propaganda

The recent Kidnapping by Belarus of the Neo Nazi Toman Protasevith catapulted back to the top of the mainstream news the at-times fiery protests that raged across Belarus throughout 2020. Similar to previous color revolution for regime change, western propaganda created leader and Belarus was not the exception with the creation of a stooge of the west in the person of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya recognized by Western leaders as the legitimate Belarusian leader. Western propaganda has deigned to mention that for many years prior to the unrest’s eruption, London and Washington had funded, trained, and promoted the very elements that took to the streets in opposition to President Alexander Lukashenko. Belarusian opposition movement promoted the killing of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in a similar way to Muammar Qaddafi of Libya. RAND, US think tank published report with a dedicated section of the 354-page report dealt with “promoting regime change in Belarus.” with the objective to undermine Moscow’s proposed Eurasian Economic Union, complicating “any attempt to employ military force against the Baltic States,” and further isolating Kaliningrad,” the Russian exclave situated between Lithuania and Poland.Furthermore, there was little tangible public appetite for democratization. RAND cited a 2015 survey conducted by the Independent Institute for Socio-Economic and Political Research, which found that 78% of Belarusians believed regime change was “not worth people’s blood” and 70% “did not want a Ukrainian-style revolution.”“People don’t want more freedom. They want more government. They want the better life they used to have,” a Belarusian expert quoted in the report said in 2017. Trigering unrest in Belarus aiming at removing a long-standing Russian-allied dictator “could come in a variety of forms, ranging from public declarations of support by U.S. leaders to more direct financial and organizational assistance helping the opposition parties.” Promoting liberalization in Belarus was predicted to require European support, and given the bloc faced “a host of other challenges from Ukraine to refugees to Brexit,” Brussels [European Union] “might not want to add Belarus to the mix” and “rock the boat.” Still, there was perceived value to attempting to precipitate regime change even if the effort ultimately failed as such a campaign would “create apprehensions among Russian leaders,” making them “worry about the prospect of such a movement in their own country.” This would in turn prompt Moscow to reinforce its military presence and political influence within Belarus, burdening Russia with a “weak, corrupt dependency” and possibly even generating “some degree of local resistance,” the report approvingly suggested. Prior to this section of RAND’s report, U.S. policymakers subsequently is somewhat moot, given Washington had been engaged in precisely the destabilization efforts proposed therein, by way of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Founded in November 1983, then-U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Casey was central to its creation. He sought to construct a public mechanism to support groups and individuals overseas to engage in propaganda and political action undermining “enemy” governments from within—activities historically organized and paid for clandestinely by the Agency—under the bogus aegis of democracy and human rights promotion. For example, during the Reagan administration’s brutal secret war against Nicaragua’s progressive Sandinista government during the 1980s, in which tens of thousands died, NED allocated millions of dollars to “civic opposition” entities—including La Prensa, the country’s primary anti-Sandinista newspaper. The CIA trained, funded, and armed the Sandinistas’ fascist opponents, the Contras. In particular, the Agency’s “Tayacan” manual on guerrilla warfare was highly influential, leading the group to incite mob violence, “neutralize” government officials and civilian leaders, and attack “soft targets” such as schools and hospitals, among other hideous atrocities. The NED funded at least 159 civil society initiatives in Belarus, costing $7,690,689, from 2016 to 2020 alone aiming at promoting Publicly available data indicates the NED funded at least 159 civil society initiatives in Belarus, costing $7,690,689, from 2016 to 2020 alone, coordinated with the Warsaw-based Belsat TV station promoting anti Lukashenko propaganda were behind the unrest aiming at regime change in Belarus. According to  investigative journalist Robert Parry  after the March 2014 Maidan coup, the NED bankrolled 65 projects in Ukraine in the years prior to that uprising. In September 1991, The Washington Post published an article on the subject of “spyless coups” abroad, in which it referred to the NED as the “sugar daddy of overt operations,” and noted that throughout the late 1980s, it had “dispensed money to anti-communist forces behind the Iron Curtain.” “Covert funding for these groups would have been the kiss of death, if discovered. Overt funding, it would seem, has been a kiss of life,” the newspaper concluded. NED funding has very clearly been a “kiss of life” to a large number of oft-dubious opposition actors within and without Belarus, in turn unleashing all manner of chaos—and what’s more, its “sugar daddy” status is now being challenged by a number of other spectral, malign Western actors. U.S. meddling in Belarus dates much further back than 2016. Five years earlier, an official White House press release on U.S.-Polish “efforts to advance democracy worldwide” had a dedicated section on the pair’s work to “pressure” the Lukashenko government and “support civil society,” which stated the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) would work with the Warsaw-based Belsat TV station “to develop content and programming on democracy education.” Founded in December 2007 by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Belsat dubs itself “reminiscent of” U.S. propaganda outlets Radio Free Europe and Voice of America—assets of BBG [now U.S. Agency for Global Media]—describes its mission as “promoting democratization processes” in Minsk, and boasts that events in Ukraine “have shown Belsat TV has influenced the public opinion not only in Belarus, but elsewhere in the region, too.” On an official visit to Warsaw in late 2017, then-UK Prime Minister Theresa May allocated £5 million of UK funding to Polish organizations to “detect and counter the spread of Russian information operations,” with some of the money specifically earmarked for Belsat. UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) files leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous shed