Non Violent Resistance

More pie is in order...

Once again our brother, FB (or Spirit Across the Sea), has saved us, since murph's and my brains seem to have gone empty, and submitted a post.


Non Violent Resistance

From Belgium

Your average, run of the mill villain always reckons that they can spot the off duty copper in a bar and probably, since the advent of the internet, spooks have also been that much easier to pick out. This has not caused the CIA to abandon its roll and go skulking off into oblivion. It is alive and well and has now outsourced its field work to proxies.

Peter Ackerman is an immensely wealthy investor and board member of the premier U.S. foreign policy think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations and is now the CIA’s privatised Grunt in Chief. Together with followers Gene Sharp who is generally credited with being the first person to study rigorously the techniques of mass civil disobedience and place them in the context of traditional military strategy and Robert Helvey, a 30 year veteran of the U.S. Army who served two tours of duty in Vietnam are the principal proponents of a nonviolent alternative to military intervention in the pursuit of U.S. foreign policy goals. Ackerman and Helvey have been training a modern type of mercenary, who travel the world, often in the pay of the U.S. government or NGOs, in order to train local groups in regime change. What the CIA used to refer to as destabilisation had been rebranded and remarketed as Non Violent Resistance (NVR). This is a clever hijacking of Martin Luther King Jr’s phrase used to bring about policy change within the USA to the international arena. However NVR is strictly a foreign affair, seeking to overturn governments abroad that operate outside the system of U.S. imperial domination. It’s about taking power overseas, in order to bring resistant countries into the U.S. imperial fold. Ackerman and Helvey have simply taken over a CIA function, made it semi-overt, and created the illusion that it’s progressive. Ackerman defines NVR as the shrewd use of strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience in addition to mass protests and even nonviolent sabotage, to disrupt the functioning of government and make a country ungovernable. Since strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience are traditional leftist techniques, NVR campaigns often garner the support of a large number of left-leaning people. But NVR isn’t about holding a demonstration, listening to speakers, and then heading home for supper. Neither is it pressuring elites — what most Western leftists set as the limit of their political activism. NVR is a political technique for overthrowing foreign governments. It’s not about making a point, it’s about taking power. Since the aim of NVR is to take political power abroad, NVR can be characterized as a form of Western warfare, employing nonviolent armies behind enemy lines.

Helvey witnessed armed opposition groups repeatedly fail in their attempts to overthrow the Myanmar government. The trouble was that rebel groups were going up against a regular army that could exercise overwhelming force. Sharp pointed out that governments have two sources of power: their ability to exact obedience coercively through their control of armies, police, courts and prisons; and their moral authority. Since a government can use overwhelming force to defeat most internal armed challenges, the key to taking power is to undermine the reason most people obey: because they believe their government is legitimate and has a right to rule. In Sharp’s view, most people obey, not because they’re compelled to, but because they want to. If a government’s legitimacy is undermined, people will no longer want to obey. That’s when they can be mobilized to participate in strikes, boycotts, acts of civil disobedience, even sabotage – anything to make the country ungovernable. Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle. NVR holds that destabilization works best when the target government is not supported by an entrenched party system that can claim a higher ideological purpose.

To buttress their efforts to undermine the moral authority of target governments, the destabilizers depend critically on the frequent use of the words “dictatorial” (to denote the governments they seek to bring down) and “democratic” (to denote the target government’s opponents.) It doesn’t matter whether the target governments are truly dictatorial or whether their opponents are truly democratic. What matters is these things are believed to be true. Getting people to believe target governments are dictatorial is done by repeating the charge incessantly, until the idea takes on the status of common knowledge, so widely accepted that proof is unnecessary. People can still be made to believe that four legs are good and two legs are bad or that Terrorism has declared war on the United States.

But what if the “dictator” has been elected, as is often the case in destabilization efforts? The destabilizers’ solution is to claim the elected leader came to power illegitimately, by means of electoral fraud but not in the USA of course where the moral high ground is kept green and lush. International monitors have shown that Ahmadiinejad’s presidential victory was legitimate. He was what the Iranian people (but not what the USG) wanted. The response of western propaganda apparatus was to repeat the opposition charge of electoral fraud over and over. Soon, the mass media and state propaganda apparatuses were singing out as one: the election was rigged. Likewise Mugabe in Zimbabwe was accused of election fraud even before the elections were held and as it happens he lost the election. The fact that he didn’t resign his government is an entirely separate issue.

Similarly, an important part of the destabilizers’ efforts to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic was to declare well before the first vote was cast in the 2000 presidential election that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Milosevic would win, illegitimately. In fact, Milosevic came second to the main opposition leader, who failed to win more than 50 percent of the vote. With no candidate commanding a clear majority, a run-off election was scheduled. The runoff never happened. Instead, Milosevic was overthrown with the help of forces trained by Helvey in the name of democracy. It is no accident that the main opposition party in Serbia, formed under the guidance of U.S. advisers, was called the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, or that the main opposition party in Zimbabwe is called the Movement for Democratic Change, or that the main opposition party in Myanmar, Helvey’s pet project, is called the National League of Democracy. Western media reinforce this branding by frequently referring to opposition parties in countries undergoing destabilization as “the democratic opposition,” implying the governments they oppose are dictatorial.

Over a number of years, Helvey’s mercenaries trained an estimated 3,000 fellow Burmese from all walks of life including several hundred Buddhist monks in philosophies and strategies of non-violent resistance and community organizing. These workshops, held in border areas and drawing people from all over Burma, were seen as ‘training the trainers’ who would go home and share these ideas with others yearning for change. That preparation, along with material support such as mobile phones helped lay the groundwork for dissident Buddhist monks in September 2007 to call for a religious boycott of the junta, precipitating the biggest anti-government protests in two decades. For 10 dramatic days, monks and lay citizens poured into the streets in numbers that peaked at around 100,000 before the regime crushed the demonstrations.

Antiwar activists will find no ideological soul mates in Ackerman, Helvey and Sharp, who are conditionally against the use of violence, not out of moral principle, but because they believe violence is often an ineffective method of achieving what political violence is normally intended to achieve: the seizure of power. Ackerman’s affection for nonviolence has nothing to do with the tactic’s moral superiority. Movements that make a strategic decision to eschew violence, he argues, have a far better record of” success.

With debt servicing forming an increasing proportion of US GDP it is predicted that in coming years, defence spending will be reduced. We can expect therefore to see increased use of NVR. In other words, Sharp’s contribution to the peace movement is showing the U.S. ruling class it can achieve its imperialist goals by non-military means. Sharp and his disciples Ackerman and Helvey aren’t progressives at all. Nor are they advocates of the moral superiority of nonviolence. They’re imperialists who believe violence isn’t always the best policy in achieving imperial goals. However were it widely known that so-called “people power” movements are aided from abroad, their moral authority (and alleged home-grown character) would be called into question. In order to overcome this problem Havely says you need radios and the ability to produce and distribute information. You need to be able to train. You need to provide the activists with some income to take care of their families. When people get arrested, you need to take food to them in prison or the hospital. This is truly winning over your enemy’s hearts and minds. At the same time Washington applies multiple sanctions against and financially isolates countries that are the targets of NVR destabilization efforts: Zimbabwe, Belarus, Iran, Myanmar and Cuba. For instance, Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation was not the result of Robert Mugabe being a thoroughly bad sort; it was because he would not hand over his country’s assets to the World Bank. Economic warfare, though nonviolent, wreaks terrible devastation, while providing immeasurable help to the destabilizers.

Ackerman equates democracy with capitalism. What he really wants to protect is the right of investors (himself included) to expropriate the fruits of other peoples’ labour. That might explain why he thinks the United States, the world’s premier champion of capitalist exploitation, has an awful lot to teach people around the world. The major proponents of NVR are not independent grassroots organizers, socialists or anarchists. They are, instead, members of the U.S. financial and foreign policy establishment, or are linked to them in subordinate roles through organizational and funding ties. NVR is hardly progressive; it is an imperialist project whose only redeeming feature is the possibility that it may stimulate Western leftists to think about how they too might use the destabilizers’ techniques to take power in their own country to win the authentic battle for democracy.

Tunisia

Now we know how it works let us now have a look at what the patriotic people of Tunisia have just thrown away as being undesirable.

1. In September 2010, Tunisia ratified the international treaty banning cluster munitions, becoming the first country in the Middle East and North Africa to do so.
Tunisia is not believed to have used, produced, stockpiled, or transferred cluster munitions.

2. The 2010 Corruption Perception Index was released by Transparency International on 26 October 2010. The report shows that Tunisia is the least corrupt country in North Africa.

3. August 2010: The 2010 report of the Oxford Business Group on Tunisia referred to the stability and social peace prevailing in Tunisia.

4. September 2010: Tunisia has the most competitive economy in Africa, according to the report on world competitiveness 2010-2011 published by the World economic forum of Davos. It thus moves ahead of numerous EU member states such as Spain (42nd), Portugal (46th), Italy (48th).

5. January 2010: Tunisia is ranked best Arab state as regards quality of life with 59 points out of 100, moving up 3 points compared with 2009, by "International Living'' magazine , out of 194 countries.

6. August 2010: US "Newsweek" magazine ranked Tunisia first in Africa in its "100 best countries in the world'' ratings based on social, economic and political data.

7. 2010: The report on human development published by the UNDP ranked Tunisia 7th out of 135 countries in terms of 'long-term development indicators'

8. September 2010: Tunisia is ranked first in the Arab region and 6th in the world as regards the access of handicapped people to ICTs, according to ratings announced in Vilnius (Lithuania) by the United Nations at the 5th forum on the governance of the Internet (IGF 2010).

9. July 2010 Tunisia's foreign trade registers 31.1% growth.

10. Tunisia has a very low crime rate. In 2002 Tunisia's murder rate stood at 1.22 /100 000, the lowest in Africa.

Now all of that is gone and things are very different. It is really quite a toppling act and must surely be a feather in somebody’s cap.

So what did Tunisia do that was so bad?

Russia's former ambassador in Tunisia Veniamin Popov commented on the situation in Tunisia as follows: "The protests of the Tunisian people remind me of the Iranian revolution in 1979, when the Shah's regime was overthrown." (Is Tunisia a messenger of a big crisis?)

The Shah was modernising Iran, giving land to the poor and cracking down on heroin. But he criticised Israel and he was not always cooperating with the USA on oil. The CIA wanted a feudal Islamic Iran that could be used against Russia so, the Shah had to be demonised and toppled.

Ben Ali made Tunisia the most successful country in Africa, but he was not cooperating fully with the USA.
Tunisia supported neither the 1991 Gulf War nor the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Ben Ali supported the Palestinians.
Ben Ali in Tunisia had to be demonised and toppled.
Ben Ali was popular, until there began a campaign of demonisation.
Now as a result of Ben Ali’s overthrow the US-Tunisian bilateral relationship is likely to remain unaffected.
After the start of the present overthrow Arab sources claim General Ammar "advised the President that his safety could not be guaranteed if he attempted to cling on to power. Gen Ammar subsequently withdrew the vast bulk of his forces from the capital. Walid Chisti, a political analyst, said: "He does not have to do anything, just watch and wait. He is an ambitious man."

Webster Tarpley has also made the following points:

1. The CIA hopes to overthrow or weaken the governments of Libya, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Algeria, Yemen, and perhaps others.
They are also trying to remove Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi - because of his friendship with Putin and support for the Southstream pipeline.

2. Some History: The CIA's Roses revolution in Georgia became discredited by the warmongering of Saakashvili. The CIA failed with its Cedars revolution in Lebanon and its Twitter revolution in Iran. The CIA's Orange revolution in Ukraine was eventually rolled back.

3. Tunisia's Jasmine revolution was not primarily a matter of the middle class 'desire to speak out, vote, and blog. It started from 'the Wall Street depredations which are ravaging the entire planet.

Who are the destabilization operatives inside the US regime? Hillary Clinton, in Qatar last week, warned assembled Arab leaders to reform their economies (according to IMF rules) and stamp out corruption, or else be toppled

I know you were all wondering by now, what all of this had to do with Sun Tsu, the Chinese military strategist from 2500 years ago. Only that he declared that ‘deception’ was a legitimate strategy of any war.

*****************************************************

Sources:

Understanding Tunisia

Sun Tsu and Heads I win Tails you Loose

Document Provenance

Based on an article by Stephen Gowans entitled ”Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman’s quest to do what the CIA used to do, and make it seem progressive” from his blog What’s Left dated August 2009 and subsequently re released on many other blogs.

http://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/overthrow-inc-peter-ackerman’s-quest-to-do-what-the-cia-used-to-so-and-make-it-seem-progressive/

And also various articles from Aangirfan from Jan 13 2011 onward.

http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2011/01/cia-nato-coup-in-tunisia.html