.
.
.
A left-wing perspective from the USA, about Egypt's "Popular Peoples Revolution" recently. Obviously they are not. Most mass revolutions are organized, but the question is by whom? And for what purpose?
______________________________
An interview with K.R. Bolton
By Mike Whitney in Information Clearing House.
MW---Do we know whether foreign agents or US-backed NGOs participated in the demonstrations in Tahrir Square? Could they have played a part in toppling Mubarak?
K R Bolton--The revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and as they are spreading further afield have all the hallmarks of the NED/Soros “color revolutions” that were fomented in the former Soviet bloc states and in Myanmar and elsewhere. They all follow the same pattern and many years of planning, training and funding have gone into the ridiculously called “spontaneous” (sic) revolts.
The organizations that have spent years and much money creating revolutionary organizations in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere include the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, International Republican Institute, Freedom House, Open Society Institute, and an array of fronts stemming therefrom, including: National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, Center for International Private Enterprise, and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity.
These organizations have for years been backing Egyptian “activists.” Freedom House for e.g. trained 16 young Egyptian “activists” in 2009 in a two month scholarship.
A few days ago the New York reported the association between the April 6 Youth movement, and Optor, the Serbian youth movement that was pivotal in overthrowing Milosevic for the benefit of globalism and the free market. Now April 6 is addressing youths form Libya, Iran, Morocco and Algeria. (“A Tunisian-Egyptian Link that Shook Arab History,” New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests..html).
MW---Whether US-backed activists were involved in the demonstrations or not, don't you think that the vast labor unrest across the country suggests that "homegrown" organizations are the real force that is driving the revolution?
K R Bolton--There do not seem to be any ‘homegrown’ organisations that have played a leading role in the revolts. The labor unions for example were organized, trained and funded by NED. The American Center for International Labor Solidarity works in conjunction with the Center for International Private Enterprise, and is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, National Endowment for Democracy, U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Labor, AFL-CIO, private foundations, and national and international labor organizations. What kind of labor organisation collaborates with those who promote globalisation and the free market?
One of the organizations especially created to sponsor pro-globalist unions is the NED-based Solidarity Center that has been involved with recreating the labor movement in Egypt. NED’s 2009 report for grants includes $318,75 to the American Center for International Labor Solidarity for their program in Egypt; in addition to an array of other organizations in Egypt, and especially those directed at training “youth activists” in social media networking and other features of “spontaneous revolt.”
MW---Do you anticipate a clash between the US-backed military junta and the growing mass of people who seem to have lost their fear of government repression?
K R Bolton--The mass movement is doing precisely what it was created to do by the US based globalist organizations. They are reminiscent of Oswald Spengler’s comment of certain ‘socialist’ organizations a century ago; that they do not function other than where and how money dictates. These are “revolutions form above,” using the masses as cannon fodder by interests whom they think they are opposing. The strategy was tried out within the New Left forty to fifty years ago, when Foundations and the CIA backed certain “radicals” such as Gloria Steinem, National Students Association etc., and the “psychedelic revolution.”
The revolt is by the secularized youth who look on Western democracy as an ideal, which is a facade for plutocracy. A truly revolutionary force such as, perhaps, the Muslim Brotherhood would be fighting for an Islamic, traditionalist renaissance, and would eschew Westernization.
MW----Why would the International Republican Institute (IRI) the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), or George Soro's Open Society Institute train activists to topple a pro-American regimen like Mubarak's?
K R Bolton-- There are long term, dialectical strategies involved that might require even removing seemingly pro-US regimes, that are simply now anomalies in the process of globalization.
However, there are indications that Mubarak was an impediment to US policy. The US and the Mubarak regime were at loggerheads over Sudan for example, Mubarak favoring a confederation, whereas the US sought dismemberment of the South from the north. Egypt’s influence was gaining in the Sudan, with investments and advisers. On Nov. 3, 2009 Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit stated that within the previous five years Egypt had invested more than $87 million into projects in southern Sudan, including hospitals, schools and power stations, “in hope of convincing the people of southern Sudan to choose unity over secession.”
Towards the end of the Bush regime the U.S. Defense Department established the Africa Command (AFRICOM), a primary concern of this new US regional command being the establishment of a massive military base in southern Sudan.
There is a very interesting article on this in The Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs: http://www.washington-report.org/component/content/article/363/10285-sudan-set-to-split-despite-egyptian-moves-.html
MW----How do Mohamed ElBaradei and Ayman Nour fit into to all of this?
K R Bolton-- Mohamed ElBaradei appears to be fulfilling the role of numerous other leaders-in-waiting who have assumed the mantle of leadership in the aftermath of “color revolutions.” ElBaradei is on the Executive Committee of the International Crisis Group, yet another globalist think tank promoting the “new world order” behind the facade of “peace and justice,” or of the “open society.” ICG was founded in 1994 by Mark Brown, former Vice President of the World Bank. Soros is a committee member, along with such luminaries of peace and goodwill as Samuel Berger, former US National Security Adviser; Wesley Clark, former NATO Commander, Europe; and sundry eminences from business, academe, politics and diplomacy of the type that generally comprise such organizations.
“Senior advisers” of the ICG include the omnipresent Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Adviser, and founding director of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, an individual up to his neck in seemingly every globalist cause and think tank going, and a de facto foreign policy adviser for Pres. Obama; and Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, former Secretary General of NATO. Financial backers of the ICG include the Ford Foundation and Open Society Institute.
Soros has already come out endorsing ElBaradei. Maidhc Ó Cathail has written an excellent article tellingly entitled ElBaradei: Soros’s Man in Cairo, which cites the links the ICG has with Zionists and Israel, which can be read at Foreign Policy Journal, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/12/elbaradei-soross-man-in-cairo/
Ayman Nour is getting the Zionists jittery, but his comments on the Camp David accord might be intended to placate Muslim factions. He has long been championed by US administrations, and would as a “liberal” by easy to tame.
MW---In your article "What’s Behind the Tumult in Egypt", you cite a Wikileaks memo from the US Embassy in Cairo which appears to prove that the US was providing support for groups of youth activists who were demonstrating in Cairo. Do you feel like this type of subversion is justifiable if it is for a noble cause, like democracy?
K R Bolton-- It depends on one’s perspective. The Soviets thought that their subversion was for a “noble cause.” The USA disagreed. Pol Pot considered he was fighting for a “noble cause,” (the USA agreed)…
NED, Open Society, IRI, Freedom House, etc. are proud of their roles and are relatively open about them, because it is assumed that everyone will be duped into believing in the nobility of internationalizing the “American Dream,” or what has been called the “new world order.” However, many people, especially those in the ex-Soviet bloc and in the Islamic states, value tradition, culture and spirit, more so than the “freedom” to produce and consume, and to become cogs in a world market with a global mono-culture.
The recently deceased columnist Joe Sobran wrote of these matters cogently a few years ago:
Anti-Americanism is no longer a mere fad of Marxist university students; it’s a profound reaction of traditional societies against a corrupt and corrupting modernization that is being imposed on them, by both violence and seduction. The very word values implies a whole modern culture of moral whim, in which good and evil are matters of personal preference. Confronted with today’s America, then, the Christian Arab finds himself in unexpected sympathy with his Muslim enemy.
America’s foreign policy elite considers the USA to have a messianic world mission to remake the Earth in its image, an early example being Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Whether this is undertaken behind the façade of idealism, of “democracy,’ “human rights” etc., or by outright military invasion, makes no difference, and of course there have been enough wars undertaken in the name of these slogans, one being the war against Serbia, for example, the actual purpose more likely being to globalize the minerals of Kosovo which can best be done under a democratic, free market, debt-ridden regime, than under a centralized state.
American globalization is worse than military dictatorship, because it rots the soul.
Maj. Ralph Peters writing in Parameters, the organ of the US Army War College, has stated that the de facto role of the American army is to keep the world “open to our cultural assault.” He talks of information as being the “most destabilising factor of our time.” He calls this the “American century” where the USA will become “culturally more lethal….” He talks of the “clash of civilisations”. Entertainment, media and internet are the basis for destroying traditional religions, which he derides as “fundamentalism” which will be unable to “control its children.” “Our victims volunteer” he states. The Muslims in the USA are what he calls the “rejectionist segment of our own population.” They are “enraged because their cultures are under assault.” He calls their “cherished values dysfunctional”.
“Hollywood goes where Harvard never penetrated, and the foreigner, unable to touch the reality of America, is touched by America’s irresponsible fantasies itself…” “Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg and Madonna” are replacing “traditional intellectual elites.” “Our cultural empire has addicted – men and women everywhere - clamouring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.” “If religion is the opium of the people, video is their crack cocaine…” “There will be no peace…” “Our military power is culturally based…” “Our American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure… But Hollywood is preparing the battlefield and burgers precede the bullets. … What could be more threatening to traditional cultures?”
This is America’s spiritual and cultural mission as related by an influential strategist and commentator, formerly with the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence; Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia.
Maj. Peters description of those who have come under the curse of secular American global culture, whom he states will serve to bring down traditional societies, sounds rather like the secularised, youthful “activists” who are spearheading the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere.
MW---Here's a quote from Leon Trotsky: "There is no doubt that the fate of every revolution at a certain point is decided by a break in the disposition of the army." There seems to be a real affection between the Egyptian people and the army. Does that mean that a confrontation can be avoided or do you think bloodshed is unavoidable?
K R Bolton-- There could be a unitary movement based around a popular military regime of the Nasser variety. However, I believe that the globalists have unleashed their chaos upon another vast region that will be in a state of disruption for many years to come, like the result of their having “liberated” (sic) Iraq.
MW---In your article titled "The Globalist Web of Subversion" (Foreign Policy Journal) you speak of a "World Capitalist Revolution". Can you explain what you mean?
K R Bolton-- The free market doctrine is the rationale of globalisation. It is fundamentally revolutionary insofar as it destroys traditional values. Free Trade is subversive, which is why Karl Marx, as he stated in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, supported Free Trade. Capitalism desires increasing concentration and an internationalised economy. It once worked through nation-sates and then through empires, but both became too restrictive and had to be surpassed by a “new world order,” which requires the destruction of national, ethnic, cultural and all other bonds that hinder the international free flow of labor, capital and technology.
A good book on this process was written a few years back, called Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations, by Richard Barnet and Ronald Muller. Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book Between Two Ages wrote of the dialectical nature of capitalism and its drive towards a world order, approvingly. And, of course, Marx wrote of the dialectical nature of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. However, Marx thought that capitalism, with its destruction of national boundaries, and its internationalising tendencies in the modes of production, would be part of the process towards world socialism and ultimately communism. He was wrong in that crucial respect; social revolutions have been part of a dialectical process towards an international capitalist order. The “color revolutions” are a most essential part of this process.
MW---Here's a quote from your article in Foreign Policy Journal: "The tumult in North Africa could conceivably backfire on the globalists terribly and create a quagmire of the Iraq variety." It looks to me like US meddling may have opened Pandora's Box. Do you agree?
K R Bolton--Yes, “Pandora’s box” is a good term. It is the “new world disorder.” It might be wondered whether these global wirepullers are extraordinarily stupid. But I think the answer lies in some kind of sociopathology. The psychotic is ultimately self-destructive; although these people would probably see things dialectically, believing that it is part of “controlled crisis.” Their mentality hovers somewhere around the Jim Jones type, with the world being their Jonestown.
With the latest disturbances being in Iran, I hypothesize that the problems generated in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, etc. might have been part of a regional process directed primarily at Iran, and next Syria, two states market in particular for destruction by the Project for the New American Century.
____________________________________
(K R Bolton is a “contributing writer” for The Foreign Policy Journal, a Member of the Emerald Literati Network and other scholarly societies, and has also been widely published on a variety of subjects by: The International Journal of Russian Studies; Geopolitika, Moscow State University; Journal of Social Economics; Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies; Retort International Arts and Literary Review; Istanbul Literary Review; The Initiate: Journal of Traditional Studies; Esoteric Quarterly; Antrocom Journal of Anthropology; Farsee News Service; Phayul.com; Radio Free Asia Vietnamese Service; Novosti Foreign Service; etc. Translations in: Russian, Vietnamese, Latvian, Czech, Italian, French, Farsee.
Bolton's recent articles on NGO involvement in Egypt include "The Globalist Web of Subversion" and "What's Behind the Tumult in Egypt?". Both articles can be found at Foreign Policy Journal )
