For sure the advice came in the form of big cash....

...and the American media has the cynicism of saying that the world leaders they are trying to overthrow don't appreciate their efforts to spread democracy. Suddenly democracy is not the form of government people ask for, but the subservient system the US needs to install.

Destabilizing Russia: The 'Democracy' Agenda of McFaul & His Oxford Masters
The following article appeared in the February 5th, 2012 Issue of EIR.

by Rachel Douglas

Two centuries ago, Russia and the young United States entered the dread year of 1812, each in peril of annihilation. We Americans were about to be assaulted along our East Coast by the British, who would seize and burn Washington, D.C., while the Anglo-Venetian creature Napoleon marched on Moscow. At that time, our ambassador at St. Petersburg was a universal thinker, an astronomer, a rhetorician, one of our outstanding statesmen and future greatest Presidents, John Quincy Adams. In Count Nikolai Rumyantsev, the commerce minister, foreign minister, and chancellor to His Imperial Majesty Alexander I of Russia, Adams, during his 1809-14 posting, found an interlocutor of likewise broad interests, and a crucial shared one: awareness of the British Empire as the common enemy of the United States and Russia.1

Today we are all the more in need of such a high quality of diplomatic representation, as the financial powers and geostrategists of the collapsing Trans-Atlantic system, descended from that same British Empire of 200 years ago, threaten to plunge the world into a dark age of depopulation and war—a thermonuclear war that would wipe out civilization.

Instead, Barack Obama this month sent to Moscow as the new U.S. ambassador, one Michael McFaul, who has pursued a narrow ideological agenda throughout his career. It is not an American agenda, but a British one: the cynical cultivation of "democratic" movements for geopolitical purposes, all the way up to and including the overthrow of governments deemed uncooperative with recent decades' globalization agenda. That has been the design of Project Democracy from its outset in the 1970s-1980s.2 The Oxford background of leading figures like McFaul and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) vice president Nadia Diuk dramatizes the British connection, while they themselves openly state what it is they are up to.

McFaul told Slon.ru in a June 2011 interview:

"Most Russia-watchers are diplomats, or specialists on security and arms control. Or Russian culture. I am neither. I can't recite Pushkin by heart. I am a specialist in democracy, anti-dictatorial movements, and revolutions" (emphasis added).

It is truly difficult to study Russian without learning by memory at least something from Alexander Pushkin, Russia's national poet, and only somebody obsessed with a higher priority would make such an omission and then brag about it. McFaul indeed had adopted a higher priority than mastering Russian culture and politics, or Soviet history. He spelled it out in a December 2004 op-ed in the Washington Post. "Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine?" asked McFaul, talking about the events of that month, when street demonstrations in Kiev forced the rerun of a Presidential election, resulting in a different outcome—the so-called Orange Revolution. "Yes," he answered to his own question.

"The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities—democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc.—but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine."

McFaul enumerated the funding for the Orange Revolution from U.S. government sources, government-funded NGOs, and George Soros's Open Society Institute (OSI), an account he later expanded in more detail in the 2006 book, Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough. But he also demurred: "Did American money bring about the Orange Revolution? Absolutely not." According to McFaul, the cumulative billions of dollars spent on "democracy promotion" merely assists a process which is moving ahead of its own accord:

"The combination of a weak, divided and corrupt ancien regime and a united, mobilized and highly motivated opposition produced Ukraine's democratic breakthrough.... Democracy promotion groups do not have a recipe for revolution. If the domestic conditions aren't ripe, there will be no democratic breakthrough, no matter how crafted the technical assistance or how strategically invested the small grants."

Any review of the NED or U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) grant lists for Russia, for example, will reveal how very strategically crafted the funding is.3

McFaul wrote,

"Does this kind of intervention violate international norms? Not anymore. There was a time when championing state sovereignty was a progressive idea, since the advance of statehood helped destroy empires. But today those who revere the sovereignty of the state above all else often do so to preserve autocracy, while those who champion the sovereignty of the people are the new progressives" (emphasis added).

It's hard to say whether that formulation of the British doctrine of liberal imperialism contains more sophistry, or hypocrisy. Nation-states are to be smashed in the name of "the people," while the same people, as well as their nations as a whole, are brought under the tyranny of the still-existing, albeit bankrupt, British Empire: the empire of globalized finance, and the "empire of the mind"—the rock-drug-sex-digital counterculture. The Empire which campaigns for reducing Earth's population from 7 billion to no more than 1 billion humans.

A veteran Russian human rights activist highlighted McFaul's hypocrisy, in a question during Lyndon LaRouche's Jan. 18 State of the Union webcast. "I know people who were told by McFaul personally," he reported,

"that when he came to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s on various 'democratization' projects, he was never interested in achieving 'democracy' as such, but rather in collapsing the Soviet Union. On Monday [Jan. 16], McFaul presented his credentials. On Tuesday, he met with representatives of the liberal opposition to the Kremlin. ... Has Michael McFaul been sent here with the same intention of breaking up Russia, as he had toward the Soviet Union over 20 years ago?"

After McFaul's hosting of some of the December 2011 street protest leaders at the U.S. Embassy, Russian state-owned TV commentators sharply criticized his behavior (see Documentation, below), openly asking if the new ambassador had come with a mission to "dismantle the existing regime" in Russia. In a Jan. 20 interview with the government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta, former Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov joined these commentators in chastising McFaul for violations of diplomatic custom and protocol.

In this installment of our dossier on the current British-driven campaign against Russia, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in particular, we shall look at the British roots of McFaul's agenda, particularly of Project Democracy's so-called color revolutions, and discover that these allegedly non-violent projects are a form of irregular warfare.

Democracy Promotion

From the time of the ruination of Greece in the Peloponnesian War of the 5th Century B.C., democratic parties again and again have served as tools of imperial factions. The manipulation of a popular movement, whose members fail to grasp who is using them, and to what ends, is an ancient skill, honed by every empire since Babylon.

Regarding contemporary "democracy promotion," it is essential to keep in mind that all the institutions of Project Democracy, since the establishment of the NED in 1983, belong to the post-Aug. 15, 1971 world (though their roots reach farther back). The floating-exchange-rate system, installed then by President Richard Nixon at the behest of his Director of the Office of Management and Budget George Shultz,4 opened the gates to globalization: a world in which financial activity, decoupled from the real economy, but demanding to be serviced by it, would balloon to unprecedented dimensions before collapsing.

Under globalization, the populations of most countries figure as pools of cheap labor, at best; at worst, they are part of what Prince Philip and lower-level ideologues consider to be the 6 billion excess people on the planet. National leaders who stand in the way of the imperial agenda, or who are powerful enough to threaten to do so, are subject to attack. Through Project Democracy, "anti-dictatorial movements" have been cultivated and used as weapons for this purpose.

No wonder the same George Shultz is credited by McFaul with pioneering the approach that he, McFaul, takes today: "American diplomats must practice dual track diplomacy of the sort practiced by Shultz in dealing with the Soviet Union: engaging autocratic leaders in charge of the state and democratic leaders in society in parallel and at the same time."5

And no wonder the biggest private financier of democracy promotion is the London-Wall Street financial kingpin George Soros. By the late 1990s, Soros's OSI was pumping $400 million annually into "civil society" programs in East-Central Europe.6 In the very same period, wagers by hedge-fund operator Soros against national currencies in Asia were notorious as a trigger of the 1997-98 phase of the global financial crisis, culminating in Russia's being forced into default in August 1998. The close ties of Soros with the London Rothschild banking interests date from their sponsorship of his career in post-war Britain, while the Rothschilds and their Inter-Alpha Group—the largest financial combine in the world—have never abandoned the intention of gaining control over Russia's vast assets. In the current generation, Nat Rothschild has made no secret of his drive to build a presence in Russia, both through his JNR Ltd. investment company and Russia-oriented raw materials ventures like Vallar Plc., and by cultivating post-Soviet "oligarchs" like Oleg Derispaska.7

Cambridge and Oxford: Brain Trust for the Empire

For sheer quantity of patronage, you can't beat Soros, the NED, and USAID. For the guiding principles of "democracy promotion," however, you have to go to Oxford.

Leading acolytes of Project Democracy did so, literally. McFaul was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. U.S. Permanent Representative at the United Nations Susan Rice was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Nadia Diuk, the NED vice president who talks about Russia's current leaders strictly as "authoritarians" to be ousted, taught at Oxford before assuming her duties in the U.S.A.

Two Oxford professors, Sir Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, have conducted a project called Civil Resistance and Power Politics since 2006. Its goals, as related to regime change in the world today, are better understood by first knowing about the centuries-long role of the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford as two wings of a brain trust, managing the British Empire.

British redcoats and gunboats were the overt instruments of imperial rule in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the Cambridge and Oxford dons were always developing its stratagems. These universities served as the monasteries of an imperial priesthood; well into the second half of the 19th Century, the "dons" even had to be members of clerical orders who had taken vows of celibacy. Today, when the British Empire operates through control over international finance and through cultural warfare, or the "empire of the mind," the role of Cambridge and Oxford is as important as ever.

Over the centuries, a rough division of labor has functioned between the two universities: Cambridge, as the center of the British cult of mathematics, has run the deeper intellectual schemes, such as James Clerk Maxwell's subversion of the physical science breakthroughs of Gauss, Riemann, and Ampère in the mid-19th Century.8 During the past 60 years, Cambridge has sat at the center of the creation of computers, the cult of cybernetics and systems analysis, postwar "mathematical economics," and an array of information-age brainwashing typified by Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet in general.9 Oxford has been more of the hands-on colonial administrator, especially through persons awarded Oxford degrees in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE). During the 20th Century, the Cambridge-based Lord Bertrand Russell, identified by LaRouche as the most evil man of his age, was a pivotal figure in both types of project.

Oxford became a staging ground for the far-flung imperial plans of Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), including the Round Table organization whose creation he inspired. Formally headed by Lord Alfred Milner (1854-1925), the Round Table was a British Crown project to carry the Empire's worldwide lines of influence well into the 20th century, until after World War I.

Alongside Milner, the active leaders of the Round Table club included royal family intimate Lord Esher (Reginald Balliol Brett, 1852-1930), who was the Constable and Governor of Windsor Castle and strategic advisor to Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and King George V; and William T. Stead, the journalist and intelligence operative who wrote that it was so important to recapture control over Britain's former North American colonies, after Abraham Lincoln's victory over the British-backed Confederacy in the Civil War, that it would be worth it to allow the seat of British power to reside—at least in part—in the U.S.A. The point was to cultivate subtle forms of indirect rule, a tradition continued in Oxford's promotion of "democratic" and "people power" revolutions today.

Stead and Lord Nathan "Natty" Rothschild were Rhodes' designated heirs in the Round Table. In 1902, Rhodes had established the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford, to educate an elite of scholars and statesmen from the colonies (later the Commonwealth) and, especially, the United States. Lord Rothschild looked after the financial side of the Rhodes scholarships.

Not every Rhodes scholar becomes an agent of British influence, as the experience of Bill Clinton demonstrates. But most of those working in PPE fields swallow British foreign policy methods hook, line, and sinker. The outstanding example in our day is now-UN Ambassador Susan Rice, whose 1990 Oxford doctoral dissertation lauding the British Commonwealth Initiative in Zimbabwe received the Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs, RIIA)-British International Studies Association prize as the best international relations thesis written in the U.K. that year.10

The Oxford 'Civil Resistance' Project

A mentor of Rice at Oxford was Sir Adam Roberts (b. 1940), co-chairman of the Oxford project on Civil Resistance and Power Politics (CR & PP). Famous as a proponent of liberal internationalism, Roberts is bringing out a book titled Liberal International Order in the Spring of 2012. Advocates of liberal internationalism, also called liberal interventionism, or liberal imperialism, trace the doctrine to the continental operations of Lord Palmerston in the 19th Century,11 as exemplifying interventions by self-identified "liberal" states in the affairs of others on behalf of liberal values.

Roberts's crony Timothy Garton Ash, in a 2008 commentary denouncing Russia for its clash with Georgia after the latter's attack on Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, dubbed himself and co-thinkers "FLIO," for "friends of liberal international order." In a 2007 column in The Guardian, Garton Ash reported on his interview with outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair:

"Sitting in the Downing Street garden, I ask him what is the essence of Blairism in foreign policy. 'Liberal interventionism.' "

Roberts' other major ongoing project is the Oxford University Programme on the Changing Character of War. As we shall see, the leading Oxford specialists in democracy promotion, non-violent action, and civil society view their efforts in military-strategic terms—lawfully enough, for a top British policy-shaper like Roberts. After retiring from teaching at Oxford, where he had been at the Centre for International Studies in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Roberts, in 2009, became President of the British Academy, the government-funded U.K. National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This top establishment body, which today has 900 active fellows, received its Royal Charter in 1902 for the promotion of British intellectual influence worldwide. Roberts is also a member of the U.K. Defence Academy Advisory Board and the national Council for Science and Technology, and has been appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George by the Queen, for "services to the study and practice of international relations."

His younger colleague Garton Ash, as one of Britain's most prolific writers on contemporary European history, has been named to "most influential intellectuals" lists by Time magazine and the British journals Prospect and Foreign Policy. Most of what he churns out is related to East-Central Europe and Germany. At the height of the British elites' "Fourth Reich" campaign against German reunification in the Summer of 1990, just months after the genuine, peaceful revolution that had brought down the Berlin Wall, Garton Ash was one of a handful of academic consultants who met with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at her Chequers residence to share their "reservations concerning Germany, [which] had not only to do with the Hitler era, but referred to the period before, the whole era after Bismarck."12

In 2006, Roberts and Garton Ash announced themselves as the "principal investigators" for the already mentioned Oxford "interdisciplinary research project on Civil Resistance and Power Politics: Domestic and International Dimensions." They held the project's major international conference at St. Antony's College, Oxford, in March 2007. Its proceedings were published in 2009 as a book titled Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present. The paperback edition came out in 2011 from Oxford University Press, "with a new foreword on the Arab Spring."

In October 2011, according to a promotional release from the Oxford Centre for International Studies, meetings to launch the paperback were held at Oxford, the British Academy, the Columbia University Law School, and the Carr Center at Harvard University, "all with a focus on the Arab Spring." Two years earlier, the U.S. venues for the hardcover book launch also included Stanford University.

The Oxford CR & PP organizers declared that they had evaluated "the nature and significance of civil (i.e., non-violent) resistance, especially, though not exclusively, in the period from the 1960s up to the Arab Spring from December 2010 onwards." At the time of the 2007 conference, flushed with excitement about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine two years earlier, they had presented case studies including the overthrow of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, and the sequence of regime changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, from Serbia in 2000, through Georgia's Rose Revolution of 2003, and then Ukraine.

A review of the resulting book, published in the RIIA's International Affairs magazine in 2010, described Roberts's attitude toward the movements he studies as "sympathetic through critical." "The book rejects the often repeated charge of western orchestration," the review noted, "[h]owever, the protesters received substantial funding and technical advice from abroad—for example, on how to use the media and how to organize effective peaceful demonstrations."13 In reality, the project's recommended questions for the case studies reveal an effort to fine-tune the techniques of outside intervention:

"3. Has civil resistance demonstrated a particular value as one instrument (alongside other instruments such as external election monitors) for challenging fraudulent election processes and ensuring a free and fair outcome?

"4. Can an international legal/normative regime provide a favorable background for civil resistance?

"5. To what extent did the non-violent movement succeed in undermining, or threatening to undermine, the adversary's sources of power and legitimacy (military, economic, psychological, organizational)?...

"7. What has been the role of external actors of all kinds (government, quasi-non-governmental organizations, NGOs, diasporas) in assisting or attempting to assist or influence civil resistance? Have international economic sanctions and/or external military interventions proved useful to civil resistance movements?...

"9. How has the development of technologies, especially information technology (e.g., email, internet, social media), affected the capacities of civil resistance?

"10. Was there any implicit or explicit threat of a future use of force or violence to carry forward the non-violent movement's cause if the movement did not achieve a degree of success, or if extreme repression was used against it?...

"12. In cases where outside governments or organizations supported the movement, did they understand and respect the reasons for avoiding the use of force or violence? Should rules (possibly in the form of a draft code of conduct) be established regarding the character and extent of such support?

"13. Was civil resistance in one country instigated or assisted by another state as a mere instrument for pursuing its own ends or embarrassing an adversary? If accusations of this kind were made, did they have any credibility?"14

At the 2007 conference, Roberts chaired a session on "Civil Resistance and the Roles of External Actors." One of his panelists was Michael McFaul, who had done Africa studies at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, but by this time, was a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, specializing on Russia.

The Gene Sharp Playbook

The Oxford CR & PP project's website recommends just a handful of "selected websites on civil resistance," including the British openDemocracy.net and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) of Washington, D.C. At the top of this short list is the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI), located in East Boston, Mass. Its founder and senior scholar, Gene Sharp, gave the main paper on yet another panel chaired by Roberts at the 2007 Oxford CR & PP conference: "The Politics of Nonviolent Action and the Spread of Ideas about Civil Resistance." Sharp (b. 1928) is a product of the same Oxford establishment as McFaul, but a generation earlier.

In the wake of the Ukrainian events of 2004-05, exposes published by EIR15 and others made Gene Sharp a household word in Russia as the author of the "color revolutions." Longtime Kremlin deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, just before stepping aside from that post in December 2011, named Sharp in an Izvestia interview about the Moscow demonstrations: "There is absolutely no doubt that some people want to convert the protest into a color revolution," Surkov wrote. "They are acting literally according to Sharp's books and the latest revolutionary method guides. So literally, that it's even tedious." During a recent raucous debate on the Russian state TV program "The Historical Process," over whether the Moscow street actions would lead to something like the February 1917 Russian Revolution (the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II), co-host Sergei Kurginyan displayed huge visual images of Sharp hunched over a desk in his basement home office, and of McFaul.

The playbooks in question are Sharp's three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), based on his 1968 Oxford doctoral dissertation, and From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (1993). His writings, especially the latter, have been translated into over 40 languages. Sharp boiled down the techniques of what he calls "PD" (for "political defiance") to a list 198 tactics, ranging from boycotts to symbolism using "Display of symbolic Colors," "Protest disrobings," "Symbolic lights," "Paint as protest," "Rude gestures," and so forth. His recommendations also include sophisticated political targetting, as a Tahrir Square activist said last year in Egypt:

"One of the main points which we used was Sharp's idea of identifying a regime's pillars of support. If we could build a relationship with the army, Mubarak's biggest pillar of support, to get them on our side, then we knew he would quickly be finished."16

Like his friends at Oxford, Sharp employs the nasty sleight-of-hand of lumping together truly heroic struggles, like those of Mahatma Gandhi against British rule in India, or Martin Luther King in the U.S. civil rights movement, with the synthetic movements targetted against specific leaders by the modern-day British Empire, employing Sharp's formulas, plus backing from Soros and/or the NED. Sharp doesn't distinguish: In his writings, they are all movements against "various dictatorships." Instead of powerful metaphors like Gandhi's homespun garments and spinning wheel (denoting real economic independence of the British, as well as simplicity in daily life), there are arbitrary colors chosen according to advertising criteria, as in "viral marketing."

Sharp's AEI, though he protests that it is a modest, two-person operation run out of his basement, received crucial funding, according to its own statements, from the NED, the NED-subsidiary International Republican Institute (IRI), and the Ford Foundation. Soros's OSI earmarked grants for the translation of Sharp's manual into various languages. The IRI funded an AEI training session held in Hungary in early 2000 for activists of the Serbian Otpor! (Resistance!) organization, which was to lead the overthrow of President Slobodan Milosevic later that year. NED officials acknowledged massive funding of Otpor!, whose activists later dispersed and took part in spreading Sharp's methods to activists in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

An array of color revolutions used his techniques (see box). Sharp himself, in a 2006 interview with The Progressive, boasted that he was in Tiananmen Square in 1989, meeting with democracy activists "three or four days before the crackdown," and that he wrote From Dictatorship to Democracy at the request of Burmese exiles after a trip to Myanmar (Burma) in 1992, when he entered the country illegally.

The cookie-cutter color revolution formula of recent years is now being applied to the Russian situation, though it is clearly not the only attack against Putin that British interests have up their sleeve. As the RIIA reviewer of the CR & PP book noted about Georgia and Ukraine, "in both cases the catalyst was the detection of election fraud—with the help of western monitors."

In Russia the Golos ("Vote" or "Voice") organization, a self-described "independent election monitor," a longtime recipient of NED and USAID funding, prepared for many months to step to the fore in charging vote fraud in the Dec. 4, 2011 Russian State Duma elections. Its activists now have their eye on the next Russian election, the Presidential vote on March 4, 2012.

The supposedly "neutral" Golos website has featured writings by people like St. Petersburg Prof. Grigori Golosov of the Helix Center for Democracy and Human Rights, who exults that the role of "social networks in spreading discontent and organizing the demonstrations in Russian cities is a crucial development," but insists that "any scenario allowing for Putin to remain in power is a pessimistic one.... An optimistic scenario is one in which Putin goes; there is no other way."

A color has been chosen for the would-be new Russian revolution: Moscow's mostly well-to-do street demonstrators wore white ribbons.

The War-Mongering Peacenik, Bertrand Russell

When Sharp left his native Ohio for Britain in the 1950s, he didn't go straight to Oxford. Beginning in 1955, he worked for the British pacifist publication Peace News, which had been notorious in the 1930s, when it was founded, for advocating peace with Nazi Germany at any cost. In the late 1950s, Peace News supported Bertrand Russell's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and it was under CND auspices that Sharp made the acquaintance of Adam Roberts, a CND activist who would become a Peace News writer in the 1960s, moving on to his high posts at Oxford and the British Academy. Roberts even credits Sharp with introducing him to the topic of "non-violent action under totalitarian regimes."17

Historians of the work of Sharp and his fellow Oxonians trace their civil-resistance studies to Bertrand Russell's article "War and Non-Resistance," published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1915, during World War I.18 There, Russell painted a fantastical picture of how England could confront an imagined German invasion through "passive resistance":

"Whatever edicts they might issue would be quietly ignored by the population.... If they ordered that English young men should undergo military service, the young men would simply refuse; after shooting a few, the Germans would have to give up the attempt in despair. If they tried to raise revenue by customs duties at the ports, they would have to have German customs officers; this would lead to a strike of all the dock laborers, so that that way of raising revenue would become impossible. If they tried to take over the railways, there would be a strike of the railway servants. Whatever they touched would instantly become paralyzed...."

(The article is also noteworthy for Russell's take on the turn-of-the-century mass strikes in Russia, which were largely police-agent projects, culminating in the January 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre of protesting workers led by secret police agent Fr. Georgi Gapon in St. Petersburg. Russell wrote approvingly, "Even in Russia, it was the general strike which secured the Constitution of 1905.")

The same Bertrand Russell is infamous for his 1946 article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, advocating that the Soviet Union be forced to accept a one-world government with supranational control of nuclear weapons, under threat of defeat in a war the West would launch before the U.S.S.R. itself could develop nuclear weapons: a nuclear first strike against Russia. It was only after the Soviet nuclear (1949) and thermonuclear (1953) bomb tests that Russell went full-steam onto the "peace" track of his world government campaign, inviting Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchov's representatives to his World Association of Parliamentarians for World Government conference in 1955.

For many years Gene Sharp's "civilian nonviolent resistance" advisories were couched in Cold War military terms, supposing conditions in which Soviet forces would have overrun Europe. An attendee at one of his lectures in 1984, when Sharp was working with the Harvard Center for International Affairs (CIA), described the scenario Sharp presented for a quarter of a century in the future: "The year is 2010. Russian tanks swarm into a small country in Western Europe, spearheading an invasion by Warsaw Pact troops. But this invasion is unusual because no shots are fired. Instead, the Communist soldiers are greeted by shuttered windows and deserted streets. The nation being overrun phased out its military years ago and now relies on a carefully planned program of civilian nonviolent resistance to deter its enemies."19

Sharp was not a Rhodes scholar, but he worked at Oxford University off and on for nearly ten years, in 1968 completing the thesis that became The Politics of Non-violent Action. In its preface, Sharp thanked Sir Isaiah Berlin, the British liberal philosopher and intelligence figure whose closest associates were leading lights of Russell's logical positivist school, like A.J. Ayer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Berlin is today idolized by Timothy Garton Ash, among others. Sharp's immediate academic advisor was the Montenegro-born John Plamenatz, with whom his "supervised study ... emphasized theories and philosophies of the nature of political power, authority and obedience; dictatorial systems; resistance and revolutionary movements" (Sharp's account). Plamenatz was a fellow of All Souls College, historically the most important of the Oxford colleges for the Round Table.

Dr. Strangelove

BBC journalist Ruaridh Arrow last year made a laudatory documentary titled "Gene Sharp: How To Start a Revolution." In a BBC interview about the project, Arrow characterized Sharp's 198 measures as follows:

"Designed to be the direct equivalent of military weapons, they are techniques collated from a forensic study of defiance to tyranny throughout history."

The military provenance of Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action is unmistakeable, leaving no doubt that it is an irregular warfare manual. On whose behalf: the brave resistance fighters seeking personal freedom and betterment for their nations; or Bertrand Russell's crazy followers who gave us the nuclear brinksmanhip of the mutually assured destruction doctrine for the past 60 years?

Sharp, in the Preface, cites the financing of his work while he was at the Harvard CIA, between Oxford stints in the 1960s, by "funds from grants for projects of Professor Thomas C. Schelling made to Harvard University from the Ford Foundation and from the Advanced Research Projects Agency [ARPA] of the U.S. Department of Defense, Contract No. F44620-67-C-0011." This was the same Thomas Schelling who, in 2005, would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, with Robert Aumann, "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis." The Nobel committee outdid itself, hailing Schelling's "vision of game theory as a unifying framework for the social sciences."

The vision was set forth in Schelling's 1958 book The Strategy of Conflict, in which he developed the notion of "rational irrationality." He applied this game theory to scenarios for nuclear war.20 This was in the period when Russellite "peaceniks" in the Anglo-American strategy establishment were holding events like the 1958 second Pugwash conference, where Leo Szilard delivered his infamous speech, "How To Live with the Bomb and Survive"; Szilard proposed that terms of a limited nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, possibly triggered by a conflict in the Middle East, should be negotiated beforehand. Nuclear war games were played at the RAND Corporation, where Schelling worked, and other hotbeds of Cambridge-originated mathematical modelling, such as MIT and Stanford. Schelling provided consultations to film director Stanley Kubrick for the famous nuclear Armageddon film of this time, "Dr. Strangelove."

Schelling also served as an idea man for Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in the Vietnam War. "What is little-known in general," wrote one critic of Schelling's Nobel prize, "is the crucial role he played in formulating the strategies of 'controlled escalation' and 'punitive bombing' that plunged our country into the war in Vietnam."21

Far from being merely a channel of money to Sharp, Schelling wrote the introduction to The Politics of Nonviolent Action, speaking of the project less as Sharp's own personal investigation, than as a joint commitment with Schelling and others:

"The original idea was to subject the entire theory of nonviolent political action, together with a full history of its practice in all parts of the world since the time of Christ, to the same cool, detailed scrutiny that military strategy and tactics are supposed to invite. Now that we have Gene Sharp's book, what we lack is an equally comprehensive, carefully study of the politics of violent action.... It is too bad that we haven't that other book, the one on violent action. It would be good to compare the two in detail."22

From 1983 to 1989, Sharp was director of the Program on Nonviolent Sanctions of the Harvard CIA. He launched his Albert Einstein Institution in 1983, the same year as the founding of the NED.

Dumping Bad Axioms

So, Dr. Strangelove's grandchild is sitting in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow? It's something like that, since Bertrand Russell begat both the game-theorizing nuclear brinksmen and the civil-resistance irregular warriors, and they all came together in the Oxford programs from which Gene Sharp and Michael McFaul emerged.

McFaul's thinking, as revealed in his tedious political-science prose (the writing of a person who avoided memorizing Pushkin), is so horribly compartmentalized that he no doubt would refuse to put the picture together that way. His Advancing Democracy Abroad book portrays democracy promotion as a budgetary and policy line-item, competing with economic or strategic relations. McFaul churns out books on his chosen topic at an alarming rate, many of them commissioned through a pipeline of research grants from historically British-oriented operational intelligence fronts like Freedom House, the Smith-Richardson Foundation, the NED, Soros's OSI, et al., and some evidently being published without even a spellcheck, never mind copyediting ("expatriate" spelled as "ex-patriot" is an eloquent example).

McFaul has shown an amazing capacity to screen out what doesn't fit his "democratization" construct. In September-October 1993, some of the people he had earlier cultivated as exemplary democratizers were in the resistance against President Boris Yeltsin's abolition of the Constitution and the elected Parliament, a maneuver Yeltsin made in order to override parliamentary opposition to the looting of the country, packaged as economic reform. Some of McFaul's former contacts were arrested and imprisoned, as events moved toward the artillery shelling of the defiant Parliament on Yeltsin's orders (hundreds, possibly thousands died). He offered them no help.

McFaul's behavior during nearly three decades of interaction with Russia brings us back to EIR's 1999 article about his Oxford classmate Susan Rice:

"[T]he question Americans must ask is: When will we finally rid the foreign policy establishment in Washington of this British contamination, and re-establish sovereignty in the tradition of the American Republic?"

Prime Minister Putin, in a heated session with his National People's Front on Dec. 8, noted that the U.S.A. has invested "hundreds of millions of dollars" to shape the Russian electoral process. "We must develop forms of protecting our sovereignty, protecting ourselves from outside interference," he said.

Some Russian patriots, who are not happy with their government's current economic policies of joining the World Trade Organization and playing by the rules of the bankrupt world financial system, but are even less pleased with outside interference in Russia's affairs, have expressed hope that the current political tension may prompt Putin to make a profound shift: not only to rid his administration of a few individuals who are particularly close to international financial interests, but to jettison the whole set of British monetarist axioms, foisted upon Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin's recent call for a "new industrialization," as well as his attacks on the prevailing practice of protecting income streams through offshore holding companies, point in that direction.

If Russia and the U.S.A. dump every policy axiom of the bankrupt British monetarist system, then the way will open up to a quality of statecraft that would please John Quincy Adams and Count Rumyantsev, to an economic boom based on the nation-building principles of Hamilton and Russia's 19th-Century industrializer Count Witte, and to vindication of the words of Marshal Zhukov to General Eisenhower at the close of World War II: "If the United States and Russia will only stand together through thick and thin, success is certain for the United Nations. If we are partners, there are no other countries in the world that would dare to go to war when we forbade it."

Footnotes
1"Why Count Rumyantsev Is Turning Over in His Grave," EIR, July 6, 1982. The Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diaries, Vol. II, Ch. 7, "Mission to Russia," reports his conversations with "Count Romanzoff" (Rumyantsev). Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1874. This book and a more recent edition, The Russian Memoirs of John Quincy Adams: His Diary from 1809 to 1814 (New York: Arno Press, 1970), are rare.
2"Bankrupt British Empire Keeps Pushing To Overthrow Putin," EIR, Jan. 20, 2012 (part 1 of this series). Project Democracy: The 'parallel government' behind the Iran-Contra affair (Washington, D.C.: EIR Research, Inc., 1987). That special report explored the connection between the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the illegal gun-running operations of Col. Oliver North, et al. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.'s introduction to the report identified the roots of North's "Irangate" gunrunning in Henry A. Kissinger's reorganization of U.S. intelligence under President Richard M. Nixon, in the wake of post-Watergate findings of the 1975 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee"). Traditional intelligence functions of government were replaced with National Security Council-centered operations, often cloaked as promoting "democracy" worldwide. Supporting "democracy"—measured by such criteria as economic deregulation and extreme free-market programs, which ravage the populations that are supposedly being democratized—became an axiom of U.S. foreign policy.
3NED grants are itemized annually. USAID projects are publicized in the form of a list of "implementing partners," including Russian NGOs and U.S.-based agencies.
4Scott Thompson and Nancy Spannaus, "George Pratt Shultz: Profile of a Hit Man," EIR, Dec. 10, 2004. One of the foremost representatives of international banking interests in the U.S. establishment during the late 20th Century, Shultz went on to be Nixon's Treasury Secretary, President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, and the architect of the George W. Bush Administration.
5Michael McFaul, Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should and How We Can (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010, p. 176).
6Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The Open Society Institute (OSI) is now called the Open Society Foundations.
7"The True Story of Soros the Golem," EIR Special Report, 1997. "Your Enemy, George Soros," LaRouchePAC pamphlet, 2008. John Hoefle, "The Inter-Alpha Group: Nation-Killers for Imperial Genocide," EIR, Sept. 17, 2010.
8Laurence Hecht, "The Ampère Angular Force and the Newton Hoax," EIR, April 13, 2007.
9The first article in this series, "Bankrupt British Empire Keeps Pushing To Overthrow Putin" (EIR, Jan. 20, 2012) introduced the role of the Cambridge Security Programme and its spinoff, the OpenNet Initiative, in shaping the Internet in Russia as a mechanism for political operations. The Oxford Internet Institute is also active in this area, seeking "to stimulate and inform debate about the Internet, and to shape policy and practice around its (re)invention and use."
10"Susan Rice, and U.S. Sovereignty," EIR, July 23, 1999: "If anyone were to doubt the accuracy of EIR's insistence, that important areas of U.S. foreign policy are run by the British oligarchy, that person should take a long, hard look at what a senior official in the State Department has recently proclaimed to leading figures of that oligarchy. The person in question is Susan Rice, U.S. Assistant Secretary for African Affairs. On May 13, Rice delivered the Bram Fischer Memorial Lecture at the Rhodes House in Oxford, England. She declared her undying loyalty to the British establishment. 'I am deeply honored to be the Bram Fischer lecturer this year,' she said. 'It is gratifying to be back at Oxford representing President Clinton and Secretary Albright.... Almost nine years ago, I spent much of my time in this very house, buried in the library upstairs. To be at Rhodes House tonight with so many friends, benefactors, and mentors is a personal privilege. It is like a coming home for me—for much of what I know about Africa was discovered within these walls, refined at this great university, with the generous support of the Rhodes Trust.' " This EIR article, situating Rice in the British-oriented Kissinger-Brzezinski school of U.S. diplomacy, is recommended reading.
11"Lord Palmerston's Multicultural Human Zoo," EIR, April 15, 1994.
12Minutes of the meeting were leaked to Der Spiegel magazine and published on July 15, 1990.
13David Wedgwood Benn, "Review article: On realpolitik and its limitations," International Affairs 86:5 (2010), p. 1191-97.
14"Civil Resistance and Power Politics"—Project Outline, Centre for International Studies, Department of Politics and International Relations; European Studies Centre, St. Antony's College; University of Oxford.
15Konstantin Cheremnykh, "Ukraine: A Postmodernist Revolution," EIR, Feb. 11, 2005.
16Quoted in Ruaridh Arrow, "Gene Sharp: Author of the Nonviolent Revolution Rulebook," the BBC, Feb. 21, 2011.
17Interviewed by Alec Ash, Dec. 8, 2011, on The Browser.
18Robert J. Burrowes, The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).
19James Van Hise.
20Esther-Mirjam Sent, "Some Like It Cold: Thomas Schelling as a Cold Warrior," Nov. 13, 2006 paper online, reports some details of how Schelling helped gear up for the potentially thermonuclear showdowns with the Soviet Union over Berlin (1961) and Cuba (1962):
"[I]n 1961, the Pentagon sponsored several huge war simulation games at Camp David that were run by Schelling, known as 'the Berlin games.'... Participants included John McNaughton, Henry Kissinger, Alain Enthoven, and national security advisor McGeorge Bundy.... The foundations for a general theory of strategy developed by Schelling ... consisted of nuclear deterrence, crisis management, limited war, arms control, and coercion and compellence."
21Fred Kaplan, "All Pain, No Gain: Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling's Little-Known Role in the Vietnam War," Slate.com, Oct. 11, 2005.
22Gene Sharp, Power and Struggle, Part One of The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973).

They want to split Russia into smaller countries. First is to remove small republics from the Caucasus area, second to separate Siberia from the rest. The Russians are very aware of this.