We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

NED, the Legal Window of the CIA

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from VoltaireNet.

This morning I debated whether to post this article or not. It has the usual awkwardness characteristic of translations that his articles have shown in the past--perhaps less so--but what is really confounding his analysis is a lack of a significant class analysis of the issues. I think that this weakness is characteristic of so many other political analysts especially in the West, and it is testimony to the success of capitalist ideological indoctrination that has gone to great lengths to suppress any kind of class analysis for obvious reasons. The theoretical understanding of the development of societies particularly during the past 1000 years has been considerably advanced by Karl Marx and many others, but you wouldn't know it by reading the analyses of most Western social theorists, especially those whose articles are published in mainstream and even much of alternative media. 

In this article one must go to great lengths to separate the wheat of factual information about the use of ideological weapons represented by the NGOs of the US Empire from the explanatory chaff that he attempts of offer. I will leave it to you to do this. I will only contribute to this effort by claiming that you can dismiss his selective history of the US as a significant causal factor.