Defending the Indefensible: Sham Democracy Promoter Defends Imperialist Tie
Posted by seumasach on July 2, 2008
By Stephen Gowans(What’s Left)
Stephen Zunes, an advisor to the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, an organization founded by former Michael Milken right-hand man Peter Ackerman, continues to defend “non-violent pro-democracy” activists involved in promoting overthrow movements abroad.
In a June 27, 2008 article in Foreign Policy in Focus, Zunes springs to the defense of Gene Sharp, the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, who has been exposed in Eva Golinger’s “Bush vs. Chavez: Washington’s War on Venezuela” as “a self-titled expert of what he calls ‘non-violent defense’, though better termed regime change” who has provided “aid to Venezuela’s opposition in finding new and inventive ways to overthrow Chavez.” Sharp has been variously connected to Western-backed overthrow movements in Myanmar, Tibet, Belarus, Serbia and Zimbabwe – countries the US ruling class is acting to bring under its heel.
Zunes’ defense of Sharp, which amounts mostly to declaring Golinger’s and others’ exposure of the AEI founder to be “fabricated allegations,” rests on his demolishing a straw man. Sharp is not, he argues, part of a Bush administration conspiracy to overthrow foreign governments. This is probably true. But I’m not aware of anyone who has ever directly linked Sharp to either the Bush administration or a conspiracy. Someone may have done so somewhere, but for the most part, Sharp have been criticized for accepting funding from and acting (whether intentionally or not) on behalf of US ruling class forces. These, of course, are much broader than the Bush administration.
Peter Ackerman, the head of the ICNC, which Zunes belongs to in an advisory capacity, is not, as far as I’m aware, connected to the Bush administration, but has taken on a leadership role on behalf of the US ruling class. He has celebrated the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic by forces Gene Sharp had a key role in training, and Western governments had a key role in bankrolling and establishing the conditions for the success of. Ackerman’s ruling class credentials are impeccable – a Wall Street investment banker, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and head of Freedom House, which is interlocked with the CIA and a “virtual propaganda arm of the (US) government and international right wing,” according to Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent. This is the company Sharp, Zunes and their left-wing regime change promoters keep. Ackerman’s wife, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, is a former director of the AEI. She is also currently a director of the US foreign policy establishment-dominated Human Rights Watch, which promotes the view that the US should use its “moral authority” to promote human rights around the world, and the US Congress-funded International Center for journalists.
After two pages of telling us there is no truth to the charges against Sharp (which, inasmuch as they involve Bush administration-connections, is probably true) Zunes reinforces the case Sharp’s critics have been making, when he reveals that the AEI:
• Is funded by corporate foundations.
• Is open to accepting funding from organizations that have received funding from government sources (i.e., accepts government funding through pass through organizations.)
• Has received grants from the US Congress’s National Endowment for Democracy (an organization that does overtly what the CIA used to do covertly.)
• Has advised members of the Venezuelan opposition.
Not disclosed in Zunes’ article, but revealing nonetheless, is that the NED paid for the AEI to provide advice to Zimbabwe’s Western-backed neo-liberal opposition party, the MDC.
I’m never sure whether Zunes is unsophisticated, sophistical, or both. He declares Sharp to be innocent of all charges, and then adduces evidence that backs up the allegations of Sharp’s critics. In doing so, he sets out a defense that amounts to the following:
1. It’s all right for left activists to take money from corporate foundations.
2. It’s all right to take money from governments, just so long as they’re not Republican ones and was done years ago.
3. It’s all right to take money from Republican governments today, just so long as it comes through pass through organizations. (The CIA, it should be noted, has a long history of using pass throughs to fund organizations like the ICNC, Freedom House and the AEI.)
4. Even if foreign overthrow movements have been bankrolled by the US, Britain and other Western governments, the effect of the funding on the success of these movements is immaterial; governments can’t be brought down unless they lose popular support.
Zunes’ last point is true, but the pressure Western governments exert on foreign policy targets through threats of war, bombing campaigns, sanctions, and propaganda, go a long way toward alienating target governments of popular support, and thereby preparing the ground for Sharp- and Zunes-trained overthrow movements to go to work.
Serbia, whose once social- and publicly-owned enterprises have been sold off to Western investors, is a model of what overthrow movements Zunes celebrates and assists produce.
As ever, Zunes would like us to believe that the corporations and wealthy individuals who furnish the foundations that support organizations like Sharp’s are either keenly interested in promoting democracy, or aren’t, and have ulterior motives in funding nonviolent pro-democracy groups, but that the latter are not influenced by their funding sources. That may be true, but useful idiots don’t need to be bribed. This is succinctly illustrated in a David Horowitz quotation, cited by Michael Barker in a forthcoming Swans article. “In the control of scholarship by wealth, it is neither necessary nor desirable that professors hold a certain orientation because they receive a grant. The important thing is that they receive a grant because they hold the orientation.”
Frances Stonor Saunders in her “Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, points out that the NCL, the non-communist left, has long been the favored funding recipients of foundations and the CIA. The idea, from their point of view, is to channel leftist sentiment and thinking in pro-imperialist directions by amplifying the voice of the pro-imperialist NCL, thereby drowning out and marginalizing the voice of the communist left. While the NCL is often opposed to Western military intervention, and on this basis professes to be anti-imperialist, it promotes and legitimizes imperialist interventions in other ways. It encourages overthrow movements, celebrating them as pro-democracy people’s forces, offers them assistance, training and legitimacy, and mimics the rhetorical assaults by imperialist governments on target governments, thereby promoting the view that Western governments must act, even if not militarily.
A commitment to peace and low-level democracy is not equivalent to anti-imperialism, and as Sharp demonstrates, is a leftist version of a pro-imperialist program. What Zunes leaves out or does not understand is than non-violent pro-democracy movements are often powerless without imperialist governments first threatening or deploying military interventions, imposing sanctions and blockades and broadcasting anti-government propaganda, thereby turning the population of targeted countries against their governments. In other words, the bad guys Zunes can rail against to establish his leftist credentials do the dirty work while his people’s forces come in at the end to effect the coup de grace. The result is never democracy, in the original sense of the word, but improved trade and investment conditions for Western economic elites – the same elites Sharp and Zunes are taking foundation lucre from.
Zunes would also like to bamboozle us into believing that the assistance and funding overthrow movements receive from Western imperialist governments makes little difference in the grand scheme of things (which means, by implication, that the foundations which dole out funding are managed by morons who are squandering money on ineffectual programs.)
As always, Zunes does his part in promoting US foreign policy goals, aping US government descriptions of regime change targets, vilifying them as “autocratic regimes,” which presumably deserve to brought down by handsomely funded overthrow movements trained by Zunes, Sharp and the left “non-violent democracy promotion” apparatus. It comes as no surprise that while Zunes refers to the target governments of Belarus and Zimbabwe as regimes (as the US State Department does), he refers to the current US executive as the Bush “administration.”
Zunes has put together a public statement in defense of Sharp, which has been signed by NCL luminaries Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Zunes hopes their endorsement will lay to rest legitimate questions about the role played by Sharp and other nonviolent pro-democracy activists, including Zunes himself, in promoting US imperialism under the guise of advancing democracy. But endorsements by Chomsky or Zinn don’t change the facts; they only raise questions about the endorsers and Zunes’ stooping to reliance of appeal to authority. Apparently, he has judged his argument too weak to stand on its own. Calling in NCL luminaries is the political equivalent of calling out the sheep herders to bring the flock back into line. But is the authority of Chomsky and Zinn deserved?
Joan Roelofs reveals in her “Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism” that The Progressive, the magazine for which Zinn writes a regular column, had advisory board members on the Council of Foreign Relations and receives grants from the Ford Foundation. Zunes will reply that I’m engaging in guilt by association, but the point is that the ruling class funds the NCL and the NCL gladly accepts ruling class lucre. Zunes can dismiss the connection as irrelevant and of no consequence, but this is sheer sophistry.
Sharp and Zunes may be genuinely interested in the pursuit of democracy, but it’s a low-intensity democracy subordinate to US imperial interests they’re promoting. Foreign governments on the US ruling class regime change hit list – and anti-imperialists in the West — have a legitimate reason to be wary of Sharp, Zunes and other leftist members of the US regime change apparatus. They are ruling class operatives who align with ruling class figures to facilitate the pursuit of overseas profits through the elimination of nationalist and socialist governments which stand in the way. Their promotion of democracy, revealed in the neo-liberal, privatized tyrannies which are the invariable outcomes of their work, is as much a sham as the democracy promotion of the imperialist governments they’re tied to through pass through funding and interlocks with ruling class foundations and activists.
Look for Michael Barker’s forthcoming article on Zunes’ defense of Sharp in Swans.
In These New Times 
Tom Paine said
Stephen Gowans’ attack on Stephen Zunes — a respected scholar and prolific author on the subject of nonviolent movements, for over a quarter-century — is full of so many false claims, spurious insinuations and distortions, it is hard to know where to begin. Perhaps we should begin by recognizing where Gowans is coming from: As can easily be established by Googling him, Gowans has defended the bloody dictatorship of Roberto Mugabe, asserting that the opposition to the Zimbabwean tyrant is inspired by Western imperialists. Does he regard the wives and children of democratic activists who have been murdered in cold blood by Mugabe’s henchmen in recent days as part of that supposed conspiracy? Were the substantial plurality of Zimbabweans who voted against Mugabe in the first round of the recent presidential election all paid to do so by the CIA? Believing that would not be much more preposterous than asserting, as Gowans does, that Stephen Zunes is a “ruling class operative.” If Zunes were the latter, he would not have demonstrated against the Vietnam War, excoriated the war in Iraq and denounced American imperialism consistently in his writings since the 1970’s. Zunes’s consistency over his long career in supporting indigenously driven nonviolent movements against oppression of any ideological coloration may be what maddens Gowans, whose tolerance for the violent repression of regimes like Mugabe’s is what should draw our derision. Why should we excuse Mugabe’s tyranny because he says he hates the West? Mugabe is no more a legitimate representative of the people’s will than are Mubarak in Egypt, Musharraf in Pakistan, the Indonesian occupiers of West Papua, or the Moroccan occupiers of Western Sahara, and unlike Gowans, Zunes has consistently condemned — and helped teach nonviolent resisters to oppose — the U.S. government-backed regimes controlling those lands. There is absolutely nothing “sham” about Stephen Zunes’s commitment to rights, democracy and justice, but great doubt that Gowans shares those beliefs.
inthesenewtimes said
From our point of view the main thing is to defend the sovereignty of Zimbabwe. Who can deny that London and Washington are engaged in a campaign to destabilise Zimbabwe and to impose their own will on Zimbabwe and its people? Who can deny that the opposition is being run by them? The puzzle is why the left think they can join in, running parallel campaigns of interference in Zimbabwe’s affairs and expect us to accept their alibi that they, unlike their elite circles, are only concerned for the welfare of Zimbabweans and what they style democratic values? Do they take us all for fools? Some of us have long experience of watching the antics of the left, at home and abroad, and are beginning to know their game only too well. Self-righteous, sanctimonious, arrogant and deceitful, their links to the imperialist elite, whether financial, organizational or ideological are confirmed time and time again. Their activities mirror and reinforce the elites’ rather than forming any kind of genuine opposition to them. Having openly supported the campaign to destabilise Zimbabwe and having joined in the lying campaign, the role of the left is becoming more transparent and their influence is correspondingly going into a precipitous decline.
jojo said
it is difficult to figure out where Stephen Gowans is coming from. he seems to spend a lot of time attacking the left, or suggesting that the left is somehow in league with imperialist forces or the imperialist elite. in Gowans article he admits that there is no connection between the whitehouse and zunes but suggests strongly that he is following their imperial program. he then ropes in zinn and chomsky for no other reason than they support sharp and zunes. it is totally mindboggling. if i was using the same logic as gowans i would be concerned that gowans might be in the employ of dark forces wishing to undermine the left, simply because his attacks are totally negative and unproductive. but i am not a conspiracy theorist so i will give gowans the benefit of the doubt, in that he is just ill-informed about world affairs.
as for inthesenewtimes, he is suggesting the left is in cahoots with Washington and London because they don’t openly condemn the MDC. they don’t condemn the mdc because they hope that the mdc might overcome the neoliberal ambitions of the pro-west mdc elite. they live in hope that the mdc might be the anwser for zimbabwe but that is not the same as supporting the west.
inthesenewtimes said
I think what Gowans has grasped is that there is more to the US power structure than the White House. I don’t think anyone thinks Zunes, or the rest of the social imperialists are linked to the White. You obviously take the naive view that power operates according to constitutional rules. But we have had the Office of Special Plans, Homeland Security, here in Britain Cobra, The Center for Security Policy, AIPAC,the myriad think tanks,all the Soros networks like OSI, other Democrat party bodies like The Tides Foundation, to say nothing of all the hidden networks which we can presume to operate through the political parties and the media, since they all come up with the same result. We know money is channeled to “progressive” causes through Tides, for example.
In short, we are discussing the the paraphernalia of the oligarchical system, one in which an overwhelming concentration of wealth is the basis of the permanent subversion of official society. What Gowans is suggesting and , indeed, documenting is the link between the like of Zunes and certain organisations within these elite networks.
As for the left thinking that the MDC might “overcome” their neo-liberalism,well. Perhaps you could have supported Hitler hoping he might “overcome” his Nazism. You only try to overcome things you see as problematic. The MDC doesn’t see its neo-liberalism as problematic, it’s their very raison d’etre. The likes of the SWP don’t seem to have any illusion about them on that count- that why it’s so shocking that they keep doing their dirty work for them i.e. helping to provide the conditions for their gaining of power.
Stephen Hunter said
Stephen Gowans totally misrepresents what Stephen Zunes said in his article.
Zunes never said and never implied that “It’s all right for left activists to take money from corporate foundations; It’s all right to take money from governments, just so long as they’re not Republican ones and was done years ago; It’s all right to take money from Republican governments today, just so long as it comes through pass through organizations.” etc.
Readers themselves can find out what Zunes really said at: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5327
There are a series of other mispresentations and falsehoods as well:
Zunes has never assisted in the overthrow of foreign governments.
Zunes does not support imperialism. In fact, he is one of the United States’ most public and harshest critics of U.S. imperialism. Check out his web site: http://www.stephenzunes.org
Zunes is a socialist, a strong opponent of neo-liberal economics, and has long recognized the anti-democratic nature of corporate capitalism.
Zunes has no interest in “facilitat[ing] the pursuit of overseas profits through the elimination of nationalist and socialist governments which stand in the way.” In fact, he has been active for years in solidarity movements in support of socialist and nationalist causes, from revolutionary Vietnam in the 1970s to revolutionary Nicaragua in the 1980s to Palestine and Western Sahara today.
Gowans also makes a series of demonstrably false charges about Gene Sharp, such as claiming his tiny outfit is funded by the U.S. government, most of which are addressed in Zunes’ original article.
It should also be noted that Gene Sharp never had any role whatsoever in training Otpor, the student-led movement that was instrumental in the unarmed insurrection against Milosevic. Two Otpor members attended a lecture by an associate of Sharp’s well after their campaign had gotten well underway and they were certainly inspired by some of this theoretical writings, but no training was involved.
Also, Human Rights Watch is not “US foreign policy establishment-dominated.” HRW has been highly critical of U.S. policy in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and in the United States itself. It has spoken out against U.S. backing of Israel and other allies involved in systematic violations of international humanitarian law. In fact, HRW has been attacked repeatedly by the U.S. foreign policy establishment and its supporters for its supposed anti-American bias.
Finally, Serbia under Milosevic already sold off most of its “once social- and publicly-owned enterprises …to Western investors” well prior to the Otpor-led uprising which toppled him. And Zunes, an outspoken critic of Western capitalist penetration, did not “celebrate” it.
inthesenewtimes said
According to this source Gene Sharp provided “the ideology and the technique for Otpor”
Go to link to see picture of Sharp with Srdja Popovic, leader of Otpor
http://www.voltairenet.org/article15870.html
Perhaps they’re just good friends.
“Lorsque les États-Unis commencent leur réarmement, en 1998 [8], l’Albert Einstein Institution devient un outil parmi d’autres dans une stratégie expantionniste. Il fournit l’idéologie et la technique à Otpor (« Résistance »), un groupe de jeunes opposants au président yougoslave Slobodan Milosevic.”
The same source cites the US institute for Peace as financing Sharp. This brings us back to the issue of the oligarchical regime and where it begins and ends. I’d be surprised if Gowans thinks the US oligarchy would be indiscreet enough to make Sharp an official national cause. But an award for “services to peace” might be in order.
“En 1987, l’association bénéficie de subventions de l’Institut des États-Unis pour la paix (U.S. Institute for Peace).”
If “Zunes is a socialist, a strong opponent of neo-liberal economics, and has long recognized the anti-democratic nature of corporate capitalism” I recommend that he helps to make sure they keep their dirty hands off Zimbabwe.
Your point about HRW is weak: of course, they have to dissociate themselves from the worst excesses of US foreign policy. That it remains , nonetheless, an instrument of that policy can be seen from this Znet(no less) article where we read that:
“Indeed, HRW was created in 1978 as the Helsinki Watch (which later became HRW’s Europe and Central Asia Advisory Committee) “at the instigation of [ambassador-at-large for President Carter] Arthur Goldberg” with the start-up costs covered by a $400,000 from the Ford Foundation.”
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/14804
alfied said
Nobody is suggesting that Zunes was at the coalface when Governments were overthrown; however I can’t think of one occasion when him, and his like, were responsible for stopping crimes of this nature. When they are involved, there seems to be inevitability about the outcome. They are a crucial part of the narrative that is sold to all “critical thinkers” in the west.
I disagree with you regarding HRW. As far as I am concerned they are a tool of the Mob. Of course they criticise the US; otherwise people like you wound not support them. However if you look at the overall picture they have an uncanny knack of attacking governments in synchronisation with their masters.
As for Yugoslavia: It was right to stand side by side with the people of Serbia, against the War Party. Pointing out what contracts Milosevic had or hadn’t with the west is, in my view, serving another agenda.
I am sure you would agree that no moral equivalence can be drawn with the likes of Milosevic, Mugage, Ahmadenejad, Putin, Chavez etc and the genocidal Maniacs in the western world.
Jojo said
“As for the left thinking that the MDC might “overcome” their neo-liberalism,well. Perhaps you could have supported Hitler hoping he might “overcome” his Nazism.”
Are you trying to compare the MDC with Nazism? then you are just as bad as the Western media which tries to compare Mugabe with Hitler.
You totally fail to understand the nature of the MDC, at its grassroots level there is struggles for basic social justice, and struggles against the neo-liberal nature of the political elite, and struggles against Mugabe. Should the SWP abandon the grassroots struggle of the MDC? Should they abandon the workers in order to support Mugabe?
And you claim the SWP are “doing their dirty work for them i.e. helping to provide the conditions for their gaining of power.” How can a few articles in a weekly left paper have more influence than the daily media propaganda of the political establishments in Great Britain and America.
If the SWP had so much influence then they would be a bigger party than they are. Have you seen their reader figures, its not very large, certainly not large enough to influence political issues in Zimbabwe.
And the critism of Zunes is equally bizarre. I hadn’t heard of this guy until I read about him in this website. So he has never influenced my thinking.
But it seems that this website dresses itself up as a progressive site, but that is a disguise in which this site attacks radical thinkers and the left, and also attacks human rights groups with claims they are in the service of imperialism.
But do these attacks not serve the imperialist forces that inthesenewtimes claim to oppose?
Jojo said
Zimbabwe shows West’s hypocrisy
Alex Callinicos
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=15349
I was fifteen in November 1965, when the racist regime of Ian Smith illegally declared Zimbabwe – or the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia, as it then was – independent of Britain. My family lived in the capital city, Salisbury, today called Harare.
I remember watching the skies, hoping to see British paratroopers descend to liberate us. But of course none came. The idea of using force against its white “kith and kin” was anathema to the British establishment.
So to hear someone like Paddy Ashdown saying that British military intervention against the regime of Robert Mugabe “could be justified” makes me want to throw up. Apparently it’s OK to use force against a black government, but not a white one.
It is precisely this kind of double standard that Mugabe has brilliantly exploited in order to maintain a degree of support in the rest of Africa and the Global South. He could have chosen no better enemies than Tony Blair and George Bush.
Of course Mugabe’s claim to be fighting for Zimbabwe’s “complete independence” against Western imperialism is a rotten sham. He is seeking to batter his half-starved, oppressed population into submission in the interests of a tiny clique of senior figures in the ruling party, Zanu-PF. They fear for the loot they have accumulated and for their very lives if Mugabe ceases to be president.
This group is concentrated at the top of the military and security apparatuses. It has apparently, through the Joint Operations Command, taken over political direction since Mugabe and Zanu-PF lost the presidential and parliamentary elections at the end of March.
Repression
The calculation of Mugabe and his cronies seems to be twofold. First, they believe that the Zimbabwean people have been bled dry by economic collapse and mass repression – and so are incapable of mounting a successful insurrection.
Secondly, Mugabe is counting on his allies in the rest of the region – notably President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa – to block external intervention. Neither of these assumptions are foolish – it’s silly to fall in with the British media portrayal of Mugabe as an irrational madman.
Strangely enough Mugabe’s thinking mirrors that of Ian Smith, who gloated back in 1971, “We have the happiest Africans in the world.” Smith believed that he could survive as long as the apartheid regime in South Africa backed him.
And just like Smith before him, Mugabe will discover that his calculations rest on sand. The Zimbabwean people showed their determination to reject his regime in March.
The combination of mass unemployment and emigration may have strengthened the regime’s hand. But all the terror can’t conceal the fact that Mugabe has lost support in many of the rural areas that backed him strongly against the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) back in the early 2000s.
That’s why – as the government interrogation of MDC secretary general Tendai Biti revealed last week – senior figures in Zanu-PF were eager to explore a deal after the March elections.
Moreover, Mbeki’s support is a wasting asset. He has been a lame duck since he was overwhelmingly defeated by Jacob Zuma for the leadership of the ruling African National Congress in December. A key part of Zuma’s base is the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
Cosatu has consistently campaigned against Mugabe’s assaults on democracy. In April South African trade unionists took action to block the import of Chinese arms destined for Zimbabwe, forcing Mbeki to follow suit.
In Sunday’s Observer, Cosatu leader Zwelinzima Vavi denounced last week’s Zimbabwean election as a sham and “called on workers in Africa and the world over, as well as all progressive citizens of the world, to work towards a total isolation of Mugabe and his government”.
Sooner or later a combination of the resistance of the Zimbabwean people and solidarity will grind down the Mugabe regime – with no thanks to the moth-eaten imperialists in London and Washington.
The following should be read alongside this article:
» Zimbabwe: resistance from below is the way to challenge Mugabe
inthesenewtimes said
In reply to 8, no I’m not comparing the MDC to the Nazis, I’m trying to highlight the flaws in your logic.
Joining a neo-liberal party to advance an anti neo-liberal doesn’t sound that bright – why not just join Zanu in that case, which, at least, doesn’t have a neo-liberal agenda. We know that because not having a neo-liberal agenda was what caused them to fall out with the “international community” in the first place.
I didn’t know that the MDC was a worker’s party.
Every little bit helps.
Your right- they don’t have much influence, but there is no room for complacency around such an important issue.
I’m glad you’ve never been influenced by Zunes -perhaps we have more in common than you think.
We never said this was a progressive site.
We don’t attack human rights groups- we just point out their links to the elite as did Znet in the article I cited.
When you have groups which behave as if thay were in the service of imperialism and who also get money from their agencies, I think it is fair to point that out. A lot of the defence of such groups depends on claims that their motives are pure. Forgive them for they know not what they do? Yes, but only when they stop doing it.
jojo said
how to you point out the “flaws in my logic” by comparing the MDC to the Nazis?
You don’t know much history of the MDC. The MDC was a left grassroots party before the elite embraced neo-liberalism. The elite embraced neo-liberalism because they wanted foreign investment and support against Mugabe. there is a struggle within the MDC between neolibs and socialism. the swp happen to support the socialists.
you didn’t know the MDC was a “workers party”? what do you know exactly? how could a party which is made up of workers across zimbabwe, which campaigns for social justice and equality in the workplace not be a “workers party”
I’m afraid we don’t have much in common. instead of attacking the political establishment and elites who are not hiding and are in full view, you are determined to chase shadows and prove links between figures in the left and “dark forces”
you are wasting precious energy in ludicrous allegations.
or perhaps this website is a intelligence/corporate component of darkforce elitist reverse propaganda designed to discredit the left and radical writers? heirs of Sefton Delmar perhaps?
or is that a ludicrous allegation?
alfied said
JOJO
RE: “As for the left thinking that the MDC might “overcome” their neo-liberalism, well. Perhaps you could have supported Hitler hoping he might “overcome” his Nazism.”
Would it be easier for you if the Pope trying to overcome his Catholicism was the analogy?
The origins of the MDC is of no matter, and we could discuss how and why it came into being all day. It’s what the MDC is today that counts, and it is indeed a neo-liberal entity financed and supported by the west’s colonial powers. However you can call the MDC a workers party a 1000 times if it makes you feel better.
I would say you are far from being in cahoots with the forces of darkness, but appear to have a naive, simplistic view towards world affairs.
inthesenewtimes said
Comrade Callinicos outlines a truly astonishing scenario.
On the one hand are the forces of global capitalism and western imperialism and on the other the workers and progressive citizens of the world. What do they do? Are they pitted against one another in a titanic, historic struggle? No, they all have to gang up against Mugabe, the font of all evil. Workers and capitalists of all nations unite against Mugabe!
But when Mugabe has finally been ground down the credit for this will go to the workers: it will all have been their doing not that of the moth-eaten imperialists. What do they know about regime change anyway?
Well actually quite a lot- they been at it for long enough and they have rather a large entourage on their payroll. I think if Mugabe’s ground down they will have had everything to do with it. Can the worker’s organise the withdrawal of credit and a programme of economic strangulation? Do they have innumerable media outlets to blast out endless propaganda against Mugabe. Do they run international rent-a-mob outfits. Are they masters of black propaganda? Can they starve themselves so that in their desperation they support the MDC?
No, clearly, if regime change comes it will have been handiwork of London and Washington. They will be the beneficiaries and the new regime will bear their stamp: the stamp of slavery.
Callinicos’s article is a piece of utter and unsurpassable stupidity. The most charitable interpretation would be that he is an utter fantasist.