North Korean charm initiative continues with personal invitation

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Hand-delivered invitation to President Moon Jae-in to meet with Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang received warmly, request made for US to resume talks with North Korea

by SERAPHIM HANISCH | THE DURAN

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un continues to make headlines with his efforts to talk with the South Korean leadership, independently of the United States’ influence. In a new development on Saturday, February 10th, Jong-un invited South Korean President Moon Jae-in to a meeting in Pyongyang, this being done via a personal letter hand delivered by Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, to President Moon.

This is in hopes of a third inter-Korean summit. The first two have been highly positive in their nature, and have progressed swiftly since the beginning of the year. Kim Jong-un’s move towards what appears to be a rapprochement was warmly welcomed by the South, and the two nations’ summits have happened independently of any direct US support.

The Winter Olympic Games are being held in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and they opened on Friday, February 9th and will conclude on the 25th of this month. The two Korean states have combined their athletic forces into one united Korean team, competing under a united Korean flag.

Kim Jong-un’s sister is a member of the North Korean Politburo. She heads the regíme’s propaganda department and she is very close to her brother. She is the highest ranking state head to attend the Olympic games on behalf of North Korea. Interestingly, during the opening ceremonies of the Games, she was seated very close to the American Vice President Mike Pence, but the Yonhap News Agency reported that the two tried to avoid directly facing one another.

The jingoist dullard Mike Pence in Korea, a typical example of US backwardness and corruption, sent to make sure that the North's charm offensive does not loosen the grip of the American empire on a long-tortured people.

This naturally is a very hopeful sign for Korean people on both sides of the DMZ, but the Americans remain unimpressed, to say the least. The rhetoric from the US President Donald Trump has been strongly supported in equally strong statements by Mr. Pence, both in deed (he was to have brought with him the father of Otto Warmbier, the American student who died just days after being returned to the USA in a coma following imprisonment in North Korea.

The South Korean President had to acknowledge the difficulty in this situation, for although the South is very interested in dialogue with the North (they are brother peoples, after all), the USA is an ally to South Korea. President Moon indicated this in his comments to Kim Yo-Jong, noting that “an early resumption of dialogue between the United States and the North is needed also for the development of the South-North Korean relationship.”

The American influence might be seen as either a voice of restraint from foolish behavior, or a wet blanket trying to ruin the good times. Of course, this depends on one’s understanding of the situation. The attraction of brother nations reuniting is huge in the region. But the point of North Korea’s {western propaganda built] reputation for brutality in the treatment of her own people as well as the treatment of foreigners is something that the US maintains cannot be taken lightly or just swept under the rug. This is a matter that the North is going to have to face as the negotiations and meetings continue.

While it is clear that the North wants closer ties with the South, it is not clear exactly why. However, the effect of the charm offensive of Kim Jong-un and his sister is very clear, and there remain signs of hope for some sort of positive change.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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F.W. ENGDAHL: The Actual Cause for World War I and a Century of War

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Newsletter Ten: The Actual Cause for World War I and a Century of War

This issue of my periodic newsletter I would like to devote to a selection from my best-selling book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics. The book describes the emergence of oil as the strategic commodity for world economic power and its role in leading not only to the First World War in August 1914, but also most subsequent wars down to the present. I have selected a section describing the long-ignored role of Germany’s mammoth Berlin-to-Baghdad railway project to decisions in London to redraw the map of Europe by encircling the German Reich with secret alliances first with France and then Russia to oppose Germany. If you like the book, it would mean a lot to me if you leave a review on Amazon. This helps me continue to create great content for you.

A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics Copyright F. William Engdahl

CHAPTER TWO--
The Lines are Drawn:
Germany and the Geopolitics of the Great War

Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder

[dropcap]G[/dropcap]rowing divergence after 1873 between the depressed economy of the British Empire, and the emerging industrial economies of Continental Europe, above all the German Reich, created the background to the outbreak in 1914 of the Great World War. The role of petroleum in this conflict already had become central, though few outside a tiny elite of London and New York bankers and financiers realized fully how central until years after. Towards the final decade of the 19th century, British banking and political elites had begun to express first signs of alarm over two specific aspects of the impressive industrial development in Germany. The first was emergence of an independent, modern German merchant and military naval fleet. Since 1815 and the Vienna Congress, the English Navy had been unchallenged lord of the seas. The second strategic alarm was sounded over an ambitious German project to construct a railway linking Berlin with, ultimately, Baghdad, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

In both areas, naval challenge and building a rail infrastructure linking Berlin to the Persian Gulf, oil figured as a decisive, if still hidden, motive force for both the British and the German side. We will see why these two developments were regarded as virtual casus belli by the Anglo-Saxon establishment at the turn of the century. By the 1890s, British industry had been surpassed in both rates and quality of technological development by an astonishing emergence of industrial and agricultural development within Germany.

By the 1870s, decades of piecemeal German adoption of the economic reforms of Friedrich List, in creation of a national modern rail transport infrastructure and tariff protection for emerging domestic industries, began to bring notable results, more so in the context of the political unity of the German Reich after 1871. Until approximately the 1850s, imitation of the apparently successful British economic model was the dominant policy followed in Germany, and the free trade economics of such British economists as Adam Smith or David Ricardo, were regarded as holy gospel in German universities.

But increasingly, after England went into prolonged depression in the 1870 s, which hit Germany and Austria as well, Germany began to realize the serious flaws in continuing faithfully to follow the British model. As Germany turned increasingly to a form of national economic strategy, and away from British free trade adherence, in building a national industry and agriculture production, the results were remarkable. As one indication of this shift away from the English model, from 1850 to the eve of the First World War in 1913, German total domestic output increased five-fold. Per capita output increased in the same period by 250%. The population began to experience a steady increase in its living standard, as real industrial wages doubled between 1871 and 1913.

But the heart of the German industrial revolution was the explosive expansion of technological, industrial, and agricultural development within Germany. With the United States concentrated largely on its internal expansion after its Civil War, the industrial emergence of Germany was seen increasingly as the largest threat to Britain s global hegemony during the last decade of the century.

By rail from Berlin to Baghdad

Sultan Mehmed V greeting the German Kaiser in 1898.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 1889, a group of German industrialists and bankers, led by Deutsche Bank, secured a concession from the Ottoman government to build a railway through Anatolia from the capital, Constantinople. This accord was expanded ten years later, in 1899, when the Ottoman government gave the German group approval for the next stage of what became known as the Berlin-Baghdad Railway project. The second agreement was one consequence of the 1898 visit to Constantinople by German Kaiser Wilhelm II. German- Turkish relations had become of high importance over those ten years. Germany had decided to build a strong economic alliance with Turkey beginning in the 1890s, as a way to develop potentially vast new markets to the East for export of German industrial goods. The Berlin-Baghdad Railway project was to be the centerpiece of a brilliant and quite workable economic strategy. Potential supplies of oil lurked in the background and Britain stood opposed. The seeds of animosities tragically being acted out in the Middle East in the 1990 s trace directly back to this period.

For more than two decades, the question of construction of a modern railway linking Continental Europe with Baghdad was at the center of German-English relations as a point of friction. By the estimation of Deutsche Bank director, Karl Helfferich, the person responsible at the time for the Baghdad rail project negotiations, no other issue led to greater tensions between London and Berlin in the decade and half before 1914 with the possible exception of the issue of Germany's growing naval fleet.

In 1888, under the leadership of Deutsche Bank, a consortium secured a concession for construction and maintenance of a railway connecting Haidar- Pascha outside Constantinople, with Angora. The company was named the Anatolian Railway Company, and included Austrian and Italian shareholders as well as a small English shareholding. Work on the railway proceeded so well that the section was completed ahead of schedule and construction was further extended south to Konia.

By 1896 a rail line was open which could go from Berlin to Konia deep in the Turkish interior of the Anatolian highlands, a stretch of some 1,000 kilometers of new rail in a space of less than 8 years in an economically desolate area. It was a true engineering and construction accomplishment.

The ancient rich valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was coming into sight of modern transportation infrastructure. Hitherto, the only rail infrastructure built in the Middle east had been British or French, all of it extremely short stretches in Syria or elsewhere to link key port cities, but never to open up large expanses of the interior to modern industrialization.

The railway gave Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire vital modern economic linkage for the first time with its entire asiatic interior.

The rail link, once extended to Baghdad and a short distance further to Kuwait, would provide the cheapest and fastest link between Europe and the entire Indian subcontinent, a world rail link of the first order. From the English side, this was exactly the point. "If Berlin- Baghdad were achieved, a huge block of territory producing every kind of economic wealth, and unassailable by sea-power would be united under German authority," warned R.G.D. Laffan, at that time a senior British military adviser attached to the Serbian Army, "Russia would be cut off by this barrier from her western friends, Great Britain and France. Laffan added. "German and Turkish armies would be within easy striking distance of our Egyptian interests, and from the Persian Gulf, our Indian Empire would be threatened. The port of Alexandretta and the control of the Dardanelles would soon give Germany enormous naval power in the Mediterranean." Laffan hinted at the British strategy to sabotage the Berlin- Baghdad link. "A glance at the map of the world will show how the chain of States stretched from Berlin to Baghdad. The German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, Turkey. One little strip of territory alone blocked the way and prevented the two ends of the chain from being linked together. That little strip was Serbia. Serbia stood small but defiant between Germany and the great ports of Constantinople and Salonika, holding the Gate of the East...Serbia was really the first line of defense of our eastern possessions. If she were crushed or enticed into the Berlin-Baghdad system, then our vast but slightly defended empire would soon have felt the shock of Germany s eastward thrust. --(emphasis added)."

In 1912, Deutsche Bank, in the course of its financing of Baghdad rail connection, negotiated a concession from the Ottoman Emperor giving the Baghdad Rail Co. full right-of-way rights to all oil and minerals on a parallel 20 kilometers on either side of the rail line. The line had reached as far as Mosul in what today is Iraq. By 1912, German industry and government realized that oil was the fuel of its economic future, not only for land transport but for naval vessels. At that time, Germany was itself in the lock-grip of the large American Rockefeller Standard Oil Company trust. Standard Oil's Deutsche Petroleums Verkaufgesellschaft controlled 91% of all German oil sales. Deutsche Bank held a minority 9% share of Deutsche Petroleums Verkaufgesellschaft, hardly a decisive interest. Germany in 1912 had no independent, secure supply of oil. But geologists had discovered oil in that part of Mesopotamia today called Iraq, between Mosul and Baghdad. The projected line of the last part of the Berlin-Baghdad rail link would go right through the area believed to hold large oil reserves. Efforts to pass legislation in the Berlin Reichstag in 1912-13 to establish a German state-owned company to develop and run the new found oil resources, independent of the American Rockefeller combine, were stalled and delayed until the outbreak of World War in August 1914 pushed it from the agenda. The Deutsche Bank plan was to have the Baghdad rail link transport Mesopotamian oil over land, free from possible naval blockade by the British and thereby, make Germany independent in its petroleum requirements.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, Engdahl is the son of F. William Engdahl, Sr., and Ruth Aalund (b. Rishoff). Engdahl grew up in Texas and after earning a degree in engineering and jurisprudence from Princeton University in 1966 (BA) and graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm from 1969 to 1970, he worked as an economist and freelance journalist in New York and in Europe. Engdahl began writing about oil politics with the first oil shock in the early 1970s. His first book was called A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order and discusses the alleged roles of Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Ball and of the USA in the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran, which was meant to manipulate oil prices and to stop Soviet expansion. Engdahl claims that Brzezinski and Ball used the Islamic Balkanization model proposed by Bernard Lewis. In 2007, he completed Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. Engdahl is also a contributor to the website of the anti-globalization Centre for Research on Globalization, the Russian website New Eastern Outlook,^[2] and the Voltaire Network,^[3] and a freelancer for varied newsmagazines such as the Asia Times. William Engdahl has been married since 1987 and has been living for more than two decades near Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

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Three Stupid, Annoying Things People Often Say When Defending Trump

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As things get even uglier in Syria I’m seeing some Trump supporters struggling to justify or dismiss the completely indefensible acts of human butchery that this administration has been inflicting upon that country. They’re arguments I’ve seen recycled in the MAGA crowd every time news breaks about the president once again continuing the reprehensible neoconservative policies of his predecessors and doing the exact opposite of what he pledged to do on the campaign trail, and I thought I’d like to address a few of them here.

For those unfamiliar with my work, I have written extensively about the many legitimate grievances that can be leveled at this administration here, here, here, here, and elsewhere. I have also written extensively about the completely illegitimate accusations that have been leveled against this administration here, here, here, here, and elsewhere. I don’t see Trump as good or helpful, let alone as the populist savior his supporters hold him to be, but I also don’t see him as the psychotic Nazi Putin puppet his detractors try to paint him as either, or even significantly different from his predecessors in any way that meaningfully impacts America’s policy and behavior. I would now like to write a bit about some of the bad arguments that are made in support of this administration.

I’m going to address a few arguments I see a lot which are just plain stupid, from a nonpartisan, non-ideological perspective. Depending on your personal opinions about immigration, fiscal policy and so on you’ll certainly have plenty of reasons to argue for or against the current administration; I’m not interested in addressing those here. I just want to focus on the few stupid, annoying arguments I keep seeing made in defense of the sitting president that are based entirely on bad logic and poor understanding, which stagnate real debate about real concerns. Here are three of them:

1. “ Hillary would have been worse.”

I happen to agree that Hillary Clinton would have been worse in some very important ways. Her campaign pledge to install a no-fly zone in an area where Russian military planes are conducting operations was horrifying and disqualifying, and she would have put less inertia on the war machine in a few key areas. Nevertheless, pointing this out is never, ever a legitimate defense of the things that Trump is doing.

Okay, sure, Hillary would have been worse. So what? How is that a legitimate response to someone condemning this administration’s nuclear escalations with Russia, keeping thousands of troops in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, approving arms sales to Ukraine, working to shut down WikiLeaks and arrest Julian Assange, perpetuation of the Orwellian surveillance state, keeping troops in Afghanistan, escalating tensions with Iran and North Korea, etc? All you’re doing is disingenuously trying to take the target of criticism off the sitting president’s head and drag the conversation kicking and screaming into a moronic partisan debate about who would have been worse. You’re killing legitimate debate with an irrelevant red herring.

Responding to criticisms of this administration’s depravity with “yeah but Hillary” is like a lawyer trying to defend an accused murderer by pointing out that Jeffrey Dahmer did way worse. It’s stupid. It’s annoying. Stop doing it.

2. “Trump is playing 57-D chess!”

We’ve talked about this before. The above video depicts Cenk Uygur on MSNBC alongside Glenn Greenwald in 2010 ranting about the way Obama supporters were defending their president in exactly the same way the MAGA crowd defends Trump today.

“Because you remember what they told us: Obama’s a genius! I couldn’t possibly understand his genius — he’s playing three-dimensional chess!” Uygur exclaims in the eight year-old clip. “Well what part of three-dimensional chess do you give away your queen, your knight, your bishop, and the House of Representatives? No! They were wrong, we were right. It’s time to fight.”

Yes, it is time to fight. It’s time to stop defending your president’s nonstop capitulations to the swamp as some great feat of strategic wizardry.

While we’re on the subject, I often see Bernie people making the same “chess” argument about Sanders’ promotion of the new cold war and other dangerous establishment kowtowing. It’s not a legitimate defense of Sanders any more than it’s a legitimate defense of Trump now or Obama eight years ago.

There is a powerful unelected second government that is controlling the behavior of your elected officials, and by dismissing it as brilliant strategic maneuvering you are actively shoving that urgent problem out of the spotlight. It’s stupid. It’s annoying. Stop it.

3. “Trump is fighting the Deep State!”

No, he is not. Trump isn’t fighting the deep state, he’s collaborating with it. He’s continued and expanded the same warmongering Orwellian policies as Bush and Obama, and he’s playing right along with the deep state’s new cold war escalations as well.

Trump isn’t fighting the deep state, and the deep state isn’t fighting him. There is no “coup”. Everything has completely changed since certain factions within the FBI and CIA had agendas against him prior to his taking office. The leaks from inside the intelligence community during his transition and the early days of his administration have completely stopped. For many many months now whenever you hear about a new leak it’s coming from congress, from inside the administration, or from people who interacted with his campaign.

The only people fighting Trump at this point are Democrats and Never-Trumpers, and that’s not what the deep state is. The deep state is the unelected power establishment consisting of a loose and often conflicting collaboration between plutocrats (including war profiteers), intelligence and defense agencies, and the corporate media which serves as their propaganda wing. It is completely nonpartisan and uses America’s elected government in whatever way will best advance its many agendas. The Democrats and John McCain types working to weaken Trump isn’t a deep state agenda, it’s normal politics.

This is a crucial distinction. Russiagate was constructed by the US intelligence community and pointed at Trump in 2016, but now that he’s demonstrated he’ll be a good little boy and play along with pretty much every one of their agendas they haven’t been targeting him. They don’t need to. They never cared about impeaching Trump, they cared about getting their new cold war and crippling the Russia-China tandem. Since they don’t have to get the sitting president impeached to accomplish that (a very risky move anyway), they’re content to work with him until the next presidential puppet rolls into office. It’s the Democrats and their allies who are fueling the Trump-Russia collusion narrative at this point, not the deep state.

If you want to support Trump, that’s fine, but don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Don’t tell me you support this president because he’s working to overthrow the unelected power establishment which uses the US government as a weapon to advance its agendas. That argument is contradicted by the raw facts of everything that has happened in the last year. It’s stupid. It’s annoying. Stop it.

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About the Author

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

What ‘News’Media in U.S. and Allied Countries Never Report

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Newsmedia effectively ban reporting corruptness of newsmedia — even of media that stand on the opposite side of the political divide.

The ‘news’media in the U.S. and allied countries never report the corruption (including lying) perpetrated by any except the very few non-mainstream media that are authentically pro-democracy (or “anti-Establishment” or “anti-elitist” — which doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “anti-elite”) in those countries — and these few pro-democracy sites are the least-corrupt newsmedia, the few ones that are careful to report only truths — no lies, no propaganda at all. They do it even if all the others call such news sites ‘fake news’ — because they are committed, above all, to conveying the truth, and nothing but the truth.

Each of the mainstream ‘news’media is funded by (and advertises) the corporations of billionaires and centi-millionaires (the people who control all of the large corporations and virtually all of the media). These people’s corporations advertise in, and donate to those media, and those mega-business-owners don’t want the public to know that all of the mainstream (and many even of the non-mainstream) ‘news’media are actually propaganda-agencies for what those super-rich [folks] want to happen (their governmental agendas). They not only advertise so that you will buy their products and services, but also report — and exclude from reporting — so that you will vote for their politicians who will impose their governmental agenda in this ‘democracy’, and will vote against their opponents. This is the governmental control-system (which is proven and explained — and shown to function in the U.S.A., by that link to ‘democracy’).

A good example of this phenomenon is the way that the Nunes Memo (about ‘Russiagate’ & Trump), which was released on Friday February 3rd, has been covered in all of the ’news’media.

On the Democratic Party side, which is funded by billionaires who control the Democratic Party and who own Democratic Party ‘news’media, there have been efforts to discredit, or else to minimize the significance of, what the Memo said.

On the Republican Party side, which is funded by billionaires who control the Republican Party and who own Republican Party ‘news’media, there have been efforts to credit, and also to maximize the significance of, what the Memo said.

It’s a Republican memo, so that’s understandable on strictly partisan grounds. If either of those Parties represented the public instead of the billionaires who fund them, then there would be a possibility of overcoming the ugly reality that’s documented in that link about our ‘democracy’ — and actually having a democratic government instead of our existing dictatorship — but unfortunately, neither Party does represent the public (which is why what was reported in that link to ‘democracy’ happened to be the case).

However, when I emailed on February 2nd, to all major and many minor ’news’media in the U.S. and its allied countries, submitting to them a news-report exposing the corruptness of one particular major U.S. ’news’medium’s news-story on the significance of what the Memo said, no mainstream U.S.-and-allied ’news’medium published it, and only two non-mainstream ones did: washingtonsblog, and RINF.

Although I hadn’t seen this tweet from the head of Judicial Watch, I had just explained the basic reasoning that stood behind it — so, here’s the significance of the Nunes Memo, in a nutshell (and my article, which was published only by washingtonsblog and RINF, provides the actual case):

https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/959481196446183426?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.infowars.com%2Fdeep-state-death-spiral-dems-in-denial-over-damning-fisa-memo%2F

Tom Fitton, President, Judicial Watch

Memo: No FISA warrant without [Steele] Dossier. Which means no Russia collusion story without Dossier. Which means no Mueller special counsel without Dossier paid for by Clinton/DNC. Shut it down.

9:38 AM – 2 Feb 2018

This happens to be in line with the Republican PR campaign on the matter, but even Republican ‘news’-sites refused to publish the article I wrote, because it exposed the fraudulence of a certain Democratic news-site — and this is unfortunately a journalistic no-no.

In other words: Not only do ‘news’-sites not expose journalistic wrongdoing that’s on their own political side, but they also hide the journalistic wrongdoing that’s on the opposite side of the political divide. Both sides actually work together, to fool the public in ways that are acceptable to — or even required by — the billionaires. This is the phenomenon that’s documented, in that link to ‘democracy’ — documented actually to exist in the U.S., and to control the U.S. Government.

Unless the journalistic taboo of hiding from the public the lies (including all of the easily preventable false and misleading assertions) that are published by other ‘news’media — thereby leaving such lies to pile up in basically the way that please all billionaires (and centi-millionaires) of all political parties — ends, there is no hope for democracy. Not even a hope. There is just the extension of the present real nightmare, into the future.

About the author

ERIC ZUESSE, Senior Contributing Editor

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

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GENE SHARP: THE PASSING OF A FALSE GURU

MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.

Beware of those the system covers in honors.

Gene Sharp in staged 2009 AP photo calculated to convince people of Sharp's "non-violent" guru creds. Fooling the masses is the work of professionals.

The New Statesman called him wittily but misleadingly "The Machiavelli of nonviolence". He was a Machiavelli alright, but not of nonviolence, unless we think of imperialist domination as a non-violent blessing.

Not that there are any genuine or harmless gurus, of course. Still, governments are unlikely to mourn the recent passing of Gene Sharp, widely reputed to be the father of the tumultuous "color revolutions" of recent memory. Nor is his departure likely to be regretted by the world's huddled masses, who were cynically deluded by the false promises of this mediatically generated guru and his zealous and corrupt local acolytes. They have no reason to be thankful for being callously instrumentalized to merely exchange one yoke for another, the later often more insufferable than the preceding one.

Curiously, it was the establishment's own mouthpiece, "The New York Times," which disingenuously mourned the "rebel" Sharp as "a preacher’s son whose own gospel of nonviolent struggle inspired velvet revolutions that toppled dictators on four continents, [who] died Jan. 28 at his home in Boston. He was 90."

Things are, of course, considerably more complex than that.

He was systematically misrepresented to the public as a shy, modest, kind-hearted academic passionately attached to the laudable humanist agenda of guiding the oppressed to raise the banner of democracy and topple loathsome dictators world-wide. But on the broad stage, Sharp was, in fact, a key institutional player in laying the theoretical groundwork for a wave of "color revolutions" over the last two decades. Together with his side-kick, Col. Robert Helvey, an intelligence operative turned "academic" just like Sharp, he worked out the "template" for an avalanche of successful political subversion operations on at least "four continents," just as in its funerary puff piece "The New York Times" said. So far, the template they pioneered has been applied in over a dozen successful and several failed coups.

Gene Sharp and Col. Robert Helvey are the principal theoreticians of these pseudo-democratic revolutions directed from above, but professionally packaged to mislead the untrained eye into imagining it was seeing a spontaneous rebellions erupting from below. Their popular dissertations on this subject, such as "Self-liberation" and "From Dictatorship to Democracy," can easily be located on the internet by anyone wishing to read them. Just like the bogus "revolutions" that they championed, Sharp and Helvey also rather audaciously misrepresented themselves. They dissimulated benign figures ensconsed in arcane niches of the academic world, passionately committed to the cause of pure democracy. In fact, however, they belonged to and operated out of the entirely different milieu of intelligence agency driven political conspiracies.

As the French political analyst Thierry Meyssan astutely noted, "Sharp has always been present everywhere American interests are put at risk." What a coincidence! His Engels-like collaborator Helvey had once served as the American military attache in Burma and, also coincidentally no doubt, that was at a time when a domestic "pro-democracy" movement was being set up in that country. Its task was to seize power and realign Burma's policies by moving it within the West's political orbit. None of that is any secret and it can be verified easily with a few clicks on the internet.

The first and fundamental postulate of Sharp's doctrine is that "change" (always understood exclusively as readjusting the policies of the targeted state to conform to the requirements and dictates of the Atlanticist Alliance) is not achieved by just encouraging the population to recognize that it is living in misery and to merely protest about it. Change -- according to Sharp -- is to be achieved by means of "strategic planning [which] can contribute in major ways to making the application of non-violent struggle significantly more effective than protests and resistance without strategic planning." What appears to be a commonplace thought is actually pregnant with profound practical implications. It foreshadows a serious operation which is neither spontaneous nor emotional, but rather carefully prepared, measured, and calculated. Potential targets, instruments, and victims of this operation would be wise to disregard Sharp's anodyne rhetoric and pay heed instead to the ruthless substance of his project.

The next point on which Sharp insisted, which also merits careful attention on the part of (as Paul Craig Roberts would put it, "insouciant") victims, usually inclined as they are to underestimate their "non-violent" opponents, is something that Sharp called "strategic thinking." According to Sharp, that refers to the "ability to make realistic assessments of what should be done for the situation to be changed and to achieve the desired goal (...) These plans will need to include how the long-term conflict will begin, how the activities are to develop, and how sub-strategies and individual campaigns for limited issues should contribute to achieving finally the main goal."

Students who, before they discovered Sharp, studied Lenin will unfailingly recognize in the reflections of the ideologue of "non-violent democratic revolution" the influence of the Leninist concept of the "minimal and maximal program." Continuing on in the same Leninist spirit, Sharp stressed that "a major factor in formulating a grand strategy needs to be the test of whether each resistance campaign will weaken or strengthen the opponent's power." Specifically in that regard "acts of social, economic, and political noncooperation (also called boycotts) constitute major classes of the available methods of nonviolent struggle." In other words, the goal of the pseudo-revolutionary political engineering operation is to achieve the paralysis of the defense assets and institutions of the targeted system, which then greatly facilitates the task of demolishing it.

As far as the spontaneity of the process is concerned, Sharp taught that "the early steps of a long-term struggle intended to end the dictatorship will therefore need to be highly limited and carefully staged." The word "staged" gives the game away. It is derived from theatrical terminology. A good political synonym would be "contrived."

Sharp is now ready to administer the death blow to the targeted government. The weakened regime's "pillars of support" (there are six main ones, according to him) are swarmed by the concentrated assault of the local NGO infantry assembled -- according to Russian television Channel One commentator Mihail Leontyev -- by "banal recruiting -- a complicated amalgam of egoism, careerism, intimidation, and blackmail." Once the job is done, with very few exceptions, the rebellious rabble are demobilized and shoved away ad acta. That is exactly what happened to all but a few of the cynically utilized members of Serbia's "Otpor" movement after in 2000, with Sharp as its godfather, they successfully executed the anti-Milosevic coup for the benefit of their Western controllers and paymasters. Most of their rank and file were never heard from again, with identical encores in the Ukraine and other similar places.

Studiously avoiding any comparative analysis of the actual conditions in the imperialist countries sponsoring them, professionally trained demagogues and agitators acting under Sharp's inspiration are taught to skillfully utilize local difficulties and deficiencies in their home countries. The goal is to gain control over the energy of discontentment in order to channel it destructively, exactly as the playbook prescribes. That is the gist of the Sharp Technology of Political Change.

To sum up. The phony idealist Gene Sharp had painted a rosy picture of a "new political order [that] can allow progressive improvements to grow and succeed, as may be required by society's needs and popular decisions. The way will have been opened for building a durable, free, democratic and participatory system."

However, and not that anyone ever asked him to do it, but if anyone had Sharp would have been unable to cite in evidence a single example of a country that was "liberated" due to the application of the "template" laid out in the subversive handbooks that he had written. Utterly unknown is the happy land where, after being subjected to the application of Sharp's liberation doctrines, any "progressive improvements" whatsoever were detected or where anything at all resembling popular decisionmaking has been observed.

Students who are still considering enrolling in his democracy school should be reminded that Gene Sharp during his lifetime may have been a charlatan but, for all that, his teachings have not remained entirely barren. They indeed have yielded certain fruits, albeit not those which the mentors promised or hare-brained acolytes expected. The actual results range from the economically, socially, and politically devastated lands such as Serbia and the Ukraine, which slowly but surely are sliding into ruin and South American-style dictatorships, to the general breakdown in Georgia under the leadership of the imbalanced pro-Western puppet Saakashvili, to mention just a few of the more conspicuous examples.

The fate of these and other unlucky countries selected for the Sharp treatment and subjected to the incessant blows of his local mercenary NGO condotierri (financed mostly by Soros, be it noted) has surely been dismal. For fairness' sake, however, it needs to be pointed out that in terms of the end result, which is the destruction of non-conformist anti-imperialist regimes, the application by itself of Sharp's subversive technology is not all its cracked up to be. It is just a component of a larger menu of offense mechanisms which are used in concerted fashion to achieve the overthrow or implosion of a recalcitrant government. Without ample supplies of Soros cash to fuel the enthusiasm (and the avarice) of Sharp's street infantry, international media satanization and isolation of the targeted country's leadership, financial and economic destabilization and pressure brought about from abroad, as well as patient long-term intelligence recruitment and corruption of key domestic figures and institutions well in advance of the official launching of the "color revolution," little would have been accomplished just by following Sharp's supposedly brilliant strategic injunctions.

Without state sponsorship, Gene Sharp's "Albert Einstein Institute" and its inspired teachings would have gotten exactly nowhere.

Sharp is a fraud. His vaunted political action manuals have turned out to be not a new or independent instrument of political action, but in retrospect just another illusionist propaganda operation to provide cover and serve as a distraction for all the classical methods of imperialist intervention.

About the Author

Born in Belgrade, Serbia (1950), STEFAN KARGANOVIC is a U.S. citizen. Graduate of the University of Chicago and Indiana University School of Law. Member of several defense teams at the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Founder and president of NGO “Srebrenica Historical Project,” registered in the Netherlands and in Serbia. Currently engaged in research on events that took place in Srebrenica in July 1995. Author and co-author of several books on Srebrenica and the technology of “color revolution.”