Gene Sharp- The Machievelli of “Non Violent” Regime Change

I’m thinking about Serbia and the recent election win of the “Student Led Movement” The nonviolent Machiavelli came to my attention quite a few years ago.. I’m going to say 2008-2010? When I began to really dig into destabilization activities of all kinds run through NGO’s giving cover/hiding or obfuscating the role of big government, usually, the US.

Below is from an older piece, written in 2019– Still relevant today. Always relevant when we see colour revolutions. Maidans. And other questionable election wins.

Gene Sharp’s influence on the U.S. activist left and social movements abroad has been significant. But he is better understood as one of the most important U.S. defense intellectuals of the Cold War, an early neoliberal theorist concerned with the supposedly inherent violence of the “centralized State,” and a quiet but vital counselor to anti-communist forces in the socialist world from the 1980s onward.

In the mid-1960s, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear theorist, recruited 29-year-old Sharp to join the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, bastion of the high Cold War defense, intelligence, and security establishment. Leading the so-called “CIA at Harvard” were Henry Kissinger, future National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and future CIA chief Robert Bowie. Sharp held this appointment for thirty years. There, with Department of Defense funds, he developed his core theory of nonviolent action: a method of warfare capable of collapsing states through theatrical social movements designed to dissolve the common will that buttresses governments, all without firing any shots. From his post at the CIA at Harvard, Sharp would urge U.S. and NATO defense leadership to use his methods against the Soviet Union.

Sharp’s ideas about nonviolent action are generally billed as apolitical, post-ideological, common sense activist strategy and tactics. But they actually flowed from a clear worldview. Sharp saw “centralized government” as the key vector of violence in the modern world. He supported “decentralizing” state functions to “independent,” “non-State” institutions—a prescription that sounds a lot like privatization. Importantly, he argued nonviolent action itself was the most strategic way to bring about this state transformation.

With the rise of the Reagan-era foreign policy of communist “rollback,” Sharp began promoting “strategic nonviolence” internationally through his Albert Einstein Institution (AEI). Sharp co-founded AEI with his former student Peter Ackerman, who was simultaneously right hand man to the notorious corporate raiding “junk bond king” Michael Milken. Later, Ackerman was a Cato Institute board member and advocate of disemboweling social security. AEI spent the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s training activists, policymakers, and defense leaders around the world in Sharp’s nonviolent methods, supporting numerous “color revolutions”—again and again in state socialist countries whose administrations were attempting to oppose the privatization, austerity policies, and deregulation being pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and U.S. Treasury-led “Washington Consensus.” Sharp’s “people-powered” nonviolent “ju-jitsu” would prove surprisingly effective, distinguishing itself as a powerful weapons system in the U.S. regime change arsenal.

While AEI was an independent non-profit, it had significant connections to the U.S. defense and intelligence community. One prominent AEI consultant was Colonel Robert Helvey, former dean of the National Defense Intelligence College. AEI’s regular funders included U.S. government pass-throughs like the U.S. Institute for Peace, the International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

Read entirely at the link provided. And there is plenty more to read at that link. There will be more about Serbia upcoming.