The world is currently swept up in a blur of political crisis. Nations around the world, from Hong Kong to Venezuela, are gripped by mass protests and determined opposition movements. Many nations seem just moments away from collapse.
But whilst the media rushes to shout about movements for “freedom!” and “democracy!”, they fail to mention the blatant evidence that the United States government is funding and manipulating these political crises through the government-funded organisation, The National Endowment for Democracy.
A New Regime Change Machine.
For most of the 1900s the CIA was the strong arm of United States’ global domination, but in the mid-1970s scandal struck the intelligence service. Released documents and investigations revealed the covert activities of the CIA to the whole world: involvement in coups, assassinations of political leaders, interfering in elections around the globe. With the organisation’s legitimacy in shreds, the U.S. government could no longer manipulate foreign politics using the now infamous CIA. As U.S. official Carl Gershman told the New York Times, “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the Sixties, and that’s why it has been discontinued.”
But the U.S. government was still determined to bend foreign nations to its will. The solution was to shift a lot of the CIA’s regime change activities to an organisation with a much more friendly sounding name, and so in 1983 President Ronald Reagan announced the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
William Blum, author and critic of U.S. foreign policy, describes the work of the NED as “to do somewhat overtly what the CIA has been doing for decades – manipulate the political process in a target country by financing political parties, labour-unions, book publishers, newspapers, etc.” Allen Weinstein, a founding member of the NED, confirmed Blum’s accusation in 1991 when he told The Washington Post, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.”
In this sense the NED is a modern-day Trojan Horse. Disguised as a noble “non-governmental” promoter of “freedom” and “democracy”, the NED is in reality a government funded vehicle of U.S. world domination, openly granting millions of dollars to foreign opposition groups intent on toppling governments hostile to American interests.
Using this strategy, Blum notes that in the 1990s alone the NED “successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996” and “helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992”.
Crushing Independence: The NED today.
With the turn of the 21st century new and greater opponents to U.S. dominance have emerged. And the NED has targeted any and every nation brave enough to challenge that dominance.
NED money supported the opposition groups that carried out an almost successful coup of Hugo Chávez in 2002, and the organisation was very active in Ukraine leading up to the overthrow of its government in 2013. Since 2014 the NED has poured over $3 million into opposition groups in lithium-rich socialist Bolivia, and has funnelled over $9 million into the opposition movement in Venezuela, a movement intent upon privatising their nationalised oil industry.
By far the NED’s greatest project, however, is China. Under the leadership of a communist government, China is the world’s fastest growing and second largest major economy. As a growing global influence, in the words of FBI director Christopher Wray, China is the United States’ “greatest threat”. As part of the strategy to crush China’s ambition, the U.S. government has pumped a staggering $27 million into opposition movements within China through the NED. Indeed, a lot of that funding went to groups which organised the recent Hong Kong protests, with $2.3 million alone directly channelled into Hong Kong.
Solidarity against imperialism.
If the Russians were funnelling millions of dollars into American organisations hostile to the U.S. government, there would be international uproar. Even now journalists are losing their heads at the very possibility of Russian “meddling” in Western elections. But when the U.S.-government-funded NED slips tens of millions of dollars into opposition movements around the world, the media are silent.
And yet the evidence is glaring.
The National Endowment for Democracy is an agent of U.S. interests, of money-crazed American capitalists and their government tools. Whether Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela or Ukraine. Governments that put the lives of their people first are buried by NED-funded opposition movements and replaced by right-wing governments favourable to U.S. interests. Millions of people are plunged into poverty in the process.
As we read the headlines about “struggles for freedom” in foreign lands, it is important to remember the role of the United States’ in these struggles, and what they stand to gain from this “freedom”.
Oli McLeod
PLEASE SUPPORT US FOR JUST £2 A MONTH
