A social scientist, Gene Sharp, was commissioned by NATO to conduct a study on how to make Europe unconquerable. His study, “Making Europe Unconquerable: A Civilian-Based Deterrence and Defense System,” with a foreword by George Kennan, diplomat, political scientist, and “the father of containment” strategy, was published in 1983. Sharp’s study became the operating manual for successive US Governments and their intelligence agencies with regard to viral Warfare (of the non-biological variety) or what would come to be known as “color revolutions.”
The test case or the first practical application of Sharp’s study as implemented by the CIA, was undertaken in China in 1989. The event would later become known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The leader of Communist China, Deng Xiaoping, was the target of the first color revolution, as sponsored by the US. As French journalist and author, Thierry Meyssan (2012) describes in his article, “Perfecting the Method of Color Revolutions”: The United States wanted to topple Deng Xiaoping in favor of Zhao Ziyang. The intention was to stage a coup with a veneer of legitimacy by organizing street protests, in much the same way as the CIA had given a popular facade to the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh by hiring Tehran demonstrators (Operation Ajax 1953). The difference here is that Gene Sharp had to rely on a mix of pro-Zhao and pro-US youth to make the coup look like a revolution.
Tiananmen Square thus bore all the hallmarks of a color revolution—mass student protests blocking government buildings, a steady supply of goods to the protestors (Coleman stoves, training, instruction, and logistics manuals—at the time, unusual for students to have been able to afford), and Molotov cocktails, the seeming weapon of choice for most color revolutions. Additionally, a sub-segment of the rioters trained as agent provocateurs would escalate the violence at the predesignated time. In the case of Tiananmen Square, it would be this third group of protestors, who would use the Molotov cocktails to attack police and soldiers, who were initially unarmed (burning a number of them alive). [...]
It was also later discovered, after much disinformation and propaganda had been spread, that the Chinese government’s version of the truth regarding Tiananmen Square was, indeed, accurate and that no massacre had ever taken place.
This color revolution, however, proved unsuccessful, as Deng quickly arrested Sharp and expelled him from China. Despite the failure, Sharp was able to learn important lessons regarding the mobilization of young activists and how to successfully manipulate them toward a desired end. The method as summed up by Meyssan: Exacerbate all underlying frustrations, blame the political apparatus for all the problems, manipulate the youth according to the Freudian “patricidal” scenario, organize a coup, and then propagandize that the government was brought down by the “street.”
Sharp would take the lessons learned from this first experiment and, with the assistance of Colonel Reuven Gal, then chief psychologist of the Israeli Army, set up “training programs for young activists, with the objective of organizing coups” (Meyssan 2012). Sharp and Gal’s strategy would be coupled with a concept, developed by the RAND Corporation in the late 1990s, called “swarming.” Swarming, as alluded to earlier, is the concept of utilizing the communication patterns and movements of insects to direct spontaneous protests against targeted leaders via GPS satellite images, chat rooms, instant messaging, cell phone text messaging, and blog sites (Engdahl 2009). [...]
The results of the various successful color revolutions, despite their lofty promises and without exception, have brought social, political, and economic suffering for the targeted nation’s masses via the Western plundering of resources, privatization, and extortion as implemented by the World Bank and the IMF’s austerity programs. Or succinctly put, the end goals of color revolutions are chaos, instability, and asset pillage. [...]
In the end, color revolutions are indeed a form of swarming social warfare, carefully staged by intelligence operatives often embedded in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that seek to manipulate rebellion, class divide, and social discord to orchestrate political change, regime change, and asset stripping in a given country. Key end goals of the various color revolutions—as they are sold to the masses, however, are hope and change, freedom, democracy, EU candidacy (when appropriate) and other objectives that the demonstrators can “believe in,” despite their ultimate hollowness.
Ukraine: Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated by Natylie Baldwin & Kermit E. Heartsong (2015)
