The Crucial Role that the ‘Nonprofits’ (‘Charities’ “NGOs”) Owned by U.S. Billionaires, Play in Fomenting ‘Revolutions’ (Coups) Abroad for the U.S.

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The way that the U.S. empire expands its control into targeted countries by means of coups has changed. Coups that the CIA had been doing (such as, most famously, in Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, and Chile 1973 — all of which replaced a democratically elected progressive leader by a fascist dictator and longstanding police-state), are now being done instead by “Non-Governmental Organizations” (NGOs, otherwise called think tanks, ‘charities,’ and ‘non-profits’) that are actually tax-write-off propaganda-mills, scams for billionaires, whose regular corporations reap profits from the consequences of these coups that had been years in preparation by propaganda from these mills. The most successful recent such operation was the U.S. coup in February 2014 in Ukraine, which started the war there, which has been a gold mine for firms such as Lockheed Martin since then.

In a previous article, titled “The Explosive Growth of U.S. Militarism after the End of the Soviet Union”, I documented how, after the 1991 end of communism in Russia and break-up of the Soviet Union, the U.S. regime secretly fulfilled on the secret instruction that America’s President had started, on 24 February 1990, issuing privately to the heads-of-state of the U.S. regime’s colonies (‘allies’), such as first West Germany, and then France, telling them that, on the U.S. side — and despite their repeated U.S.-instructed verbal promises to Gorbachev that they would not do this — the Cold War must actually continue, but now secretly, until Russia itself becomes conquered and absorbed into the empire. Each of the first two linked-to articles in this paragraph,is neccessary to read in order to be able to see the documentation for, and so understand, the historical account that will be presented in the following, about how American-and-allied billionaires’ nonprofits or charities or Non-Governmental Organizations (“NGOs”), have, after the end of the Soviet Union, become crucial agencies (largely replacing the CIA’s former role) for expanding yet further the U.S. empire, so that U.S. coups are now perpetrated in a different way, which is less dependent, than before, upon the CIA. Whereas the CIA has acquired (except within the U.S. empire) a very negative public reputation (which hinders the CIA’s effectiveness at helping to acquire for the empire, additional, new, colonies), these NGOs, with such deceptively benign PR monikers as the “Open Society Foundation”, the “Carnegie Endowment for International Peace”, and many others, still haven’t yet acquired so sullied a global reputation, and, therefore, they can openly be cited by the targeted nation’s ‘news’-media as being authorities which favor a particular pollicy, which is actually the U.S. Government’s propaganda-line. Thus, the empire controls the local public.

Already as early as 25 November 2004, Britain’s Guardian published an article from their European editor Ian Traynor (who favors the U.S. empire as being The West’s protector against the “election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes”), headlining “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev” and describing the U.S. NGOs foreign regime-change operations that had overthrown (or tried to overthrow) Governments in Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. He wrote: “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.” Because it’s being done by ‘non-profits’ etc, instead of the CIA, they call it “grass-roots”; these are “revolutions,” instead of “coups,” according to the perpetrators of this newer type of U.S. imperialism.

Of all public commentators on international relations, one stands out for me as having the most encyclopedic and (I have verified by my long having fact-checked hundreds of his commentaries) higher than 99% accuracy in his factual allegations and in his predictions: Alexander Mercouris. Almost every day, he posts, at The Duran dot com, at least one new commentary, and I have found that in the vastness, wide range, and detailed accuracy, of his commentaries, he has no peer anywhere on the internet. The sheer range of his topics is astounding, but what is even more remarkable is that he is an expert of each one of them (though he constantly denies that, even while he is publicly displaying that extraordinary expertise — for example, on military matters, he denies expertise, despite the fact that his predictions in that field have been far more accurate than just about any specialized military expert’s have been). In my own researches, whenever I have checked the veracity of his allegations, I have found him to be as skeptical, careful, and rigorous, in the quality of his sources, as I am; and, on all aspects of international relations and of geostrategy, I consider him to be the most broad-ranging and deep expert of all who publish in those fields. His knowledge of the history of each one of the individual nations on which he comments, matches or exceeds that of individuals who specialize on each, even though he himself actually has no specialty. His comment on April 28th about “the death of the NGO state” is typical, and I give it here, both linking to the video, and presenting here (cleaned up slightly from the automatically generated youtube transcript) in written form, that commentary by him:

https://theduran.com/georgia-armenia-and-the-death-of-the-ngo-state/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra1Bta86DBg

“Georgia, Armenia and the death of the NGO state”

28 April 2024

0:00

Alex Christoforou: all right Alexander [Mercouris] let’s talk about

0:03

Georgia and the the Caucasus. We

0:07

haven’t talked about this region in a

0:10

while. There was

0:12

a law that is being passed in

0:17

Georgia which basically mirrors the U.S.

0:22

FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] act. It’s pretty much the

0:25

same thing as as what the U.S. has

0:29

with the Foreign Agents Registration Act

0:30

but in this instance there’s

0:35

been a lot of protests and a lot of

0:38

EU flags are are being waved in the, in

0:41

the main squares of Georgia, because they

0:44

don’t like this foreign agents act. I

0:46

imagine it’s because when people

0:49

look at the books of all the NGOs and the

0:51

financial statements, they’re going to

0:54

find a very uncomfortable truth, which is

0:57

that these NGOs are not really funded by

1:00

Russia but they’re funded by the

1:03

collective West and funded a lot by the

1:06

collective West. Anyway, what are your

1:07

thoughts on what’s happening in

1:09

Georgia? MERCOURIS: The the first thing to say is

1:12

that Georgia, like all of these

1:15

countries, like Ukraine, like Armenia now,

1:17

have been caught up in this tug of war

1:20

between ultimately the Russians, not

1:23

that the Russians have really wanted to

1:25

be involved in a tug of war with the West

1:28

in these countries, but a tug of war

1:29

between between the Russians and the

1:30

West, in other words these were all

1:34

countries that once formed part of the

1:36

Soviet Union, they gained their

1:38

independence in

1:41

1991, their trade links the geography all

1:45

of that, point that their history points

1:48

to them needing to have good relations

1:52

with Russia. Georgia by the way has a

1:55

very long history of close relations

1:58

with Russia going way back into

2:03

the18th

2:04

century, and mostly in fact for far

2:10

and away the greatest part of that

2:12

period, relations between Russians and

2:15

Georgians have been very good. You go to

2:17

Moscow today and you’ll find lots of

2:19

Georgian restaurants, for example. There’s

2:21

a large Georgian diaspora in Russia.

2:24

There’s an awful lot of interconnections

2:26

between Russians and Georgians going all

2:28

the way back as I said to the 18th

2:30

century, and Georgia by the way just to

2:32

add, it’s an Orthodox Christian

2:35

country like Russia is an Orthodox

2:38

Christian country, so there are all these

2:40

deep

2:41

connections. There are some people in

2:44

Georgia who don’t like that they want

2:47

Georgia instead to align with the west

2:51

and ultimately to join the EU and

2:54

ultimately to join NATO. Now, if things

2:58

had been allowed to take their course, if

3:01

the West had not involved itself in this

3:03

region, it is very likely that those [pro-NATO]

3:06

people would have remained a

3:08

minority. What

3:10

happened is that starting from around

3:15

2000 perhaps a bit earlier, the West

3:18

started to involve itself very deeply in

3:21

the affairs of Georgia and

3:23

Armenia, and it did so in the classic way,

3:27

by funding local NGOs

3:30

which are very well funded, which pay

3:33

very big salaries, which are able over

3:36

time to get a significant traction

3:40

over the media, and which gradually

3:43

influenced the opinion in these countries

3:46

in a pro-western direction, and firstly

3:49

you have the so-call rose Revolution [in 2003 Georgia]

3:51

which was largely propelled by these

3:55

NGOs, which brought Mikhail Saakashvilli to power.

3:59

He took a fiercely anti-Russian

4:03

pro-western pro-NATO line. He always

4:06

appeared everywhere with an EU flag as I

4:09

remember. He led Georgia into a

4:11

catastrophic war against the Russians in

4:14

2008, which Georgia disastrously lost. He

4:19

lost power a short time later. because of

4:22

the effect of that defeat. The swing came

4:25

back and a new party gained control,

4:29

Georgia Dream, which is the ruling party

4:32

now, which has been trying slowly and

4:36

gradually to rebuild relations with

4:38

Russia despite the the problems

4:41

left over from the Saakashvilli

4:44

era, and what they found as they’ve been

4:48

working to do that, is that they still

4:50

have the same problem with these Western

4:52

NGOs, who have been Western funded NGOs,

4:56

who continue to agitate all the time for

4:59

a reversal, of course, and a return to

5:02

basically Saakashvilli’s line, and eventually they

5:08

have done that which the Russians for

5:11

example have done, they’ve started to

5:13

move

5:15

towards having a FARA type law in

5:19

Georgia, and the

5:22

experience of countries in this region

5:27

which succeed in passing FARA type laws

5:32

is that the Western funded NGOs are

5:36

unable to survive them. The revelation

5:39

that they’re funded by the West destroys

5:42

their

5:43

credibility, and the NGOs eventually start

5:46

to fold and collapse, and so the

5:50

prospects of a color Revolution and a

5:53

change of political direction begins to

5:56

fade. So the result is that at this

5:59

particular moment in time there is

6:02

intense resistance in Georgia organized

6:07

by this these NGOs to stop this law being

6:10

passed, and that’s why you have

6:12

protesters in Tiblisi, people trying to stop

6:15

this law going through. The

6:17

Georgian Parliament so far

6:20

has held to its course. This

6:24

is a complicated process passing a law

6:26

like this. It takes several weeks to do.

6:30

The Georgian president who is pro

6:32

Western is likely to veto the law once

6:36

it is passed by the parliament. The

6:38

parliament has enough, there’s

6:40

enough votes in the parliament

6:42

apparently, to override the president’s

6:45

veto. If the law is passed, there will

6:48

probably be a continued period of

6:51

instability before the law starts to

6:53

have its effect. If it does have its

6:56

effect, we will probably see the

6:58

political situation in Georgia

7:02

stabilize. If the law is not passed or if

7:05

there is a color revolution in the

7:08

meantime, then we will see Georgia follow

7:11

the course that Armenia has taken. The

7:14

pro Western course proved disastrous for

7:16

Georgia in 2008. It’s proving disastrous

7:20

for Armenia now. I can’t imagine that it

7:23

will deliver for Georgia anything good.

7:26

So, that’s a summary of what the

7:27

situation is like at the moment

7:31

AC: Yeah, the the collective West is going

7:34

to fight tooth and nail to make sure

7:36

that this law does not get

7:39

passed, yeah, because, I mean, it all starts

7:42

the color revolution, it all starts with the

7:45

NGOs, that that’s where all your

7:48

instability begins and then, I

7:51

mean, it’s the NGOs that that cause all

7:53

the instability and cause all the the

7:55

revolutions. I mean, we saw it play out in

7:58

in the Maidan, and so the the so so many

8:02

so many of the revolutions, the color

8:04

revolutions, all the revolutions with,

8:06

with all their interesting names, um, it’s

8:09

always the NGOs, and, and, I find it really

8:13

really interesting that that — here we are

8:15

in 2024

8:17

and, and, uh, countries still have not

8:19

found a way to to deal with these NGOs,

8:23

and that these NGOs still have so much

8:27

support, knowing that that they cause so

8:29

much instability in a country. They have

8:32

support from the, from from the people or,

8:33

or a large percentage of people,

8:35

especially the young. MERCOURIS: Yes, well this is

8:39

the, this is the key thing to understand,

8:41

because of course the

8:42

NGOs — if there was no, um, reservoir of

8:47

potential support of them, would not be

8:50

able to function. But they are able to

8:53

function because there is this reservoir

8:57

of support. I mean, throughout the former

8:59

Soviet Union, there is, um, a middle class

9:03

which, perhaps as a result of the Soviet

9:06

history, perhaps also even more a

9:09

result of what happened in the post

9:11

Soviet period, always remains to some

9:15

extent at least potentially attracted to

9:19

the West. I think in Russia that has

9:21

changed, by the way. I think that the

9:23

Russian — in the Russian period — they

9:26

eventually got over that. But in other

9:29

places as in Ukraine in Georgia in

9:32

Armenia, that middle class exists. But

9:35

where the NGOs are very powerful, and

9:38

where they’re very effective, is they

9:41

have this enormous funding that means

9:44

that they can pay people salaries to

9:47

work for them which are far higher than

9:50

the salaries that they would be able to

9:53

get in any other, um, position in the

9:57

local economies, and that, of course,

10:00

always makes the NGOs already attractive

10:03

because young people, I mean their their

10:06

ambition, is to be part of this extremely

10:09

well-funded process. The other thing that

10:12

the NGOs are very skilled at doing is

10:14

that they gain control, they they

10:16

particularly focus on gaining control, of

10:19

the local media in these various

10:22

countries, and again that helps them to

10:26

shape, to shape the debate, in

10:30

these countries. Now, what happened is

10:34

that the, in this post Soviet

10:39

period, the governments of these

10:41

countries, which

10:44

themselves emerged out of the Soviet

10:47

Union, were led by people who just didn’t

10:52

understand this kind of politics, because

10:55

they, they have no real knowledge of it. I

10:57

mean, they, they assume that provided you

10:59

control the Ministries, and provided you

11:02

have the police on side, and all of that,

11:05

you’re able to maintain control in that

11:08

way. It has taken a very long time for

11:11

governments in these countries to

11:14

gradually come to

11:16

understand that public opinion, currents

11:20

of public opinion matter, and also the

11:24

other factor is that all of these

11:27

countries — Russia Ukraine Georgia Armenia —

11:33

even governments that ultimately were

11:36

targeted for removal by the West — Moldova as

11:40

well, by the way, they wanted good

11:42

relations with the West, which made them

11:44

very reluctant to go against

11:46

institutions within their own countries

11:49

and societies that were funded by the

11:51

West — what is gradually starting to happen

11:54

and the Russians led the way with the uh

11:58

so-called, you know, white ribbon

12:01

attempted color Revolution 2011 2012 — is

12:05

that the Russians gradually said, you

12:06

know, we’ve got to get on top of this NGO

12:09

thing. So, they passed their version of

12:11

the FARA law, and gradually other

12:13

governments across the former Soviet

12:16

space who come to understand that it is

12:19

for them an existential matter [to avoid a coup], have

12:21

started to follow, uh, the course which

12:25

the Russians led. And you’re starting to

12:27

see action being taken to close down

12:30

these NGOs, um, and to pass similar FARA

12:33

type laws, um, and gradually, slowly, one

12:38

gets the sense that color revolutions

12:40

are becoming more difficult, and more

12:44

difficult to organize, and that NGOs of

12:46

this kind are finding it more difficult

12:48

to operate. I mean, you saw that in

12:50

Kazakhstan about two years ago, and

12:53

you’re seeing it perhaps in Georgia

12:56

now. AC: Yeah, yeah, Kazakhstan seems like a,

12:59

like a turning point, um, you you

13:02

mentioned Armenia just to to close out

13:04

the video, um Pashinyan is is still

13:08

pushing forward, with, uh, Armenia’s um

13:11

realignment into the European Union, and

13:13

NATO, or with the European Union and

13:16

NATO. Uh, Russia, for its part, seems to be,

13:21

uh, building stronger ties with

13:24

Azerbaijan. Armenia’s heading towards a

13:28

disastrous, uh it’s a disastrous

13:30

course isn’t it? MERCOURIS: Absolutely, uh, that is

13:33

exactly true. And, um,

13:37

eventually, I think what the Russians

13:39

calculate is that eventually the time

13:41

will come when they will come to their

13:43

senses and will realign, but in the

13:45

meantime as Azerbaijan is becoming emboldened,

13:48

and exactly as we predicted, they are now

13:50

starting to make further claims on

13:54

Armenian territory. They’re starting to

13:56

say that, you know, this village and that

13:58

village on the border really belongs to

14:00

Azerbaijan and should be transferred; and you

14:03

can see how eventually they’re going to

14:06

take step by step, they’re going to

14:08

demand that the corridor that Armenia

14:12

has which cuts off Nakhchivan, that entire

14:15

area should be transferred to Azerbaijan as

14:19

well. It is a disastrous course, but you

14:22

know a member of my family who knows

14:24

this region well, and who’s traveled to

14:26

both Armenia and Georgia, he has told me

14:30

precisely this that these are NGO States

14:33

or at least Georgia was. He visited

14:35

Georgia in Saakashvilli time, and he said that

14:38

it, at that time, it was obvious that it

14:40

was an NGO State. All the people who ran

14:42

things in ministries and governments

14:46

ultimately were people who came out of

14:47

the NGOs, and he’s telling, tells me, that

14:52

Armenia is today exactly the same. Um,

14:58

it’s people who come out of this system

15:02

this ecosystem, who are now in the

15:05

government, and who are leading Armenia

15:09

down this course, which, of course, as

15:13

things get

15:14

worse, they have the

15:16

readymade excuse for why they’re

15:18

getting worse, which is Russia. You see

15:21

the same, by the way, in Moldova, with Maria

15:23

Sandu, it’s exactly the same

15:27

there. AC: It’s all the same

15:29

script.

——

TO CLOSE HERE: If you haven’t yet read my  “The Explosive Growth of U.S. Militarism after the End of the Soviet Union”, you might want to do that now, in order to flesh-out Mercouris’s account here. Also, there’s much more documentation of this, such as the WikiLeaked email from Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton, on 14 February 2011, “US MENTOR TO EGYPTIAN REVOLUTIONARIES”, and, months later, on 26 July 2011, from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton, “GENE SHARP”. Furthermore, on April 18th, there was this current description by a Georgian, Sopo Japaridze, regarding the almost stranglehold that Western NGOs have established over the ‘news’-media in Georgia. (Where she refers to “the former president’s health and treatment in prison,” she means Saakashvilli.)

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.