Skip Navigation
United States | News & Politics @lemmy.ml
Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence

nonsite.org

Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One) – Nonsite.org
History @lemmy.ml
davel [he/him] @lemmy.ml

Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One)
politics @lemmy.world
Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence
Socialism @lemmy.ml
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @lemmy.ml

Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One)
3 comments

  • He was a color revolutionary. How could he not have been on the CIA’s payroll?

    The same year the NED was founded, Gene Sharp launched the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI), a public-facing non-profit dedicated to advancing “the worldwide study and strategic use of nonviolent action.” Thomas Schelling, Sharp’s Cold War mentor from the CIA at Harvard, would sit on the board of directors.

    In November and December 1991, with the USSR in political and economic tailspin, Sharp and Ackerman conducted another three-week consulting trip to Russia and the Baltics. There they coached the anti-Soviet activists of Boris Yeltsin’s camp who wanted the USSR totally destroyed and its economy pried open for private capital penetration. Yeltsin was leader of the Russian soviet, but his was a minority position: in a 1991 referendum, over 75% of the Soviet citizenry had affirmed they wished the Union to remain in tact. The preference of the majority would not be heeded. AEI wrapped up its trip to Russia and the Baltics on December 7. The next day, Yeltsin and other Soviet leaders signed the Belavezha Accords, formally dissolving the USSR.

    [N]one other than Development Advisory Services at the CIA at Harvard, spun off and re-branded as the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), got the USAID contract to supervise the privatization of Russian state assets and creation of private capital markets.

    • Reading just those quotes alone, or skimming the article and searching for "CIA", can give an incorrect impression that Sharp's affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency was more overt than it actually was.

      Just to clarify: the "CIA at Harvard" it's referring to is actually an [independent, totally-not-CIA™, founded by Henry Kissinger] organization which was then called the Center for International Affairs at Harvard (which was originally actually abbreviated "CIA", according to Howard J. Wiarda's book about it, but later was called "CFIA" and today is the WCFIA).

      Here is the paragraph where it is first introduced in the article:

      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.