Things You Probably Don't Know about the Revolution Business

A friend emails:

Robert

Thanks for taking the time to review the REVOLUTION BUSINESS link and posting about it on EPJ.

• This recent post from blog "LAND DESTROYER"  says that Arab Spring is a "color coded revolution" and that the leader of the new regime in Tunisia is essentially a National Endowment for Democracy (NED) agent -     
• http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/12/us-funded-activist-becomes-president-of.html

Less controversial, here are some more links I bookmarked when doing my own review of  the REVOLUTION BUSINESS video a month or so ago. These may be of interest...

• A key thinker cited in this is Gene Sharp = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp
• Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) have been subject to some allegations of their connection to NED in a paper presented at a left-leaning human rights conference here in Australia
•  (See article from page 25) http://www.scu.edu.au/research/cpsj/human_rights/AHRP2008_Proc_Final.pdf
• "The AEI as front" theory is discussed on the Wiki article about the AEI
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein_Institution

• The REVOLUTION BUSINESS video also cites a revolution simulation game called "A Force More Powerful" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Force_More_Powerful
• The video game is produced by BreakAway Games a company that does a lot of US DoD work, including training videos for the military http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BreakAway_Games
• Serbian anti-Milosevic activists associated with "Otpor!" were associated with the development of the game and "Otpor" is associated with NED http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otpor!

• Is Revolution inc. involved with OWS?   The "Land Destroyer" blog says at least one leading "Arab Spring" activist is involved in OWS. He refers to this recent WIRED item.
• http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/search/label/OccupyWallStreet
• http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/ahmed-maher/

(Land Destroyer blog has a "Guide to OWS" which sees OWS as essentially a front movement.
The LD "Guide to OWS" [you have to run down the page a bit!!]  actually includes some pretty detailed  'power elite' analysis of various Think Tanks and 'influencer' outfits like Brookings and CFR.
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/10/land-destroyer-occupywallstreet-guide.html

LD doesn't raise the possibility of blowback - i.e. tactics fostered for use against foreign enemies rebounding against their original sponsors. We've seen that before!!   History suggests the sponsoring revolutionary activities abroad can blowback. For example, it is well known that Lenin was shipped to Russia on a "sealed train" [organised by Arthur Zimmermann (yes, "the Zimmermann telegram" guy!)] towards the end of WW1. The Germans wanted to use the communists to help destabilise Czarist Russia. The regime Lenin founded would of course eventually become the preferred enemy of the German militarists. They would indeed be fighting agents of the same regime on the streets of Germany itself in about a dozen years.

All this is interesting stuff - but once you start digging into this whole covert / intelligence / conspiracy world it becomes something of a sand pit. Still, I think there is some merit in the comments of John Laughland from (UK) "The Spectator" some years ago (see http://www.spectator.co.uk/spectator/thisweek/11613/i-believe-in-conspiracies.thtml ) . JL noted that despite fundamental hostility to "conspiracy theories" from 'establishment' opinion makers, the same "anti-conspiracists" somehow failed to note that US and UK foreign policy for some years was plainly based on 'officially' promoted conspiracy theories about Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein - whilst massive covert efforts by western powers to shape domestic politics in the Eastern Europe and the Arab world is barely touched by 'respectable' media outfits.

In Profile: The Man Behind the Russian Protests

It is Aleksei Navalny.

NYT's Ellen Barry writes:

The man most responsible for the extraordinary burst of antigovernment activism here over the past week will not speak at a rally planned for Saturday, or even attend it, because he is in prison...

A week ago, Mr. Navalny, 35, was famous mainly within the narrow context of Russia’s blogosphere. But after last Sunday’s parliamentary elections, he channeled accumulated anger over reported violations into street politics, calling out to “nationalists, liberals, leftists, greens, vegetarians, Martians” via his Twitter feed (135,750 followers) and his blog (61,184) to protest.

If Saturday’s protest is as large as its organizers expect — the city has granted a permit for 30,000 — Mr. Navalny will be credited for mobilizing a generation of young Russians through social media, a leap much like the one that spawned Occupy Wall Street and youth uprisings across Europe this year.

The full measure of Mr. Navalny’s charisma became clear after protests on Monday night; an estimated 5,000 people materialized, making it the largest anti-Kremlin demonstration in recent memory, and Mr. Navalny was arrested on charges of resisting the police and sentenced to 15 days in prison...

MR. NAVALNY has Nordic good looks, a caustic sense of humor and no political organization.

Five years ago, he quit the liberal party Yabloko, frustrated with the liberals’ infighting and isolation from mainstream Russian opinion. Liberals, meanwhile, have deep reservations about him, because he espouses Russian nationalist views. He has appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, “I recommend a pistol.”

What attracts people to Mr. Navalny is not ideology, but the confident challenge he mounts to the system.. A real estate lawyer by training, he employs data — on his Web sites he documents theft at state-run companies — and relentless, paint-stripping contempt. “Party of Swindlers and Thieves” has made its way into the vernacular with breathtaking speed and severely damaged United Russia’s political brand.

He projects a serene confidence that events are converging, slowly but surely, against the Kremlin.
.
“Revolution is unavoidable,” he told the Russian edition of Esquire, in an interview published this month. “Simply because the majority of people understand that the system is wrong. When you are in the company of bureaucrats you hear them talking about who has stolen everything, why nothing works and how horrible everything is.”

He was less definitive about the future he envisioned for the country, saying only that he hoped it would “resemble a huge, irrational, metaphysical Canada.”

Of note, the NYT profile is titled, "Rousing Russia With a Phrase". I'm sure using colors and phrases, to incite trouble is part of "Inciting Revolution 101" at the CIA. (See: From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp)

Here is WSJ's Phillip Shiskin on Sharp:

In his writings, Mr. Sharp teased out common principles that make nonviolent resistance successful, creating a broad road map for activists looking to destabilize authoritarian regimes. Mr. Sharp's magnum opus, the 902-page "Politics of Nonviolent Action," was published in 1973. But the main source of his success is his 90-page "From Dictatorship to Democracy."

This slim volume offers concise advice on how to plan a successful opposition campaign, along with a list of historically tested tactics for rattling a dictatorial regime. Aimed at no particular country, and easily downloadable from the Internet, the booklet has found universal appeal among opposition activists around the globe.

Though he warns readers that resistance may provoke violent crackdowns and will take careful planning to succeed, Mr. Sharp writes that any dictatorship will eventually collapse if its subjects refuse to obey.

He offers a list of 198 methods of nonviolent action, like the staging of mock elections to poke fun at problems like vote-rigging, using funerals to make political statements and adopting symbolic colors, a la Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Less conventional tactics include skywriting political messages and "protest disrobings."

Go that? And where did we just see naked protests just appear? In Russia. Was that spontaneous in cold Russia, especially when the girls were imported from the Ukraine?

Curious stuff.

Here's the video where Navalny explains how to kill militants from Caucasus. (Hell of a guy. Is the CIA getting in bed with this character?)