More on USAID and narrative control

Two things everybody needs to know about Western democracy. One, it ain’t real. A lot of work goes in – not just through news media but an array of ideological apparatus from education to arts and entertainment, and from organised religion to the matrix of shared, dynamic and mutually reinforcing understandings of reality we call common sense – to the chimera of a truly democratic society which by happy coincidence for privileged elites just happens to deliver, with barely a hiccup or falter, results in line with the interests of – ta-da! – said privileged elites. The system seems to run itself and, in times of relative prosperity, there’s truth in that. But whether we realise it or not – and few of us are incentivised to examine our thought processes on such matters – ruling classes were not cancelled by universal suffrage. To get we turkeys voting for Xmas demands that mountains of wool – if you’ll forgive my switch of farmyard metaphor – be pulled over myriads of eyes. ¹

The other truth we need to digest is that these are not “times of relative prosperity”. The curtain is falling on five centuries of Western supremacy. One consequence of this – or to precise, of its denial by ruling elites – is that the world has never stood closer to the brink of thermonuclear Armageddon, but the one I have in mind is that those elites are diluting if not abandoning even the pretence of democracy. Witness the overturning of Romania’s election result when voters Got It Wrong, ² the checks and balances (eroded by such as the US Patriot Act ³ and Britain’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill) of an open society, and indeed the rule of law itself – ask Julian Assange, whose desertion by the “woke” robbed him of what should have been his most loyal constituency.

Both truths merit a dedicated post. Here I cite them as context for the attacks, stepped up this past year, on journalists critical of mainstream narratives on Gaza and Ukraine. Recent months have seen the FBI raid on Scott Ritter’s home, similar state persecution of Sarah Wilkinson, Richard Medhurst and Asa Winstanley in the UK, and the arrest and deportation by the Swiss authorities of Ali Abunimah (like Asa, one of the Electronic Intifada crew often featured on this site). These are samples; the full list is longer, especially when – as with Bristol academic, David Miller, and Alt-Media critics who lose Patreon crowd-funding and find themselves demoted by Google search algorithms – extended to those facing loss of livelihood.

During the dirty war on Syria, critics were hounded. Ask the professors – Piers Robinson at the University of Sheffield, Tim Hayward at Edinburgh and Tim Anderson in Sydney – who refused to buy the propaganda on a nation targeted for regime change years before the Dara protests of 2011 gave the US a casus belli. All three were – like Julian – vilified by our lovely media, and in at least one case had careers terminated for having the courage to speak out in the face of a narrative of unbridled ferocity, and of lie after lie swallowed by mainstream and far Left alike.

But why have the assaults against dissidents on Ukraine and Palestine begun to cross the line from media vilification and career persecution to more overt intervention by the State itself? It could be that things are simply getting worse across the board in the West. I for one take that seriously. But I see a more specific reason. The propaganda blitz over Syria was so successful – so many across the spectrum from Far-Right through what Tariq Ali called the Extreme Centre to Far-Left bought it – as to make dawn raids, confiscations and arrests redundant. Nay-sayers were instead marginalised, and called out as unhinged apologists for whatever charges it suited Western propagandists to heap at Bashar al-Assad’s door.

The critics of genocide in Gaza by contrast are not few but many. Ditto those on Ukraine, ⁴ now that the extent of folly in the proxy war on Russia is finally – as German businesses go under, and households shiver – sinking in. Two official narratives – Israel’s Right to Self Defence, and Ukraine as victim of Unprovoked Aggression – are teetering. And isn’t the gist of my second paragraph that when rulers lose control of the narrative, the velvet glove will – as night follows day – slip away? Bear this in mind when considering the attacks on another professor, Norway’s Glenn Diesen, whose book last year – The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order – offers the most far reaching understanding of the conflict I’ve had the privilege of reading.

Glenn’s situation is introduced by another voice approvingly featured more than once on this site. Here’s Jan Oberg of Transnational Foundation:

Jan is cross-posting from Glenn’s substack, whose offering of two days ago addressed in greater detail the theme of my previous post …

USAID and NGOs for Narrative Control and War

President Trump’s decision to cut funding to USAID revealed the extent to which the US government has been financing media, protests and other means to hijack civil society around the world. In Ukraine, USAID had a key role in toppling President Yanukovych in 2014 and has since financed between 85-90% of Ukrainian media to ensure narrative control. The Georgian Prime Minister has also been warning that Western NGOs have been activated to topple the government and convert Georgia into a second front against Russia. There is also overwhelming evidence that the US government established “non-governmental organisations” (NGOs) since the 1980s that are financed by the US government, staffed with people linked to the US intelligence community, and pursue US geopolitical interests under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights. One of these “NGOs” is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) established by Reagan to take over some of the tasks of the CIA. These organisations are instruments for the US to govern the societies of other nations and pursue regime change when necessary.

Subverting Democracy and Pursuing War

When Zelensky won a landslide victory in the 2019 presidential election on a peace platform, the US activated its NGOs to ensure that Zelensky would reverse and abandon his peace mandate. Zelensky had won 73% of the votes by promising to engage in talks with Donbas, make peace with Russia, and implement the Minsk peace agreement. Furthermore, Zelensky argued in favour of preserving language rights and religious rights to prevent divisions in society. Immediately, protests emerged with NGOs presenting Zelensky’s peace platform as “capitulation”.

One of the US-financed “NGOs” was the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre which had been established allegedly to “promote the development of a self-sufficient Ukrainian state and society”, something I would certainly support. However, this is yet another NGO created by the US to subvert society and prevent peace from breaking out.

The Ukraine Crisis Media Centre threatened Zelensky, and warned him against delivering on his election promises: “As civil society activists, we present a list of ‘red lines not to be crossed’. Should the President cross these red lines, such actions will inevitably lead to political instability in our country and the deterioration of international relations”.[1]

These red lines included “holding a referendum on the negotiations format to be used with the Russian Federation and on the principles for a peaceful settlement”; conducting negotiations without the Western states; “making concessions to the detriment of national interests”; failing to implement the security and defence policies of the former government; “delaying, sabotaging, or rejecting the strategic course for EU and NATO membership”; “initiating any actions that might contribute to the reduction or lifting of sanctions against the aggressor state by Ukraine’s international partners”; attempting to review the language law or supporting the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine; “ignoring dialogue with civil society” etc. Simply put, abandon the peace platform supported by the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population, otherwise the US-funded NGOs would make sure Zelensky is also ousted from power.

This threat from the US-financed NGO was countered with death threats from US-financed far-right groups. Zelensky eventually abandoned the peace mandate, ignored the Minsk peace agreement and fell in line with US policy.

The donors to the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre that financed the cancellation of Zelensky’s peace mandate include USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US embassy, and various Nordic governments. On the list of donors is also The Institute for Statecraft, the discredited organisation behind the Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative was caught in a covert operations of creating “clusters” of loyal politicians, journalists and academics to manufacture the impression of an established consensus to control the narrative. The integrity initiative was also working with UK intelligence agencies to target dissent in politics and the media.

My Encounter with these “NGOs” …

Read the full piece on Glenn’s substack …

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Later today I’m going rubber-tramping for a few days. There may be radio silence.

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1. Reverend Chris Hedges’s assessment – Let’s stop pretending America is a functioning democracy – is broadly applicable across the collective West:

   Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.

   Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

2. Of course, the EU Romanian authorities didn’t say the result was overturned because voters got it wrong; rather, that there’d been Russian interference of which, more than a month on, we still await a scintilla of evidence.
3. The US Patriot Act, like the declared intent to effect regime change in seven countries in the Middle East, was passed with overwhelming bipartisan backing amid the moral hysteria generated by 9/11. I was initially and for a long time scathing of the proposition that the attacks on the twin towers were a false flag or inside job. That I felt compelled to u-turn and eat my words was due on the one hand to holes and inconsistencies in the 2005 NIST Report which to this day remain unaddressed; on the other to how that day legitimised erosion in the West of hard won civil liberties, and in the Middle East decades of carnage and chaos.
4. Critics of the empire’s war on Russia are still fewer than those of its genocide in Gaza. But where the West had hoped for a quick-win, with awkward questions unasked for decades – at which point ‘courageous’ Guardian and WashPo columnists would win plaudits for raising them (see my personal take on this) – the West’s miscalculation of Russia’s military and economic strength – a rentier miscalculation fed by confusing FIRE–driven GDP with actual wealth creation – gave evidence-defiant narratives three whole years to unravel. Who would deny that popular support for Ukraine, from those heady days of ’22, when every street in Europe was decked out in blue and yellow, is haemorrhaging?