George Soros backing street fight regime change in E. Europe

[conspiracy analyst]

former titles
Soros & 'peaceful' revolutions in E Europe-New Gladio?
George Soros behind new Gladio in E. Europe?

The new Gladio in action?
By Jonathan Mowat
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Mar 19, 2005, 02:34 -- Last Updated: Jan 4th, 2007 - 01:08:31

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"Gene Sharp started out the seminar by saying 'Strategic nonviolent
struggle is all about political power.' And I thought, 'Boy is this
guy speaking my language,' that is what armed struggle is about." --
Col. Robert Helvey

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government and allied forces' year-end
installation of Victor Yushchenko as president of Ukraine have
completed the field-testing of the "Postmodern Coup." Employing and
fine-tuning the same sophisticated techniques used in Serbia in 2000
and Georgia in 2003 (and unsuccessfully in Belarus in 2001), it is
widely expected that the United States will attempt to apply the same
methods throughout the former Soviet Union.

"We have to confront those forces that are committed to reproduce a
Georgian or Ukrainian scenario," Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev stated
on December 26, the day of the coup, "we'll not allow the import of
Rose [Georgian] and Orange [Ukrainian] revolutions in our country."
One day later, the Kazakh government launched a criminal case against
the Soros Foundation for tax evasion, one of the coups' financiers.
And last spring, Uzbek President Islam Karimov accused Soros of
overseeing the revolution in Georgia, and condemning his efforts to
"fool and brainwash" young intelligentsia in his own country, banned
the group. The same networks are also increasingly active in South
America, Africa, and Asia. Top targets include Venezuela, Mozambique,
and Iran, among others.

The method employed is usefully described by The Guardian's Ian
Traynor in a November 26, 2004, article entitled "US campaign behind
the turmoil in Kiev," during the first phase of the coup.

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at
banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy
guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched
up a famous victory -- whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off
in Kiev.

[T]he campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and
brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing
that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage
rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies,
pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-
government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in
Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And
by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in
Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard
Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US
ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in
central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical
campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil
disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a
template for winning other people's elections

Much of the coup apparatus is the same that was used in the overthrow
of President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, the Tiananmen
Square destabilization in 1989, and Vaclav Havel's "Velvet revolution"
in Czechoslavakia in 1989. As in these early operations, the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), and its primary arms, the National
Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and International
Republican Institute (IRI), played a central role. The NED was
established by the Reagan Administration in 1983, to do overtly what
the CIA had done covertly, in the words of one its legislative
drafters, Allen Weinstein. The Cold War propaganda and operations
center, Freedom House, now chaired by former CIA director James
Woolsey, has also been involved, as were billionaire George Soros'
foundations, whose donations always dovetail those of the NED.

What is new about the template bears on the use of the Internet (in
particular chat rooms, instant messaging, and blogs) and cell phones
(including text-messaging), to rapidly steer angry and suggestible
"Generation X" youth into and out of mass demonstrations and the like
-- a capability that only emerged in the mid-1990s. "With the crushing
ubiquity of cell phones, satellite phones, PCs, modems and the
Internet," Laura Rosen emphasized in Salon Magazine on February 3,
2001,"the information age is shifting the advantage from authoritarian
leaders to civic groups." She might have mentioned the video games
that helped create the deranged mindset of these "civic groups." The
repeatedly emphasized role played by so-called "Discoshaman" and his
girlfriend "Tulipgirl," in assisting the "Orange Revolution" through
their aptly named blog, "Le Sabot Post-Modern," is indicative of the
technical and sociological components involved.

A Civilian Revolution in Military Affairs

The emphasis on the use of new communication technologies to rapidly
deploy small groups, suggests what we are seeing is civilian
application of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military
Affairs" doctrine, which depends on highly mobile small group
deployments "enabled" by "real time" intelligence and communications.
Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of
"intelligence helmet" video screens that give them an instantaneous
overview of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of
youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on
cell phones constitute the doctrine's civilian application.

This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and
National Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet,
cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these
technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the
optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The "revolution" in warfare that
such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several
specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians
have been working in high places (for example the RAND Corporation)
for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of
the most important command structures of the US military apparatus
with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of Donald
Rumsfeld.

The new techniques of warfare include the use of both lethal (violent)
and nonlethal (nonviolent) tactics. Both ways are conducted using the
same philosophy, infrastructure, and modus operandi. It is what is
known as Cyberwar. For example, the tactic of swarming is a
fundamental element in both violent and nonviolent forms of warfare.
This new philosophy of war, which is supposed to replicate the
strategy of Genghis Khan as enhanced by modern technologies, is
intended to aid both military and non-military assaults against
targeted states through what are, in effect, "high tech" hordes. In
that sense there is no difference, from the standpoint of the
plotters, between Iraq or Ukraine, if only that many think the Ukraine-
like coup is more effective and easier.

Indicative of the common objective are the comments of the
theoreticians of the post modern coup, for example, Dr. Peter
Ackerman, the author of "Strategic Nonviolent Conflict" (Praeger
1994). Writing in the "National Catholic Reporter" on April 26, 2002,
Dr. Ackerman offered the following corrective to Bush's Axis of Evil
speech targeting Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, which he otherwise
approved: "It is not true that the only way to 'take out' such regimes
is through U.S. military action."

Speaking at the "Secretary's Open Forum" at the State Department on
June 29, 2004, in a speech entitled, "Between Hard and Soft Power:The
Rise of Civilian-Based Struggle and Democratic Change," Ackerman
elaborated on the concept involved. He proposed that youth movements,
such as those used to bring down Serbia, could bring down Iran and
North Korea, and could have been used to bring down Iraq -- thereby
accomplishing all of Bush's objectives without relying on military
means. And he reported that he has been working with the top US
weapons designer, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, on developing new
communications technologies that could be used in other youth movement
insurgencies. "There is no question that these technologies are
democratizing," he stressed, in reference to their potential use in
bringing down China, "they enable decentralized activity. They create,
if you will, a digital concept of the right of assembly."

Dr. Ackerman is the founding chairman of International Center on
Nonviolent Conflicts of Washington, DC, of which former US Air Force
officer Jack DuVall is president. Together with former CIA director
James Woolsey, DuVall also directs the Arlington Institute of
Washington, DC, which was created by former Chief of Naval Operations
advisor John L. Peterson in 1989 " to help redefine the concept of
national security in much larger, comprehensive terms" it reports,
through introducing "social value shifts into the traditional national
defense equation."

"Swarming Adolescents" and "Rebellious Hysteria"

As in the case of the new communication technologies, the potential
effectiveness of angry youth in postmodern coups has long been under
study. As far back as 1967, Dr. Fred Emery, then director of the
Tavistock Institute, and an expert on the "hypnotic effects" of
television, specified that the then new phenomenon of "swarming
adolescents" found at rock concerts could be effectively used to bring
down the nation-state by the end of the 1990s. This was particularly
the case, as Dr. Emery reported in "The next thirty years: concepts,
methods and anticipations,'' in the group's "Human Relations," because
the phenomena was associated with "rebellious hysteria." The British
military created the Tavistock Institute as its psychological warfare
arm following World War I; it has been the forerunner of such
strategic planning ever since. Dr. Emery's concept saw immediate
application in NATO's use of "swarming adolescents" in toppling French
President Charles De Gaulle in 1967.

In November 1989, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, under the
aegis of that university's "Program for Social Innovations in Global
Management," began a series of conferences to review progress towards
that strategic objective, which was reported on in "Human Relations"
in 1991. There, Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a professor of "Social
Architecture'' at the Wharton School, and a follower of Dr. Emery,
stressed that "rock video in Katmandu," was an appropriate image of
how states with traditional cultures could be destabilized, thereby
creating the possibility of a "global civilization." There are two
requirements for such a transformation, he added, "building
internationally committed networks of international and locally
committed organizations,'' and "creating global events" through "the
transformation of a local event into one having virtually
instantaneous international implications through mass-media."

(Perlmutter on the origin of the concept of globalization: see quote.)

This brings us to the final ingredient of these new coups -- the
deployment of polling agencies' "exit polls" broadcast on
international television to give the false (or sometimes accurate)
impression of massive vote-fraud by the ruling party, to put targeted
states on the defensive. Polling operations in the recent coups have
been overseen by such outfits as Penn, Schoen and Berland, top
advisors to Microsoft and Bill Clinton. Praising their role in
subverting Serbia, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (and
later Chairman of NDI) , in an October 2000 letter to the firm quoted
on its website, stated: "Your work with the National Democratic
Institute and the Yugoslav opposition contributed directly and
decisively to the recent breakthrough for democracy in that
country . . . This may be one of the first instances where polling has
played such an important role in setting and securing foreign policy
objectives." Penn, Schoen, together with the OSCE, also ran the widely
televised "exit poll" operations in the Ukrainian elections.

In the aftermath of such youth deployments and media operations, more
traditional elements come to the fore. That is, the forceful, if
covert, intervention by international institutions and governments
threatening the targeted regime, and using well placed operatives
within the targeted regime's military and intelligence services to
ensure no countermeasures can be effectively deployed. Without these
traditional elements, of course, no postmodern coup could ever work.
Or, as Jack DuVall put it in Jesse Walker's "Carnival and conspiracy
in Ukraine," in Reason Online, November 30, 2004, "You can't simply
parachute Karl Rove into a country and manufacture a revolution."

Gladio and James Bond Get a Youth Group

The creation and deployment of coups of any kind requires agents on
the ground. The main handler of these coups on the "street side" has
been the Albert Einstein Institution, which was formed in 1983 as an
offshot of Harvard University under the impetus of Dr. Gene Sharp, and
which specializes in "nonviolence as a form of warfare." Dr. Sharp had
been the executive secretary of A.J. Muste, the famous U.S. Trotskyite
labor organizer and peacenik. The group is funded by Soros and the
NED. Albert Einstein's president is Col. Robert Helvey, a former US
Army officer with 30 years of experience in Southeast Asia. He has
served as the case officer for youth groups active in the Balkans and
Eastern Europe since at least 1999.

Col. Helvey reports, in a January 29, 2001, interview with film
producer Steve York in Belgrade, that he first got involved in
"strategic nonviolence" upon seeing the failure of military approaches
to toppling dictators -- especially in Myanmar, where he had been
stationed as military attaché -- and seeing the potential of Sharp's
alternative approach. According to B. Raman, the former director of
India's foreign intelligence agency, RAW, in a December 2001 paper
published by his institute entitled, "The USA's National Endowment For
Democracy (NED): An Update," Helvey "was an officer of the Defence
Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon, who had served in Vietnam and,
subsequently, as the US Defence Attache in Yangon, Myanmar (1983 to
85), during which he clandestinely organised the Myanmarese students
to work behind Aung San Suu Kyi and in collaboration with Bo Mya's
Karen insurgent group. . . . He also trained in Hong Kong the student
leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were
to subsequently use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989" and
"is now believed to be acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong, the
religious sect of China, in similar civil disobedience techniques."
Col. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been
working with Albert Einstein and Soros long before then.

Reflecting Albert Einstein's patronage, one of its first books was Dr.
Sharp's "Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-Based
Deterrence and Defense," published in 1985 with a forward by George
Kennan, the famous "Mr. X" 1940's architect of the Cold War who was
also a founder of the CIA's Operations division. There, Sharp reports
that "civilian-based defense" could counter the Soviet threat through
its ability "to deter and defeat attacks by making a society
ungovernable by would be oppressors" and "by maintaining a capacity
for orderly self-rule even in the face of extreme threats and actual
aggression." He illustrates its feasibility by discussing the examples
of the Algerian independence in 1961 and the Czechoslovakian
resistance to Soviet invasion in 1968-9. In his forward, Kennan
praises Sharp for showing the "possibilities of deterrence and
resistance by civilians" as a "partial alternative to the traditional,
purely military concepts of national defense." The book was promptly
translated into German, Norwegian, Italian, Danish, and other NATO
country languages. See the link to the Italian translation of the book
(Verso un'Europa Inconquistabile. 190 pp. 1989 Introduction by
Gianfranco Pasquino) that sports a series of fashionable sociologists
and "politologists" prefacing the book and calling for a civil
resistance to a possible Soviet invasion of Italy.

Such formulations suggest that Albert Einstein activities were,
ironically, coherent (or, possibly updating) the infamous NATO's
"Gladio" stay-behind network, whose purpose was to combat possible
Soviet occupation through a panoply of military and nonmilitary means.
The investigations into Gladio, and those following the 1978
assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, also shed some light
(immediately switched off) on a professional apparatus of
destabilization that had been invisible for several decades to the
public.

It is noteworthy that the former deputy chief of intelligence for the
US Army in Europe, Major General Edward Atkeson, first "suggested the
name 'civilian based defense' to Sharp," John M. Mecartney,
Coordinator of the Nonviolent Action for National Defense Institute,
reports in his group's CBD News and Opinion of March 1991. By 1985,
Gen. Atkeson, then retired from the US Army, was giving seminars at
Harvard entitled "Civilian-based Defense and the Art of War.

The Albert Einstein Institution reports, in its "1994-99 Report on
Activities," that Gen. Atkeson also served on Einstein's advisory
board in those years. Following his posting as the head of US Army
intelligence in Europe, and possibly concurrently with his position at
the Albert Einstein Institution, the Washington-based Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reports that Gen. Atkeson,
who also advised CSIS on "international security." served as "national
intelligence officer for general purpose forces on the staff of the
director of Central Intelligence."

A 1990 variant of Sharp's book, "Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-
Military Weapons System," the Albert Einstein Institution reports,
"was used in 1991 and 1992 by the new independent governments of
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in planning their defense against
Soviet efforts to regain control."

As we shall see below, with such backing, Col. Helvey and his
colleagues have created a series of youth movements including Otpor!
in Serbia, Kmara! in Georgia, Pora! in Ukraine, and the like, which
are already virally replicating other sects throughout the former
Soviet Union, achieving in civilian form what had not been possible
militarily in the 1980s. The groups are also spreading to Africa and
South America.

And Dope Too?

Col. Helvey's long experience in Myanmar in training insurgent ethnic
minorities in a region that is the center of world opium production
raises another question of great bearing on "post modern coups." That
is: what is the role of narcotic mafias in facilitating "regime
change?" Law enforcement agencies from many nations, including the
United States, have long reported that the Balkans is the major
narcotics pipeline into Western Europe. Ukraine is said to be a top
conduit, as is Georgia. Kyrghyzstan, now at the top of the hit list,
is another opium conduit. And George Soros "the Daddy Warbucks of drug
legalization," has been the top "private" funder of all the Eastern
European and Central Asian insurgent groups, as well as those in
Myamar. The spread of such mafias, is, of course, one of the most
efficient ways of infiltrating and corrupting government agencies of
targeted states.

Col. Helvey is not the only operator with such a background. The head
of the OSCE's vote monitoring operation in Ukraine, for example, Geert-
Hinrich Ahrens, was German Ambassador to Colombia in the late 1990s,
when German secret agent Werner Mauss was arrested for working closely
with the narco-terrorist ELN, whose bombings are financed by the
cocaine trade. Ahrens was also on the scene in Albania and Macedonia,
when the narcotics smuggling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was created
with US and German patronage. And Michael Kozak, the US ambassador
whose 2001 effort to overthrow Belarus' Lukachenko failed, had been a
top handler of the cocaine-smuggling Contras.

The Serbian Virus

The networks and methods used in the Serbian through Ukraine sequence
were first publicly revealed in a Washington Post article on Dec. 11,
2000, by Michael Dobbs, entitled. "U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic
Opposition: Political Consultants Helped Yugoslav Opposition Topple
Authoritarian Leader." He reports that:

U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in
virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking
polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to
organize a vitally important parallel vote count. U.S. taxpayers paid
for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-
Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia, and 2.5 million stickers
with the slogan "He's Finished," which became the revolution's
catchphrase.

Some Americans involved in the anti-Milosevic effort said they were
aware of CIA activity at the fringes of the campaign, but had trouble
finding out what the agency was up to. Whatever it was, they concluded
it was not particularly effective. The lead role was taken by the
State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development,
the government's foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds
through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and
its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute
(IRI).

While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused
its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution's ideological
and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor
leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton
Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-
favored Marriott.

During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such
matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols,
how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a
dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col.
Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods
around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the
civil rights struggle in the American South.

Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor
activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharp, whom he
describes as "the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement," referring
to the renowned Prussian military strategist.

Peter Ackerman, the above-mentioned coup expert, analyzed and
popularized the methods involved in a 2001 PBS documentary-series and
book, "A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict,"
together with retired US Airforce officer Jack DuVall. Focusing on
youth organizing, they report:

After the NATO bombing, which had helped the regime suppress
opposition, Otpor's organizing took hold with a quiet vengeance. It
was built in some places around clubhouses where young people could go
and hang out, exercise, and party on the weekends, or more often it
was run out of dining rooms and bedrooms in activists' homes. These
were "boys and girls 18 and 19 years old" who had lived "in absolute
poverty compared to other teenagers around the world," according to
Stanko Lazendic, an Otpor activist in Novi Sad. "Otpor offered these
kids a place to gather, a place where they could express their
creative ideas." In a word, it showed them how to empower themselves.

Otpor's leaders knew that they "couldn't use force on someone
who . . . had three times more force and weapons than we did," in the
words of Lazendic. "We knew what had happened in. Tiananmen, where the
army plowed over students with tanks." So violence wouldn't work --
and besides, it was the trademark of Milosevic, and Otpor had to stand
for something different. Serbia "was a country in which violence was
used too many times in daily politics," noted Srdja Popovic, a 27 year-
old who called himself Otpor's "ideological commissar." The young
activists had to use nonviolent methods "to show how superior, how
advanced, how civilized" they were.

This relatively sophisticated knowledge of how to develop nonviolent
power was not intuitive. Miljenko Dereta, the director of a private
group in Belgrade called Civic Initiatives, got funding from Freedom
House in the U.S. to print and distribute 5,000 copies of Gene Sharp's
book, "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for
Liberation." Otpor got hold of Sharp's main three-volume work, "The
Politics of Nonviolent Action," freely adapting sections of it into a
Serbian-language notebook they dubbed the "Otpor User Manual."
Consciously using this "ideology of nonviolent, individual
resistance," in Popovic's words, activists also received direct
training from Col. Robert Helvey, a colleague of Sharp, at the
Budapest Hilton in March 2000.

Helvey emphasized how to break the people's habits of subservience to
authority, and also how to subvert: the regime's "pillars of support,"
including the police and armed forces. Crucially, he warned them
against "contaminants to a nonviolent struggle," especially violent
action, which would deter ordinary people from joining the movement:
and alienate the international community, from which material and
financial assistance could be drawn. As Popovic put it: "Stay
nonviolent and you will get the support of the third party."

That support, largely denied to the Serbian opposition before, now
began to flow. Otpor and other dissident groups received funding from
the National Endowment for Democracy, affiliated with the U.S.
government, and Otpor leaders sat down with Daniel Serwer, the program
director for the Balkans at the U.S. Institute for Peace, whose story
of having been tear-gassed during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration
gave him special credibility in their eyes. The International
Republican Institute, also financed by the U.S. government, channeled
funding to the opposition and met with Otpor leaders several times.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, the wellspring for most
of this financing, was also the source of money that went for
materials like t-shirts and stickers.

No Lack of Opportunities for Employment

In the aftermath of the Serbian revolution, the National Endowment for
Democracy, Albert Einstein Institution, and related outfits helped
establish several Otpor-modeled youth groups in Eastern Europe,
notably Zubr in Belarus in January 2001; Kmara in Georgia, in April
2003; and Pora in Ukraine in June 2004. Efforts to overthrow Belarus
President Alexsander Luschenko failed in 2001, while the US overthrow
of Georgian President Eduard Schevardnadze was successfully
accomplished in 2003, using Kmara as part of its operation.

Commenting on that expansion, Albert Einstein staffer Chris Miller, in
his report on a 2001 trip to Serbia found on the group's website,
reports:

Since the ousting of Milosevic, several members of Otpor have met with
members of the Belarusian group Zubr (Bison). In following
developments in Belarus since early this year, It is clear that Zubr
was developed or at least conceptualized, using Otpor as a model.
Also, [Albert Einstein's report] From Dictatorship to Democracy is
available in English on the Zubr website at www.zubr-belarus.com. Of
course, success will not be achieved in Belarus or anywhere else,
simply by mimicking the actions taken in Serbia. However the
successful Serbian nonviolent struggle was highly influenced and aided
by the availability of knowledge and information on strategic
nonviolent struggle and both successful and unsuccessful past cases,
which is transferable.

Otpor focused on building their human resources, especially among
youth. An Otpor training manual to "train future trainers" was
developed, which contained excerpts from The Politics of Nonviolent
Action, provided to Otpor by Robert Helvey during his workshop in
Budapest for Serbs in early 2000. It may be applicable for other
countries.

And with funding provided by Freedom House and the US government,
Otpor established the Center for Nonviolent Resistance, in Budapest,
to train these groups. Describing the deployment of this youth
movement, Ian Trainor, in the above cited Guardian November 2004
article, reports:

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-
literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent
Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the
mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the
voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning
resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia
last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it
was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons.
Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful
in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr
Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the
techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the
dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up
with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the
hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow
from neighbouring Hungary -- Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one
of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the
border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican
party's International Republican Institute, the US State Department
and USAID are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns
as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's Open
Society Institute.

An Associated Press article by Dusan Stojanovic, on November 2, 2004,
entitled "Serbia's export: Peaceful Revolution," elaborates:

"We knew there would be work for us after Milosevic," said Danijela
Nenadic, a program coordinator of the Belgrade-based Center for
Nonviolent Resistance. The nongovernmental group emerged from Otpor,
the pro-democracy movement that helped sweep Milosevic from power by
organizing massive and colorful protests that drew crowds who never
previously had the courage to oppose the former Yugoslav president. In
Ukraine and Belarus, tens of thousands of people have been staging
daily protests -- carbon copies of the anti-Milosevic rallies -- with
"training" provided by the Serbian group.

The group says it has "well-trained" followers in Ukraine and Belarus.
In Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, anti-government activists "saw what
we did in Serbia and they contacted us for professional training,"
group member Sinisa Sikman said. Last year, Otpor's clenched fist was
flying high on white flags again -- this time in Georgia, when
protesters stormed the parliament in an action that led to the
toppling of Shevardnadze.

Last month, Ukrainian border authorities denied entry to Alexandar
Maric, a member of Otpor and an adviser with the U.S.-based democracy
watchdog Freedom House. A Ukrainian student group called Pora was
following the strategies of Otpor.

James Woolsey's Freedom House "expressed concern" over Maric's
deportation, in an October 14, 2004, press release which reported that
he was traveling to Ukraine as part of "an initiative run by Freedom
House, the National Democratic Institute, and the International
Republican Institute to promote civic participation and oversight
during the 2004 presidential and 2006 parliamentary elections in
Ukraine." In a related statement, it added that it hoped the
deportation was not a sign of the Ukrainian government's
"unwillingness to allow the free flow of information and learning
across borders that is an integral and accepted part of programs to
encourage democratic progress in diverse societies around the world."

Timeline:

* Otpor! founded in Belgrade, Serbia in October 1998. Postmodern
Coup overthrows Slobodan Milosevic on October 5, 2000. Subsequently
forms Center for Nonviolent Resistance to spead !!! revolutions.
* Clinton Administration's Community of Democracies launched in
Warsaw, Poland, in June 2000.
* Zubr! founded in Minsk, Belarus, on January 14, 2001. Election-
Coup efforts fail in September 9, 2001.
* Mjaft! founded in Tirana, Albania, on March 15, 2003.
* Kmara! founded in Tblisi, Georgia in April 2003. "Rose
revolution" overthrows President Eduard Shevardnadze on November 23,
2003.
* Pora! founded in Kiev, Ukraine in June 2004. "Orange revolution"
installs Victor Yushchenko into power on December 26, 2004.
* Kmara! overthrows Abashidze of Ajaria (western Georgian
secessionist province) May 5, 2004

Who Is Col. Bob Helvey?

Who is Col. Bob Helvey, who personally, and through his Albert
Einstein Institution, played such a key role in the Serbian and
Ukrainian coups?

According to his own account, Helvey first got involved in "strategic
nonviolence" upon seeing the failures of military approaches to
toppling dictators, especially in Myanmar (also known as Burma). In a
January 29, 2001, interview with Steve York in Belgrade, Helvey
stated:

My career has been that of a professional soldier. And one of my last
assignments was to be the defense attaché in Rangoon [Myanmar]. And I
really had an opportunity -- two years living in Rangoon and getting
around the country -- to really see first hand what happens when a
people are oppressed to the point that they're absolutely terrorized.

And, you know, there was no future for people and there was a struggle
for democracy going on, but it was an armed struggle on the periphery
of the country and in the border regions. And it was very clear that
that armed struggle was never going to succeed.

So, when I got back [to the US], I kept Burma in the back of my mind.
Here were a people that really wanted democracy, really wanted
political reform, but the only option they had was armed struggle. And
that was really a nonstarter, so there was really a sense of
helplessness.

Back in the US, he reports, he was selected as senior fellow at the
Harvard Center for International Affairs -- while still an active duty
officer, where he attended a meeting on a "Program for Nonviolent
Sanctions."

Dr. Gene Sharp happened to be there. And he started out the seminar by
saying, "Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power.
How to seize political power and how to deny it to others." And I
thought, "Boy, this guy's talking my language." And, you know, that's
what armed struggle is about. So I got interested in this approach
because I saw immediately that there may be an opportunity here for
the Burmese.

And how did he get involved in Serbia?

I had done some work along the Thai-Burmese border with the
International Republican Institute. So when they were looking for
someone to present information on strategic nonviolent struggle to a
Serb group, they called me.

The Albert Einstein Institution repeatedly emphasizes Col. Helvey's
role in training the Myanmar opposition, and a substantial amount of
the group's web page stresses the group's involvement there.
Reflecting this preoccupation, Albert Einstein's writings have
repeatedly been translated not only into Burmen, but also into Karen,
Chin, Mon, Jingphaw and several other ethnic minority languages and
dialects in that country.

The Albert Einstein Institute does not emphasize, however, that even
the US State Department and Drug Enforcement Agency identify the
ethnic minority opposition to the Myanmar government as comprising the
world's largest producers of opium and heroin.

The DEA's 2002 "Drug Intelligence Brief: Burma: Country Brief," for
example, states:

Armed ethnic minority groups who have been in conflict with the GOB
[Government of Burma, aka Myanmar ed] for decades control cultivation,
production, and trafficking in Burma. . . . The drug trafficking
groups operating within Burma are mostly insurgent factions that have
been warring with the GOB and among themselves for many years.

Special note should be made here of Bo Mya and his Karen group, which
Col. Helvey has advised for years. Bo Mya, now retired, has admitted
to have held meetings with Burmese drug king pin Khun Sa, that Khun Sa
said were held in an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate opium and
heroin routes of Myanmar and Thailand. (Bo Mya has denied Myanmar
government allegations of his involvement in the narcotics trade.)

According to Khun Sa's statements -- later made famous by the US
military "Missing in Action" investigator "Bo" Gritz -- his opium
trafficking was done under the coordination of Richard Armitage,
currently US Undersecretary of State. (See references here, here and
here)

While Col. Helvey's precise relations with former CIA deputy director
Theodore Shackley, who had been widely accused of overseeing this
narcotics trafficking, remain unknown, such reports do lend credence
to claims that narcotics syndicates have played a pivotal role in the
recent coups in the Balkans, and now Ukraine, which comprise an
important route for Southeast Asian heroin entering Western Europe.

Myanmar Operations

In its "Report on Activities, 1993-1999," the Albert Einstein
Institution laid great stress on the importance of Helvey's operations
to subvert the Myanmar regime as a centerpiece of their activities. In
fact, the first paragraph of the introduction of the report reads:

Colonel Kyaw Thein was clearly unhappy with our workshop on nonviolent
struggle held along the Thai-Burma border. At a September 1996 press
briefing in Rangoon, the spokesman for the military dictatorship
charged that "aliens and mercenaries" were trying to "disrupt the
peace and tranquility" in Burma -- as if widespread torture, forced
labor, and other human rights atrocities constitute "tranquility." The
military official was incensed by an ever increasing global
phenomenon: direct transnational assistance and cooperation between
nongovernmental organizations and pro-democracy groups around the
world, in this case of course, in Burma. The Albert Einstein
Institution's groundbreaking outreach on strategic nonviolent struggle
is but one example of this growing trend that moves beyond traditional
humanitarian and human rights efforts.

. . . The impetus for our intensive workshops on nonviolent struggle
for Burmese groups came in November 1991, when Robert Helvey, a
retired U.S. Army colonel and former U.S. military attaché in Burma,
requested that we assist in reviewing lesson plans for an introductory
course in nonviolent struggle. Mr. Helvey designed the course for
Burmese opposition groups in part by relying on Gene Sharp's The
Politics of Nonviolent Action. The May 1992 course, conducted inside
Burma at the opposition headquarters at Manerplaw, was extremely well
received. In fact, when leading Burmese opposition groups formed the
umbrella organization National Council of the Union of Burma in August
1992, they also established a "Political Defiance Committee" to
educate activists and to organize strategic nonviolent struggle inside
Burma ("political defiance" is the term adopted in Burma to connote
nonviolent struggle). Senior pro-democracy leaders requested
additional workshops from Robert Helvey and the Albert Einstein
Institution.

A Fall 1992 article in "Nonviolent Sanctions" by Gene Sharp, entitled
"Exploring Nonviolent Struggle in Thailand and Burma," and found on
Albert Einstein's website, describes their role in Myanmar, and in
particular Col. Helvey's role:

Gene Sharp traveled to Thailand and Burma in the fall, October 20-
November 8, 1992, in response to two invitations. The American Friends
of Democracy in Burma (headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia) asked
him to help evaluate a course on "Political Defiance" that had been
taught in Mannerplaw by Robert Helvey for the Democratic Alliance of
Burma.

"After two days rest and orientation in Bangkok, I traveled to
Mannerplaw, a base camp for the Burmese democratic opposition located
along the Thai-Burma border. . . . During my four days in Mannerplaw I
participated in a variety of meetings and discussions about nonviolent
struggle (or political defiance as it is more often called there).
These included meetings with top political officials, military
officers, and leaders of the All Burma Students' Democratic Front, the
National League for Democracy, the Karen Youth Organization Leadership
Seminar, the Democratic Alliance of Burma, and the Political Defiance
Committee."

Robert Helvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel and an expert on Burma,
began offering a course on political defiance to groups in Mannerplaw
last spring. The aim of this intensive course is to give participants
a basic understanding of the technique of nonviolent struggle. At the
end of the course, students are expected to understand the insights
into political power on which political defiance is based, and also to
have developed an understanding of the technique's multiple methods,
its dynamics of conflict against a repressive regime, the mechanisms
of change, and the principles of strategy in nonviolent struggle.

Peace Magazine, in its April June 2003 issue, contains further details
on Helvey's career, in a laudatory article entitled "Robert Helvey's
Expert Political Defiance."

From 1983 until 1985 Helvey was a US military attaché at the American
Embassy in Rangoon, where he was dismayed by the futility of armed
resistance to the brutal dictatorship of Burma. An armed struggle had
continued without success for over two decades.

After retiring from the army in 1991, Helvey gave a speech in
Washington, using Sharp's insights and adding his own. A member of the
audience later offered to pay his way to Burma to spread his message.
With this funding, from 1992 to 1998, he made 15 trips to the Thai-
Burmese border to meet with more than 500 members of the National
Council Union of Burma, a pro-democracy umbrella group. On eight
occasions, Helvey taught a six-week course, seeking to build
confidence, identify the dictatorship's major weaknesses, and form
pressure groups.

Many of those attending Helvey's course had been officers in armed
resistance groups for many years and were skeptical about nonviolence.
For example, Auun Nang Oo, who is now a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy
School of Nonviolence, was astonished that a career soldier could hold
such views. Another unbeliever was General Bo Mya, the leader of the
Karens, the biggest national minority. At first he would just grumble
and grunt that he "wasn't interested in doing the work of cowards." To
change such attitudes, Helvey coined the more militant-sounding
phrase, "political defiance," which won Bo over and caused him to ask
Helvey to train more Karen leaders.

The Myamar government has also commented on Col. Helvey's career. For
example, at a June 27, 1997 press conference entitled "How some
Western powers have been aiding and abetting terrorism committed by
certain organizations operating under the guise of democracy and human
rights by giving them assistance in both cash and kind." There, Lt-Gen
Khin Nyunt, at the time Secretary-1 of the State Law and Order
Restoration Council of Myanmar, said of Helvey:

He was assigned to Myanmar as Defense Attache (Army) at the U.S.
embassy in Myanmar from 1982 to 1984 with the rank of full colonel. On
conclusion of his assignment in Myanmar he went home, retired
immediately from the US Army and returned to the Myanmar-Thai border.
He is military advisor to the KNU, KNPP and the Democratic Party for
New Society, personally giving military training and manipulating the
armed groups in various ways right up till now.

The Myamar government newspaper, New Light of Myanmar, on February 4,
1995, also reported on Helvey's involvement with insurgent groups then
working with opium kingpin Khun Sa.

As the second strategy of the NCUB [National Coalition Union of
Burma], it formed the Political Defiance Committee with the objective
to use all sorts of subversive acts so that the people will have wrong
impressions of the Government and lose their respect on it and so
disturbances and upheavals will break out in the country. Thus, they
made contacts with underground elements within the country and
distributed agitative pamphlets, set off bombs in townships to disturb
peace and tranquility and cause disturbances and resorted to other
disruptive acts. Those who gave training in political defiance (PD)
activities were a former retired US Defence Attache Robert Helvey and
one Gene Sharp. It was seen that during the three-year period of
extending invitation for peace, the KNU were bent on undermining the
interest of the people. KNU Bo Mya sent KNU Lt-Col Law Wadi,
demolition expert Lt-Col Saw Isaac, to drug warlord Khun Sa at Homein
Camp and had discussions from 10 to 12 April 1994 on cooperation
between KNU and MTA, assisting in making land mines and arms and
ammunition and other economic cooperation.

The Coup Plotters

The Albert Einstein Institution

The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) has played the key role in
recent years in training and deploying youth movements to help prepare
the conditions for coups through fostering the impression that the
targeted regimes are deeply unpopular, and through destabilizing those
regimes through their demonstrations and the like. The group, which is
funded by the Soros foundations and the US government, is led by
former DIA officer Col. Robert Helvey, and Harvard University's Dr.
Gene Sharp.

According to the Albert Einstein Institution's report, Dr Gene Sharp
(curriculum vitae and Biographical Profile) "founded the Albert
Einstein Institution in 1983 to promote research, policy studies, and
education on the strategic uses of nonviolent struggle in face of
dictatorship, war, genocide, and oppression."

Dr. Sharp has held research appointments in Harvard University's
Center for International Affairs for nearly 30 years. His writings,
which on the strategic use of nonviolence in overturning states, have
been translated into 27 languages. Through funding provided by the
Soros foundations, and through the National Endowment of Democracy and
other US government conduits, Sharp and his associates have regularly
traveled to targeted regions to facilitate revolutions, since the
group's creation.

According to Sharp, "If the issue is to bring down a dictatorship,
then it is not good enough to say, 'we want freedom.' It's necessary
to develop a strategy, or a super-plan, to weaken a dictatorship and
that can only be done by identifying its sources of power. These
[sources of power] include: authority, human resources skills,
knowledge, tangible factors, economic and material resources and
sanctions like police and troops."

For this reason, Sharp reports, he has written numerous books on
nonviolent struggle to help oppressed peoples develop a "superplan."
These works, of which the major one is "The Politics of Nonviolent
Action," have been translated into 27 languages. Among these languages
are Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian, Macedonian, Arabic, Tamil,
Burmese, Karen (and several other Burmese minority languages), Thai,
Chinese, Korean, as well as French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Italian,
and other European languages still spoken in former colonies.

While Sharp is the main theoretician of the group (and officially its
senior scholar), its more practical work is overseen by its president,
Colonel Robert Helvey, who began working with the center even before
officially retiring from the US Army in 1991. A 30-year veteran of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, Helvey had practical experience in
subversive operations throughout Southeast Asia prior to his work with
the institution. According to numerous reports, Helvey was the case
officer for the US-sponsored coup in Serbia, was deeply involved in
similar operations in Georgia, and according to at least on report,
was on the ground in the recent coup in Ukraine. (Ukrainian
translation of From Dictatorship to Democracy by Sharp has just been
announced by The Albert Einstein Institution)

According to the Albert Einstein Institution's report for the years
2000 to 2004, its mission is to "advance the worldwide study and
strategic use of nonviolent action in conflict."

Numerous individuals and organizations interested in the potential of
nonviolent struggle contact the Albert Einstein Institution. In recent
years, requests for information or advice have come from people
involved in conflicts in Albania, Kosovo, Moldova, Serbia, Slovakia,
Cyprus, the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Iran,
Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Lebanon, the Occupied
Territories, Vietnam, China, Tibet, West Papua, Sri Lanka, Malaysia,
Aceh (Indonesia), Kashmir, Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Cuba,
Mexico, Angola, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Togo, Kenya and Zimbabwe.

AEI's translation program has been instrumental in expanding our
global reach. In the last four years alone, the Albert Einstein
Institution's publications have appeared in Serbian, Russian,
Ukrainian, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Tibetan, and several ethnic Burmese
languages. Additional translations are currently underway in Chinese
and Kurdish.

In his letter from the president, Col. Helvey reports:

Strategic nonviolent struggle must be recognized as a subject that can
be understood and applied by all who seek to throw off the yoke of
governmental oppression.

. . . The assumption that there is no realistic alternative to
violence in extreme situations is contradicted by various cases of
important nonviolent struggles in several countries in recent decades.
These include Norway, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, the
Philippines, the Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,
Serbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, India, and others. Many earlier cases
of improvised nonviolent struggle occurred and are also relevant.
Usually the importance of these history-making nonviolent struggles
has been trivialized or ignored. Although there have also been some
failures in nonviolent struggle, such as in China and Burma, the fact
that these cases could have been waged at all, and that numerous
nonviolent struggles have succeeded, is highly important.

International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts

The International Center on Nonviolent Conflicts has been heavily
involved in the new Postmodern Coups, especially through its top
figures, Dr. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall.

According to its website, the center "develops and encourages the use
of civilian-based, nonmilitary strategies to establish and defend
democracy and human rights worldwide." It "provides assistance in the
training and deployment of field advisors, to deepen the conceptual
knowledge and practical skills of applying nonviolent strategies in
conflicts throughout the world where progress toward democracy and
human rights is possible."

The most significant nonviolent conflicts in the world today, which
may lead to "regime changes," it reports, are occurring in Myanmar,
Zimbabwe, Chinese Tibet, Belarus, Ukraine [now nearing completion],
Palestine, Iran, and Cuba.

Dr. Peter Ackerman is the founding chairman of the center. He is
currently the chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, an important US
intelligence recruitment center, and is on the Executive Council of
the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Dr
Ackerman was also a founding director of the Albert Einstein
Institution.

Dr. Ackerman was the executive producer of the PBS-TV documentary,
"Bringing Down a Dictator," on the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, which
has since been translated into Arabic, Farsi, French, Mandarin,
Russian, and Spanish. He was also the series editor and principal
content advisor behind the PBS-TV series, "A Force More Powerful,"
which documents the use of nonviolence in regime changes. It has been
translated into Arabic, Farsi, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish. Ackerman
is the co-author of two books on nonviolent resistance: A Force More
Powerful (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press 2001), which is a companion book
to the television series, and Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The
Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century (Praeger 1994). He
regularly lectures on the use of the nonviolence in toppling targets
states, including at the State Department.

Former Air Force officer Jack DuVall, is the president of the center,
and was one of its founders. Like Dr. Ackerman, DuVall gives frequent
lectures nationally and internationally on the strategic use of
nonviolence.

The center's vice chairman, Berel Rodal, is the former director-
general of the Policy Secretariat of the Canadian Department of
National Defence.

The Arlington Institute

The Arlington Institute (TAI), is an apparent strategist in the use of
postmodern coups. It was founded in 1989 by John L. Petersen, in
order, in his own words, " to help redefine the concept of national
security in much larger, comprehensive terms by introducing the
rapidly evolving global trends of population growth, environmental
degradation, and science and technology explosion, and social value
shifts into the traditional national defense equation." Among its
board members are Jack DuVall, the former Air Force officer who is
director of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in
Washington, DC and James Woolsey, the former Clinton administration
CIA director and neocon spokesman who is currently the chairman of
Freedom House.

The need for an organization like the Arlington Institute, its website
reports, "evolved from the bipartisan, eighteen-month long National
Security Group project that Petersen co-founded and jointly led in
Washington, DC, in 1986-7. That ad-hoc group of national security
experts was brought together to explore and map the security
environment that the successful candidate would have to operate within
after the 1988 presidential campaign. Petersen also wrote the final
report for the group, 'The Diffusion of Power: An Era of Realignment,'
which became a strategy document used at the highest levels of the
Department of Defense."

"In the early part of the 90s," it adds, "Petersen was engaged in a
number of projects for the Department of Defense which functioned to
build a systematic understanding of the major approaches that were
then being used to study and anticipate futures. One notable project
for the Office of the Secretary of Defense involved traveling
throughout the world visiting the foremost practitioners of futures
research to assess each methodology and attempt to develop a new,
synthetic approach that drew from the best of the then current
processes." Petersen became an advisor to a number of senior defense
officials during this time, serving in various personal support roles
to the undersecretary of the Navy and the chief of Naval Operations,
among others.

Midway through the 1990s, it adds, "Petersen became convinced that
humanity was living in an extraordinary time of change that would
necessarily result in a major global shift within the following two
decades. TAI committed itself to playing a significant role in
facilitating a global transition to a new world that operates in a
fundamentally different way from the past."

Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates

Penn, Schoen and Berland (PSB) has played a pioneering role in the use
of polling operations, especially "exit polls," in facilitating coups.
Its primary mission is to shape the perception that the group
installed into power in a targeted country has broad popular support.
The group began work in Serbia during the period that its principle,
Mark Penn, was President Clinton's top political advisor.

PSB was founded in 1975, with offices in Washington, DC, Denver, and
New York. It reports it has conducted research in over 65 countries
for Fortune 500 companies and major political campaigns.

"PSB is perhaps best known for our work as long-term strategic
advisors to Bill Gates and Microsoft," it reports, while in the
political world, "the firm is best known for being the long-time
strategic advisors to President Bill Clinton and to Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton, among others."

The firm reports that it has conducted "a wide variety of government
research projects, including recent work for the U.S. State Department
in troubled countries overseas." Its business clients have included
Siemens, American Express, Eli Lilly, Fleet, Boston Financial, Texaco,
BP, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, ING Group, DeBeers, and KMG, among
others.

The groups touts its role in Serbia. In an article, entitled
"Defeating dictators at the ballot box: Lessons on how to develop
successful electoral strategy in an authoritarian society," posted on
their website, coauthors Penn and Schoen report:

International strategists, political and media consultants -- such as
ourselves have played critical roles behind the scenes of the
elections in Serbia and Zimbabwe, helping the opposition parties craft
strategies, messages and organize a credible and effective campaign
that has enabled them to weaken the dictator, his political party, and
eventually throw him out of power..

The introduction of cutting edge political and communications
techniques is as well as the advise of the best Western political
consultants and image makers, is as potent a weapon as the planes,
bombs, and intelligence technology used in such conflicts as the
Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, most recently Afghanistan.

The firm's role in subverting Serbia was first detailed in a December
11, 2000, Washington Post article by Michael Dobbs, US Advice Guided
Milosevic Opposition.

In a softly lit conference room, American pollster Doug Schoen flashed
the results of an in-depth opinion poll of 840 Serbian voters onto an
overhead projection screen, sketching a strategy for toppling Europe's
last remaining communist-era ruler.

His message, delivered to leaders of Serbia's traditionally fractious
opposition, was simple and powerful. Slobodan Milosevic -- survivor of
four lost wars, two major street uprisings, 78 days of NATO bombing
and a decade of international sanctions -- was "completely vulnerable"
to a well-organized electoral challenge. The key, the poll results
showed, was opposition unity.

Held in a luxury hotel in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, in October
1999, the closed-door briefing by Schoen, a Democrat, turned out to be
a seminal event, pointing the way to the electoral revolution that
brought down Milosevic a year later. It also marked the start of an
extraordinary U.S. effort to unseat a foreign head of state, not
through covert action of the kind the CIA once employed in such places
as Iran and Guatemala, but by modern election campaign techniques.

Milosevic's strongest political card was the disarray and
ineffectiveness of his opponents. The opposition consisted of nearly
two dozen political parties, some of whose leaders were barely on
speaking terms with one another.

It was against this background that 20 opposition leaders accepted an
invitation from the Washington-based National Democratic Institute
(NDI) in October 1999 to a seminar at the Marriott Hotel in Budapest,
overlooking the Danube River. The key item on the agenda: an opinion
poll commissioned by the U.S. polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland
Associates.

The poll reported that Milosevic had a 70 percent unfavorable rating
among Serbian voters. But it also showed that the big names in the
opposition -- men such as Zoran Djindjic and Vuk Draskovic -- were
burdened with negative poll ratings almost as high as Milosevic's.

Among the candidates best placed to challenge Milosevic, the poll
suggested, was a moderate Serbian nationalist named Vojislav
Kostunica, who had a favorable rating of 49 percent and an unfavorable
rating of only 29 percent.

Schoen, who had provided polling advice to former Yugoslav prime
minister Milan Panic during his unsuccessful 1992 campaign to depose
Milosevic, drew several conclusions from these and other findings of
the poll. . . . Most important, only a united opposition had a chance
of deposing Milosevic. "If you take one word from this conference,"
Schoen told the delegates, "I urge it to be unity."

Mark Penn has been president of the firm since its founding in 1975.
He served as President Clinton's pollster and political adviser for
the 1996 re-election campaign and throughout the second term of the
administration, including during the period he oversaw the Serbian
election campaign which toppled President Milosevic. His influence
over the Clinton administration was such that the Washington Post
called him perhaps "the most powerful man in Washington you've never
heard of". According to the firm's website, Penn helped elect 15
overseas Presidents in the Far East, Latin America, and Europe.

Doug Schoen is the firm's founding partner and a principal strategist.
According to the firm, Schoen has, for the last 20 years "created
winning messages and provided strategic advice to numerous political
clients in the United States and to heads of state in countries around
the world, including Greece, Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, the
Dominican Republic, Bermuda and Yugoslavia." Additionally, he was
"President William Jefferson Clinton's research and strategic
consultant during the 1996 reelection, and has been widely credited
with creating and effectively communicating the message that turned
around the president's political fortunes between 1994 and 1996."

Alan Fleischmann, who runs the firm's Washington offices, is described
as a "specialist in strategic and crisis communications who has served
in domestic and overseas senior management posts in the private and
public sectors, specializing in finance, public and foreign policy,
marketing, communications, negotiation, mediation, and strategy. Prior
to joining the firm, Fleischmann been staff director of the Committee
on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemispher

[conspiracy analyst]

George Soros, Imperial Wizard

"Yes, I do have a foreign policy...my goal is to become the conscience of the world."'

This is not a case of narcissistic personality disorder; this is how George Soros exercises the authority of United States hegemony in the world today. Soros foundations and financial machinations are partly responsible for the destruction of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. He has set his sights on China. He was part of the full court press that dismantled Yugoslavia. Calling himself a philanthropist, billionaire George Soros' role is to tighten the ideological stranglehold of globalization and the New World Order while promoting his own financial gain. Soros' commercial and "philanthropic" operations are clandestine, contradictory and coactive. And as far as his economic activities are concerned, by his own admission, he is without conscience; a capitalist who functions with absolute amorality.







Master-builder of the new bribe sector systematically bilking the world




He thrusts himself upon world statesmen and they respond. He has been close to Henry Kissinger, Vaclav Havel and Poland's General Wojciech Jaruzelski. 4 He supports the Dalai Lama, whose institute is housed in the Presidio in San Francisco, also home to the foundation run by Soros' friend, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. 5


Soros is a leading figure on the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum, and Human Rights Watch (HRW). In 1994, after a meeting with his philosophical guru, Sir Karl Popper, Soros ordered his companies to start investing in Central and Eastern European communications. The Federal Radio Television Administration of the Czech Republic accepted his offer to take over and fund the archives of Radio Free Europe. Soros moved the archives to Prague and spent over $15 million on their maintenance. 2 A Soros foundation now runs CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty jointly with the U.S. and RFE/RL, which has expanded into the Caucasus and Asia. 3 Soros is the founder and funder of the Open Society Institute. He created and maintains the International Crisis Group (ICG) which, among other things, has been active in the Balkans since the destruction of Yugoslavia. Soros works openly with the United States Institute of Peace-an overt arm of the CIA.

He thrusts himself upon world statesmen and they respond. He has been close to Henry Kissinger, Vaclav Havel and Poland's General Wojciech Jaruzelski. 4 He supports the Dalai Lama, whose institute is housed in the Presidio in San Francisco, also home to the foundation run by Soros' friend, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. 5

When anti-globalization forces were freezing in the streets outside New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel in February 2002, George Soros was inside addressing the World Economic Forum. As the police forced protesters into metal cages on Park Avenue, Soros was extolling the virtues of the "Open Society" and joined Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama and others.

WHO IS THIS GUY?

George Soros was born in Hungary in 1930 to Jewish parents so removed from their roots that they once vacationed in Nazi Germany. 6 Soros lived under the Nazis, but with the triumph of the Communists moved to England in 1947. There, Soros came under the sway of the philosopher Karl Popper, at the London School of Economics. Popper was a lionized anti-communist ideologue and his teachings formed the basis for Soros' political tendencies. There is hardly a speech, book or article that Soros writes that does not pay obeisance to Popper's influence.

Knighted in 1965, Popper coined the slogan "Open Society," which eventually manifested in Soros' Open Society Fund and Institute. Followers of Popper repeat his words like true believers. Popperian philosophy epitomizes Western individual ism. Soros left England in 1956, and found work on Wall Street where, in the 1960s, he invented the "hedge fund."

"...hedge funds catered to very wealthy individuals... The largely secretive funds, usually trading in offshore locations. . produced astronomically superior results. The size of the "bets" often became self fulfilling prophecies: 'rumors of a position taken by the big hedge funds prompted other investors to follow suit,' which would in turn force up the price the hedgers were betting on to begin with." 7

Soros organized the Quantum Fund in 1969 and began to dabble in currency manipulation. In the 1970s, his financial activities turned to:

"Alternating long and short positions... Soros won big both on the rise of real estate investment trusts and on their subsequent collapse. Under his 20-year stewardship, Quantum returned an amazing 34.5% a year. Soros is best known (and feared) for currency speculation.. . In 1997 he earned the rare distinction of being singled out as a villain by a head of state, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, for taking part in a highly profitable attack on that nation's currency." 8

Through such clandestine financial scheming, Soros became a multibillionaire. His companies control real estate in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico; banking in Venezuela; and are some of the most profitable currency traders in the world, giving rise to the general belief that his highly placed friends assisted him in his financial endeavors, for political as well as financial gain. 9

George Soros has been blamed for the destruction of the Thai economy in 1997.10 One Thai activist said, "We regard George Soros as a kind of Dracula. He sucks the blood from the people." 11 The Chinese call him "the crocodile," because his economic and ideological efforts in China were so insatiate, and because his financial speculation created millions of dollars in profits as it ravished the Thai and Malaysian economies. 12

Soros once made a billion dollars in one day by speculating (a word he abhors) on the British pound. Accused of taking "money from every British taxpayer when he speculated against sterling," he said, "When you speculate in the financial markets you are free of most of the moral concerns that confront an ordinary businessman.. .I did not have to concern myself with moral issues in the financial markets." 13

Soros has a schizophrenic craving for unlimited personal wealth and a desire to be thought well of by others:

"Currency traders sitting at their desks buy and sell currencies of Third World countries in large quantities. The effect of the currency fluctuations on the people who live in those countries is a matter that does not enter their minds. Nor should it; they have a job to do. Yet if we pause to think, we must ask ourselves whether currency traders.. .should regulate the lives of millions." 14

It was Soros who saved George W. Bush's bacon when his management of an oil exploration company was ending in failure. Soros was the owner of Harken Energy Corporation, and it was he who bought the rapidly depreciating stocks just prior to the company's collapse. The future president cashed out at almost one million dollars. Soros said he did it to buy "political influence." 15 Soros is also a partner in the infamous Carlyle Group. Organized in 1987, "the world's largest private equity firm" with over twelve billion dollars under management, is run by "a veritable who's who of former Republican leaders," from CIA man Frank Carlucci to CIA head George Bush, Sr. The Carlyle Group makes most of its money from weapons expenditures.

THE PHILANTHROPIST SPOOK

In 1980, Soros began to use his millions to attack socialism in Eastern Europe. He financed individuals who would cooperate with him. His first success was in Hungary. He took over the Hungarian educational and cultural establishment, incapacitating socialist institutions throughout the country. He made his way right inside the Hungarian government. Soros next moved on to Poland, aiding the CIA-funded Solidarity operation and in that same year, he became active in China. The USSR came next.

It is not coincidental that the Central Intelligence Agency had operations in all of those countries. The goal of the Agency was exactly the same as that of the Open Society Fund: to dismantle socialism. In South Africa, the CIA sought out dissidents who were anticommunist. In Hungary, Poland and the USSR, the CIA, with overt intervention from the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, USAID and other institutions, supported and organized anticommunists, the very type of individuals recruited by Soros' Open Society Fund. The CIA would have called them "assets." As Soros said, "In each country I identified a group of people - some leading personalities, others less well known - who share my belief..."16 Soros' Open Society organized conferences with anticommunist Czechs, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians, Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars. 17 His ever-expanding influence gave rise to suspicions that he was operating as part of the U.S. intelligence complex. In 1989, the Washington Post reported charges first made in 1987 by the Chinese government officials that Soros' Fund for the Reform and Opening of China had CIA connections. 18

TAKING ON MOSCOW

After 1990, Soros funds targeted the Russian educational system, providing the entire nation with textbooks. 19 In effect, Soros ensured the indoctrination of an entire generation of Russian youth with OSI propaganda. Soros foundations were accused of engineering a strategy to take control of the Russian financial system, privatization schemes, and the process of foreign investment in that country. Russians reacted angrily to Soros' legislative meddlings. Critics of Soros and other U.S. foundations said the goal of these maneuvers was to "thwart Russia as a state, which has the potential to compete with the world's only superpower." 20 Russians began to suspect Soros and the CIA were interconnected. Business tycoon Boris Berezovsky said, "I nearly fainted when I heard a couple of years ago that George Soros was a CIA agent." 21 Berezovsky's opinion was that Soros, and the West, were "afraid of Russian capital becoming strong."

If the economic and political establishment in the United States fear an economic rivalry from Russia, what better way to control it than to dominate Russian media, education, research centers and science? After spending $250 million for the "transformation of education of humanities and economics at the high school and university levels," Soros created the International Science Foundation for another $100 million. 22 The Russian Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK) accused Soros foundations in Russia of "espionage." They noted that Soros was not operating alone; he was part of a full court press that included financing from the Ford and Heritage Foundations; Harvard, Duke, and Columbia universities, and assistance from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services. 23 The FSK criticized Soros' payouts to 50,000 Russian scientists, saying that Soros advanced his own interests by gaining control of thousands of Russian scientific discoveries and new technologies to collect state and commercial secrets. 24

In 1995, Russians were infuriated by the insinuation of State Department operative Fred Cuny into the conflict in Chechnya. Cuny's cover was disaster relief, but his history of involvement in international conflict zones of interest to the U.S., plus FBI and CIA search parties, made clear his government connections. At the time of his disappearance, Cuny was working under contract to a Soros foundation. 25 It is not widely known in the U.S. that the violence in Chechnya, a province in the heart of Russia, is generally perceived as the result of a political destabilization campaign on which Washington looks favorably, and may actually be directing. This assessment of the situation is clear enough to writer Tom Clancy that he felt free to include it as an assertion of fact in his best-seller, The Sum of All Fears. The Russians accused Cuny of being a CIA operative, and part of an intelligence operation to support the Chechen uprising. 26 Soros' Open Society Institute is still active in Chechnya, as are other Soros-sponsored organizations.

Russia was the site of at least one joint endeavor to enhance Soros' balance sheet, arranged with diplomatic assistance from the Clinton administration. In 1999, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright blocked a $500 million loan guarantee by the U.S. Export-Import Bank to the Russian company, Tyumen Oil, on the grounds that it was contrary to U.S. national interests. Tyumen wanted to buy American-made oil equipment and services from Dick Cheney's Halliburton Company and ABB Lummus Global of Bloomfield, New Jersey. 27 George Soros was an investor in a company that Tyumen had been trying to acquire. Both Soros and BP Amoco lobbied to prevent this transaction, and Albright obliged. 28

NURTURING LEFT ANTI-SOCIALISM

Soros' Open Society Institute has a finger in every pot. Its board of directors reads like a "Who's Who" of Cold War and New World Order pundits. Paul Goble is Communications Director; 'he was the major political commentator at Radio Free Europe. Herbert Okun served in the Nixon State Department as an intelligence adviser to Henry Kissinger. Kati Marton is the wife of former Clinton administration UN ambassador and envoy to Yugoslavia, Richard Holbrooke. Marton lobbied for the Soros-funded radio station B-92, also a project of' the National Endowment for Democracy (another overt arm of the CIA), which was instrumental in bringing down the Yugoslav government.

When Soros founded the Open Society Fund he picked liberal pundit Aryeh Neier to lead it. Neier was the head of Helsinki Watch, a putative human rights organization with an anticommunist bent. In 1993, the Open Society Fund became the Open Society Institute.

Helsinki Watch became Human Rights Watch in 1975. Soros is currently on its Advisory Board, both for the Americas and the Eastern Europe-Central Asia Committees, and his Open Society Fund/Soros/OSI is listed as a funder. 29 Soros is intimately connected to HRW, and Neier wrote columns for The Nation magazine without mentioning that he was on Soros' payroll. 30

Soros is intimately involved in HRW, although he does his best to hide it. 31 He says he just funds and sets up these programs and lets them run. But they do not stray from the philosophy of the funder. HRW and OSI are close. Their views do not diverge. Of course, other foundations fund these institutions as well, but Soros' influence dominates their ideology.

George Soros' activities fall into the construct developed in 1983 and enunciated by Allen Weinstein, founder of the National Endowment for Democracy. Weinstein said, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."32 Soros is operating exactly within the confines of the intelligence complex. He is little different from CIA drug runners in Laos in the 1960s, or the mujahedin who profited from the opium trade while carrying out CIA operations against socialist Afghanistan in the 1980s. He simply funnels (and takes home) a whole lot more money than those pawns, and he does much of his business in the light of day. His candor insofar as he expresses it is a sort of spook damage control that serves to legitimize the strategies of U.S. foreign policy.

The majority of people in the U.S. today who consider themselves politically left-of-center are undoubtedly pessimistic about the chances for a socialist transformation of society. Thus the Soros 'Decentralization" model, or the "piecemeal" approach to "negative utilitarianism, the attempt to minimize the amount of misery," which was Popper's philosophy, appeals to them. 33 Soros funded an HRW study that was used to back California and Arizona legislation relaxing drug laws. 34 Soros favors the legalization of drugs - one way of temporarily reducing awareness of one's misery. Soros is an equal-opportunity bribester. At a loftier rung of the socioeconomic ladder, one finds Social Democrats who accept Soros funding and believe in civil liberties within the context of capitalism. 35 For these folks, the evil consequences of Soros' business activities (impoverishing people all over the world) are mitigated by his philanthropic activities. Similarly, liberal/left intellectuals, both in the U.S. and abroad, have been drawn in by the "Open Society" philosophy, not to mention the occasional funding plum.

The New Left in the United States was a social democratic movement. It was resolutely anti-Soviet, and when Eastern Europe and the USSR fell, few in the New Left opposed the destruction of the socialist systems. The New Left did not mourn or protest when the hundreds of millions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia lost their right to jobs, housing at reasonable and legally protected rents, free education through graduate school, health care and cultural enhancement. Most belittled any suggestion that the CIA and certain NGOs such as the National Endowment for Democracy or the Open Society Fund had actively participated in the annihilation of socialism. These people felt that the Western determination to destroy the USSR since 1917 was barely connected to the fall of the USSR. For them, socialism failed of its own accord, because it was flawed.

As revolutions, such as the ones in Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua or El Salvador were destroyed by proxy forces or were stalled by demonstration "elections," New Left pragmatists shrugged their shoulders and turned away. The New Left sometimes seemed to deliberately ignore the post-Soviet machinations of U.S. foreign policy.

Bogdan Denitch, who had political aspirations in Croatia, was active within the Open Society Institute, and received OSI funding. 36 Denitch favored the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatia, NATO bombing of Bosnia and then Yugoslavia, and even a ground invasion of Yugoslavia. 37 Denitch was a founder and chair for many years of the Democratic Socialists of America, a leading liberal-left group in the U.S. He has also long chaired the prestigious Socialist Scholars Conference, through which he was key to manipulating the sympathies of many toward support for NATO expansion. 38 Other Soros targets for support include Refuse and Resist the ACLU, and a host of other liberal causes. 39 Soros added another unlikely trophy when he became involved in the New School for Social Research in New York, long an academy of choice for left intellectuals. He now funds the East and Central Europe Program there. 40

Many leftists who were inspired by the revolution in Nicaragua sadly accepted the election of Violetta Chamorro and the defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990. Most of the Nicaragua support network faded thereafter. Perhaps the New Left could have learned from the rising star of Michael Kozak. He was a veteran of Washington's campaigns to install sympathetic leaders in Nicaragua, Panama and Haiti, and to undermine Cuba - he headed the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

After organizing the Chamorro victory in Nicaragua, Kozak moved on to become U.S. Ambassador to Belarus. Kozak worked with the Soros-sponsored "Internet Access and Training Program" (IATP), which was busy "creating future leaders" in Belarus. 41 This program was simultaneously imposed upon Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. IATP operates openly with the support of the U.S. Department of State. To its credit, Belarus expelled Kozak and the Soros-Open Society/U.S. State Department crowd. The government of Aleksandr Lukashenko found that for four years before moving to Minsk, Kozak was instrumental in engineering the flow of tens of millions of dollars to the Belarus opposition. Kozak was creating a united opposition coalition, funding web-sites, newspapers and opinion polls, and tutoring a student resistance movement similar to Yugoslavia's Otpor. Kozak brought in Otpor leaders to instruct dissidents in Belarus. 42 Just before September 11, 2001, the U.S. was revving up a demonization campaign against President Aleksandr Lukashenko. Demonizing Lukashenko has temporarily taken a back burner to the "war on terrorism."

Through OSI and HRW, Soros was a major supporter of the B-92 radio station in Belgrade. Soros funded Otpor, the organization that received those "suitcases of money" in support of the October 5, 2000 coup that toppled the Yugoslav government. 43 Human Rights Watch helped legitimize the subsequent kidnapping and show trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague by saying nothing about his rights." 44 Louise Arbour, who served as judge at that illegal tribunal, is presently on the Board of Soros' International Crisis Group. 45 The Open Society/Human Rights Watch gang has been working on Macedonia, calling it part of their "civilizing mission." 46 Expect that republic to be "saved" to finish the total disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.

DEPUTIES OF POWER

Soros has actually stated that he considers his philanthropy moral and his money management business amoral. 47 Yet those in charge of Soros-funded NGOs have a clear and consistent agenda. One of Soros' most influential institutions is the International Crisis Group, founded in 1986. ICG is headed by individuals from the very center of political and corporate power. Its board includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, Morton Abramowitz, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State; Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe; and Richard Allen, former U.S. National Security Adviser, Allen is noteworthy for quitting Nixon's National Security Council out of disgust with the liberal tendencies of Henry Kissinger; recruiting Oliver North to Reagan's National Security Council, and negotiating missiles for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal. For these individuals, "containing conflict" boils down to U.S. control over the people and resources of the world.

In the 1980s and 1990s, under the aegis of the Reagan Doctrine, U.S. covert and overt operations in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia were in the works. Soros was openly active in most of these places, working to buy off would-be revolutionaries, or subsidize politicians, intellectuals and anyone else who might come to power when the revolutionary moment had passed. According to James Petras:

"By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neoliberal ruling classes realized that their policies were polarizing the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neoliberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy 'from below,' the promotion of 'grassroots' organizations with an 'anti-statist' ideology to intervene among potentially conflictory classes, to create a "social cushion." These organizations were financially dependent on neoliberal sources and were directly involved in competing with sociopolitical movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1 990s these organizations, described as "nongovernmental," numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to four billion dollars world-wide." 48

In Underwriting Democracy, Soros boasts about the "Americanization of Eastern Europe." According to his account, through his education programs he began to establish a young cadre of Sorosian leaders. These Soros Foundation-educated young men and women are prepared to fulfill the functions of so-called "influence agents." Thanks to their fluent knowledge of languages and their insertion into the emerging bureaucracies in target countries, these recruits would philosophically smooth the inroads for Western multinational corporations.

Career diplomat Herbert Okun, on the Europe Committee of Human Rights Watch, along with George Soros, is connected to a host of State Department-linked institutions, from USAID to the Rockefeller-funded Trilateral Commission. From 1990 to 1997, Okun was executive director of something called the Financial Services Volunteer Corps, part of USAID, "to help establish free market financial systems in former communist countries." 49 George Soros is in complete accord with the capitalists who are in the process of taking control of the global economy.

NON-PROFIT PROFITEERING

Soros claims not to do philanthropy in the countries in which he is involved as a currency trader. 50 But Soros has often taken advantage of his connections to make key investments. Armed with a study by ICC, and with the support of Bernard Kouchner, chief of the UN Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK), Soros attempted to acquire the most profitable mining complex in the Balkans.

In September 2000, in a hurry to take the Trepca mines before the Yugoslavian election, Kouchner stated that pollution from the mining complex was raising lead levels in the environment. 51 This is incredible considering that he cheered when the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia rained depleted uranium on the country and released more than 100,000 tons of carcinogens into the air, water and soil. 52 But Kouchner had his way, and the mines were closed for "health reasons." Soros invested $150 million in an effort to gain control of Trepca's gold, silver, lead, zinc and cadmium, which make the property worth $5 billion. 53

As Bulgaria was imploding into "free-market" chaos, Soros was busy scavenging through the wreckage, as Reuters reported in early 2001:

"The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) invested $3.0 million in [Bulgarian high-tech company] Rila, the first firm to benefit from a new $30 million facility set up by the EBRD to support IT firms in central and eastern Europe.... Another $3. 0 million came from U.S private investment fund Argus Capital Partners, sponsored by Prudential Insurance Company of America and opera ting in central and eastern Europe... Soros, who had invested around $3.0 million in Rila and in 2001 invested another $1.0 million...remained its majority owner. " 54

FRAMING THE ISSUES

His pose as a philanthropist gives Soros the power to shape international public opinion when social conflict raises the question of who are the victims and who are the malefactors. Like other NGOs, Human Rights Watch, Soros' mouthpiece on human rights, avoids or ignores most organized and independent working class struggles.

In Colombia, labor leaders are routinely killed by paramilitaries working in concert with the U.S.-sponsored government. Because those unions oppose neoliberal economics, HRW is relatively silent. In April of this year, HRW's Jose Vivanco testified before the U.S. Senate in favor of Plan Colombia: 55

"Colombians remain committed to human rights and democracy They need help. Human Rights Watch has no fundamental problem with the United States providing that help." 56

HRW equates the actions of the Colombian guerrilla fighters struggling to free themselves from the oppression of state terror, poverty and exploitation with the repression of the U.S-sponsored armed forces and paramilitary death squads, the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia). HRW validated the Pastrana government and its military, whose role was to protect property rights and maintain the economic and political status quo. According to HRW, 50% of civilian deaths are the work of the government-tolerated death squads. 57 The correct number is 80%. 58

HRW essentially certified the election and ascendancy of the Uribe government in 2002 as well. Uribe is a throwback to the Latin American dictators the U.S. supported in the past, although he was "elected." HRW had no comment about the fact that the majority boycotted the election. 59

In the Caribbean Basin, Cuba is another opponent of neoliberalism that has been demonized by Human Rights Watch. In nearby Haiti, Soros-funded activities have worked to defeat popular aspirations following the end of the Duvalier dictatorship by undermining Haiti's first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. HRW's Ken Roth helpfully chimed in with U.S. denunciations of Aristide as "undemocratic." To demonstrate his idea of "democracy," Soros foundations were commencing operations in Haiti complimentary to such unseemly U.S. activities as USAID's promotion of persons associated with FRAPH, the notorious CIA-sponsored death squads which have terrorized the country since the fall of 'Baby Doc' Duvalier. 60

On HRW's web site, Director Roth criticized the U.S. for not opposing China more vigorously. Roth's activities include the creation of the Tibetan Freedom Concert, a traveling propaganda project that toured the U.S. with major rock musicians, urging young people to support Tibet against China. 61 Tibet has been a pet project of the CIA for many years. 62

Roth has recently pressed for opposition to Chinese control over its oil-rich western province of Xinjiang. With the colonialist "divide and conquer" approach, Roth has tried to convince some of the Uighur religious minority in Xinjiang that the U.S/NATO intervention in Kosovo holds promise as a model for them. As late as August 2002, the U.S. government has given some support in this endeavor as well.

U.S. designs on this region were signaled clearly when a New York Times article on Xinjiang Province in western China described the Uighurs as a "Muslim majority, [which] lives restively under Chinese rule." They "are well versed in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last year which some celebrate for liberating the Muslims in Kosovo; they fantasize about a similar rescue' here." 63 The New York Times Magazine noted "Recent discoveries of oil have made Xinjiang extremely attractive to international trade," while comparing the conditions for its indigenous population to those in Tibet. 64

INNUMERACY

When Sorosian organizations count, they seem to lose track of the truth. Human Rights Watch asserted that 500 people, not over 2,000, were killed by NATO bombers in the 1999 war in Yugoslavia. 65 They said only 350, not over 4,000, died as a result of U.S. attacks on Afghanistan. 66 When the U.S. bombed Panama in 1989, HRW prefaced its report by saying that the "ouster of Manuel Noriega.. and installation of the democratically-elected government of President Guillermo Endara brought high hopes in Panama..." The report neglected to mention the number of casualties.

Human Rights Watch prepared the groundwork for the NATO attack on Bosnia in 1993 by the false rape-of-thousands and "genocide" stories. 67 This tactic of creating political hysteria was necessary for the United States to carry out its Balkan policy. It was repeated in 1999 when HRW functioned as the shock troops of indoctrination for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. All of Soros' blather about the rule of law was forgotten. The U.S. and NATO made their own law, and the institutions of George Soros stood behind it.

Massaging of numbers to provoke a response was a major part of a Council on Foreign Relations campaign after September 11,2001. This time it was the 2,801 killed in the World Trade Center. The CFR met on November 6, 2001, to plan a "major public diplomacy campaign." CFR created an "Independent Task Force on America's Response to Terrorism." Soros joined Richard C. Holbrooke, Newton L. Gingrich, John M. Shalikashvili (former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and other powerful individuals on a campaign to make the Trade Center dead into tools for U.S. foreign policy. The CFR report set out to make the case for a war on terrorism. George Soros' fingerprints were all over the campaign:

"Have senior-level U.S. officials press friendly Arab and other Muslim governments not only to publicly condemn the 9/11 attacks, but also to back the rationale and goals of the U.S. anti-terror campaign. We are never going to convince the publics in the Middle East and South Asia of the nghteousness of our cause if their governments remain silent. We need to help them to deflect any blow-hack from such statements, but we must have them vocally on board.... Encourage Bosnian, Albanian, and Turkish Muslims to educate foreign audiences regarding the U.S. role in saving the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo in 1995-99, and our long-standing, close ties to Muslims around the world. Engage regional intellectuals and journalists across the board, regardless of their views. Routinely monitor the regional press in real time to enable prompt responses... Stress references to the victims (and ideally named victims to personalize them) whenever we discuss our cause and goals." 68

Sorosian innumeracy: counting to bolster and defend U.S. foreign policy.

Soros is very worried about the decline in the world capitalist system and he wants to do something about it, now. He recently said: "I can already discern the makings of the final crisis.... Indigenous political movements are likely to arise that will seek to expropriate the multinational corporations and recapture the 'national' wealth." 69

Soros is seriously suggesting a plan to circumvent the United Nations. He proposes that the "democracies of the world ought to take the lead and forge a global network of alliances that could work with or without the United Nations." If he were psychotic, one might think he was having an episode. But the fact is, Soros' assertion that "The United Nations is constitutionally incapable of fulfilling the promises contained in the preamble of its charter," reflects the thinking of such reactionary institutions as the American Enterprise Institute. 70 Though many conservatives refer to the Soros network as left-wing, on the question of U.S. affiliation with the United Nations Soros is on the same page as the likes of John R. Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, who, with "[M]any Republicans in Congress-believe that nothing more should be paid to the UN system." 71 There has been a decades-long rightwing campaign against the UN. Now Soros is leading it. On various Soros web sites one may read criticism of the United Nations as too rich, unwilling to share information, or flawed in ways that make it unfit for the way the world should run according to George Soros.

Even writers at The Nation, writers who clearly ought to know better, have been influenced by Soros' ideas. William Greider, for instance, recently found some validity in Soros' criticism that the United Nations should not be a venue for "tin-pot dictators and totalitarians. . treated as equal partners." 72 This kind of Eurocentric racism is at the heart of Soros' hubris. His assumption that the United States can and should run the world is a prescription for fascism on a global scale. For much too long, Western "progressives" have been giving Soros a pass. Probably Greider and others will find the reference to fascism excessive, unjustified, even outrageous.

But just listen closely to what Soros himself has to say: "In old Rome, the Romans only voted. In the modern global capitalism, the Americans only vote. The Brazilians do not vote." 73

NOTES

1. Dan Seligman, "Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire," commentary, April 2002.
2. "Sir Karl Popper in Prague, Summary of Relevant Facts Without Comment,"
http://www.lf3.cuni.cz/aff/p1_e.html.
3. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Transcaucasia/Central Asia, www.rferl.org.
4. Seligman.
5. Lee Penn, "1999, A Year of Growth for the United Religions Initiative." http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/N1684.TMP3/B103O723.3;sz=720x300;ord=624 9?.
6. George Soros, Soros on Soros, Staying Ahead of the Curve (New York: John Wiley, 1995), p. 26.
7. "Hedge Funds Get Trimmed," Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2000.
8. Theodore Spencer, "Investors of the Century," Fortune, December 1999.
9. Jim Freer, "Most International Trader George Soros," Latin Tradecom, October 1998, http://www.latintrade.com/newsite/content/archives.cfm?StoryID=473.
10. Busaba Sivasomboon, "Soros Speech in Thailand Canceled," AP wire, January 28, 2001.
11. Sivasomboon.
12. George Soros, The Asia Society Hong Kong Center Speech, www.asiasociety.org/speeches/soros.
13. Soros on Soros, pill.
14. George Soros, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2000).
15. David Corn, "Bush and the Billionaire, How Insider Capitalism Benefited
W," The Nation, July 17, 2002.
16. Soros on Soros, pp. 122-25.
17. Agence France-Presse, October 8,1993.
18. Marianne Yen, "Fund's Representatives Arrested in China," Washington Post, August 8, 1989, p. A4.
19. Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1994, p. ASS.
20. Chrystia Freeland, "Moscow Suspicion Grows: Kremlin Factions Are at Odds Over Policy," Financial Times (London), January 19, 1995.
21. Interfax Russian News, November 6,1999.
22. Irma Dezhina, "U.S. Non-profit Foundations in Russia, Impact on Research and Education" www.jhu.edu/~istr/conferences/dublin/workingpapers/dezhina.pdf.
23. "FSK Suspects Financing of Espionage on Russia's Territory," AP wire, January 18, 1995.
24. David Hoffman, "Proliferation of Parties Gives Russia a Fractured Democratic System," Washington Post, October 1, 1995, p. A27; Margaret Shapiro, "Russian Agency Said to Accuse Americans of Spying," Washington Post, January 14, 1995, p. A17.
25. Allan Turner, "Looking For Trouble," Houston chronicle, May 28, 1995, p. E1; Kim Masters, "Where Is Fred Cuny," Washington Post, June 19, 1995, p. D1; Patrick Anderson, "The Disaster Expert Who Met His Match," Washington Post, September 6, 1999, p. C9; Scott Anderson, "What Happened to Fred Cuny?" New York Times Magazine, February 25, 1996, p. 44.
26. Scott Anderson, "The Man Who Tried to Save the World: the Dangerous Life and Disappearance of Fred Cuny," Philanthropy Roundtable, March/April 2002, www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/2000-01/hedges.
27. "U.S. Blocks $500M Aid Deal for Russians" Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1999.
28. Bob Djurdjevic, "Letters to the Editor," Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1999.
29. "Open Society Institute," www.soros.org/osi/newyork.
30. Connie Bruck, "The World According to Soros," New Yorker, January 23, 1995.
31. Olga M. Lazin, "The Rise of the U.S. Decentralized Model for Philanthropy, George Soros' Open Society and National Foundations in Europe," http://www.isop.ucla.edu/profmex/volume6/1winter01/01lazin1.htm.
32. David Ignatius, "Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups," Washington Post, September 22, 1991, p. C1.
33. Patrick McCartney, "Study Suggests Drug Laws Resemble Notorious Passbook Laws," www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n861/a06.
34. McCartney.
35. See Sean Gervasi, "Western Intervention in the USSR," CovertAction Information Bulletin, no. 39, Winter 1991-92.
36. "The Cenasia Discussion List," http://www.eurasianet.org/resource/cenasia/hypermail/200102/0052.html.
37. Bogdan Denitch, "The Case Against Inaction," The Nation, April 26, 1999.
38. "Biographies, 2002 Socialist Scholars Conference," www.socialistscholar.org/biographies.
39. "Grants," www.soros.org/repro/grants.
40. "East and Central Europe Program," www.newschool.edu/centers/ecep.
41. Oxana Popovitch, "IREX Belarus Opens a New IATP Site in Molodechno." www.iatp.net/archive/belarus.
42. lan Traynor, "Belarussian Foils Dictator-buster...For Now," Guardian, September 14, 2001, www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,551533,00.html
43. Steven Erlanger, "Kostunica Says Some Backers 'Unconsciously Work for American Imperial Goals,"' New York Times, September 20, 2000; and "Bringing Down a Dictator, Serbia Calling." PBS, http://www.pbs.org/weta/dictator/rock/serbiacalling.html
44. Milosevic in the Hague, Focus on Human Rights, "In-Depth Report Documents Milosevic Crimes," April 2001, http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/10/milocroat1029.htm.
45. "About ICG," May 2002, http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/annual/2002/ICG2002.pdf.
46. Macedonia Crimes Against Civilians: Abuses by Macedonian Forces in Lluboten, August 10-12, 2001,
47. Andrew Leonard. "The Man Who Bought the World," February 28, 2002, Salon.com. http://archive.salon.com/tech/books/2002/02/28/soros/
48. James Petras, "Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America," Monthly Review, vol. 49, no. 7, December 1997.
49. International Security Studies, "Herbert Okun," www.yale.edu/iss/peopleadvisoryboard1.
50. Leonard.
51. Edward W. Miller, "Brigandage," Coastal Post Monthly, Mann County, CA, September 2000.
52. Mirjan Nadrljanski, "Eco-Disaster in Pancevo: Consequences on the Health of the Population," July 19, 1999, www.gci.ch/GreenCrossPrograms/legacy/yugoslavia/Nadrljanski.html
53. "Soros Fund Launches $150 MIn U.S.Backed Balkans Investment," Bloomberg Business News, July 26, 2000; Chris Hedges, "Below It All in Kosovo," New York limes, July 8,1998, p. A4.
54. Galina Sabeva, "Soros' Sofia IT Firm Gets $9 Million Equity Investment," Reuters, January 23, 2001.
55. On Plan Colombia see: Manuel Salgado Tamayo, "The Geostrategy of Plan Colombia CovertAction Quarterly no. 71, Winter 2001.
56. "Colombia: Human Rights Watch Testifies Before the Senate," Human Rights Watch Backgrounder, April 24, 2002, http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/americas/colombia-testimony0424.htm.
57. "Colombia: Bush/Pastrana Meeting, HRW World Report 2001, Human Rights News" (New York, November 6, 2001).
58. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Action Alert," New York limes Covering for Colombian Death Squads," February 9, 2001.
59. Doug Stokes "Colombia Primer Q&A on the Conflict and U.S. Role," April 16, 2002. Znet, http://www.zmag.org/content/Colombia/stokes_col-primer.cfm.
60. Interpress Service, January 18, 1995. For additional background see Jane Regan, "AIDing U.S. Interests In Haiti," CovertAction Quarterly no. 51, Winter 1994-95; and Noam Chomsky, "Haiti, The Uncivil Society," CovertAction Quarterly no. 57, Summer 1996.
61. Sam Tucker, Human Rights Watch, www.webactive.com/webactive/sotw/hrw.
62. John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War (New York, BBS Public Affairs 1999), p. 236.
63. Elisabeth Rosenthal, "Defiant Chinese Muslims Keep Their Own Time," New York limes, November 19, 2000, p. 3.
64. Jonathan Reynolds (pseudonym), "The Clandestine Chef," New York Times Magazine, December 3, 2000.
65. "Lessons of War," Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2000; Peter Phillips, "Untold Stories of U.S./NATO's War and Media Complacency," http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/suntold.htm
66. Marc W. Herold, "A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting," www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/civiDeaths.html
67. "Rape as a crime against humanity," www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/rape.html
68. "Improving the Public Diplomacy Campaign in the War Against Terrorism," Independent Task Force on America's Response to Terrorism, Council on Foreign Relations, November 6, 2001.
69. William Greider, "Curious George Talks the Market, The Nation, February 15, 1999.
70. "Oppose John Bolton's Nomination as State Department's Arms Control Leader," Council for a Livable World , April 11, 2001, http://www.clw.org/bush/opposebolton.html
71. Ibid.
72. Greider.
73. "The Dictatorship of Financial Capital," Federation of Social and Educational Assistance (FASE), Brail, 2002, www.fase.org.br

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Heather Cottin is a writer, lifelong political activist, and recently retired high school history teacher She lives in Free port, NY and was for many years married to the late scholar and activist Sean Gervasi.

[outsider]

Italian ex-President 'provoke riots', then hospitalise peaceful protesters:

http://www.firecongress.org/article.php/Story-Italian_Police_Provocate uring

[Thermate911]

Just some further confirmation I cannot locate on this forum

[chek]

[quote="Thermate911"]Just some further confirmation I cannot locate on this forum

[Thermate911]

LOL - I don't recollect a more confused and angry western populace than present day Americans. Those sort of responses I'm inclined to glide over as examples of 25 years of dumbing down. Amazing what flouride and mercury can achieve!

Trying to get the word out that Lenin & Himmler were equally 'useful' toys to the money masters was an uphill job until I started quoting chunks of Carr's Pawns in the Game - as he's Canadian, seems they can relate to that, at least the ones who can still read and retain anything for more than 5 minutes...

[TonyGosling]

Interesting article on the life and times of George Soros

The Jewish People vs George Soros
Saturday, November 13, 2010
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/11/jewish-people-vs-george-soros. html

I spent yesterday evening in the company of a man whose grandfather spent much of the Holocaust dressed in a Nazi uniform. The difference between him and George Soros, is that he used that uniform as a disguise in order to find Jewish refugees and lead them to shelter. And that difference is a profound one. It is the difference between a perpetrator and a rescuer. Between a collaborator and a hero.



Soros did not wear a Nazi uniform, but he might as well have, because he aided in the persecution of the Jews of Europe, without compassion, without guilt and without regret. Various excuses have been made for his actions, and none of them hold the least bit of water.

Yes Soros was only a teenager at the time. So was my father, who nevertheless escaped to join the partisans, rather than accompanying a Nazi officer in his search for Jewish property he could loot. He had no choice? He certainly had a choice. Even in the worst of times, people still can and do make moral choices. And the choice for everyone, for Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Frenchmen and so on down the line-- was to collaborate with evil, or to do the right thing.

George Soros made the wrong choice then. As he has made the wrong choice over and over again. And he has never regretted any of them. And the one thing that clearly emerges from that, is that he has no understanding that evil is wrong. That participating in the persecution and murder of Jews is wrong. He didn't know it back then, while the Holocaust was going on. He doesn't know it today, when he helps set up and fund organizations like J Street, whose sole purpose is to help the Muslim terrorists who are murdering Jews today.

The liberal media which is busy defending Soros as a victim of the Holocaust and a survivor should find the bare decency to remain silent for once. To call Soros a Holocaust survivor is an obscenity. Soros was not victimized by the Holocaust. He was never targeted by it. He was on the other side of the line. The side that was pulling the trigger, running the gas chambers and sorting the gold teeth. Soros was not a victim, he was a perpetrator. Yes, he was only a teenager, but we do jail teenagers as accomplices to crimes much milder than that of collaborating in genocide.

Liberal using charges of Anti-Semitism to silence critics of Soros is one of the most profoundly cynical exercises imaginable, by people who routinely mock the idea that their bias again Israel is in any way motivated by Anti-Semitism. It is all the more cynical, because Soros has described himself as growing up in a "Jewish, Anti-Semitic home" and suggested that Jewish behavior causes Anti-Semitism. Defending criticism of a billionaire Anti-Semite as Anti-Semitism is thoroughly surreal. It's an inversion of the meaning of the word that punches a hole through reason and all the way over into the other side.

Soros has funded organizations that actively promoted Anti-Semitic smears against Jews. MoveOn's bulletins have linked to sites like CounterPunch, a site which actually published an article in defense of blood libels. One bulletin linked to pieces which accused Jews of dual loyalty, claimed that a small group of Jewish elites monopolize foreign policy and began with a "special feature" from former Klansman, Senator Byrd. All this is from an organization funded by George Soros. A man so reviled within the Jewish community that his funding for J Street had to be kept secret for fear of a backlash against the entire group.

The media's implication that criticism of Soros is an attack on Jews as a whole is mind-bogglingly false. When even an organization aimed at liberal Jews actually has to hide its Soros funding, it is safe to say that Herr Soros is not representative of the Jewish community. After a failed attempt to scam money out of a Jewish charity in his youth, Soros has avoided Jewish organizations and Jewish causes. J Street is one of those exceptions, only because it is an Anti-Jewish organizations masquerading as a Jewish organization.

Soros has said that he doesn't want to be part of any Jewish national existence, and that the solution to Anti-Semitism is for Jews to "give up on the tribalness". His narrative has always been to blame Anti-Semitism on Jews and on Israel. And frankly that is the essence of what Anti-Semitism is. Blame the victim. And there's every reason for Soros to do that. because he helps the perpetrators. And that seems to have been a lifelong hobby with him.

Soros' father identified with Germans, more than with Jews. Like some of that type, he wanted to be more German, than the Germans. After Nazi Germany fell, George seemed to hold a special animus for the countries that had defeated the Third Reich. His political and economic primarily war targeted America, Europe and Russia. The countries and societies that had destroyed Hitler's dream of world conquest. Whether that is deliberate or not, is not a question I can answer. But if Soros had strongly resented the Allied forces that shut down National Socialism, then his likely course of behavior would be the same one that he has followed. To find weak spots in the system, exploit them to make money and then use that money to bring those societies and countries down.

Over the years Soros has made it very clear that he doesn't like Jews, and doesn't want to be associated with them. This wasn't an aberration that developed during the Holocaust, but runs in his family. His father changed his last name from Schwartz to Soros. His ex-wife has stated that Soros' mother disliked her, because she was "openly Jewish". In his biography, Soros agreed that his ex-wife's Jewishness was the problem. He even referred to his own mother as a "Jewish Anti-Semite". Indeed Soros' mother disliked Jews so much, she ended up converting.

George Soros has not converted, but he considers himself an atheist and like the rest of his family, is hostile to Jews. He has mentioned an "antipathy" to Jewish organizations, one which he dates back to his time delivering deportation orders to Jewish lawyers. At one point he describes his Jewishness as a "secret shame" that required psychoanalysis. While Soros has said that he has no guilt over his Nazi collaboration, he apparently did feel guilt for whatever Jewishness he still felt he had. That is not the attitude of a moral man, but of a man who enjoyed being a Nazi, but hated being Jewish. With that kind of attitude, it's no wonder that Soros acts the way he does.

But having excluded himself from the Jewish community and having waged war against the places and countries where Jews are secure-- having even funded Anti-Semitic organizations, he has absolutely no right to try and hide from criticism over his political activities by using his front groups to denounce critics as Anti-Semitic. Certainly not by claiming to be a Holocaust survivor, when he was actually a collaborator. His front groups have produced and circulated materials that accused American Jews of secret conspiracies, that certainly meet the same test that his front groups are now using to argue that Beck is engaging in Anti-Semitism.

But Soros is never held to the standards of the people he wages war on. Soros destroys the savings of British pensioners, while using the money to fund left wing groups which claim to care about the plight of the poor. Now left wing groups which promote Anti-Semitism are accusing Soros critics of being Anti-Semitic. To them it's just a word. Another weapon they can use to promote their agenda. To us however it's not just a word. It's a reality. It's a reality that Jews have been living with for a very long time now.

For thousands of years, the Jewish people have survived persecution, outlived genocide, and every form of oppression under the sun. And during all that time, there have been Jewish survivors and heroes, and collaborators as well. The upcoming holiday of Chanukah is the story of Jews who refused to collaborate. On the other hand, the story of Soros is the story of those who brought pigs on altars. Who hated their Jewishness and eagerly sought to join with the oppressors. Soros is only one of that number. But it is not the collaborators or the traitors who continue on. They die and turn to dust. Their malice may be great and the harm they cause terrible, but like all mortals, they still perish and pass away. But the Nation of Israel, like the lights of the Menorah, go on.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/11/jewish-people-vs-george-soros. html

[TonyGosling]