WATCH: UKRAINE ON FIRE

UKRAINE ON FIRE – The Real Story. Full Documentary by Oliver Stone (Original English version)

+++

“Ukraine. Across its eastern border is Russia and to its west—Europe. For centuries, it has been at the center of a tug-of-war between powers seeking to control its rich lands and access to the Black Sea. 2014’s Maidan Massacre triggered a bloody uprising that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych and painted Russia as the perpetrator by Western media. But was it?

Ukraine on Fire by Igor Lopatonok provides a historical perspective for the deep divisions in the region which lead to the 2004 Orange Revolution, 2014 uprisings, and the violent overthrow of democratically elected Yanukovych. Covered by Western media as a people’s revolution, it was in fact a coup d’état scripted and staged by nationalist groups and the U.S. State Department. Investigative journalist Robert Parry reveals how U.S.-funded political NGOs and media companies have emerged since the 80s replacing the CIA in promoting America’s geopolitical agenda abroad.

Executive producer Oliver Stone gains unprecedented access to the inside story through his on-camera interviews with former President Viktor Yanukovych and Minister of Internal Affairs, Vitaliy Zakharchenko, who explain how the U.S. Ambassador and factions in Washington actively plotted for regime change. And, in his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Stone solicits Putin’s take on the significance of Crimea, NATO and the U. S’s history of interference in elections and regime change in the region.” [Source: Ukraine on Fire website]

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=X4JoT_ElvvA

How the West Manufactures “Opposition Movements”

WKOG admin.: Feb 6, 2014. Due to conflicting assessments of the complicated political situation in Thailand, we would like to share with our readers alternative analysis that differ, or are in stark contrast from, the authors assessment in the article below.We welcome your comments.

Dec 3, 2013: THE ROVING EYE, Thai protests turn a darker color, by Pepe Escobar

Feb 5, 2014: Thailand: The People Have Spoken – No Confidence in Regime or System, by Tony Cartelli

From Egypt, Ukraine, the Turkish-Syrian border, Cuba and Thailand

Counterpunch

FEBRUARY 03, 2014

by ANDRE VLTCHEK

Capitalising On Nonviolence

Above image: March 3, 2013: Otpor/Canvas (fist symbol) rears its ugly head in Venezuela. Today’s youth are the oligarchy’s sacrificial lambs.

Massive displays of nonviolent resistance have always been an essential component to challenging oppression successfully. One can only hope that Western citizens will learn from contemporary history and rise up to overthrow the ultra-violent warmongers who manage their countries too, mindful of the fact that nonviolent liberal institutions are routinely complicit in the brutality of the systems they ostensibly criticize. – Michael Barker

Swans Commentary

June 20, 2011

By Michael Barker

Berel Rodal is the founding vice chair of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) — a center that was formed in 2006, ostensibly “as a catalyst to stimulate interest in nonviolent conflict…” Like many peace reformers, members of the ICNC’s cadre of intellectuals are happy to work with a wide variety of institutions, organizations, and groups. This includes peace groups, resistance movements, and — strangely — war academies and intelligence agencies. While their engagement with the latter groups may seem contradictory, teaching peace to leading members of the military-industrial complex is critical to peace advocacy efforts at the ICNC. This is because they aim to change the views of people they disagree with, not just confirm the ideas of those who are already close to their views. Therefore, in this respect, it is fitting that at the peak of his former career Berel Rodal served as the director general of the policy secretariat for Canada’s Department of National Defence and continues to maintain close connections to leading hawks in the US foreign policymaking circles, like, for example, long-time cold warrior Richard Perle (see later). This should not be taken as a demonstration of a massive conspiracy, but is simply evidence that imperial elites are interested in co-opting critical voices. →

FLASHBACK: DEEPER DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE OF U.S. BACKED COLOR REVOLUTIONS

US Department of Imperial Expansion

March 6, 2011

NGO’S AND INREVENTIONISM AS A GEOPOLITICAL INSTRUMENT

by Hannes HOFBAUER

October 01, 2012

Strategic Culture Foundation

The mother of all coloured revolutions was black and white. Its name: «Otpor», «Resistance». Its symbol: a white feast in front of a black ground, red colour was hated. «Otpor» was founded in the beginning of the 1990s in Belgrade. The group understood itself in sharp opposition to the rise of Slobodan Milosevic and his «Socialist Party of Serbia» (SPS). «Otpor’s» battle-cry: «gotov je!», «he is finished». «He» was the big enemy: Milosevic. The first manifestations against his government began in 1988. Their social character was evident. People protested against rising prices for living. These «bread-riots» pointed at the government, but meant the IMF that dictated what they called «reform», the abolishment of state subsidies for housing and goods of daily use. Out of parts of these protesters «Otpor» formed a political group with one single goal: to get rid of whom they called «the autocrat», Slobodan Milosevic.

After the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia the legitimacy of rule and governance was debated widely in a political and philosophical sense. Where rulers of the old type or their supposed revenants did not give way voluntarily, oppositional groups felt legitimated to overthrow the system. This also happened in Serbia. Slobodan Milosevic and his SPS undermined the shock therapy of the IMF in Winter 1990/91 by setting in motion the money-printing machine. The fresh banknotes allowed paying state employers like teachers, doctors and military. Hence he obstructed the restrictive monetary policy, prescribed by the IMF. What was appreciated by vast parts of the people, provoked Western organisations, and he became an enemy of them. «Otpor» repeated its standpoint: «Milosevic has to leave». It took some time until the potential of this oppositional group was discovered by Western financiers.

Civil society intervention

Since the middle of the 1990s masses of so-called Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have been operating in the countries of ex-Comecon and Yugoslavia. Their «mission» followed slogans of «democracy», «nation-building» or «new governance». They aimed at interfering in politics by supporting local oppositional groups of civil society.

One of the most prominent and strongest «Mission»-organisation to bring Western democracy to Eastern and Southern countries is the American foundation named «National Endowment for Democracy» (NED). Founded by the US-Congress in 1983 and financed by state-money since then, NED has the function to distribute an annual amount of a three-figure million Dollar number to four so-called NGOs: The «National Democratic Institute for International Affairs» (NDI), which stands under the influence of the Democratic Party, its Republican vis-à-vis, the «International Republican Institute» (IRI), the «Center for International Private Enterprise» (CIPE) and the «American Center for International Labor Solidarity» (ACILS), one representing the Chamber of commerce, the other the AFL/CIO-union. These four NGOs, all of them fully backed by state-money and therefore cheating with the «N» in their self-representation as «NGO», work in their respected fields on the ground in Eastern Europe, the Islamic world and elsewhere.

The ideological background of foundations like NED, the United States Agency for International Development USAID, «Freedom-House» or its British variant «Westminster Foundation for Democracy» is rooted in a specific understanding of what they call «universal democracy», which they claim to be spread all over the world. The concept is based on the declared necessity of economic competition and its political administration through democratic institutions. Democratic institutions have to follow the principles of market economy and not vice versa. The ideal, universalistic form of this model of democracy can be described as «constitutive liberalism» in a parliamentary two-party-system under a strong presidency. The electoral freedom excludes the social and economic system and reduces socio-economic debates, if admitted at all, to measures of tax policy.

This understanding of democracy is not compatible with revolutionary processes having taken place in Eastern Europe and North Africa. There the vision of democracy reaches beyond the system of «constitutive liberalism» and its defence of property. On the contrary: revolutions overwhelm such things like property laws and open new radical perspectives. Political and media observers are well aware of this fact and its potential danger. Therefore all missions of civil society-interventions by Western foundations are united by one goal: to direct revolutionary processes in East and South towards the Western understanding of liberal democracy; to pave the way for «constitutional liberalism».

Many democratic elections, for example in Eastern Europe, but also in the Arab world after 1989/91, did not reflect the Western idea of liberal democracy. The outcome were «false results» in the cases of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Slovakia, when leaders like Milosevic, Iliescu, Meciar or Fico received majorities at the ballot-box. The American political scientist and redactor in chief of the influential magazine «Foreign Affairs», Fareed Zakaria, named these democratic elections, when Milosevic or Meciar took legal power, «illiberal democracies». (1) In his view it is not the democracy as such that are in ill health condition, but the constitutional liberalism. He even makes his view more concrete: «Democracy without constitutional liberalism is not simply inadequate, but dangerous». Meciar, Iliescu, Milosevic, Yanukovych… they all won elections and got majorities, some of them more than one time. Nevertheless Western media and politicians call them despots, autocrats, nationalists, communists or national communists. Western foundations like NED, USAID, Westminster or Freedom House see their task in spreading their universalistic claim of a bourgeois, liberally constituted democracy throughout the world. In the societies of transformation they intervene into civil society by moulding local protests into coloured revolution.

How do these interventions function? At the beginning local or national discontent, which almost always is rooted in social problems, has to be «politicised». That means that social revolutionary elements have to be excluded. They could be dangerous for the establishment of a liberal democracy. In a second step cadres are formed. They run through different seminars in «regime change», «liberal democracy», «institution building», «nation building» etc. Allen Weinstein, one of the founders of NED, once stated openly, what the function of organisations like NED was like at the beginning of the 1990s: «A lot of what we [NED] do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA». (2) In some cases like in the case of James Woosley this statement can be proved even biographically. Woosley was head of the CIA between 1993 and 1995, before he led the board of «Freedom House».

If the civil society interventions do not fulfil the aim of «regime change», a military intervention can take place, like it did in Yugoslavia in March 1999. Since the rule of Bill Clinton civil mission and military threat go hand in hand. Barack Obama brings this system to perfection.

With the help of Western foundations, the Serbian «Otpor» positioned itself as a more or less successful export model. From Georgia to Ukraine, Belarus and Egypt former activists of «Otpor» hold trainings and seminars in civil resistance to form NGO-units of oppositional groups to overthrow the respective political leaders and governments like Shevardandze, Kuchma/Yanukovych or Lukashenko. Not everywhere the plan is functioning, like the case of Belarus shows. There the local coloured revolutionaries were persecuted and moved to Lithuania or Poland, where they now maintain their infrastructure like radio stations, offices and «universities».

Moscow is warned

In July 2012 the Russian Duma passed a law which obliges civil society organisations to financing transparency. This includes the declaration and control of foreign money. The Western resentment at this law is dishonest in some regards. On the one hand, the civil society interventions of Western foundations for Eastern and Southern coloured revolutions get more and more visible. Their function is evident. Even more: For example NED is publishing openly which NGO is getting how much grants. In its annual statement of accounting (2011) NED notes that it concentrated on subsidising NGOs in Belarus, where organisations like «Freedom of information» (1,23 Mio Dollars) or «Civil Society» (300.000 Dollars) all together received 3,5 Mio. Dollars in 2011.

On the other hand, Russia is not the first country to hinder civil society interventions from outside. So Venezuela closed down the NED-bureau in Caracas in December 2010. And Egypt checked the bureaus of five foreign foundations and brought more than 40 responsible employees (Americans, Germans, Serbians and Egyptians) to the court. They are accused of «illegal activities with illegal money transfers».

After all the experiences with intervening in civil societies in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus, nobody can be astonished that Moscow is trying to protect its civil society from foreign attempts to implement coloured opposition. Let’s be frank: what would happen if Russian foundations would intervene in Western European civil societies? How would the European Union, for example, react, if Russian of Chinese financial support would be given to – let’s say – groups for national self-determination. They could even use the same political argument Berlin did in the 1990s by supporting Croatian and Bosnian nationalists and their fight against Belgrade. National discontent is widespread in Europe. And easily young people from Greece to the Netherlands could be found to fight EU-establishment with social or national arguments. Russian money could help them to organise. It is for sure that in the case of logistical and financial intervention into EU-inner politics, Brussels would immediately stop the flow of money from outside, for example from Moscow. This restriction would be labelled as a necessary «capital control» to protect EU-European interests, as it is done in other fields of the economy. Moscow is doing exactly the same, but Western media and politicians are defaming the restriction for being «undemocratic» representing «Soviet-type politics». With the new Russian law controlling foreign money flow into civil society organisations, the Western «NGOs are forced to react. USAID is the first to close down its office end of September 2012…

____________________________________

(1) Fareed Zakaria, The Rise of Illiberal Democracy. In: Foreign Affairs 76/6 (1997), 42

(2) Washington Post, 21th of September 1991

Libya: Imperial Humanists and Helpless Others

[…continued from the previous article; see the list of related articles at the bottom of this page, plus information on the latest book, Slouching Towards Sirte]

The empire that speaks of “dignity” first invented the image of the helpless Libyan begging for us to “stop standing idly by”—because we, in the West, are tasked with authoring the history of Libyans, according to this logic—and after inventing the image we went about destroying Libya until the image could materialize. Now U.S. officials tell the media that, “the Libyans have barely re-established full control of their country,” and that the post-Gaddafi government “has limited tools at its disposal,” with Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA official adding that, “the Libyans in just about every endeavor are just learning to walk, let alone run”. They are, in other words, infants. Hence Obama rushed in Marines, drones, and CIA agents to hunt down those that attacked the consulate in Benghazi. According to the U.S., the Libyans themselves do not know who the attackers are; this matter requires U.S. intelligence. Destruction is creation, and in the chaos ensuing from the U.S./NATO unraveling the country, interventionists feel free to inscribe their preferred myths of history—“where they make a desert, they call it peace” (Tacitus, 98, ch. 30).

It’s also interesting to reflect on the contradictory and bifurcated image created of ourselves by the humanitarian imperialists. On the one hand, as civilized Westerners we are something akin to angels. Our actions and thoughts reign high above history, residing in an altostratus of unimpeachable rectitude. In our teleological view of our own progress, we are at the highest point of human cultural evolution, ours being the highest stage of human achievement. We are the standard by which others are measured. We are what the future of all humanity looks like. The absence of our institutions and values in other societies is a measure of their inferiority. We should help them. We should help them to become more like us. These various “savage” others can be raised to our level of dignity, if we help them to acquire “prosperity” through the advance of “opportunity.” Fixated on providence and destiny, we of course resent history, because while history carries the inevitability of change (and we think of ourselves as the paragon of “change” that others must follow), history also means the inevitable decline of empire. As much as we resent history, we find particularity loathsome: some differences simply defy polite tolerance, and demand our corrective intervention. High up in the clouds, perched on the wings of our stealth bombers, we preach the ideology of universal, individual human rights.

On the other hand, both NATO propaganda and the public advocacy of humanitarian imperialists are based on certain assumptions of humanity thereby creating another image of ourselves that is not about dignity, but rather impulse—not even impulse, maybe more something like mere pulsation. This is an image of humanity that is fundamentally founded on consumerism and instant gratification. The vision of our humanity that liberal imperialists entertain is one which constructs us as shrieking sacks of emotion. This is the elites’ anthropology, one that views us as bags of nerve and muscle: throbbing with outrage, contracting with every story of “incubator babies” (first in Iraq, now again in Syria), bulging up with animus at the arrest of Gay Girl in Damascus, recoiling at the sound of Viagra-fueled mass rape. From mass hysteria in Twitter, to hundreds of thousands signing an online Avaaz petition calling for bombing Libya in the name of human rights (the same Avaaz that had a petition calling for the release of the non-existent “Gay Girl in Damascus”), we become nerves of mass reaction. We cannot “stand idly by” because that would be what thinking people would do. In our state of frenzy, we scream for action via “social media,” thumbs furiously in action on our “smart” phones. What should we do? Whatever, “do something…stand up and be counted”. If we do not act, we should be held responsible for the actions of others. When we do act, we should never be held responsible for our own actions. Then again, our “action” merely consists of asking the supremely endowed military establishment to act in our name.

This is a vision of us as an audience, a body of public opinion harnessed to a feed bag. One image of us as such an audience was strikingly described in William Gibson’s Idoru (1996):

“Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”[1]

Lacking in any dignity in the political and media elites’ constructions of us as reactive bags of emotion, their anthropology as I call it, is also accompanied by NATO’s implicit sociology: societies can be remade through a steady course of high-altitude bombings and drone strikes. It’s like schooling an unruly child with heavy caning, and if that does not work there is always “indefinite detention”.

But remade into what? It was Obama’s stated intention to “install democracy” in Libya through foreign military intervention, which is an amazing indictment of what he means by democracy. Obama announced his “commitment to the goal of helping provide the Libyan people an opportunity to transform their country, by installing a democratic system that respects the people’s will”. The question is though, do Libyans want democracy? What do Libyans understand by democracy? These questions persisted in spite of the July 2012 elections for a national congress. With a 62 percent turnout of registered voters—not a spectacular figure if we had believed that there was a massive and popular yearning for elections—and with 80 percent of eligible voters registered, this meant that the actual turnout of all those who were eligible to vote was little more than 48 percent. After supposedly being crushed by the tyranny of Gaddafi, less than half of Libyans bothered to vote. A British survey that preceded the elections, the “First National Survey of Libya” conducted by Oxford Research International in association with the Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford, and the University of Benghazi, presented some interesting results.[2] Only 13 percent of those surveyed said democracy (either “Libyan-style” or “Western-style”) should be installed in a year’s time, with the total number rising to only 25 percent when the time period was stretched to five years. The majority simply rejected democracy. The largest number, 26 percent, wanted to see a single, strong Libyan leader (with another 12 percent choosing a small group of strong leaders), for the next year; the numbers declined to only 22 percent plus 9 percent respectively when choosing for the next five years. Also, 62 percent wanted to maintain a politically centralized nation, rejecting the demands for autonomy by eastern Libya. Just under 50 percent wanted to see any prosecution of former regime supporters, with 66 percent wanting this for former regime members. Also, 53 percent of respondents said that the Muslim Brotherhood should play no role in the political future of Libya—and indeed, religious parties fared poorly in the elections. A further 16 percent said they were prepared to use violence for political ends. It’s also true that the survey reported that 80 percent of Libyans thought that regime change was “absolutely right”; the same number also reported being “very careful with people” out of a lack of trust, and with tens of thousands of armed men roaming the streets, one has to wonder if they would express outright disagreement with the revolution to British outsiders accompanied by academics from Benghazi. What is interesting is that roughly a third of those surveyed manifested an overall pattern of preference for the political system that they had lost, added to a predominant lack of trust overall, and a strong current that prefers violence.

For some, violence and elections worked well together. On the eve of the election, gunmen shot down a helicopter carrying polling materials near the eastern city of Benghazi, killing one election worker. Previously, an election candidate had also been murdered. Following the NTC’s issuing of draft electoral laws, several tribal leaders and militia commanders in Libya’s east declared self-rule, “set up their own council and formed their own army, while saying that they would boycott elections and even work to prevent Saturday’s vote from taking place”. Over 216,000 had registered to vote in Benghazi’s own election in May 2012 for an autonomous Cyrenaica Congress. Misrata, like Benghazi, also sacked its rebel city council, amidst plenty complaints of corruption, and elected an autonomous one. Days before the July national congressional election, militia members from eastern Libya took over oil refineries in the towns of Ras Lanouf, Brega and Sidr, shutting down the facilities to pressure the NTC to cancel the elections. As a result, protesters shut off half of all of Libya’s oil exports. Angry protesters and militia fighters attacked election offices, setting fire to ballot papers and other voting materials, in Benghazi and Ajdabiya. In a sudden move to appease Islamists, the NTC even stripped the parliament waiting to be elected of its responsibility in drafting a constitutional panel, now saying this would be directly elected in a separate vote. On the day of the election itself, “acts of sabotage, mostly in the east of the country, prevented 101 polling stations from opening,” according to the chairman of the electoral commission. With militias firmly in control of Libya’s cities and towns, frequently engaged in deadly assaults on each other, British journalists could only conclude: “Gaddafi has been replaced by what is in effect a patchwork quilt of local dictatorships,” echoing statements I made previously.

After touting itself to foreign audiences as a force for democracy, it was interesting to see what the NTC meant by democracy in the electoral and other laws that they decreed since January 2012. Workers could not run as candidates, given the requirement that candidates must have a professional qualification; anyone who ever worked at any level of the former government was barred, unless they could demonstrate, “early and clear support for the February 17th revolution”; those with an academic degree that involved study of Gaddafi’s Green Book, which was previously a prerequisite to professional advancement, were also barred; also, anyone who received any monetary benefit under Gaddafi could be prohibited from participation—as Massaoud El Kanuni, a Libyan constitutional lawyer, realized, these “criteria could be used against three-quarters of the country”. The NTC would then continue its practice of holding meetings in secret, not even releasing the names of its ruling members. What was known was that Khalifa Hifter, a Libyan exile on the payroll of the CIA, was now Libya’s most influential army officer, especially after Gaddafi defector, General Abdul Fatah Younes, was mysteriously assassinated by forces aligned with the NTC during the middle of NATO’s war. NTC leaders who were officials in Gaddafi’s government clearly exempted themselves from their own laws—they were above the law. Meanwhile, the great mass of Libyans who benefited under Gaddafi, or had any “connections” whatsoever, were to be forgiven of nothing. Yet, insurgent militias guilty of widespread and ongoing atrocities, were to be forgiven of everything: before the elections, the NTC passed a law granting immunity to all of the “revolutionaries.” In addition, the NTC passed a series of laws that criminalized free speech and any ties to the former government in sweeping terms, as if to codify the reign of terror that had been unleashed since Gaddafi’s overthrow: the authorities were to take action against individuals who participated in “official and unofficial bodies of the former regime,” as they pose a “threat to the security or stability” of Libya, with punishments ranging from surveillance to travel bans to barring them from residence in certain parts of the country; “glorification” of Gaddafi or the former regime was also criminalized and punishable by a prison sentence (that the anti-glorification law was later repealed meant little, it simply legalized the ongoing practice of de facto persecution, and its original passage would have been enough to scare some); another law banned spreading “news reports, rumours or propaganda” that could “cause any damage to the state,” with the penalty being “life in prison”; there would also be a prison sentence for anyone spreading information of rumours that could “weaken the citizens’ morale” during “conditions of war,” and Libya was still defined as being at war; there would also be prison sentences for anyone who “attacks the February 17 revolution, denigrates Islam, the authority of the state or its institutions”; and, another law confiscated all property and funds belonging to persons who served in the former regime, that is except for those passing this law (source). NTC Chair, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, threatened: “we will be tough towards people who threaten our stability”. This language echoed that of interim Defence Minister, Osama al-Juwali, who threatened Bani Walid (a pro-Gaddafi bastion that liberated itself from NTC rule) that forces loyal to the NTC would strike it with an “iron fist”. Where’s that anti-Stalinism now?

That this language, the repression and persecution, and the laws above, constitute a “democratic” transformation and “liberation from dictatorship” is something deserving of mockery and condemnation—especially as citizens of NATO states have literally paid to bring this about. But instead of either mockery or condemnation, Western leaders have offered celebratory congratulations. Obama called the elections “another milestone in the country’s transition to democracy,” a statement parroted by the media, while the European Union hailed Libya’s “first free elections” as the “dawn of a new era,” and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared that Libyans had “sacrificed their lives or suffered lasting injury in order to win the right of the Libyan people to build a new state founded on human dignity and the rule of law”—“as if this were now a reality”.

What remains a reality is that Libya continues to be a society at war with itself, not just as a matter of interpretation, but as a matter of the new national security laws. Neither officially, nor in practice, has the war ended. Not only are there still militarily active resistance units that supported Gaddafi, and refuse to admit defeat, but the government and opposing militias themselves also live in fear of possible overthrow. Taking matters to an extreme, Gaddafi is blamed for virtually everything that has transpired since his death, including getting blame for the torture and mass detentions by those who overthrew him. When the U.S. diplomats were murdered in Benghazi, Libyan government officials immediately saw the hand of “Gaddafi sympathizers”. If Gaddafi is to blame for everything, it would mean that he still has power over Libyans, and there has been no real revolution. Worse yet, by consistently blaming Gaddafi, Libya’s new rulers disclaim any responsibility for themselves, which once again is a defeat for dignity as a reiteration of the “helpless Libyan.”

The “helpless Libyan” was of course very popular to those making careers of “helping” and “protecting” others. If Libyans were not helpless, then they would be made so. Once protected, they would be thankful: “One, Two, Three, merci Sarkozy!”. Gratitude is good (even if you have to go all the way to Benghazi to get it). Gratitude provides important symbolic capital, which can then be converted into actual capital: tales of success and victory in countering “genocide,” when properly mass mediated and aided by viral Internet campaigns, can be used to appeal for donations from the public, to offer paid memberships, and seek financial support from states, while retaining a dubious identity as a NGO. In the case of thanks offered to states, gratitude translates into something akin to subordinate acquiescence, offering legitimation and thus serving as a lubricant for power. Thus French President Nicolas Sarkozy could tell his warrior-philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy:

“The role I am playing goes beyond my person, or my mandate. It is the position of France in the Arab world on which the dawn is rising. It is the world order, the style of international relations for the approaching decades that we are in the process of defining. It is an event of long-term import [de longue portée]. A slow earthquake. All this is worth a little patience. Let’s keep in contact. Thank you for what you have done.”

Notions of protecting civilians, preventing genocide, ending human rights abuses, putting war criminals on trial, providing humanitarian relief, all of these are rarely even of secondary concern to the key Western actors in actual practice, except as weapons. Sarkozy is at least frank: this story is about empire. Lévy, anxious to show how much of an insider he was in the power group that crushed Libya, unfortunately makes the mistake of providing information that entirely nullifies all of his other claims, such as the grotesque ones that Gaddafi brought war on himself, or the need to prevent a massacre in Benghazi, and so on (source). Lévy is not harmless enough to be judged a mere court jester, which would be his obvious calling–he’s a heavyweight amongst quacks, widely repudiated as such by other French philosophers.

The worst thing one could do to the dogmatic upholders of the “responsibility of protect” doctrine, is to take them seriously and to judge the outcomes of the interventions they endorse, on the very same terms they have chosen. Rather than the protection of civilians that key R2P advocates applauded as the defining feature of the intervention in Libya, what we have seen is a wide range of systematic and recurring actions that demonstrate the exact opposite of civilians being protected. My book demonstrates, through documented cases, a consistent pattern in NATO actions where the safety of civilians was either ignored, or civilians were themselves the chosen targets, or certain civilians were armed and supported in threatening the lives of other civilians. Apart from cases, and speaking in terms of a broader framework, war itself cannot but escalate the costs to human lives, and NATO’s intervention not only prolonged the war, it escalated the war and directly destroyed countless civilian lives both directly and indirectly. If we really wanted to see “civilians” being “protected,” then we needed a counter force to protect Libyans from NATO. Moreover, NATO’s intervention did not stop armed conflict in Libya, as that continues to the present. Massacres were not prevented, they were enabled, and many occurred after NATO intervened and because NATO intervened. The only issue on which NATO spokespersons and R2P advocates can score a rhetorical “win” is on Benghazi having been “saved”—saved, that is, from a fictitious massacre that was not in the offing, and even then one must be possessed of a certain racist bend of mind to talk about lives “saved” in Benghazi when we know of the horrors committed there against countless black Africans and black Libyans. Only if the latter do not count, as if they were to be subtracted from the “humanity” that “human rights” advocates claim as their devout concern, can one possibly make a claim that lives were saved in Benghazi. In addition, it takes a determined partisan to simply dismiss the documented revenge killings that took place, and continue to take place in Benghazi against persons known or imagined to have been loyal to Gaddafi. The implicit agreement tacitly binding NATO and R2P advocates was simply that certain lives were worth saving, and many more were not. Their answer to the killing, real or imagined, that they claimed to find so abhorrent was to introduce more killing. If this intervention is what they imagine to be “humanitarian,” does it mean that they are capable of even worse?

Intervention, as the one that occurs in Libya, is fundamentally opposed to dignity: the very act of intervention implies that there is some deficit or deficiency that requires the curative power of foreign actors. The Libyans are somehow inadequate in this frame of mind, not even their numbers are sufficient; hence we “iPad imperialists” must join their struggle: “we are all Libyans now.” Except we are not, and never can be, nor should we ever pretend to assume someone else’s identity. Imperial hubris (wars seen as “cake walks”) is well accompanied by imperial narcissism (“they will greet us as liberators”), and now we can add imperial personality disorder (I am them, they are all I).

Once foreign military intervention occurs, it scorches the earth in a way that unleashes new forces, and creates new deadly consequences that can be exploited for the purposes of further intervention. As we see in the rapid, militarized response of the U.S. to the killing of its ambassador and staff in Benghazi, intervention begets intervention. More intervention is needed to solve the problems caused by intervention.

The next time that empire comes calling in the name of human rights, please be found standing idly by.

Notes

[1] My many thanks to Brendan Stone, host of CFMU 93.3 FM, “Unusual Sources,” for bringing this quote to my attention.

[2] I received data compiled by the survey, along with two written reports and two PowerPoint presentations, from the British authors of the report.

References

Abunimah, Ali. (2011/8/8). “How CNN Helped Spread a Hoax about Syrian Babies Dying in Incubators”. Electronic Intifada, August 8.

Agence France Presse. (2012/7/7). “Libya Unrest ‘Prevents Voting in 101 Centres’”. Agence France Presse, July 7.

————— . (2011/3/23). “Libyan Rebels Foresee Democratic Regime”. Herald Sun, March 23.

————— . (2012/2/17). “Libya Marks Revolution Day amid New Warning”. ABC News (Australia), February 17.

Al Arabiya. (2012/1/6). “Qaddafi Brought War upon Himself, Says Architect of Libyan Intervention”. Al Arabiya, January 6.

Associated Press (AP). (2012/7/6). “Fears of Violence, Calls for Boycott Threaten to Mar Vote in Libya”. CP24, July 6.

————— . (2012/2/21). “Elections in Libya’s Misrata Show a Splintered Nation”. CTV News, February 21.

BBC. (2012/1/25). “Libyan Defence Minister in Restive Bani Walid for Talks”. BBC News, January 25.

————— . (2012/7/6). “Libya Election Helicopter ‘Shot Near Benghazi’”. BBC News, July 6.

Dozier, Kimberly. (2012/9/15). “US Scrambles to Rush Spies, Drones to Libya”. Associated Press, September 15.

Gibson, William. (1996). Idoru. New York: Berkley Books.

Gumuchian, Marie-Louise, & Shuaib, Ali. (2012/7/6). “Half of Libya’s Oil Exports Hit by Protests”. Reuters, July 6.

Huffpost Hill. (2011/3/22). “Obama: We’re Promoting Democracy in Libya”. Huffpost Hill, March 22.

Morrow, Will. (2012/1/13). “Libya: TNC Releases Anti-Democratic Draft Electoral Laws”. World Socialist Web Site, January 13.

Murphy, Dan. (2011/6/13). “The Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax, ‘Mass Rape’ in Libya, and Press Credulity”. Christian Science Monitor, June 13.

Oborne, Peter, & Cookson, Richard. (2012/5/18). “Libya Still Ruled by the Gun”. The Telegraph, May 18.

Reuters. (2012/5/19). “Vote in Libya’s Benghazi Tests Support for Autonomy”. Reuters, May 19.

Shaoul, Jean, & Marsden, Chris. (2012/7/11). “The Real Significance of Libya’s Elections”. World Socialist Web Site, July 11.

Shuaib, Ali. (2012/5/14). “Libya Election Candidate Killed in Remote South”. Reuters, May 14.

Soguel, Dominique. (2012/5/3). “Libya Grants Immunity to ‘Revolutionaries’”. Agence France Presse, May 3.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius. (98). De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae.

Walden, George. (2011/12/29). “How is Bernard-Henri Lévy Possible?” The Times Literary Supplement, December 29.

---

The Dignity Series

• Keep Your Money: A Series on Dignity
• A Tear for Africa: Humanitarian Abduction and Reduction
• Zimbabwe: “Keep your money, keep your power, and keep away from us”
• Still Standing: Zimbabwe
• Stay Up, Zimbabwe: Pan-Africanism, Caribbean Solidarity, and Dignity
• Libya: Empire or Dignity
• Libya: Imperial Humanists and Helpless Others

Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II

September 11, 2012

Part two of an investigative report by Cory Morningstar

The Avaaz Investigative Report Series 2012 [Further Reading]: Part I • Part II • Part III • Part IV • Part V • Part VI

Avaaz Investigative Report Series 2017 [Further Reading]: Part I • Part II • Part III

 

 Corporate “Green” Pedophilia

After the success of TckTckTck, Havas (a global advertising firm) cut out the middleman (that being the NGO), creating their own NGO named One Young World. One Young World could be defined as predatory corporate pedophilia. On the TakingItGlobal website, under the headline How to Mobilize Youth Globally to Support the Goals of the Rio 2012 Summit [the illusory “green” economy], a IYY HLM (INTERNATIONAL YOUTH YEAR – HIGH LEVEL MEETING) RSVP event is described as follows: “The vast networks represented by AVAAZ, Taking IT Global, Peace Child and One Young World represent an excellent way of building on the momentum of the IYY to promote the Rio+20 goals through online media, advertising and PR – and good, old-fashioned campaigning…. The Rio+20 Summit is as good a moment as any to mark that watershed moment: young people – through their schools, their community groups and their online network are well-placed to support the UN and its member states to explain that transition and embed it in the hearts and minds of the general public. This side meeting will raise the profile and importance of the Rio+20 meeting in the minds of all who attend the IYY HLM – and send them home with new skills and new inspiration to support the UN to achieve a stunning success in Rio in June 2012.” Featured speakers included David Jones (founder/director, One Young World; director, Havas Global Advertising) and Jeremy Heimans (founder/board member of AVAAZ.org; director of Purpose Inc.). At breakneck speed, One Young World is establishing partner organizations throughout the globe (H. W. Bush is an endorser in the One Young World Pittsburgh org). It has also secured a partnership with Association Internationale des Étudiants en Sciences Économiques et Commerciales (AIESEC); present in over 110 countries and territories and with over 82,000 members, AIESEC is the world’s largest student-run organization.

The Commerce of Trust

One must recognize that the non-profit industrial complex, not unlike the oligarchy, retains its power via a constant influx of corporate cash (via foundations). When an NGO becomes as wealthy as the corporations who made such wealth possible, the necessity to funnel the corporate funding through foundations is no longer necessary. Recent examples are Coca-Cola partnering with World Wildlife Fund for $3 million and Nature Conservancy merging with Dow Chemical for a cool $10 million. This does not begin to take into account the money doled out by the US administration to NGOs under the guise of “humanitarianism.” [PR Newswire, WASHINGTON, 24 May 2012, “NGOs welcome Senate leadership in international humanitarian funding; The Senate FY2013 State, Foreign Operations appropriations bill provides for $52.1 billion in discretionary spending for the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other international development and humanitarian assistance programs….”]

Today, in 2012, with the recent “approved” invasion and annihilation of Libya, which, prior to the NATO-led invasion, had the highest standard of living in Africa, the imperialist states are frothing at the mouth over the prospects of invading/ occupying Syria under the carefully orchestrated guise of “humanitarian intervention.” The imperialists steal and plunder every last drop of wealth from resource-rich countries – both monetary and cultural, as well as ecological. Of equal importance to the imperialists is protection of the decaying US dollar and Euro and keeping resource-rich countries poor via debt. (Case in point: Libya had no debt. Further, Gaddafi was working toward the introduction of the gold dinar, a single African currency, made by gold, which was to be a “true sharing of the wealth” for the African people that would have resulted in their oil no longer being traded in American or Euro currency, thus liberating them, to some extent, from the chains of imperialism.) If one looks closely, we can witness a steady transformation, well underway within the meticulously maintained, well-greased gears of the propaganda machine – a machine that continues to be refined. The blurring of lines between corporate power, the corporate media complex, the non-profit industrial complex, and the United Nations continues to accelerate, while simultaneously the veil begins to lift.

The Cat is Out of the Bag

In the 21 December 2011 Strategic Culture Foundation article, “A Third-Rate Intelligence Agency for a Failing Super-Power: The CIA’s Global Demise,” the author closes by stating:

“The CIA’s political influence operations around the world are also being exposed every day. Run in tandem with international financier George Soros and his network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and not-for-profit foundations, the CIA’s attempts to foment rebellions through ‘themed revolutions’ and election engineering are becoming better understood, ironically through the media that Soros and the CIA champion the most – social networking. From the streets of Egypt and Syria, where the CIA’s and Soros’s involvement in artificially-created uprisings is no longer a secret, to Russia, Venezuela, Belarus, and China, where political intervention by the CIA and its team of Soros ‘do-gooders’ is now being met with strong opposition, the cat is out of the bag.

 

“While the CIA has for decades enjoyed the luxury of hiding behind NGOs, missionaries, aid workers, and journalists, the Internet has allowed CIA influence networks to be exposed and its agents, shills, and dupes to be identified. Time magazine has named as its ‘Person on the Year’ for 2011 the generic ‘protester.’ However, as the CIA’s worldwide operations become further exposed, the ‘protester’ lauded by Time will no longer be a paid provocateur working for the CIA or Soros – taking orders and money from Human Rights Watch and Global Witness – but one who is genuinely protesting the interference and aggression of the United States. And that protester will be found not only in Cairo, Moscow, Caracas, and Beirut but in New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles.”

The Open Society Institute (renamed in 2011 to Open Society Foundations) is a private operating and grantmaking  foundation founded by George Soros, who remains the chair. Soros is known best as a multibillionaire currency speculator who became known as “the man who broke the bank of England” when he gained one billion (US) in investment profits in a single day on September 16, 1992. Soros is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), created in 1924 by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. The CFR is essentially the promotional arm of the ruling elite in the US with most all US policy initiated and written by the exclusive membership within the CFR. Soros has deep ties to the Trilateral Commission, which is the international counterpart of the CFR created in 1973 by David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski (who worked with CIA operant Gloria Steinman) and McGeorge Bundy. Soros also is privy to the exclusive Bilderberg Group, which functions behind closed doors. The Bilderberg Group is an offshoot of the CFR, founded by David Rockefeller; Dean Rusk, former head of Rockefeller Foundation; Joseph Johnson, head of Carnegie Endowment; John J. McCloy, Ford Foundation Chair, and some notables of the European oligarchy. Most revealing, Soros is an avid supporter of Occupy Wall Street.

New York City Occupy Wall Street Embraces Otpor and Bombing for Peace

 “Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.” — Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Discours de la servitude volontaire), c. 1553

Murray N. Rothbard asks, “Since despotic rule is against the interests of the bulk of the population, how then does this consent come about? Again, La Boétie highlights the point that this consent is engineered, largely by propaganda beamed at the populace by the rulers and their intellectual apologists. The devices – of bread and circuses, of ideological mystification – that rulers today use to gull the masses and gain their consent, remain the same as in La Boétie’s days. The only difference is the enormous increase in the use of specialized intellectuals in the service of the rulers.”

There is little doubt that if he were alive today, Étienne de La Boétie would consider the non-profit industrial complex an integral component, indeed the intellectual apologists, of the oligarchy. La Boétie wrote, “This is the establishment, as it were the permanent and continuing purchase, of a hierarchy of subordinate allies, a loyal band of retainers, praetorians, and bureaucrats.” La Boétie considered this factor “the mainspring and the secret of domination, the support and foundation of tyranny.”

The following text contains factual information/evidence obtained from many months of research that undoubtedly will be met with much hostility and resentment by many. Yet, analyzing such information is critical if we are to see the light through our veils and illusions. As only then does the possibility for a real influence and positive outcome arise from orchestrated events that are being engineered with a false exterior to serve corporate and imperialist interests. The very forces we claim to oppose continue to successfully reabsorb us into the very system destroying us – the very system we must starve, struggle against and ultimately dismantle. This is where we fail. If we continue to deny these truths rather than confront them, our collective denial will serve as the instrument for securing our own annihilation.

This is NOT TO SAY that there are not legitimate Occupy Wall Street (OWS) sects that have broken off from the core, neoliberal-funded and dominated OWS reform movement.

A reconnaissance of corporate funding (via foundations), coupled with a rock solid understanding of history, is vital. The understanding of how our movements have been financed, designed and controlled by the forces we seek to oppose, of the very sequence of events that has led society to the present moment, is vital if we are to transcend the barbed wire barriers that keep us enslaved within the system.

It should come as little surprise that MoveOn.org, founder of Avaaz with Res Publica, heavily promoted Occupy Wall Street. (Both MoveOn and Res Publica will be discussed further in this report.)

Image: The Otpor/Canvas logo as prominently featured on the New York City General Assembly website

“Youth enamored with lofty, naïve notions of ‘freedom’ sold to them by corporate-fascist funded NGOs were brought into the streets to create chaos and division which was then capitalized on by covert political and even military maneuvering by the West and its proxy forces.” – 2011-Year of the Dupe

From 2011-Year of the Dupe: February 17, 2011: “The London-based National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) calls for a Libyan “Day of Rage” [note the hijacked term from the real revolutionary Weather Underground movement] to match the US-destabilization rhetoric used in Tunisia and Egypt. The NFSL has been backed by the CIA-MI6 since the 80’s and had made multiple attempts to overthrow Qaddafi’s government with both terrorist attacks and armed insurrection.

 Note the “EnoughGaddafi.com” signs. EnoughGaddafi.com’s webmaster is listed on the US State Department’s Movements.org as the “Twitter” to follow.

“A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.

“The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED): “The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.

“It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous foundations, organizations, and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. As we will see, preparations for the “Arab Spring” and the global campaign that is now encroaching on both Russia and China, as predicted in February 2011’s “The Middle East & then the World,” began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first “fist” was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

“December 3-5, 2008: Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM’s various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman, attended, as did Jared Cohen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

“Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO ‘Otpor’ who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a ‘well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.’ After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.” [Source: 2011-Year of the Dupe]

Foreign Policy Magazine (a major organ of the Council on Foreign Relations promoting globalization) would report in their article, “Revoluton U,” that CANVAS assisted protesters in the ‘Rose Revolution’ of Georgia, the ‘Orange Revolution’ of the Ukraine, and is currently working with networks from Belarus, Myanmar (Burma), all across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as with activists in North Korea, and 50 other countries.”

 Above screenshot: Occupy Wall Street Screenshot featuring an Avaaz destabilization campaign against the Syrian Government. Note the red Otpor logo (fist).

 

Above screenshot: Earth.350.org.blog: Leading up to the 15 October 2011 Occupy movement, Rockefellers 350.org’s past presenters include Ivan Marovic, founder of US-funded Otpor (22 September2011), Srdja Popovic founding member of Otpor and Slobodan Dinovic, one of Otpor’s original organizers (29 September 29 2011).

Like the Egyptian “Revolution,” the change in venue and transition of key players we witness today has been anything but spontaneous. And although it is tragic that most of the entire globe has been conned, far worse is the fact that global society as a whole, with “the left” movement at the forefront, continues to swallow and perpetuate the lies that the continued “uprisings” of the countries targeted for destabilization are spontaneous revolutions. The logic being, if the revolutions were spontaneous uprisings, then the Occupy movement was also spontaneous; arising from the people, not orchestrated by the ruling classes. “The left,” in an act of insanity and denial, has committed itself to supporting what the ruling classes, via corporate media and a network of Soros-funded NGOs, have framed as “revolutionaries” in sovereign states under strategic invasion, while in reality, these so-called revolutionaries are foreign-backed insurgents/terrorists, including the CIA-created Al-Qaeda terrorist cell, which the US now acknowledges publicly as having partnered with.

The “progressive left,” in order to save face, has sided with the 1% they claim to oppose – millions, no doubt, unwittingly. Well-intentioned citizens who believe themselves to be progressive in their ideologies, who believe they are of sound intelligence, continue to cling to this position as volumes of evidence dispels all myths of Gaddafi having turned on his own people. If tens of thousands must die in order for the “left” EuroAmericans to feel good about themselves, then so be it. No one wants to be the dupe. The oligarchy understood this unequivocally. And while Occupy preached the virtues of non-violent direct action, the imperialist countries advanced their destabilizations, invasions and occupations in the Middle East and Africa at an unparalleled speed – murdering, some estimate, as many as 100,000 Libyans in the process. The silence of dissent was deafening. Very few of us have despaired at our complicity; most people simply turn a blind eye to the truth so they don’t have to feel bad about their coffee shop assent.

The Occupy Wall Street “movement” website www.15October.net was registered and paid for on 12 July 2011 by Paulina Arcos, spouse of Francisco Carrión Mena, the Permanent Representative of Ecuador to the United Nations.

Meaning, by 12 July 2011, certain individuals were aware of, planned and banked on “spontaneous” global occupations that would take place 15 October 2011 – long before the rest of us knew anything. The address provided for the October15.net domain is identical to that of Francisco Carrión Mena’s address at the UN. One can safely assume that the credit card used to pay for the domain was a United Nations corporate credit card; if it were Arcos’s personal credit card, the domain registration would display her home residence address rather than the UN address. On 19 October 2011, the 15October.net domain registration was changed to a (web) domain privacy service that protects the registered owner’s information and other relevant information. [13 October 2011, Occupation & Infiltration: Questions Regarding 15October.net http://thewrongkindofgreen.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/pertinent-questions-regarding-the-websitecampaign-www-15october-net/]

The WikiLeaks Connection

Santiago Carrión has founded and/or partnered with, and/or is affiliated with the following organizations:

• 15 M
• 15October.net
• EuroRevolution.net
• Future Press
• Roar Magazine
• Take the Square
• The Global Square
• United for Global Change (May 12)
• US Day of Rage
• WikiLeaks Central
• WikiLeaks World

 

The son of Arcos and Carrión is Santiago Carrión, a partner/collaborator of Europe’s TakeTheSquare.net, partner/affiliate of Roar Magazine (Reflections on a Revolution), founder of EuropeanRevolution.net, FuturePress, 15October.net, United for Global Change (also known as May 12), The Global Square, and a writer specializing in WikiLeaks cable analysis. [From WL Central (the Wikileaks-endorsed news site): “We are Pedro Noel and Santiago Carrión Arcos, two Philosophy graduates from different origins, who met while studying in Spain. We were always concerned with politics and human rights, so when Wikileaks broke into the scene we decided to contribute by writing cable analysis…. From November 2010 we have been working on a daily basis in different fields of Internet activism and journalism anonymously. We have decided, however, to become public. The reasons are many, our personal security being the main one…. Recently, we have also collaborated in running the @wlfind Twitter account, hoping to provide a complete record for findings in the latest crowd-source initiative #wlfind, started by Wikileaks.]

Santiago Carrión’s associate, Pedro Noel, is a Brazilian Internet media activist known in the Romanian media as “the man who made 700 thousand Spaniards take the streets.” In 2011, along with other internet activists, researchers and volunteers, Pedro Noel started the project The Global Square in partnership with Delft University of Technology and its project Tribler. Roarmag.org website lists the founders of The Global Square as volunteers of the following organizations: Take the Square, United for Global Change, 15october.net, European Revolution, and Reflections on a Revolution (ROAR). Note that all of these organizations are founded by or affiliated with Carrión.

On 5 November 2011 at 10:04pm, WikiLeaks tweeted: “The Global Square: an online platform for our movement,” citing the link: http://wlcentral.org/node/2328.

On 16 February 2012, Truth-out announced that Wikileaks is now “dabbing” in social media: “Wikileaks is dabbling in social networking. In March, the whistleblower website will launch its “Global Square” project – which Wikileaks calls the, “first massive decentralized social network in the history of the Internet.”

In truth, we have approximately 2 people, openly identifiable (who, until recently worked in complete anonymity), at the helm of designing and shaping the entire global occupy “movement” into the ultimate platform for the accumulation, coordination and dissemination of information. A platform “where people of all nations can come together as equals to participate in the coordination of collective actions and the formulation of common goals and aspirations” (bold emphasis added).

With a massive throng of WikiLeaks supporters that has only grown stronger with the attack on WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, is there anyone, in any spectrum of the left, who won’t trust Carrión’s, Noel’s and Wikipedia’s Global Square project? While steadfastly upholding lost values with which the left wishes to be associated, Assange has been vilified by the very forces that the left opposes. Thus, Assange has embodied impenetrable hero, if not martyr, status. Could this be the most brilliant psyops ever conducted via internet technology, utilizing the world’s leading technocrats and global social media – or has WikiLeaks simply been infiltrated? Will the Global Square serve to be the ultimate coup de grâce on a society both manipulated and intoxicated by the non-profit industrial complex? Interestingly, this infrastructure very much follows the strategy behind the Climate Action Network (CAN), co-founded by Michael Oppenheimer (Environmental Defense Fund) in 1988, which successfully reigned in and presided over a global network of environmental organizations, thus ensuring that no movement would ever threaten economic growth. Occupy/15M, now transcending into The Global Square, is quickly being established as the official clearinghouse for all dissent, direction, communication – and as the global technological superpower for social engineering, soft power destabilizations and a cooling mechanism to keep the public passive and controlled.

One major theme within all of the aforementioned organizations has been the persistent framing of imperialist destabilizations as revolutions and uprisings, prior to and during the unprovoked annihilation of Libya, and the heavily financed destabilization now well underway in Syria. [Case in point: On 15 June 2012, Take the Square posts the article Syria Sectarian Divide Takes Alarming Turn, which states: “A perpetual and repugnant war is likely to replace the collective aspirations for equality, freedom and democracy that fuelled the non-violent uprising nearly 15 months ago.”] The demonization of Gaddafi, Assad, and other governments of sovereign, resource-rich states in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, has been key, thus mirroring and amplifying the very sentiments put forward by the US State Department. On the WikiLeaks Central website we find several Avaaz petitions. Most striking are the headlines: Stop the Massacre – Save the Libyans and To the UN Security Council, both posted on 03/22/2011. The second highlighted the Avaaz petition demanding a no-fly zone be imposed on Libya.

Carrión and Noel perhaps should be considered the Marovic, Popovic (Otpor/Canvas) adaptation for Europe. Whether Santiago Carrión’s and Pedro Noel’s intentions (along with many others) were or are sincere, whether they are naive patsies or CIA operatives – matters little. The global Occupy movement was the psyops needed, and brilliantly executed, that would build a cohesion of silence within the left against the deliberate destabilization of the Middle East and Africa. For the “revolutionaries” cannot be wrong. The “revolutionaries” are united as one. To admit that the revolutions were strategically set into motion and financed by the ruling plutocrats is to admit we’ve been co-opted by the very forces we seek to oppose – yet again.

And the need of imperialists and corporate interests to expand their growing corral of such recruits teamed with social media/marketing executives extraordinaire has never been greater:

“Pressing for unchallenged hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, Washington keeps the populist regimes in Latin America under permanent pressure. Outwardly, the U.S. Administration pledges not to resort to military force to displace the ALBA governments in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, or Cuba, but in reality Washington’s efforts to undermine them are a constant background of the continent’s political picture. The activity began under president G. Bush and shows no signs of subsiding under president Obama. Supposedly, plans are being devised in the White House that a series of color revolutions will erupt across Latin America in 2013-2014 and derail the continent’s advancement towards tighter integration in the security and other spheres. As the fresh experience of Libya showed with utmost clarity, Washington’s new brand of color revolutions will – in contrast to the former coups which used to be accompanied with outpourings of pacifist rhetoric – involve ferocious fighting and massive fatalities.” — 4 February 2012: Destabilizing Arsenals Concealed in US Embassies. Emphasis in original.]

And as Avaaz coordinated the OWS live stream in 2011, perhaps one single tweet is the most revealing of all.

An OWS “tweet” to over 86,000 followers on 20 October 2011 exclaims: “Congrats Libya! Your struggles against the #Gadhafi regime is [sic] over. Let’s hope for a bright future #solidarity.” @OccupyWallSt states it is an “official account” of https://occupywallst.org, followed by 86,347 as of that date (155,565 by 26 March 2012). The “tweet” echoed the sentiments of the imperialist states and “leaders” such as Hillary Clinton, and demonstrated a total upside down ideological pandemonium by a so-called “leftist” movement. This sentiment of “congratulations” over the horrific murder of the brother leader of a sovereign nation who refused to abandon his people was “retweeted” by over 100 “followers.” Yoshie Furuhashi summed it up best via Twitter: “IMHO, capitalists have nothing to fear from #OccupyWallStreet, who can’t tell imperialist regime change from popular revolution.”

Jump forward to the present. In a 6 July 2012 article titled SYRIA: Wikileaks – hard at work for NATO, Jorge Capelán wrote:

“With the decision to commit this act of psy-warfare against Syria, Assange himself may have provoked doubt as regards the seriousness of his request for political asylum. Publishing 2 million e-mails is not an overnight action. It takes weeks and months of preparation, not to mention the time required to establish appropriate contacts with international media.”

It would be a mistake to dismiss the possibility of the CIA working in tandem with or within the United Nations (Carrión) or WikiLeaks when it has been documented that Kofi Annan, the United Nations “Peacekeeper” was handpicked by the CIA (30 March 2012, Kofi Annan: black skin, white mask].

Consider that in June 2011 LulzSec claimed responsibility for an attack on both the FBI and CIA websites. Flash forward to March 2012 to find that the leader of the hacker group LulzSec (affiliated with Anonymous) was exposed as an FBI operant.

Video: Uploaded 1 August 2011, the group Anonymous promotes the Global Occupy Demonstration to take place on 15 October 2011:

http://youtu.be/RPd25yDiOwU

Veterans Today, Military and Foreign Affairs Journal, 23 January 2011:

“It is illuminating that none of Assange’s document dumps have revealed any notable scandals involving Great Britain or Israel. No US public figures have had to resign because of anything Wikileaks has done. No major ongoing covert operation or highly placed agent of influence has been blown. After all these months, there are still no US indictments against Assange, even though we know that a US grand jury will readily indict a ham sandwich if the US Attorney demands it. If the CIA had wanted to silence Assange, they could have subjected him to the classic kidnapping aka rendition, meaning that he would have been beaten, drugged, and carted off to wake up in a black site prison in Egypt, Poland, or Guantanamo Bay. Otherwise, the CIA could have had recourse to the usual extralegal wetwork [not sic; euphemism for murder or assassination]. We must also assume that the new US Cybercommand with its vast resources would have little trouble shutting down the Wikileaks mirror sites, no matter how numerous they might be. The same goes for Anonymous and other flanking organizations of Wikileaks. But these considerations are purely fantastic. Assange emerges today as the pampered darling and golden boy of The New York Times, Der Spiegel. The Guardian, El Pais – in short, of the entire Anglo-American official media Wurlitzer. He reclines today in baronial splendor in the country house of a well-connected retired British officer who should be quizzed by the media about his ties to British intelligence. The radical-chic world, from Bianca Jagger to Michael Moore, is at Assange’s feet.” — Webster Griffin Tarpley, in Nihilists of The World Unite: Wikileaks Is The “Cognitive Infiltration” Operation Demanded by Cass Sunstein

Unidentified “Freedom of Speech”

The iNEWP – Freedom of Speech (formed in 2010) is yet another new highly suspect “news media” outlet where one can find highlighted a recent Avaaz destabilization campaign against the Morales (MAS) government of Bolivia. It lists its affiliates as Anonymous, The Occupy Movement (note the red Otpor/Canvas fist above the featured Avaaz campaign in the screenshot prior), The Sun Maker, TesfaNews, and VVVPR (VVV Public Relations: BPR + Guerrilla Marketing). This once very public information (accessed 30 March 2012) has since been removed from the iNEWP website. One must wonder how an organization such as iNEWP – Freedom of Speech solidifies and retains a partnership with an Anonymous group (that being Anonymous), and how the Occupy Movement has partnered with this organization without a democratic vote of its occupiers, considering the Occupy Movement claims there are no leaders. One may also question why iNEWP – Freedom of Speech uses a (web) domain privacy service that protects the registered owner’s private information, offers first names only of their international staff, and purposely neglects to offer any information as to who they are funded by. Further, one must ask oneself exactly if any entity within or outside of the Occupy Movement is paying VVV Public Relations for their services. There is one item of interest disclosed in the domain registration of iNEWP and that is the address listed as 666 NY, New York. This should be considered an inside joke whereby they are mocking the masses. They are playing with us.

 “But there is one state function which, if fully privatised across the world, would make the profits made even from essentials such as health care and education look like peanuts. That is the most basic and essential state function of all, indeed the whole raison d’etre for the state: security.” – Dan Glazebrook

And where consumerism made the plutocrats monetarily rich in the 20th century, the 21st century riches will flow from privatized security. One can safely assume the Occupy Movement (promoted heavily by the Democratic Party and the Rockefeller/Soros NGOs such as MoveOn – sister organization of Avaaz) will assist in advancing “the imperative” to expand privatized security [See Council on Foreign Relations: Armies Without States: The Privatization of Security]and the “need” to override civil liberties and freedoms by introducing fascist censorship and legislation; the most recent example being martial law itself in the U.S. The plans that we witness being unveiled today are years, if not decades, in the making. Nothing is left to chance.

15M – Europe’s Occupy Movement

In Europe we find the “revolutionary movement” 15M who identifies itself as “global Occupy/15M movements.” They are heavily promoted by a slew of NGOs from the Soros network (one being that of Global Voices, whose sponsors include the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Institute) to Take the Square, whose partners include US Day of Rage (this terminology was discussed earlier in this report; it is terminology we continue to witness, as in Libya, being co-opted by NGOs funded by globalists). US Day of Rage (a finance reform organization founded by Alexa O’Brien that seeks to distract by directing their followers to believe in the US electorate, marketing the phrase One citizen. One dollar. One vote. O’Brien also is identified as a founder of Occupy Wall Street by Wired as well as a reporter for WikiLeaks Central.) US Day of Rage lists its partners, all promoting 15M, as: EuroRevolution (over 30,000 Facebook followers), Anonymous (over 300,000 twitter followers, and whose logo bears uncanny resemblance to the logo shared by the United Nations), Roar Mag, WikiLeaks Central, and Take the Square – all founded by and/or affiliated with (with the probable exception of Anonymous, whose primary focus is the highlighting/promotion of #OWS) Santiago Carrión. It is worth noting that the movement is also referred to as the Spanish Revolution. The creator of this web platform is none other than Chris Moya, software developer and author for the Soros Global Voices network.

And where did the 15M movement originate? Was the 15M campaign also founded in part by Santiago Carrión, or as in many cases, was this simply a case of co-opting a legitimate concept from near inception in order to corral it, thus absorbing it into the NGO matrix where it can be controlled. The following facts speak volumes.

15M.cc was launched in September of 2011 with the intent not to represent the movement but rather to serve as the umbrella for data/history/projects organized (past, present and future) on behalf of the 15 May 2011 mass demonstration/movement organized by Democracia real YA! (Real Democracy NOW! or DRY!). It is publicly stated that there are 3 key people behind the 15M.cc initiative: an entrepreneur/developer and self-described “founding father” of P2P (peer to peer) social networking (Pablo Soto), a filmmaker (Stéphane M. Grueso) and an expert in marketing, design and journalism (Patricia Horrillo).

AOL/Time Warner’s Huffington Post “explains” 15M on 25 May 2011 (see excerpt below) while Soros’s Global Voices highlighted 15M on 17 May 2011. This mass demonstration was also referred to by these outlets as the #spanishrevolution. On 5 July 2011, leading “progressive left media” outlet/Soros shill, Democracy Now! really lays it on in an interview with DRY founder Olmo Gálvez in Madrid, Spain. Amy Goodman continually employed specific language such as “grassroots movement” and “crowd-funding platform” – phrases that provoke the idea of credibility and legitimacy behind the idea of spontaneous uprisings rather than corporate engineered/managed venting mechanisms. [For more information on Democracy Now! Read: DEMOCRACY NOW! AND “PROGRESSIVE ALTERNATIVE MEDIA”: CHEERLEADERS FOR IMPERIALISM AND WAR.]

The Huffington Post’s vague description on who is behind the #spanishrevolution is pitiful yet revealing:

“The #spanishrevoution is an internet movement that was started by leading figures on the internet, including top bloggers and internet entrepreneurs, to harness the distress of the Spanish people into action ahead of this past weekend’s elections.

 

Some of the most important figures/initiators of the 15M movement are Fabio Gándara (who has been part of the movement since the beginning), Jon Aguirre Such (DRY’s spokesperson) and Olmo Gálvez (whom El País calls a social networking “crack”). It’s interesting to point out that all three of them are quite young, between 26 and 30, and didn’t know each other until shortly before 15M….

 

As I already mentioned, most of the initiators didn’t know each other at the beginning and only met in person a couple of weeks before the 15M event. The main platforms enabling them to join forces were social networks like Facebook and Tuenti, and of course platforms like Twitter and hundreds (or even thousands) of blogs that supported the movements and spread the word. The sit-in at Plaza del Sol even has its own TV channel, with a mind-blowing 11 million accumulated views so far. Around 45 million people live in Spain.” (Emphasis added)

RoarMag.org disclosed one key player while stating that the other key the player wished to remain anonymous:

“Fabio Gándara, the man at the origin of it all, a 26-year old lawyer, started the social mobilization project with two friends: Eric Perez and another person who prefers to remain anonymous.”

Although Huffington tells us that it “was started by leading figures on the internet, including top bloggers and internet entrepreneurs,” the author only discloses three names: Fabio Gándara, Aguirre Such and Olmo Galvez. Gándara is a campaigner for Change.org – a for-profit NGO. Gándara states:

“Before joining Change.org as campaign organizer, I worked as a lawyer in the prestigious law firm Cuatrecasas, Gonçalves Pereira, in the areas of Spanish and European Public Law. I also have been working as an activist in a Spanish grassroots organisation, Democracia Real Ya, seed of the #Spanishrevolution.”

The Commerce of Exploitation: Change.org

“And nobody’s making more money from online petitions than Change.org. I wonder how many people visiting a change.org petition know that despite its dot-org name, the organization is a for-profit lead generation business. Just take a look at their partners page, and you’ll see what they do…. Change.org is being deliberately deceitful through the use of the change.org name. I’d suspect that the average change.org user does not know that Change.org is a for-profit corporation, and that the corporation plans on using the contact information being provided to them to earn revenue.” — Clay Johnson, Information Diet

Change.org (based in San Francisco, CA), founded in 2005, was launched on 7 February 2007 by current CEO Ben Rattray (with a background in economics), with the support of current CTO Mark Dimas and Adam Cheyer (co-founder of Siri software and director of engineering in the iPhone group at Apple). As of February 2012, the site has 100 employees with offices on 4 continents. By the end of 2012, Rattray “plans to have offices in 20 countries and to operate in several more languages, including Arabic and Chinese.” It was reported on 5 April 2012 that Change.org hit 10 million members, and is currently the fastest-growing social action platform on the web. They are currently receiving 500 new petitions per day. [Source: Wikipedia]

The founding Change.org team of advisors include Darren Haas, developer of financial trading and currency exchange software with Euronet Worldwide; Sundeep Ahuja, founder/product manager/marketing/strategy advisor/investor/co-founder/president at blissmo, Kiva.org, indiegogo, DailyFeats, Sparked.com, richrelevance, friendput, MySpace, and an actor, to boot; and Joe Greenstein, software developer and co-founder and CEO of Flixster.

Change.org is a member of George Soros’s Media Consortium. Change.org is subtle yet clear in their affiliations. Ample media coverage provided by Media Consortium partners and social media/tech sites, etc. Change.org seldom fails to mention the other effective organizations – Avaaz.org, Sumofus.org, and 38degrees.org.uk.

On the Change.org partner page, the corporation states they have hundreds of partners, yet only 5 are made public. Yet they make no secret of their expanding empire:

“We’re Hiring!: Change.org is a rapidly expanding and profitable social venture, growing by more than a million new members a month by empowering people across the globe to win social action campaigns on a wide range of issues such as human rights, global poverty, and environmental protection. Our current partners include hundreds of the world’s largest nonprofits, including Amnesty International, Sierra Club, Human Rights Campaign, and the United Nations Foundation.”

Change.org  is the darling of corporate media powerhouse TIME magazine, which having named change.org founder Ben Rattray, as one of TIME’s, 100 Most Influential People of 2012 while profiling of Olmo Gálvez in TIME Magazine’s 2011 Person of the Year – The Protestor. Goodman (of Democracy Now!) describes Gálvez as “a young entrepreneur with experience in several countries….” Such corporate-controlled entities lend credibility and legitimacy to “leaders,” movements and ideologies that secure and protect corporate power. Such well-greased mechanisms are essential in establishing a collective consent to the hegemony of the ruling oligarchy. Other recent instances of corporate-sponsored NGO “leaders” that have been praised by the likes of TIME and foundation-funded “progressive” media include “green” capitalist Al Gore, who is also deemed by TIME as one of the 100 Most Influential, while Rockefeller’s lovechild Bill McKibben seems to have taken up symbolic residence at the studio of Democracy Now! In a patriarchal society, charismatic fellows such as Gore and McKibben are key members of a manufactured, managerial elite, building global public acceptance for the illusory green economy – formerly known as industrialized capitalism – the goal being to protect capitalism, thereby protecting the current structures at all costs, by any means necessary, by every means available.

Francisco Polo is now director of Change.org Spain, after founding Actuable, a Spanish-based campaign platform that merged with Change.org in 2011. Prior to this, Polo was coordinator of Amnesty International in Barcelona. On 7 October 2011, techPresident reports the following in an article titled Change.org’s International Move:

“This was a crucial night for the protestors calling themselves ‘indignados,’ who had descended upon Puerta del Sol on May 15 intent on staying until national elections in Spain. Frustrated with a political system they feel does not work for them, many of them out of work, they stayed to protest in defiance of a national law that prohibits discussion of electoral politics so close to the elections. But it was also a crucial night for Actuable, an online petitions platform then just a few months old. Protesters wanted to tell Spanish elections authority, the Junta Electoral Central, that they had a right to be heard. While they rallied in Madrid despite the electoral rules, they also went online – to Actuable, where a petition asserting their right to demonstrate, even immediately before an election, collected 200,000 signatures….

 

“Actuable co-founder Francisco Polo told techPresident in a recent interview. ‘It was an unprecedented way to empower people.’ It’s hard to know what impact the petition actually had, but the chance to see use by the indignados was a moment in the sun for Actuable. Founded last year, Actuable was always intended to operate in the style of Change.org – which recently acquired the Madrid-based platform. Now it is a new international presence for Change.org, and part of the company’s new plans to expand globally….

 

“Polo is now director of Change.org Spain, and Actuable will be rebranded with Change.org’s colors over the next few months….

 

“A company spokesman says that the two platforms will be completely merged by 2012, with languages and campaigns localized for each visitor. Actuable’s 720,000-some-odd members will be rolled into Change.org’s user base, which already grows – or so the company claims – by about 400,000 users a month.

 

“Actuable rolling into Change.org comes as ‘indignados’ emerge in Mexico City, and one of our own commenters points us to student protesters advocating for education reform in Chile.”

One must ask oneself if these European organizations founded by Carrión, with deep UN connections, are involved in the US Day of Rage campaign. Adbusters (originator of Occupy Wall Street, announcing it 12 June 2012, one day prior to the registration (via UN) of the 15Octber.net website) features 15M in their June 2012 issue in an article titled Spain’s Indignados, written by Marta Sánchez at, none other than, ROARmag.org. The article focuses exclusively on the 15M movement. Almost from inception, www.15October.net has been publicly affiliated with Adbusters in videos (25 September 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y3X2VFruLM) and other branding/marketing campaigns while Anonymous has also actively promoted it (15 August 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPd25yDiOwU). Under the Adbusters website link “Get Involved,” Adbusters recommends going to the website Takethesquare.net “for international perspective.”

The founder of US Day of Rage (and Occupy Wall Street) cites four principles:

1. Non-Violence
2. Principles before Party – US Day of Rage will never endorse, finance, or lend our name to any candidate or party.
3. Volunteer – Every US Day of Rage organizational committee on the state, city, and federal level should be entirely self-supporting, declining outside contributions from any political party, association, or candidate. US Day of Rage is not a money making operation. We are volunteers.
4. Autonomous Except in Matters Affecting the Whole – We do not support, for example, violations to our principle of non-violence. USDayofRage.org is here to help facilitate city and state level organization, and to organize the federal protest at the US Capitol.

And although volunteers of US Day of Rage are told to decline outside contributions, this did not stop the founder’s other venture, Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Wall Street affiliates, from accepting $3.6 million from George Soros. Although some media found this interesting enough to cover, it was of little interest to the Occupy Movement itself, who downplayed the connection or ignored it altogether. Soros gave $1.1 million to MoveOn.org (founder of Avaaz) and tossed $8,900.00 to Rockefeller’s 350.org. [October 14, 2011]

When organizations set up Twitter accounts, it is always revealing to see who has been added “to follow” first and foremost as this demonstrates their closest affiliations. In the case of 15M, it is important to note Take the square (@takethesquare) was the sixth account to be “followed” by @15M_cc twitter upon registration, with the first three chosen to follow being that of the founders of original 15M concept: (1) Pablo Soto, @pabloMP2P (2) Patricia Horrillo, @patrihorrillo (3) Stéphane M. Grueso, @fanetin (4) Acampada Sol TL, @acampadasolTL (5) tomalosbarrios, @tomalosbarrios (6) Take the square @takethesquare: “Tweeting from the #spanishrevolution to connect our struggle with people all around the world. Global problems, global uprising. https://takethesquare.net”

[For more information on 15M within Latin America (including Periodismociudadano.com), read the investigative report titled FUNDACIONES GLOBALISTAS y ONGs -15M.]

 

Next: Part III

 

[Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in Canada. Her recent writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation, Counterpunch, Political Context, Canadians for Action on Climate Change and Countercurrents. Her writing has also been published by Bolivia Rising and Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. You can follow her on Twitter @elleprovocateur]

 

Open Eyes

Editorial

By Jay Taber

Jul 24, 2012

Intercontinental Cry

Fantasy of the Fatherland

By Jay Taber May 7, 2012

Source: Intercontinental Cry

U.S. Covertly Funds North Korea Destabilization While Training With South Korea to “Re-stabilize” It Using an Army of 100,000 [Canvas/Otpor, NYC OWS, 350.org]

April 12, 2012

S.Korea, U.S. Practice Stabilizing N.Korea in Civil War