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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-the-us-coup-machine

https://theduran.com/what-happens-when-the-u-s-coup-machine-hires

What Happens When the U.S. Coup Machine Hires People Who Don’t Know that That’s Their Actual Job

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

On 24 April 2023, the well-intentioned fool Leslie Aun, who since November 2022 was Vice President and Communications Director for the National Endowment for Democracy — the organization which took over coup planning for the U.S. Government when the CIA’s reputation for doing that became internationally toxic in the 1980s — was shocked to learn from The Grayzone's investigative reporters, what her organization actually does and has been doing for the past fifty years.

She had phoned them that day in order to object to their having referred to her organization as “a CIA cut-out.” She didn’t even know what that phrase meant. The website https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy, says on its page about her organization,“National Endowment for Democracy”, 

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA cut-out^[1][2][3] soft-power^[4] organization which finances protests and color revolutions to destabilize targets of US foreign policy.^[5] It provided $1.2 billion of grants between 2011 and 2020 and issues over 2,000 grants every year.^[6] Despite calling itself a non-governmental organization, it receives funding from the U.S. Congress.^[7]

Ronald Reagan founded the NED in 1983.^[7] In 1986, NED's President Carl Gershman said that the NED was created because "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA. We saw that in the 60's, and that's why it has been discontinued."^[8]

In 1991, Allen Weinstein, founder of the NED, said "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."^[9]

The organization has been involved in numerous coups, including the 2014 coup in Ukraine. But, apparently, Aun didn’t know anything about any of that.

Here was her phone-conversation on 24 April 2023 with The Grayzone’s Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal, where you can hear her befuddlement at learning what she was actually doing for a living (which was providing PR cover for NED’s shilling for U.S. billionaires on their foreign coups):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khv7dYG15Fs

The Grayzone debates National Endowment for Democracy VP on group's CIA ties

29 May 2023, The Greyzone

And here is the file of internal NED executives’ emails that The Grayzone somehow acquired, showing merely the ones which concerned this PR catastrophe for that branch of the U.S. Government (which constantly denies being that and claims to be “independent”):

https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/NED-Master-Files.pdf

On that file's page 17 is NED Founder Carl Gershman responding on 17 August 2023 to his wife Laurie Gershman’s email of an “Anne A” (probably Anne Applebaum) tweet which had alleged that “The Grayzone is going to appear at a UN meeting on behalf of Russia.” (Anne Applebaum is the wife of  Radosław Sikorski, who had served as Poland's Defence Minister, Foreign Minister, Marshal of the Sejm, and a member of the European Parliament, and is again Poland's Minister of Foreign Affairs. The aristocracies both of Poland and U.S. hate and aim to regime-change or otherwise conquer — take over — Russia.)

On 12 December 2023, Michael Allen, special assistant to the vice-president for government and external relations at the National Endowment for Democracy, and editor of their Journal of Democracy, emailed to a colleague “Re: Terminated” and said that Christine “Bednarz” (who had just taken over Aun’s job because of Aun’s blunder) “who sacked me, was complicit in the Grayzone fiasco — but more complicated and relates to DW [Deutsche Welle, Germany’s equivalent of the BBC] being hugely embarrassed by the whole business [because they get money from NED].”

On 12 February 2024, Allen explained to Gershman, who supported him, that “my termination was prompted by

a) being “canceled” due to my outspoken criticisms of and resistance to D[iversity]E[quity]I[nclusion] orthodoxy;

b) and a related campaign of harassment and marginalization prompted by the Grayzone affair,

arguably the biggest PR fiasco in NED’s history.”

Gershman conveys in those emails not only his support for Allen and opposition to NED’s more recent and pro-“woke” hires, but an extraordinary passion for Israel and against Palestinians and Iran: he apparently doesn’t hate only Russia, China, Venezuela, etc. But why are people like that participating so significantly in the control over U.S. foreign relations? As for the younger crew, it seems that their only difference is that they are less competent.

Gershman said (p. 28), 

The notion that any external agency can manipulate an entity that comprises a political spectrum ranging from the Republican Party to the AFL-CIO, the most progressive mainstream group in US politics, is risible. There is voluminous literature and commentary on our field and no reputable scholars, journalists or other analysts of democracy assistance or US foreign policy have ever endorsed such assertions, including those otherwise critical of or hostile to the NED. Similarly, no serious scholars, journalists or other analysts of the CIA have made such a connection. Independent academic analysis of NED’s founding (by a Left-leaning scholar) also punctures the myth. CIA involvement was not only “unacceptable to Congress”, but was “ruled out” by Reagan administration officials. As the Church Committee “placed sharp limits” on CIA covert ops, limited government capacity opened up space for non-state initiatives.

Given that Aun had been hired and trained to believe such falsehoods (for example: far from the AFL-CIO being “progressive,” it was an arm of U.S. imperialism during the pre-1991 Cold War, and has remained so since. As Tim Gill wrote in Jacobin magazine on 5 August 2020:

The union federation also aligned with repressive right-wing dictatorships supportive of US anticommunist foreign policy efforts by working with and funding groups aligned with such regimes. Kim Scipes and William Robinson, for example, have each offered a thorough account of how the AFL-CIO aligned with labor groups affiliated with the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a regime which regularly repressed, murdered, and disappeared trade unionists and activists.

With the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983, the AFL-CIO began to work in tandem with this newfound quasi-governmental agency on advancing US foreign policy interests abroad under the auspices of “democracy promotion.” Into the present, the AFL-CIO has retained this partnership and “promoted democracy” through the Solidarity Center (SC), formerly named the American Center for International Labor Solidarity.

On its website, the SC describes itself as “[e]mpowering workers to raise their voice for dignity on the job, justice in their communities and greater equality in the global economy.” In recent years, the AFL-CIO has explicitly sought to shed its Cold Warrior image and portray itself as solely interested in the nonpartisan promotion of workers’ rights. In particular, former president John Sweeney, who was elected AFL-CIO leader in 1995 as part of a new progressive slate in the federation, “forced several of the AFL-CIO’s most notorious cold warriors into retirement,” and at the outset of his presidency, “saw unimpeded neo-liberalism a greater threat to American workers than ‘communism.’”

But despite such invocations, the AFL-CIO through the SC has continued to confront leftist governments abroad, particularly in South America, by funding and supporting groups opposed to Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and their United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) allies.

The AFL-CIO argues that it operates independently of the US foreign policy establishment. But documents on the federation’s recent activities in Venezuela I obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests indicate otherwise. These documents suggest that whatever changes have taken place in the AFL-CIO since the end of the Cold War, in recent years, the federation did not entirely give up on attempting to undermine those same governments that US state leadership has also opposed — regardless of whether or not those governments truly respect workers’ rights.

The only reason why NED’s more recent hires are less competent than the old ones is that the old ones have been seeking to hire people as their replacements who — even so late in the game now — are still ignorant that all of the U.S. regime’s claims to being a “democracy” are mere lies. And that fact is the basic reality: they’re not informed  of the basic reality of what they are doing. So, of course, Aun wasn’t prepared for the avalanche of truths that Rubinstein and Blumenthal released upon her in that video. 

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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.