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Jun-27-2008 17:24printcomments
Sharp Attack Unwarranted
by Stephen Zunes
Salem-News.com
As a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Bush administration’s
open advocacy for “regime change,” any American group or individual who
provides educational resources on strategic nonviolence to civil society
organizations or human rights activists in foreign countries has
suddenly become suspect of being an agent of U.S. imperialism -- even
Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution.
http://www.aeinstein.org/
(SAN FRANCISCO) -- Gene Sharp, an 80-year-old scholar of strategic
nonviolent action and veteran of radical pacifist causes, is under
attack by a number of foreign governments that claim that he and his
small research institute are key players in a Bush administration plot
against them.
Though there is no truth to these charges, several leftist web sites and
publications have been repeating such claims as fact. This raises
disturbing questions regarding the ability of progressives challenging
Bush foreign policy to distinguish between the very real manifestations
of U.S. imperialism and conspiratorial fantasies.
Gene Sharp’s personal history demonstrates the bizarre nature of these
charges. He spent two years in prison for draft resistance against the
Korean War, was arrested in the early civil rights sit-ins, was an
editor of the radical pacifist journal Peace News, and was the personal
assistant to the leftist labor organizer A.J. Muste. He named his
institute after Albert Einstein, who is not only remembered as the
greatest scientist of the 20th century but was also a well-known
socialist and pacifist.
Sharp founded the Albert Einstein Institution in 1983, dedicated to
advancing the study and utilization of nonviolent conflict in defense of
freedom, justice, and democracy. Long considered the foremost authority
in his field, Sharp has inspired generations of progressive peace,
labor, feminist, environmental, and social justice activists in the
United States and around the world. In the past few decades, as
nonviolent pro-democracy movements have played the decisive role in
ending authoritarian rule in such countries as the Philippines, Chile,
Madagascar, Poland, Mongolia, Bolivia and Serbia, interest among peace
and justice activists has grown in his research and the work of other
scholars studying strategic nonviolent action.
Fabricated Allegations
Unfortunately, however, as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the
Bush administration’s open advocacy for “regime change,” any American
group or individual who provides educational resources on strategic
nonviolence to civil society organizations or human rights activists in
foreign countries has suddenly become suspect of being an agent of U.S.
imperialism -- even Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution.
For example, in February Iranian government television informed viewers
that Gene Sharp was “one of the CIA agents in charge of America’s
infiltration into other countries.” It included a computer-animated
sequence of him and John McCain in a White House conference room
plotting the overthrow of the Iranian regime. In reality, Sharp has
never worked with the CIA, has never met Senator McCain, and has never
even been to the White House. Government spokespeople and sup****ters of
autocratic regimes in Burma, Zimbabwe, and Belarus have also blamed
Sharp for being behind dissident movements in their countries as well.
Ironically, some on the left have picked up and expanded on these
charges. For example, in an article about the Bush administration
promoting “soft coups” against foreign governments it doesn’t like,
Jonathan Mowat claims that “The main handler of these coups on the
’street side’ has been the Albert Einstein Institution,” which he says
is funded by Hungarian-American financier George Soros.
Venezuelan-American attorney Eva Golinger, meanwhile, claimed that
“Peter Ackerman, a multimillionaire banker had sponsored ‘regime
changes’ in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia through the Albert Einstein
Institute.” Tony Logan insists that AEI “is a U.S. government run
operation designed to link Gandhian methods of nonviolent protest to
Pentagon and U,S, State Department efforts to overthrow foreign
governments.” In a similar vein, Counterpunch readers were recently
informed that the Albert Einstein Institution plays “a central role in a
new generation of warfare, one which has incor****ated the heroic
examples of past nonviolent resistance into a strategy of obfuscation
and misdirection that does the work of empire.”
Absolutely none of these claims is true. Yet such articles have been
widely circulated on progressive websites and list serves. Such false
allegations have even ended up as part of entries on the Albert Einstein
Institution in SourceWatch, Wikipedia, and other reference web sites.
The international press has occasionally echoed some of these bogus
claims as well. For example, a commentary published in the Asia Times
last fall accused Sharp of being the “concert-master” for the Saffron
Revolution in Burma, claiming that the Albert Einstein Institution is
funded by an arm of the U.S. government “to foster U.S.-friendly regime
change in key spots around the world” and that its staff includes “known
CIA operatives.” Though these charges were utterly false, the article
was then widely circulated on a number of progressive list serves,
including such academic networks as the Peace and Justice Studies
Association.
Implicit in such charges is that Burmese monks and other pro-democracy
activists in that country are unable to initiate such actions themselves
and their decision to take to the streets last fall in mass protests
against their country’s repressive military junta came about because an
octogenarian academic in Boston had somehow put them up to it. One
Burmese human rights activist, referring to his country’s centuries-old
tradition of popular resistance, noted how the very idea of an outsider
having to orchestrate the Burmese people to engage in a nonviolent
action campaign is like “teaching grandma to peel onions.” (The Asia
Times article also tried to connect Sharp to the 1989 Tiananmen Square
protests in China and another article from the Straits Times in
Singa****e even places Sharp and AEI behind the recent uprising in Tibet.)
This racist attitude that the peoples of non-Western societies are
incapable of deciding on their own to resist illegitimate authority
without some Western scholar telling them to do so has been most
dramatically highlighted by French Marxist Thierry Meyssan. In his
article “The Albert Einstein Institution: non-violence according to the
CIA,” he insists that Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution were
personally responsible for the 1991 Lithuanian independence struggle
against the Soviet Union; the 2000 student-led pro-democracy movement
that ousted Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia; the 2003 Rose Revolution that
forced out Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze; and, the 2004 Orange
Revolution that forced the revote on the rigged national election in
Ukraine. He also credits (or, more accurately, blames) Gene Sharp for
personally playing a key role in uniting the Tibetan opposition under
the Dalai Lama, as well as forming the Burmese Democratic Alliance, the
Taiwanese Progressive Democratic Party, and a dissident wing of the
Palestine Liberation Organization that Sharp supposedly trained secretly
in the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv.
The failure of people power movements to succeed in some other cases was
not, according to Meyssan, due to weaknesses within the movement or
strengths in the state apparatus. Says Meyssan, “Gene Sharp failed in
Belarus and Zimbabwe for he could not recruit and train in the proper
time the necessary amount of demonstrators.”
Despite the absurdity of these claims and the attribution of seemingly
superhuman capabilities to this mild-mannered intellectual, Meyssan’s
article has been repeatedly cited on progressive web sites and list
serves, feeding the arrogance of Western leftists who deny the
capability of Asians, Africans, Latin Americans, and Eastern Europeans
to organize mass actions themselves.
The Real Story
The office of the Albert Einstein Institution -- which supposedly plays
such a “central role” in American imperialism -- is actually a tiny,
cluttered space in the downstairs of Gene Sharp’s home, located in a
small row house in a working class neighborhood in East Boston. The
staff consists of just two employees, Sharp and a young administrator.
Rather than receiving lucrative financial sup****t from the U.S.
government or wealthy financiers, the Albert Einstein Institution is
almost exclusively funded by individual small donors and foundation
grants. It operates on a budget of less than $160,000 annually.
Also contrary to the slew of recent charges posted on the Internet, the
Albert Einstein Institution has never funded activist groups to subvert
foreign governments, nor would it have had the financial means to do so.
Furthermore, AEI does not initiate contact with any individual or
organizations; those interested in the group’s educational materials
come to them first.
Nor have these critics ever presented any evidence that Sharp or the
Albert Einstein Institution has ever been requested, encouraged,
advised, or received suggestions by any branch of the US government to
do or not do any research, analysis, policy studies, or educational
activity, much less engage in active subversion of foreign governments.
And, given the lack of respect the U.S. government has traditionally had
for nonviolence or for the power of popular movements to create change,
it is not surprising that these critics haven’t found any.
The longstanding policy of the Albert Einstein Institution, given its
limited funding and the reality of living in an imperfect world, is to
be open to accepting funds from organizations that have received some
funding from government sources “as long as there is no dictation or
control of the purpose of our work, individual projects, or of the
dissemination of the gained knowledge.” Well prior to the Bush
administration coming to office, AEI received a couple of small grants
from the congressionally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
and the International Republican Institute (IRI) to translate some of
Gene Sharp’s theoretical writings. Nearly forty years ago (and fifteen
years prior to AEI’s founding), Sharp received partial research funding
for his doctoral dissertation from Harvard Professor Thomas Schelling,
who had received sup****t from the Advanced Research Projects Agency of
the US Department of Defense to fund doctoral students.
Though these constitute the only financial sup****t Gene Sharp or the
Albert Einstein Institution has ever received, even indirectly, from
government sources, critics have jumped on these tenuous links to allege
that AEI is “funded by the U.S. government.”
Progressive Connections
A look at the five members of the Albert Einstein Institution’s board
shows that none of them is a sup****ter or apologist for U.S.
imperialism. In addition to Sharp himself, the board consists of: human
rights lawyer Elizabeth Defeis; disability rights and environmental
activist Cornelia Sargent; senior deputy executive director of Amnesty
International USA Curt Goering; and, veteran civil rights and anti-war
activist Mary King, author of a recent highly acclaimed book that gives
a sympathetic ****trayal of the first -- and largely nonviolent --
Palestinian Intifada.
During the 1980s, Gene Sharp’s staff included radical sociologist Bob
Irwin and Greg Bates, who went on to become the co-founder and publisher
of the progressive Common Courage Press.
Some years ago, when the institute had a larger budget, one of their
principal activities was to sup****t research projects in strategic
nonviolent action. Recipients included such left-leaning scholars and
activists as Palestinian feminist Souad Dajani, Rutgers sociologist Kurt
Schock, Israeli human rights activist Edy Kaufman, Kent State Peace
Studies professor Patrick Coy, Nigerian human rights activist Uche
Ewelukwa, University of Coventry professor Howard Clark, and University
of Glasgow lecturer Paul Routledge, all of whom have been outspoken
critics of U.S. foreign policy.
For decades, the work of Gene Sharp has influenced such radical U.S.
groups as Movement for a New Society, the Clamshell Alliance, the
Abalone Alliance, Training for Change and other activist organizations
that have promoted nonviolent direct action as a key component of their
activism.
Sharp and AEI have also worked closely in recent years with
pro-democracy activists battling U.S.-backed dictator****ps in such
countries as Egypt and Equatorial Guinea as well as with Palestinians
resisting the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation, hardly “the work of
empire” designed “to foster US-friendly regime change” as critics claim.
The Case of Venezuela
As part of an effort to challenge the longstanding stereotype of
nonviolent action being the exclusive province of radical pacifists, Dr.
Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution have taken a “transpartisan”
position that cuts across political boundaries and conceptions and makes
their educational resources available to essentially anyone.
Not surprisingly, a small minority of those who have taken advantage of
such resources have been those whose commitment to justice and equality
is questionable, including some members of Venezuelan opposition groups.
This ideological indifference on the part of Sharp and his institution
has been troubling for many of us on the left, but it certainly does not
constitute evidence that they are part of a U.S.-funded conspiracy to
overthrow foreign governments around the world to advance U.S.
imperialism and capitalist hegemony. Indeed, their consulting policy
explicitly prohibits them from taking part in any political action,
participating in strategic decision-making with any group, or taking
sides in any conflict. None of the institute’s critics has been able to
provide evidence of a single violation of this policy.
Nevertheless, in her book Bush vs. Chavez: Wa****ngton’s War on
Venezuela, author Eva Golinger falsely claims that the Albert Einstein
Institution has developed a plan to overthrow that country’s
democratically elected government through training right-wing
paramilitaries to use “widespread civil disobedience and violence
throughout the nation” in order to “provoke repressive reactions by the
state that would then justify crises of human right violations and lack
of constitutional order.” Similarly, in a recent article, Golinger has
gone so far as to claim that Gene Sharp has written “a big
destabilization plan aiming to overthrow Chavez government and to pave
the way for an international intervention” including sabotage and street
violence. Neither Golinger nor anyone else has been able to produce a
copy of this supposed plan, instead simply citing Sharp’s book The
Politics of Nonviolent Action, written over 35 years ago, in which he
outlines close to 200 exclusively nonviolent tactics that have been used
historically, but includes no destabilization plan aimed at Venezuela or
any other country.
In addition, Meyssan, in an article posted in Venezuela Analysis,
insisted that “Gene Sharp and his team led the leaders of [the
opposition group] Súmate during the demonstrations of August 2004.” In
reality, neither Sharp nor anybody else affiliated with the Albert
Einstein Institution even took part in -- much less led -- those
demonstrations. Nor were any of them anywhere near Venezuela during that
period. Nor were any of them in contact with the leaders of that
demonstration.
In another article, recently posted on the Counterpunch web site, George
Cicariello-Miller falsely accuses Sharp of having links with right-wing
assassins and terrorists and offering training “toward the formulation
of what was called ‘Operation Guarimba,’ a series of often-violent
street blockades that resulted in several deaths.” Cicariello-Miller’s
only evidence of Sharp’s alleged role in masterminding this operation
was that a right-wing Venezuelan opposition leader had once met with
Sharp in Boston and that a photo of a stylized clinched fist found in
some AEI literature (taken from a student-led protest movement in Serbia
eight years ago) matched those on some signs carried by anti-Chavez
protesters in Venezuela.
It appears that no one who has written any of these articles or who has
made such claims has ever actually attended any of the lectures,
workshops, or informal meetings by Gene Sharp or others affiliated with
the Albert Einstein Institution or has even bothered to interview anyone
who has. If they had done so, they would quickly find that these
presentations tend to be rather dry lectures which focus on the nature
of power, the dynamics of nonviolent struggle, and examples of tactics
used in nonviolent resistance campaigns historically. They do not
instruct anybody or give specific advice about what to do in their
particular situation other than to encourage activists to avoid all
forms of violence.
Finally, even if one were to assume that the Albert Einstein
Institution’s underfunded two-person outfit was indeed closely involved
in training the Venezuelan opposition in tactics of nonviolent
resistance, Chavez would have little to worry about. No government that
had the sup****t of the majority of its people has ever been overthrown
through a nonviolent civil resistance movement. Every government deposed
through a primarily nonviolent struggle -- such as in the Philippines,
Chile, Bolivia, Madagascar, Nepal, Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Serbia,
Mali, Ukraine, and elsewhere -- had already lost popular sup****t. This
is not the case with Venezuela. While Chavez’ progressive economic
policies have angered the old elites, he still maintains the sup****t of
the majority of the population, particularly when compared to the
alternative of returning to the old elite-dominated political system.
Unfortunately, Chavez himself was apparently convinced by these
conspiracy theorists that Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution
really were part of a CIA-backed conspiracy against him, claiming last
June that “they are the ideologues of the soft coup and it seems like
they’re here [in Venezuela.] They are laying out the slow fuse . . .
they’ll continue laying it out [with] marches, events, trying to create
an explosion.” In reality, no one affiliated with AEI was in Venezuela
nor were they organizing marches, events, or any other activity, much
less trying to create an “explosion.”
In response, Sharp wrote a letter to President Chavez explaining the
inaccuracy of the Venezuelan leader’s charges against him and expressing
his concern that “for those persons who are familiar with my life and
work and that of the Albert Einstein Institution, these inaccuracies,
unless corrected, will cast doubts on your credibility.” He also offered
Chavez a copy of his book The Anti-Coup, which includes concrete steps
on how a threatened government can mobilize the population to prevent a
successful coup d’etat, hardly the kind of offer made by someone
conspiring with the CIA to overthrow him.
With the U.S. cor****ate media and members of Congress refusing to
challenge the very real efforts by the Bush administration to subvert
and undermine Chavez’s government, the credibility of those of us
attempting to expose such genuine imperialistic intrigues are being
compromised by these bizarre conspiracy theories involving Gene Sharp,
the Albert Einstein Institution, and related individuals and NGOs.
Golinger’s books and articles, for example, bring to light some very
real and very dangerous efforts by the U.S. government and U.S.-funded
agencies. It is hard for many people to take her real accusations
seriously, however, in the face of her simultaneously putting forward
such blatant falsehoods about Gene Sharp and his institute.
Why Such Bizarre Attacks?
There is a long, sordid history of covert U.S. sup****t for foreign
political parties, military cliques, and individual leaders, as well as
related activities that have resulted in the overthrow of elected
governments. And there are the very real ongoing efforts by such U.S.
government-funded entities as the NED and IRI which, in the name of
“democracy promotion,” provide financial and logistical sup****t for
groups working against governments the United States opposes. Given
these very real manifestations of U.S. imperialism, why have some people
insisted on going after an aging scholar whose worst crime may be that
he is not being discriminating enough regarding with whom he shares his
research?
One reason is that some critics of Sharp subscribe to the same
realpolitik myth that sees local struggles and mass movements as simply
manifestations of great power politics, just as the right once tried to
****tray the popular leftist uprisings in Central America and elsewhere
simply as creations of the Soviet Union. Another factor is that many of
the originators of the conspiracy theories regarding Gene Sharp and the
Albert Einstein Institution are Marxist-Leninists who have traditionally
downplayed the power of nonviolence and insisted that meaningful
political change can only come about through manipulation by powerful
external actors or privileged elites.
This is reinforced by the fact that many sup****ters of U.S. imperialism
-- particularly the neo-conservatives -- share this vanguard mentality
with Marxist-Leninists. As a result, the right has given the United
States unjustifiable credit for many of the dramatic transitions from
dictator****ps to democracies which have taken place around the world in
recent decades. This, in turn, has led some on the left to see such
ahistorical polemics as “proof” of the central U.S. role because the
imperialists are “admitting it.”
The attempts to discredit Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution
-- as well as similar charges against the International Center on
Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) and the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action
and Strategies (CANVAS) -- appear to be part of an effort by both the
right and the far left to delegitimize the power of individuals to make
change and to ****tray the United States -- for good or for ill -- as the
only power that can make a difference in the world. (For a detailed
analysis of the relation****p between U.S. foreign policy and popular
democratic movements, see my article on the United States, nonviolent
action and pro-democracy struggles.)
It is therefore troubling that so many progressive sources of
information have transmitted such falsehoods so widely and that so many
people have come to believe them, particularly given the transparent
lack of any solid evidence to back their accusations. The minority of
these articles that actually have citations, for example, simply quote
long-discredited sources such as Meyssan and Golinger. In a mirror-image
of the right-wing’s blind acceptance of false stories about Barack
Obama’s embrace of militant Islam, Michelle Obama’s anti-white rhetoric,
and Nancy Pelosi’s punitive tax plan against retirees, some on the left
all too easily believe what they read on the Internet. The widespread
acceptance of these false charges against Gene Sharp and others raises
concerns as to how many other fabricated pseudo-conspiracies are out
there that distract progressive activists from challenging all-too-real
abuses by the U.S. government and giant cor****ations.
One consequence of these attacks has been that a number of progressive
grass roots organizations in foreign countries have now become hesitant
to take advantage of the educational resources on strategic nonviolent
action provided by the Albert Einstein Institution and related groups.
As a result of fears that they may be linked to the CIA and other U.S.
government agencies, im****tant campaigns for human rights, the
environment, and economic justice have been denied access to tools that
could have strengthened their impact. Furthermore, these disinformation
campaigns have damaged the reputation of a number of prominent
anti-imperialist activists and scholars who have worked with such groups
by wrongly linking them to U.S. interventionism.
Fortunately, there is now an effort underway to fight back. Activists
from groups ranging from the Fellow****p of Reconciliation to Code Pink
to the Brown Berets -- as well as such radical scholars as Noam Chomsky,
Howard Zinn, and Paul Ortiz -- are signing onto an open letter in
sup****t of Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution.
http://www.stephenzunes.org/petition/
Stephen Zunes, a Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst, serves as a
professor of Politics and chair of Middle East Studies at the University
of San Francisco (http://www.fpif.org
). From 1996 to 1999, he served as
chair of the board of Peaceworkers, a U.S.-based group sup****ting the
nonviolent struggle of the Kosovar Albanians and other nonviolent
movements and peacemakers in areas of conflict.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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