as far as eating and exercise habits. They usually recommend a test in order to see if there’s a blockage. My mother promptly responds that those tests don’t work for her and that she has had blockages countless times that have gone undetected because of those tests. The doctor gets frustrated and insists on them anyway. She goes through with them. No blockages show up and the doctors flippantly say she needs to do more exercise and have her go home.

Within two weeks to a month, we’d usually be in the emergency room and they’d find a nearly 100% blockage in one of her arteries. Three of these times she’s had a heart attack. The doctors would just shrug and not even apologize for misdiagnosing her.

It baffles me to this day that doctors could not only dismiss my mother’s complaints as a patient and a Registered Nurse herself. But unfortunately, she’s not the only one with this experience. Researchers from The University of Leeds and the British Heart Foundation claim women are dying from heart attacks at an increasing rate because doctors aren’t as likely to believe them about their symptoms in comparison to men. A study from the Public Library of Science has also proven that due to the racial empathy gap, medical personnel assume that people of color feel less pain than white people and therefore do not provide them with the pain relief that is necessary. . .

via Insult To Injury: When Urgent Health Care Is Based On Your Race — News One