Japanese commanders told the crews sailing east that their target was the American fleet moored at Pearl Harbor.

“When I heard that, the blood rushed out of my head,” Mr. Yoshioka recalled. “I knew that this meant a gigantic war, and that Hawaii would be the place where I would die.”

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2183070

Quoting Carl T. Schmidt’s The Corporate State in Action: Italy under Fascism, pages 135–6:

Yet despite the efforts of the Fascist régime to salvage property interests and promote recovery, Italy was in an unhappy condition at the end of 1934. For, after more than ten years of power. Fascism had been unable to solve Italy’s economic difficulties.

Mussolini was forced to admit: ‘We touched bottom some time ago. We shall go no farther down. Perhaps it would be hard to sink any lower. […] We are probably moving towards a period of humanity resting on a lower standard of living. We must not be alarmed at the prospect. Humanity is capable of asceticism such as we perhaps cannot conceive.’²³

Not long after, in inaugurating the Corporations, he announced: ‘One must not expect miracles.’²⁴ Industrial production remained at low ebb, foreign trade still fell off, unemployment was at a distressingly high level and efforts to combat it had had little substantial effect. All this was very harmful to Fascist prestige.

Continued economic troubles and the inner pressures of Fascism impelled the Dictatorship to seek escape in foreign fields. War might be a kind of public works vastly more effective in reviving industry than anything tried before. With their attention focused on the glories of the battlefield, the people might be diverted from an uncomfortable concern over their domestic misfortunes. And certainly a military victory would solidify the Fascist movement and restore its fading glamour.

In this crisis, the rulers themselves would learn that the machine they had built under whose dominion men must live in constant spiritual tension, in fear and uncertainty is above all an engine of warlike enterprise.

(Emphasis added.)

For many Africans, this was the real start of World War II, and Fascism’s reputation in the liberal régimes would never be the same. Ethiopia was the only nation‐state in Africa to have successfully resisted European imperialism up until this point, and the invasion was so shocking to the world that even many otherwise profascist Japanese were appalled (for a while).

It cost the lives of at least 350,000 Ethiopians, involved numerous unpunished war crimes, and brought Europe’s two Fascist empires closer together, serving as an important inspiration to the Third Reich. Its importance can hardly be overstated, but I suspect that many of us know little to nothing about his tragedy thanks to Eurocentrist education.

Now, concerning the documentary: it is a bit crude and archaic at times, and being made for television it inevitably suffers from time constraints, but it is still quite good for beginners and anybody who is more orientated towards visual learning. It also provides examples of U.S. attitudes towards Mussolini pre‐1935, something that antisocialists rarely discuss.

Alternatively, Lion of Judah is an hour longer and is lush with precious archived footage, but it almost feels like a stereotypical nature documentary with its painfully long pauses between narrations, its lengthy shots of almost everything that the Italians and Ethiopians were doing (from dancing to pedestrianism), and the subtitles are difficult to read, but beggars can’t be choosers. (There are a few modern, amateur documentaries available, but I am reluctant to recommend them given that the authors are centrist chumps.)

Further reading:

*The Invasion of Ethiopia — Mussolini’s […] Plan For Restoration of the Roman Empire*

Prelude to World War II

Click here for more.

My humblest request is that we not let the memory of this tragedy fade away. Where other educators have failed in their duty, we must not fail in ours.

Click here for other events that happened today (October 3).

1892: Sentaro Omori, Axis vice admiral, existed.
1894: Walter Warlimont, Deputy Chief of the Operations Staff of the Third Reich’s Armed Forces High Command, blighted the earth.
1904: Ernst‐Günther Schenck, SS doctor, joined him.
1932: Imperial luxury ocean liner Hikawa Maru departed Kobe for Seattle, her 13th round trip across the Pacific.
1934: The Fascists of Gil Robles entered the Spanish government, sparking four days of violence by the workers in Barcelona and Asturias.
1935: Brixia Model 35 light infantry mortars entered service with the Regio Esercito. 1937: Imperial flightcraft sank Chinese torpedo boat Hupeng at Jiangyin.
1939: Hans Frank ordered a ‘ruthless exploitation’ of occupied Poland.
1940: Vichy passed antisemitic laws that excluded Jews from positions in the army, government, commerce, industries, and the press (in other words, Vichy reduced France’s Jews to second‐class citizens). Philippe Pétain, Pierre Laval, Raphaël Alibert, Marcel Peyrouton, Paul Baudouin, Yves Bouthillier, Charles Huntzinger and François Darlan all signed this law.

Meanwhile, the Axis assaulted London, Worcester, Birmingham, and Wellingborough through single‐bomber raids. The Allies suffered damage at the De Havilland aircraft factory at Hatfield, while the Axis lost one Ju 88 bomber to ground‐based antiaircraft fire. Overnight, several small Axis raids targeted London again. Lastly, Prince Kotohito stepped down as the Chief of the IJA’s General Staff.
1941: At about 0001 hours, Axis submarine U‐431 sank Allied ship Hatasu east of Newfoundland, massacring forty humans, and only seven survived. Afterwards at the Berliner Sportpalast in Berlin, the Chancellery announced during a rally that the Third Reich had captured 2,500,000 Soviet prisoners of war, destroyed or captured 22,000 guns, destroyed or captured 18,000 tanks, destroyed 14,500 aircraft, and since 1939 had expanded by an area four times as large as Britain. The Chancellery stressed that the Soviet Union had been broken and would never rise again. Coincidentally in Russia, Panzergruppe 2 of the Armeeguppe Mitte captured Orel 220 miles south‐southwest of Moscow. Elsewhere, the Axis attempted to encircle the Soviet Bryansk Front.
1942: The Axis and the Eastern Allies both incurred heavy losses as the 6.Armee pushed the Soviet 62nd Army back to the Volga River at Stalingrad. Additionally, the first successful A4 test flight reached the altitude of 84.5 kilometers (52.5 miles) at Peenemünde.
1943: The Wehrmacht invaded Kos Island under a heavy air umbrella, and the Axis massacred ninety‐two civilians in Lingiades, Greece.
1944: The Third Reich’s Air Force III/KG 66 at Burg, near Magdeburg reported an inventory of thirteen Mistel unmanned glide bombs, of which tenwere serviceable. Five of the flightcraft took off on this night to attack the bridges at Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The weather conditions were poor and three of the vehicles crashed into the Teutoburger Wald; Oberst Horst Polster, the Staffelkapitän, died as did Unteroffizier Fritz Scheffler and Unteroffizier Paul Barinski. The other pilots could not find the target in the fog and yet another was brought down.

Additionally, the Axis established the first Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter unit at Achmer and Hesepe near Osnabrück under the command of Austrian‐born ace Major Walter Nowotny. The unit had thirty flightcraft distributed among two squadrons and took the task of intercepting USAAF day bomber raids on the heart of the Greater German Reich. As well, an Axis V‐2 rocket hit the Hellesdon Golf Course near Norwich, England at 1950 hours, injuring somebody and damaging a glasshouse, five farm buildings or barns, several haystacks, and one acre of sugar beet. On the other hand, Axis troops evacuated Tiddim, Burma.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5823211

On 9 April 1933, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler’s nomination as Reich Chancellor, a group of communist activists tore down the German flag of the German general consulate in Beirut and wrote explicit slogans on its walls: “Down with Hitler, the tyrant, the executer of the German workers! The German workers and their heroic Communist Party shall live!”⁸

For a broader, left‐leaning spectrum, including not only the Syrian–Lebanese Communist Party but other non‐party‐affiliated workers, students, and intellectuals as well, opposition against fascism gradually shifted to the center of ideological and strategic debates.⁹

[…]

The threat of fascist coups in Europe, the formation of Popular Fronts in France and Spain, and [Fascist] preparations for an attack against Abyssinia in 1935 ever more highlighted the need to revise the [Communist] party’s isolationist strategy. In close contact with the Comintern and the French [Communist Party], the communist movement in Lebanon and Syria set up a Committee for the Popular Struggle in Defense of Ethiopia explicitly meant to raise public awareness and to create broader alliances against fascism in the Arab world itself.¹⁴

In addition to the publication of the clandestine newspaper Nidal al‐Shaʻb (People’s Struggle) and the takeover of the renowned monthly cultural magazine Al‐Duhur (Ages), the organization of strikes and manifestations extended the popular basis of its activities—and further shifted its political priorities to questions of Arab independence, national unity, and the struggle for Palestine.¹⁵

Internationally, the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, held in July–August 1935 in Moscow, marked a turning point for Communist strategies vis‐à‐vis Italian Fascism and German [Fascism], confirming the gradual revision of past tactics whose devastating consequences had become all too visible in the ultimate defeat of political opposition in [the Third Reich].

The proceedings of the conference and the speeches by representatives of the national communist parties highlighted these changes, drawing particular attention to the need to unite mainstream nationalist forces in an attempt to thwart further fascist successes. Summarizing recent developments in Syria and Lebanon, Yusuf Khattar al‐Hilu, the delegate of the Syrian Communist Party, outlined the menaces posed by several imperialist powers striving to extend their influence into the Arab world:

Italian Fascist propaganda has greatly increased in recent times. Each year Mussolini’s agents organize free trips to Italy for young Arabs. The station Radio Bari broadcasts Arabic‐language programs three times a week about “Italian–Arab friendship” and “fascist well‐being” in Italy. It is the same with German fascism. Hitler has purchased the largest bourgeois newspapers in Syria which every day are full of photographs and articles about Hitlerism, which they represent as the “saviour of the German people.” Nazi agents try to use the national hatred the Arab people have for French imperialism to obtain their fascist goals.¹⁶

The resulting strategy to confront [Fascism] echoed the dilemma of the communist movement under French mandate rule. The congress’s decision to form broad popular fronts in Europe and national fronts in the colonies further emphasized the national struggle of the colonized populations, shifting attention from local “reactionary” powers and social and political rights to imperialism and European fascist régimes. The [Fascist] invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 gave credibility to these needs.

As in the case of Libya, Italy’s latest aggression illustrated the immediate dangers posed by European fascism. The struggle against fascism as a threat to independence increasingly served to mobilize popular support and helped link the [Communist Party] to mainstream nationalist currents. While larger sectors of the local population continued to voice fascination for the [German Reich], Italy’s brutal policies in Libya and its attack against Abyssinia had fostered the image of fascism as an imperialist power.

Notwithstanding significant efforts to ameliorate its standing in the Middle East, suspicion of [Fascist] ambitions was shared—as in Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq—by many in Lebanon and Syria.¹⁷

[…]

The [Fascist] advance against France in summer 1940 left the Levantine public in a state of shock. On 22 June 1940 the German–French armistice agreement was signed. Three days later, on 25 June, a similar agreement was concluded in Rome between Italy and France.

The agreed‐on conventions were intended to regulate France’s relations to the Axis and to set preliminary rules for cooperation and the administration of territories affected by the French defeat. Both armistice conventions called for the demobilization and disarmament of French forces not required for an immediate preservation of public order and territorial defence.²⁹

Despite the immediate influence of the Axis and the rule of Vichy forces in the mandates, opposition to rapprochements to the Axis and its agents had not completely ceased. Local communist circles were among the most outspoken objectors of the Axis’s growing influence. The publication of the clandestine newspaper Nidal al‐Shaʻb in the name of the party was part of their activities.³⁰

As a handwritten pamphlet consisting of a few pages, the paper provided one of the rare opportunities to voice uncensored criticism of the local government and its Axis partners. Demands for an amelioration of the economic and social conditions were linked to calls for neutrality of the mandates in the international conflict. Despite its explicit criticism of the Axis as an immediate threat and the most aggressive expression of imperialist rule, such a position did not imply concession to the Allied powers.

On the eve of the Iraqi–British conflict, in March 1941, the paper strongly criticized not only Axis ambitions in Africa and the Arab Middle East but British intentions as well, with its slogan “No British, no Germans, no Italians, but bread, freedom and independence!”³¹ Under current conditions, neither European power could count on sympathies among the local population. As imperialist states driven by shared interests in the region, they were no allies in the struggle for independence, political rights, and economic prosperity.

[…]

News of the Soviet army’s encirclement of Berlin had reached the Levantine public in the early evening of 24 April 1945. Soon after, large crowds took to the streets. People gathered spontaneously in Beirut and other Lebanese and Syrian cities. From a local perspective, the war against [the Western Axis] had effectively come to an end.

(Emphasis added.)

Quoting Harvey Henry Smith’s Area Handbook for Lebanon, page 299:

Upon the surrender of the Vichy […] troops in [West Asia] in July 1941, volunteers from the Troupes Spéciales du Levant were enlisted in the [Allies] and saw action in north Africa, Italy, and Southern France.

In June 1943 the [Allies] reconstituted units of the Troupes Spéciales du Levant, which then operated as part of the British forces in the Middle East. In 1945, as a result of continuing pressure by Lebanese leaders for control of their own forces, [Paris] turned over to them the Lebanese units of the Troupes Spéciales du Levant. These units totaled about 3,000 men and became the nucleus of the present Lebanese Army.

In 1942, these troops participated in the Battle of Bir Hakeim against the Wehrmacht.

I'm specifically looking for documentaries or podcast. I will happily read if I must but I prefer these mediums. It seems difficult to find these thing through a browser these days

Unrelated but I am currently heartbroken about the people of Rapa Nui and especially the Rongorongo script

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/76983

Liechtenstein
‘An official investigation into Liechtenstein's World War II history […] has found that forced labor from a [Axis] concentration camp worked on estates owned by the royal family in [Axis]‐occupied Austria at the time.’ (Source.)

Portugal
By 1938, the Third Reich was the Estado Novo (Portugal)’s second largest trading partner. Its balance of trade went from a $90 million shortfall in 1939 to a $68 million surplus in ’42; the Bank of Portugal’s assets more than tripled and those in the private banks nearly doubled during World War II’s first four years. The Third Reich depended on the Estado Novo’s rich wolframite and tungsten ore deposits, which were critical for producing more war munitions and particularly the armour‐piercing kind. Tungsten ore was so valuable that the Allies tried to buy as much as possible before the Reich could, and when that failed they used economic sanctions on the Estado Novo in 1944, but the Reich bypassed this by simply cloaking its mining interests there. (Source.) Finally, the Estado Novo was home to dozens of Portuguese men who fought alongside their Spanish brethren in the Blue Division.

Spain
This is the most obvious addition, but few of us are familiar with the details. Like the Estado Novo, the Spanish State supplied the Third Reich with wolframite, but it also channelled oil thereinto. (Source.) Likewise, while never officially part of the Axis, the Spanish ruling class still sent about 47,000 other anticommunists, and medical services, to assist in the reinvasion of Soviet Eurasia. Read Transnational Exchange in the Nazi New Order for the details in that regard. Finally, the Spanish ruling class sent a good deal of arms to the Third Reich; it vended 85,350 copies of the Astra 300, for example, to the Third Reich during the 1940s.

Sweden
The Swedish ruling class was not only complicit in ‘Aryanisation’ but also built some of its wealth on supplying the Third Reich’s war effort with scarce essential resources (such as iron ore) for weapons, possibly prolonging World War II by one year. (Source.) Despite its neutrality policy, the Swedish ruling class smuggled Fascist weaponry to Finland, used scores of thousands of railroad cars to transport over a million military personnel on leave to the Reich and another million to Norway from 1940 to ’43, and at least a hundred Swedish anticommunists directly assisted the Axis in warfare. They, like some of the Baltic anticommunists (Baltutlämningen) who took refuge there, never suffered either extradition or prosecution when they returned to the Kingdom of Sweden.

Switzerland
Some have written entire books on how Swiss banking benefited the Third Reich. In short, this was the most frequent client among all of the so‐called ‘neutral’ countries due to its liberal policies and willingly supplied the Third Reich with loans, gold reserves, munitions, machines, oil, electricity, aluminium, and much more. Additionally, the Swiss ruling class collaborated with the Fascist bourgeoisie in inhibiting the movement of Jews and legally ‘Jewish’ people.

Turkey
Turkish chromite was essential for the Third Reich’s defence industries, particularly for hardening steel for armour. It was so critical, in fact, that the Reich’s war production probably would have shut down in only ten months if Turkey’s ruling class stopped giving any to the Reich. The Turkish ruling class signed the Treaty of Friendship with the Reich’s in June 1941 (it almost officially joined the Anti‐Comintern Pact) and it did not cease shipping chromite ore to the Reich until international pressure overwhelmed the Turks in April 1944. (Source.) Although the Turkish government did declare war in 1945, it appears that this was simply a diplomatic maneuver and it meant nothing in practice militarily.

Kind of inspired by the new Blowback season. If anyone knows any articles, videos or books on the subject would be much obliged. I've only really looked at The Jakarta Method.

Reminds me of that painting of a Red Army soldier gazing in amazement at the interior of the Winter Palace.

Twenty-nine years after this photograph, the Soviets started the Space Race with the world's first artificial satellite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borki_train_disaster#Investigation

In the preceding years, [Sergei] Witte had been regularly involved in managing imperial train journeys across his railroad and was well known to the tsar. Two months before the crash, Alexander, upset about Witte's insistence on reducing train speed limits, had publicly chastised him and his railway, referring to its owners' ethnicity:

Nowhere else has my speed been reduced; your railroad is an impossible one because it is a Jewish road.

According to Witte, he had warned the government earlier of the deficiencies in train setup, notably using paired steam engines and faulty saloon cars.

In the photo, French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier shakes hands with Benito Mussolini, with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the background.

At the same time , throughout 1938, right-wing and nationalist deputies in France demanded a ban on the French Communist Party. And more than 400 newspapers, picking up on the theses of Mein Kampf, spoke of communists as conductors of foreign influence in the country and a conspiracy of world Jewry.

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2121750

Quoting A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War, page 262:

It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference. Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.”

The [German–Soviet] pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs. The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also.

Andrew Rothstein’s The Munich Conspiracy is the perfect resource for learning more about this. Pages 70–2:

On September 26 [the Third Reich’s head of state] prepared the way for this by a speech at the Sportpalast in Berlin, in which raving abuse of Czechoslovakia and Beneš, with denunciations of the U.S.S.R. and threats of war, was interspersed with assurances that this was “the last territorial claim which I have in Europe”, expressions of friendship for Britain, France and Poland, and of personal gratitude to Chamberlain.

This was well calculated to impress: since the British Ambassador in Berlin, at any rate, had freely revealed the same train of thought passing through his mind for many months, and Hitler knew from many sources that Nevile Henderson was not alone.

He followed up the speech with a personal letter to Chamberlain on the 27th (which the Prime Minister received the same evening), arguing in the most reasonable tones against various criticisms of his terms, offering to guarantee the independence of the remainder of Czechoslovakia once the German, Polish and Hungarian minorities had gone, and finishing with an invitation to Chamberlain to “continue your effort, for which I should like to take this opportunity of once more sincerely thanking you”—in order to prevent “Prague” from bringing about a general war.⁷²

The calculation was correct. Chamberlain snatched at the opportunity, and telegraphed next day to Hitler proposing an immediate Four‐Power Conference (i.e. including Italy). He had already informed the French Government, whose leaders were mainly concerned to get in ahead of Chamberlain (on the morning of the 28th) with an even more eager offer of co‐operation against Czechoslovakia—that it should be required to agree (on pain of losing any French support) to the immediate occupation by German troops of “all four sides of the Bohemian quadrilateral”.⁷³

Hitler had only to choose: and he preferred the British precisely because it involved the public participation of Britain and France in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, at his dictation. Mussolini, who feared that a war might end in disaster, supported Chamberlain in a series of messages to Hitler.⁷⁴

He sent the necessary invitations on the morning of the 28th; and the conference—Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and Daladier—met on the afternoon of the 29th, sitting until the early hours of the morning of the 30th. Mussolini already had the draft of a settlement, which had been drawn up the previous day by the Germans, and passed on to him by the Italian Ambassador at Berlin: and at a suitable moment, after a preliminary statement by Hitler on the usual lines, Mussolini produced it as his own.

The draft provided for evacuation of the “Sudeten–German” territory, according to a map drawn up by the Germans, between October 1 and 10 and without the destruction of any existing installations: an international commission (of the four Powers with Czechoslovakia) to supervise the evacuation: a plebiscite to be held in “doubtful territories”, which until then would be occupied by international forces: and German troops to begin occupying “predominantly German territory” on October 1.⁷⁵

After argument about the drafting of various passages, with intervals for meals, these points became the essential features of the Munich Agreement, signed on September 30. There were several additional points, designed to make the document more palatable to the public in Britain and France—since none of those present could have supposed that they would make the “carve‐up” more acceptable to Czechoslovakia.

Such were the provisions that the international commission should determine one particular zone which was to be occupied, the boundaries of which were doubtful at Munich: that there was to be the right of option for individuals: that Britain and France maintained the offer of an international guarantee of the new boundaries, made on September 19, and that [the Third Reich] and [Fascist] Italy would join it once the Polish and Hungarian minority questions were settled.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Further reading: The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People: International, Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (interview with author)

Click here for other events that happened today (September 30).

1883: Bernhard Rust, Reich Minister of Science, Education and Culture, was unkind enough to exist.
1934: Erwin Rommel met Adolf Schicklgruber for the first time, and Reich Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht reported to his Chancellor on his progress of planning the German Reich’s economy for another war.
1935: The Third Reich commissioned U‐12 into service under the command of Kapitänleutnant Werner von Schmidt.
1936: Mutsu completed her reconstruction at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal.
1937: Imperial flightcraft bombarded Chinese coastal battery positions overlooking the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province.
1939: As General Władysław Sikorski became the Polish government‐in‐exile’s prime minister, Reinhard Heydrich became the leader of new Reich Main Security Office, RSHA, and U‐23 completed her twoth war patrol. Additionally, Walther von Brauchitsch received the Clasps to his Iron Cross 2nd Class and 1st Class medals as well as the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross.
1940: Four Axis raids, each consisting of sixty to two hundred bombers and escorted by large numbers of fighters, crossed into southern England at 0900, 1000, 1300, and 1600 hours; some got through to London, but some did not drop their bombs as they had little visibility due to low clouds, overshooting their targets as radar operators misread the Knickebein radio beacon signals. Meanwhile, two groups of about one hundred bombers each attacked cities on the southern coast. On that day, the Axis lost fourteen bombers, twenty‐eight Bf 109 fighters, and one Bf 110 fighter (while the Allies lost 19 fighters and 8 pilots). The daylight attacks would represent the last major raids of such type conducted by the Luftwaffe. Overnight, the Axis bombed London, Liverpool, and several others cities; the aircraft factory at Yeovil was only lightly damaged as most bombs fell on the town instead.

Apart from that, Axis submarine U‐37 sank Allied ship Samala west of Ireland at 1013 hours, massacring everyone aboard (65 crew, 1 gunner, and 2 passengers). At 2156 hours, in the same area, U‐37 sank Allied ship Heminge, killing somebody. Axis mines laid by destroyers Eckholdt, Riedel, Lody, Galster, Ihn, and Steinbrinck two days earlier off Falmouth in southwestern England destroyed two Allied vessels, resulting in twenty‐nine and fifteen deaths, respectively. Elsewhen, Karl Dönitz inspected the Axis submarine Alessandro Malaspina at Bordeaux, and Alpino Bagnolini ended her third war patrol arriving there.
1941: The Axis finished the Babi Yar massacre, but the Jager Report noted that the Axis exterminated 366 Jewish men, 483 Jewish women, and 597 Jewish children in Trakai, Lithuania (for a total of 1,446 people). As well, Operation Typhoon got an unofficial start when Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 attacked two days ahead of schedule, and Axis bombers attacked shipyards at Tyneside in northern England, severely damaging submarine HMS Sunfish.
1942: The Third Reich’s head of state publicly repeated his forecast of the annihilation of Jewry while a transport containing 610 Jews arrived at Auschwitz from the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands; the Axis registered 37 men and 118 women into the camp but exterminated the remaining 454. As well, Axis bombers attacked Lancing and Colchester, England, and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss forbade his SS guards to consume raw fruits, raw vegetables, and raw milk due to the typhus epidemic in the camp. On the bright side, Hans‐Joachim Marseille, Axis pilot, died falling to his death.
1943: On the eve of the Jewish New Year, the Gestapo and Danish fascists began rounding up Danish Jews. A Danish businessman passed the news of the operation and passed the information to the Danish resistance, which then arranged fishing boats to ferry a large number of Danish Jews to Sweden. Meanwhile, SS‐Hauptsturmführer Eduard Weiter became the commandant of Dachau (replacing Martin Wei), and the Wehrmacht began evacuating Naples amidst continued fighting, leaving behind a burning city historic archive and many traps. A ‘wolfpack’ consisting of Axis submarines U‐703, U‐601, and U‐960 also attacked Soviet convoy VA‐18 near the Sergey Kirov Islands in the eastern Kara Sea and sank freighter Arhangelsk.
1944: The Third Reich commenced a counteroffensive to retake the Nijmegen salient, this having been captured by the Allies during Operation Market Garden. Likewise, a V‐1 flying bomb caused five deaths and many injuries when a row of houses was demolished at Ardleigh in Essex, England. The USAAF base at Thorpe Abbots, home of the 100th Bomb Group (‘The Bloody 100th’) reported buzz bombs flying over the airfield at one hundred fifty feet before exploding in the farm fields surrounding the base. A U.S. 8th Air Force 750‐bomber raid on Munster and Handorf in the Greater German Reich killed the Staffelkapitän and the training officer of Axis Air Force 7/KG3; records captured by the Allies showed that the Staffel had launched one hundred seventy‐seven flying bombs during thirteen nights of sorties in Sept. 1944.
1945: The Western Allies disbanded I‐401’s crew, and all of the officers and other men went back into the civilian population, including the few who had committed war crimes!
1946: Takashi Sakai, Axis governor of Hong Kong, died at the hands of a Chinese firing squad.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5822855

Of Bhopal’s one million residents, 8,000 died in the first three days. Over 22,000 people eventually died from their exposure to MIC that night, and over half a million were maimed for life.

Illnesses, birth defects and deaths attributable to MIC exposure in the December 1984 disaster still occur, some of them to descendants of those exposed. Over 150,000 people in Bhopal live with chronic illnesses related to direct exposure or inherited from their parents’ exposure.

In addition to being responsible for the 1984 gas release, Union Carbide unsafely disposed of poisonous wastes within the factory compound starting in 1969. The company pumped hazardous waste into designated ponds starting in 1977. In 1996, it dumped toxic sludge from the ponds outside the factory. Over 100,000 residents of 48 communities within five kilometers of the factory were drinking dangerously contaminated groundwater without knowing it.

During the 40 years following this worst industrial accident in history, none of the eight executives of UCC’s Indian subsidiary in 1984 have spent a minute in jail.

After the Bhopal disaster, UCC sold the local company to Dow Chemical, which maintains that it has no responsibility for the cleanup. As a result, 93% of survivors of the 1984 disaster have received no more than $500 as compensation for personal injuries. Families of those who died received $2,000 for each death — and that only after years of struggle.

This article is depressing

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2068089

Pictured: ‘Representatives of the governments of Italy, Germany, and Japan sign the Three Power Pact, establishing the Rome–Berlin–Tōkyō Axis. Seated left to right are: Galeazzo Ciano (Italy), Joachim von Ribbentrop (Germany), and the Japanese ambassador, Kurusu.’ (Source.)

Quoting Christian Goeschel’s Performing the New Order: The Tripartite Pact, 1940–1945:

On 27 September 1940, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan signed the tripartite pact in Berlin. The signatories committed to ‘assist one another with all political, economic, and military means when one of the three Contracting Parties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Sino‐Japanese conflict’. The pact was a warning to the USA not to enter the wars in Europe and China. But [Washington] immediately saw the pact as the formal confirmation of Japan’s belligerence and so increased its military involvement in the Pacific.¹

The tripartite pact built on existing treaties, including the military alliance between Italy and Germany, formalized in the 1939 Pact of Steel, and the German–Japanese Anti‐Comintern pact, concluded in 1936 and joined by Italy in 1937. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (the latter country albeit only for twelve days) and then the Independent State of Croatia joined the tripartite pact subsequently, but the three main signatories denied the accessory states equal rank, thereby perpetuating their idea of a strictly hierarchical world order.²

[The Third Reich’s] non‐aggression pact with the Soviet Union in late August 1939 had greatly upset [Tōkyō]. But as the June 1940 defeat of France by [the Third Reich] had demonstrated, the defeat of liberal democracy seemed within reach of the Axis powers.³

At first the alliance with the Empire of Japan may looking puzzling, especially given that the German Fascists had mixed feelings on the Japanese, but given Imperial Japan’s fierce competition with liberal colonialism and its militant anticommunism, an alliance was too good to pass up:

Germany and Italy had previously maintained close links with China, but Japan’s increasing undermining of the liberal–internationalist order helped raise the possibility for the [Fascist] dictatorships to expand their territories.⁵

Pictured: ‘German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (standing at right), addresses the audience gathered to witness the signing of the Three Power Pact, establishing the Rome–Berlin–Tōkyō Axis. Seated from left to right are: the Japanese Ambassador Kurusu, Galeazzo Ciano (Italy), and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.’ (Source.)

The signing of the pact was a triumph for Hitler. While he regarded the Japanese as racially inferior, he admired Japanese military achievements such as the 1905 victory over Russia. He saw an alliance with Nippon in strategic terms, or at least that is what he told his entourage in May 1942 when Germany, Japan and Italy dominated large swaths of Europe, East and Southeast Asia and North Africa.²³ Moreover, because of his racist views, he did not agree with Japan’s aim to drive European colonial powers from Asia; yet in this case he was prepared to subsume his racist principles to strategic considerations.²⁴

The pact’s signing in Berlin underlined Germany’s preponderant position in the alliance at the time. Despite the fanfare, reactions in Britain and the United States were cool overall. Joseph C. Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Tōkyō, drily stated that the pact ‘may be a diplomatic success for Germany’, but he could not see how Tōkyō would benefit from it.²⁵

Soon afterwards, in January 1941, the American historian A. Whitney Griswold commented on the pact in Foreign Affairs. For him, the pact had been Germany’s brainchild. Europe still held the reins over East Asian matters. The Times, while warning against the tripartite powers’ aggression to conquer living space, judiciously commented that in ‘political geometry, the Axis is an unstable figure’.²⁶

One conclusion that I find disagreeable—and I am well aware that I’m being iconoclastic for saying this—is that the Axis had ‘no common military strategy’. Even overlooking theaters such as North Africa, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Eastern Front, the unimplemented invasions Kantokuen and Operation Orient suggest that that is at least questionable.

Quoting James William Morley in Deterrent Diplomacy: Japan, Germany, and the USSR, 1935–1940, pages 182–3:

On [Tōkyō’s] intent in signing the pact, […] Konoe as well as senior Foreign Ministry and navy officials were sincere in not wanting war with the United States. At the same time, especially after Germany’s victories in Europe, they were not prepared any more than were the army or the right wing radicals in the media and elsewhere in the bureaucracy to defer to American opposition or possible German greed and let China or the former European colonies in Southeast Asia slip from their grasp.

The pact was designed to solve this problem, that is, to confirm [Berlin’s] lack of ambition in these areas and, without war but by presenting an appearance of a formidable German–Japanese military combination, to dissuade the United States from pushing its opposition to Japan to a military showdown.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

The most important lesson that we should draw from this is that the Axis’s creation was not purely a matter of choice. Nobody coerced another power into agreeing to the alliance, but that is beside the point: the Axis was a consequence of capital’s need to expand. When the Great Depression devastated Imperial Japan’s economy, warfare was the escape hatch. Thus:

The organic weaknesses inherent in Japanese capitalism have made its life span particularly violent and explosive; have driven it to a continuous series of wars since the first Sino‐Japanese war in the 1890s; have driven it far along the road of economic autarchy and [militarism].

These weaknesses and contradictions are primarily four in nature: (a) Necessity of seeking all vital raw materials beyond its natural frontiers (Japan, up to 1941, had to import 80 per cent of the twenty‐five strategic raw materials listed by Fortune as necessary for modern war; one‐half its copper, zinc, tin and scrap iron had to be imported; one‐fourth its pig iron; one‐third its aluminum; three‐fourths of its iron ore; 90 per cent of its lead and all its mercury and nickel). (b) A weak economic base at home, lacking heavy industries (iron and steel, chemicals, etc.). (c) A dependency on its export trade abroad out of which to accumulate profits to purchase the needed raw materials. (d) An inability to accumulate surplus capital with which to develop and exploit foreign conquests and for foreign investment.

In order for [Imperial] Japan to survive at all it was necessary to take certain measures, both industrial and political, to overcome the weight of these initial handicaps. It is our ignoring of the important industrial changes that largely accounts for the underestimation of [Imperial] Japan’s power.

(Emphasis original. Source.)

While the author did not comprehensively address the problem of war, Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business gives us clues. Page 330:

Export industry complains that it has been sacrificed. In spite of subsidies from the dumping fund, [Fascist] exports are declining in all the foreign markets, and this is aggravated by the circumstance that world economy is itself in decline. In a memorandum addressed to Chancellor Hitler in June, 1937, the spokesmen of the export industry, particularly of the Rhenish‐Westphalian coal barons, state their grievances.¹⁴⁰

Exports are strangled by all sorts of formalities that “transform the exchange of goods into a purely bureaucratic activity.” Export industry lacks raw materials: these are reserved almost exclusively for the armament industry. It lacks labor: “They insist on borrowing the best workers from certain branches of industry” in order to assign them to war or synthetic products industries. It lacks capital: it is unable to grant foreign customers the big credits made necessary by increasing competition. It lacks markets: the result of autarky is to isolate [the Fascist] economy from the world market.

“It has been shown,” the memorandum sadly notes, “that the foreign trade of the principal countries in the world does not necessarily depend on the German market…” So the export industry demands that engines be reversed and contact resumed with world economy.

But—and they do not mince words—it is impossible “to bring back into the orbit of world economy an economy functioning to the detriment of the domestic value of its currency and carrying on solely such activities as rearmament and autarky.”

Thus, the additions of Ethiopia, the Saar Basin, the Rhineland, Austria, and Sudetenland could not possibly have satiated Fascist capital forever, and when the fascists won the Spanish Civil War on April 1939, there was nowhere else to turn but total war.

[Footnote]

Finally, there is the anticommunist factoid that either Berlin seriously considered inviting Moscow to the Axis, for which we have little evidence. One example of this claim:

To bring a swift conclusion to the negotiations, Germany had offered to include the Soviet Union into the pact, an idea going back to earlier geopolitical visions of a solid totalitarian continental block against the US and the UK.

Goeschel, it seems, was referring to this:

Paradoxically, the setting up of the Axis during Schulenburg’s stay in Berlin only helped him to further his ideas. The Tripartite Part was clearly a vehicle for the establishment of the Continental bloc and initially assumed the inclusion of the Soviet Union by giving her ‘at the proper moment and in a friendly manner […] a free hand towards the south to fulfil any possible wishes in the direction of the Persian Gulf or India’.¹⁶ The prevailing feeling in the Wilhelmstrasse, best expressed by Weizsäcker, was:

We annoyed Russia with the guarantees to Romania […] and yesterday again with the tripartite pact of Germany, Italy, and Japan. It is necessary to compensate these surprises to Russia, if we do not want her to alter her attitude towards us. An attack by Russia is not to be feared because it is not strong enough militarily or as a régime. But Russia could still open its territory to English intrigues and, more importantly, stop the deliveries to us.

It might not have entirely been Goeschel’s fault given how misleadingly Gabriel Gorodetsky worded this, but the context should make it clear that the Tripartite Pact simply stipulated acquiescences to Moscow, not pact membership (in which case it would have been the Quadrupartite Pact). A few pages later, Molotov purportedly said that he ‘did not object to participating in various activities of the four powers but not in the Tripartite Pact, where the USSR was no more than an object’. (What ‘various activities’ he might have had in mind is unclear, but in case it isn’t obvious, ‘participation’ is not the same thing as membership.) Goeschel either misunderstood Gorodetsky’s clumsy writing or he lied, maybe to appease a publisher. In any case, this does not substantiate the rumor that Berlin seriously considered including its future Lebensraum into the pact, much less as ‘a solid totalitarian continental block against the US and the UK’ (ugh).

Click here for other events that happened today (September 27).

1864: Andrej Hlinka, Slovakian fascist, was born.
1938: Franz Halder and other Wehrmacht officers set September 29, 1938 as the launch date of their revolt should Berlin lead the Third Reich into a war over the Sudetenland crisis. In the early afternoon, the Third Reich’s Chancellery moved several divisions to the German–Czechoslovakian border. In the late afternoon, it called for a military parade on the Unter den Linden boulevard in Berlin to rouse a patriotic sentiment; Berlin citizens responded coolly, however. Apart from that, the Third Reich passed law to revoke licenses to practice law for all Jewish attorneys, effective November 30, 1938; thereafter Jewish attorneys could only act as ‘consultants’ for other Jews on matters of law.
1939: Berlin ordered its top military leaders to begin planning for a war in the west, with a target launch date of November 12, 1939. The generals would complain that the date was too soon. As well, Reinhard Heydrich became the head of Reichssicherheitshauptamt, and the Dachau concentration camp temporarily closed until February 18, 1940 for use of training SS units; prisoners of Dachau transferred to Mauthausen.
1940: Julius Wagner‐Jauregg, Fascist eugenicist, dropped dead. At 0900 hours that day, eighty Axis bombers escorted by one hundred fighters flew over Kent toward London, but most of the bombers turned back near Maidstone and Tonbridge; some got through and released their bombs over London. Between 1200 and 1230 hours, three hundred Axis aircraft, mostly fighters, conducted a sweep and engaged in dogfights near London; a score of bombers within this group were able to bomb London. By the end of the day, the Axis lost twenty‐one bombers and thirty‐four fighters. Overnight, the Axis bombed London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Nottingham.
1941: The Axis and its collaborators exterminated 23,000 Jews at Kamenets‐Podolsk, Ukraine, and the Jager Report (issued on December 1, 1941) noted that the Axis slaughtered 989 Jewish men, 1,636 Jewish women, and 821 Jewish children in Eysisky, Lithuania (for a total of 3,446 people). Additionally, Axis submarine U‐201 attacked Allied convoy HG‐73 north of the Azores islands, sinking two merchant ships and the antiaircraft ship HMS Springbank; thirty‐two folk died but two hundred one survived. On the other hand, the Axis garrison at Wolchefit Pass in Ethiopia surrendered to British King’s African Rifles regiment, and Axis troops in plain clothes infiltrated the north gate of the walled city of Changsha, Hunan Province, China, but failed to complete their sabotage mission.
1942: Luftwaffe unit III./KG 4 (flying He 111 bombers) flew its last bombing sortie over Stalingrad. The unit would soon be transported out of its base in Morozovsk, Russia for the German Reich to undergo glider towing training. As well, Axis troops landed on Kuria, Gilbert Islands.
1943: One of the Axis officials in Rome demanded that the Jewish community pay one hundred pounds of gold within three dozen hours or three hundred Jews would become prisoners. The Vatican would open its treasury to help the Jews reach the required amount. Meanwhile the Wehrmacht started to withdraw all forces out of Ukraine to defensive positions on the west side of the Dnieper River, and Italy’s Axis occupation administration arrested thousands of rioters in Naples.
1944: Armeegruppe E withdrew from western Greece, and the Kassel Mission (which aimed to destroy the factories of the engineering works of Henschel & Sohn, which built tracked armoured vehicles and their associated infrastructure) resulted in the largest loss by a USAAF group on any mission in World War II.
2006: Helmut Kallmeyer, a chemist involved in Action T4, finally died.

Publishers summary:

A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union - showing how Gorbachev's misguided reforms led to its demise

In 1945, the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong, 5,000 nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward, the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the 20th century.

Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev's misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, and the crisis of Soviet finances.

Foreword

The United States has long used democracy as a tool and a weapon to undermine democracy in the name of democracy, to incite division and confrontation, and to meddle in other countries’ internal affairs, causing catastrophic consequences. 

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as one of the US government’s main “foot soldiers”, “white gloves” and “democracy crusaders”, has subverted lawful governments and cultivated pro-US puppet forces around the world under the pretext of promoting democracy. Its disgraceful record has aroused strong discontent in the international community. 

In today’s world, peace and development is the theme of the times, and the trend towards greater democracy in international relations is unstoppable. Any attempt to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs in the name of democracy is unpopular and is doomed to failure.

I. NED organizational structure

After World War II, the United States opened a covert front against the Soviet Union through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence apparatus. By the 1960s, the United States had realized gradually that it was far from enough to “promote democracy” through secret means only. There was an urgent need to establish a “public-private mechanism” to openly provide funding. In 1983 and with the efforts of the then US President and some other people, NED was founded as a bipartisan, non-profit institution. 

NED is nominally an NGO that provides support for democracy abroad, but in fact, it relies on continuous financial support from the White House and the US Congress, and takes orders from the US government. Through the provision of funding, it has manipulated and directed NGOs around the world to export American values, conduct subversion, infiltration and sabotage, and incite so-called “democratic movements” in target countries and regions. It is essentially the US government’s “white glove” that serves US strategic interests. 

As early as in 1991, the founder of NED Alan Weinstein put it bluntly in an interview with the Washington Post that a lot of what they were doing was what the CIA had done 25 years ago. NED was therefore known globally as the “second CIA”.

NED has four core institutes: the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, mainly responsible for supporting local political groups; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity responsible for promoting trade unions and labor movements; and the Center for International Private Enterprise for co-opting private enterprises. Through these four institutes, NED has become the mastermind behind separatist riots, color revolutions, political crises, lies and rumors, and infiltration around the world, with an ever-growing list of evils.

II. Instigating color revolutions to subvert state power

NED was seen behind color revolutions instigated and orchestrated by the United States, including the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Arab Spring. 

1.NED instigated color revolutions against “hostile” countries. Early NED documents revealed activities by NED mainly in Eastern Europe to subvert state power in as early as the late 1980s. 

◆ On 27 August 1989, the Washington Post published a report titled “How we helped Solidarity win”, pointing out that NED provided financial support for the Polish Solidarity to help them overthrow the then Polish government, heralding drastic changes in Eastern Europe.

◆ In October 2000, NED financed and instigated the Velvet Revolution in Serbia which overthrew the Milosevic government. In 1999 and 2000, NED funded the Serbian opposition with 10 million and 31 million US dollars respectively for its rapid expansion. NED also helped the secret training of a group of college students before handing them over to the leadership of a student group called Otpor! (Resistance!) that later instigated riots. The Washington Post wrote in its post-mortem analysis of Serbia’s Velvet Revolution that US-funded advisers played a key role behind the scenes in nearly every aspect of the anti-Serbia movement. They tracked the polls, trained thousands of opposition activists and helped organize the crucial parallel vote tabulation.

◆ In 2003, the Rose Revolution broke out in Georgia, and then President Eduard Shevardnadze was forced to step down. In this color revolution, NED planned and participated in the entire process from “selecting” opposition leaders, training the opposition to providing huge funds. After the revolution succeeded, NED continued to offer “generous funds”. In 2004 alone, NED provided nearly 540,000 US dollars to 12 NGOs in Georgia.

◆ At the end of 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the United States offered 65 million US dollars to the Ukrainian opposition through NED and other organizations. When massive anti-government demonstrations broke out in Ukraine in 2013, NED funded as many as 65 NGOs in the country, and even provided large funds to pay “wages” to each and every protester. RIA Novosti reported that NED had invested 14 million US dollars in a project in Ukraine which led to the large demonstrations in 2014 that overthrew the then Yanukovych government. 

2. NED was an important enabler behind the Arab Spring. In Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Syria, Libya and other countries, NED provided financial support to pro-America individuals and groups by supporting professed feminism, freedom of the press, and human rights activities. It exported various kinds of anti-government ideas, incited color revolutions, and plunged the Arab world into war, social unrest and economic recession.

◆ At the end of January 2011, large-scale anti-government demonstrations broke out in Egypt. On 11 February, President Hosni Mubarak resigned. According to US diplomatic cables and other materials obtained by WikiLeaks, NED played an important role in organizing and manipulating anti-government demonstrations in Egypt. Through NGOs such as the National Association for Change and the April 6 Youth Movement, NED provided funding, training and other support to the demonstrations. The name and slogan of the National Association for Change are identical to those of anti-government organizations in other countries that have received NED training. 

◆ In Libya, NED funded, among others, the founders of anti-government organizations Libya Forum for Human and Political Development, Libyan Transparency Association, and the founder of Libya akhbar who fled to London. These groups were active in the 2011 Libyan civil war. 

◆ In Yemen, NED funded and worked closely with NGOs such as the “Women Journalists Without Chains” and played an important role in the 2011 anti-government protests in Yemen. Founder of the “Women Journalists Without Chains” Tawakkol Karman organized and led student rallies against the Saleh government.

◆ In Algeria, a number of organizations involved in the Arab Spring protests received funding from NED. NED’s annual reports revealed that the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights received US funding in 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2010. The National Autonomous Union of Public Administration Staff had close ties with the NED-affiliated American Center for International Labor Solidarity.

3. NED instigated the “color revolution” in Bolivia, forcing President Evo Morales to resign and go into exile. During the nearly 14-year rule of the leftist government under Morales, Bolivia enjoyed political stability and the fastest growth rate in South America. Its poverty rate continued to drop, people’s livelihoods improved markedly, and tensions between the white and the indigenous eased significantly. The Morales government won the general election, but was forced to step down by “street movements” and the military and police. NED played a part in more ways than one.

First, grooming anti-Morales forces over the years. Between 2013 and 2018, NED and USAID provided, by various means, 70 million US dollars to the opposition in Bolivia, funded white elites, former right-wing political figures and other anti-Morales elements, weaved an anti-Morales network spanning across universities, think tanks and civil organizations, and even roped in indigenous Bolivians to stand against Morales. A number of leading figures of the opposition received such financial support or had close interactions with the United States. 

Second, alleging “election fraud” in a brainwashing campaign. Starting from 2018, NED invested 45,000 and 42,000 US dollars respectively through Fundacion para el Periodismo (Foundation for the Media) and Agencia de Noticias Fides Compania de Jesus (FIDES News Agency Company) to encourage right-wing media outlets in Bolivia to dig up dirt about corruption and abuse of power by the Morales government and to label Morales, who was seeking reelection, a “dictator”. It allocated 45,000 US dollars through Fundacion Milenio (Millennium Foundation) to sponsor universities, business councils and NGOs to hype up “fair election” and “judicial transparency”, in order to build up public expectations for Morales’ “election fraud”. 

Third, masterminding street movements. On 29 October 2019, after the result of the general election was released, opposition leaders including Carlos Mesa organized a “peaceful demonstration”, calling for a rerun of the election and distributing cash to the protesters. Opposition leader José Antonio Camacho, who later became a propaganda focus of the right-wing media backed by NED, incited nationwide strikes and became a daring and controllable spokesperson of the United States. NED also spent 200,000 US dollars through the International Republican Institute, a core institute of NED, to improve the mobilizing and organizational capabilities of the opposition parties and give counsel to the “street movements”.

III. Colluding with local political groups to meddle in other countries’ political agenda

By infiltrating target countries, cultivating local anti-government forces and stoking social tensions, NED has been reaching its hands into the internal affairs of other countries.

1. Meddling in Hong Kong’s elections and interfering in China’s internal affairs. NED contacted opposition parties, groups and organizations in Hong Kong through its affiliating National Democratic Institute for International Affairs or the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Since 1997, the NDI has published 18 assessment reports aimed at influencing Hong Kong’s “democratic development”. In 2002, the NDI opened an office in Hong Kong. In 2003, it funded the “1 July marches” orchestrated by the opposition to obstruct legislation on Article 23. In 2004, it funded the participation of opposition parties and groups at workshops and seminars, and provided personal counseling on campaigning skills for their leaders. In 2005, it ran a young political leaders program to support emerging political groups in confronting the government. In 2006, it funded a “Hong Kong Transition Project”. In 2007, it divided its activities in Hong Kong into four programs, i.e. a series of reports entitled “The Promise of Democratization in Hong Kong”, survey of perceptions, the youth’s public engagement and women’s political participation. In 2008, it organized a summit for students. In 2010, it plotted, together with opposition members of the Legislative Council (LegCo), a “five-district referendum” . In 2012, it funded Hong Kong University in opening a “Design Democracy Hong Kong” website, recruited university interns, and funded the summit for students. In 2014, it directed and funded the opposition and young radicals in orchestrating the illegal “Occupy Central” movement.

According to the NED website, 2 million US dollars were spent on 11 Hong Kong-related projects in 2020, with a particular focus on disrupting LegCo elections. Key projects include: “Strengthening Citizen Election Observation”, which offered technical and financial assistance to newly formed destabilizing groups in Hong Kong, and encouraged them to obstruct LegCo elections by means of election monitoring, get-out-the-vote methods, etc.; “Amplifying Citizens’ Perspectives on Political Participation”, which collected and disseminated survey findings on democratic development, and induced young Hong Kongers to share their political participation experiences on the Internet; “Supporting Unity Among Student Activists”, which called for better coordination among Hong Kong student groups prior to LegCo elections, and instructed and trained them to build capacity for “democratic change” and international communication and to play a role in disrupting electoral order; and “Building Regional Solidarity and Empowering the Hong Kong Movement”, which sought to strengthen Hong Kong’s “democratic movement” through network building, cultivate next-generation “leading activists” in Hong Kong, and set up a network of “democratic movement” in Asia.

2. Interfering in Russia’s elections and threatening Russia’s constitutional, defense and national security. According to the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation, between 2013 and 2014, NED allocated 5.2 million US dollars to Russian organizations. In July 2015, NED was declared an “undesirable organization” by Russia. An official statement from Russia pointed out that NED “participated in work to recognize election results as illegitimate, to organize political action with the goal of influencing government policy, and to discredit Russian army service.”

3. Creating political instability in Belarus. The United States masterminded three “color revolutions” against the Belarusian government in 2006, 2010 and 2020 respectively, during which NED played an important role. In 2020, NED spent a total of 2.35 million US dollars in projects related to Belarus. Under the pretext of advancing political processes, NED conducted a project to foster “free and fair elections” with a funding of 80,000 US dollars. Under the project, a comprehensive publicity campaign was launched before presidential elections to inform citizens of electoral rights and independent election monitoring; and during campaigning, education and training on voting were carried out for activists, observers deployed to monitor the voting process, and monitoring findings published through a variety of media outlets.

On 9 August 2020, the incumbent president Alexander Lukashenko won his sixth presidential term with 80.1 percent of the votes. The opposition alleged election fraud, leading to mass protests in Minsk and other cities for days and riots in some regions. NED was very busy during this period. On 17 May 2021, RT released a video call clip between NED’s leadership and opposition figures of Belarus. In the video call, the then NED President Carl Gershman admitted that NED had long been operating across different parts in Belarus and engaged in alleged civil rights activities in eastern Belarus, including Vitebsk and Gomel. NED supported the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, and worked with her team through its core institutes to facilitate the team’s activities.

While commenting on NED’s activities in Belarus, Dmitry Yegorchenkov, a Russian expert on international relations, said that NED funded many “independent media”, and while the funding for any individual media outlet may not look that significant, the recipients are many. According to the NED website, between 2016 and 2020, NED funded 119 projects in Belarus under the category of “Freedom of Information”, spending an average of 50,000 US dollars on each project. This particular category received more funding than any other category for five consecutive years.

4. Interfering in Mongolia’s parliamentary elections. The International Republican Institute (IRI), one of the core institutes of NED, was deeply involved in Mongolia’s parliamentary elections in 1996. In its 1996 annual report, the IRI revealed that it had provided training for the country’s opposition parties on recruitment, organizational building and campaign activities since 1992. At the instigation of the IRI, Mongolia’s scattering “democratic” forces were integrated into two political parties and later formed a unified opposition alliance in early 1996, taking 50 out of the 70 seats in Mongolia’s parliament. According to several NED annual reports, it awarded the IRI over 480,000 US dollars of grants between 1992 and 1996. In 1996 alone, nearly 160,000 US dollars were earmarked for Mongolia’s opposition alliance to win the elections.

5. “Monitoring” the elections and constitutional referendum in Kyrgyzstan. From 2013 to 2020, NED appropriated over 13 million US dollars to media outlets and various NGOs in the country. NED funding for “disruptive news” in Kyrgyzstan reached over 2 million US dollars in 2020, which included the allocation of 300,000 US dollars to the Kloop Media website to “monitor” Kyrgyzstan’s constitutional referendum and local parliamentary elections. The website recruited 1,500 “observers” during the presidential elections in January 2021, and hired 3,000 “observers” during the local parliamentary elections and constitutional referendum in April. 

6. Stirring up protests and demonstrations in Thailand. In 2020, protests and demonstrations broke out in the streets of Thailand. Organizations such as the NED-funded Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR) publicly supported and incited the street protests. The Bangkok Post disclosed that the TLHR had received funds from NED. The Nation, a Thai newspaper, reported that NED has also funded media platforms including Prachatai, an online media outlet, and NGOs such as iLaw, an internet-based legal institution. NED has interfered in the internal affairs of Thailand through these platforms and organizations as they call for the Thai government to amend the constitution. 

7. Inciting the opposition parties in Nicaragua to seize power by force. Supporting pro-US political forces in the central American country of Nicaragua was among the first programs of NED after its inception in 1983. Between 1984 and 1988, NED provided about 2 million US dollars of funds to the opposition forces in Nicaragua, helping their leader Violeta Chamorro to become president-elect in 1990. As of today, NED is still channeling funds to the opposition and right-wing media outlets in Nicaragua via the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation for Reconciliation and Democracy established after Violeta Chamorro stepped down. According to public records, between 2016 and 2019, NED provided at least 4.4 million US dollars to Nicaraguan opposition groups, including media organizations. These forces played key roles in Nicaragua’s violent coup attempt in 2018 when they called on opposition supporters to attack the government and assassinate the president. 

8. Funding anti-Cuba forces to manipulate public opinion against the government. Cuba has long suffered heavily from US infiltration and subversive activities. Cuban media revealed that NED and USAID allocated nearly 250 million US dollars to programs targeting Cuba over the past 20 years. According to the awarded grants disclosed in 2021 on the NED website, it funded 42 anti-Cuba programs in 2020 alone. In 2021, NED funded and guided anti-Cuba forces to fabricate and spread disinformation on social networks to stoke public sentiments against the government, and instigate the people to take part in activities disrupting public order. For instance, in mid-June 2021, anti-Cuba forces rumor-mongered that the country’s health system was overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, causing public panic. In July, capitalizing on the surge of street protests in Cuba, NED churned out the fake news that “(more than) 100 protesters ... are missing” and used Internet robots to disseminate it. That was a malicious attempt to influence public opinion online and incite the Cuban people to overthrow their government.

9. Long-standing interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs. After Hugo Chavez, the “anti-US fighter”, was elected president of Venezuela in 1999, NED accelerated its behind-the-scenes operations. It provided continuous funding to the Venezuelan opposition and invited people to “training courses” in the United States. Since 1999, NED has run activities via the USAID office in the US Embassy and the offices of its core recipient organizations in Venezuela. It stayed in touch with and funded activities of dozens of institutions and opposition parties and organizations in Venezuela in the name of “promoting democracy”, “resolving conflict” and “strengthening civil society”. NED’s spending on interference activities in Venezuela rose year by year. It was 257,800 US dollars in 1999, the largest in Latin American countries. In 2000, it soared to 877,400 US dollars. In 2002, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the US Department of State earmarked as much as 1 million US dollars to support NED programs in Venezuela. In 2019, NED programs in Venezuela totaled 2.66 million US dollars. Among them was an NED project that focused on advancing “political processes”, for “Strengthening Outreach, Communication and Organizational Capacity” with the funding of over 90,000 US dollars, to be used for providing training and support to local activists, to strengthen the communication capacity of democratic actors, to strengthen the nationwide “civil society” network, and to develop communications teams to disseminate across the country a message (of hope and support) for “democracy”.

In October 2005, Juan Guaidó and four other Venezuelan “student leaders” arrived in Belgrade, Serbia to attend NED-funded training for insurrection. After the training, Guaidó and others returned to Venezuela to promote extreme right-wing ideas, in an attempt to influence young Venezuelans, masterminding a series of violent street political activities. Later, Guaidó enrolled at a US university and, with the support of NED, has been active in relevant political groups in the United States. After Guaidó declared himself “interim president” of Venezuela, his Wikipedia page was created shortly afterwards and edited 37 times by NED-affiliated organizations, to support the propaganda for his “legitimacy”. In November 2021, Russia Today reported in an article that a string of recent US internal documents revealed how the United States meddled in the electoral process in Venezuela. Documents showed that US intelligence fronts weaponized social media to promote Venezuela’s right-wing opposition, and assist their election to parliament, thus laying the foundations for Washington’s appointment of Juan Guaido as the country’s leader.

The four core institutes of NED all engage in all kinds of activities in Venezuela. They have built close ties with opposition parties in the country and helped train existing or newly-established opposition parties on organization, management, publicity and other fronts. They have provided several funding packages to the largest opposition union in Venezuela and pushed it to stage anti-Chavez protests and demonstrations. When Nicolás Maduro was sworn in as President on 10 January 2019, the United States and some other countries refused to recognize his new term and instigated Juan Guaidó, then president of the National Assembly and opposition leader, to contend for leadership and openly challenge Maduro. Guaidó then declared himself interim president and demanded a new presidential election, plunging the country into unrest. The turmoil in Venezuela is a telling example of what “color revolutions” plotted by US-backed proxies would incur. NED’s many years of attempts to cultivate Venezuelan opposition elements clearly played a role. In March 2019, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said that funded by NED, many organizations conducted destablizing activities across the country and attempted to overthrow the Venezuelan government over the past 20 years.

10. Orchestrating violent coup to realize regime change in Haiti. The International Republican Institute (IRI) was deeply involved in the 2001 violent coup in Haiti which toppled the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In February 2001, Stanley Lucas, the IRI’s Senior Program Officer for Haiti, openly put forward three ways to dislodge President Aristide at a local radio program. Then US Assistant Secretary of State Roger Francisco Noriega not only collaborated with the IRI to provide funding for the opposition in Haiti, but also gave acquiescence to the opposition’s separatist tactics when mediating the political crisis in Haiti. While claiming to be “promoting democracy around the world”, the IRI was actually in close contact with the opposition in Haiti to conduct subversive operations.

11. Interfering in Uganda’s presidential election by supporting the opposition leader. In Uganda’s presidential election held in January 2021, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, candidate of the opposition National Unity Platform, won 34.83 percent of the vote, coming second. Ssentamu grew up in the slums and was a pop star before entering into politics. Analysts attribute his high popularity largely to the US backing. According to online media, he received training on regime subversion in the United States at the invitation of NED in 2018 on the pretense of seeking medical treatment. Besides, NED also provided funding and assigned counsel to support him during his presidential campaign. 

IV. Funding separatist forces to undermine target countries’ stability 

China has long been a key target of NED’s infiltration and subversion activities. NED invests heavily in anti-China programs every year and attempts to incite “Xinjiang independence”, “Hong Kong independence”, and “Tibet independence” . According to data released on its website in 2020, NED provided over 10 million US dollars of grants for 69 China-related programs within one year which were aimed to deliver various activities endangering China’s political and social stability.

1. NED is the main source of funding for various “Xinjiang independence” organizations. NED claims to have provided 8.7583 million US dollars of grants for various “Uyghur organizations” between 2004 and 2020. In 2020 alone, various “Xinjiang independence” forces received around 1.24 million US dollars of grants from NED, and the bulk of that was channeled to “Xinjiang independence” organizations such as the “World Uyghur Congress” (WUC). Then NED President Carl Gershman openly claimed that to solve the problems in Xinjiang, a color revolution must be held in China and that regime change can turn the country into a federal republic. Speaking at NED’s Democracy Award event in June 2019, Gershman openly supported the idea of “East Turkestan” to embolden “Xinjiang independence” forces. He also called for global attention to so-called human rights issues in Xinjiang and sought to launch an international alliance dedicated to this matter and to sanction China. 

As exposed by US-based website The Grayzone, over the years, NED has directly provided the WUC and the Uyghur American Association (UAA) with millions of dollars, and assisted them in collaborating with governments and legislatures in the United States and other Western countries to level up hostile activities against China. UAA President Kuzzat Altay openly stated that “The most normal thing that I could ever imagine is anti-China activities every freaking day”. The Grayzone’s investigative report showed that when COVID-19 hit the United States in 2020, UAA and its key members fawned on far-right political forces in the United States, branded the coronavirus the “China virus” and incited anti-Asian sentiment.

NED’s Xinjiang-related programs focus on hyping up “human rights crisis” in Xinjiang and are part of the US and Western attempt to use Xinjiang to contain China. In 2019, NED provided 900,000 US dollars of grants for Xinjiang-related programs. Major programs include the program of “Documenting Human Rights Violations in East Turkistan” which was initiated in the name of “defending human rights”, but in reality the program included bribing witnesses and fabricating evidence to justify the so-called charge of “human rights violations” in Xinjiang, and issued nonfactual interim reports and an annual report about education and training centers in Xinjiang; the program of “Empowering Women and Youth for Advocacy and Civic Participation” which provided training on skills and ways of anti-China propaganda and advocacy to Uyghur women and youth, and incited them to carry out anti-China activities; the program of “Defending and Advocating for Uyghur Human Rights” which collected and forged disinformation about “violations of Uyghurs’ human rights” in and outside China, and mounted negative publicity campaigns on Xinjiang-related issues around the world. In 2020, NED provided 1.24 million US dollars of grants for Xinjiang-related programs. Major programs include “Advocating for Uyghur Human Rights through Artistic Interaction” which encouraged “Xinjiang independence” forces in and outside China to hype up Xinjiang-related issues in the name of art, “Documenting and Developing Resources to Strengthen Uyghur Advocacy” designed to build a Uyghur “human rights” database and produce reports to discredit China’s Uyghur-related policies, and “Defending and Advocating for Uyghur Human Rights” and “Empowering Women and Youth for Advocacy and Civic Participation” which were the extension of relevant 2019 programs.

2. NED maintains close ties with “Tibet independence” forces. They have been in contact since 2010 when then Chairman of NED Gershman presented the “Democracy Service Medal” to Dalai Lama. Gershman attended the “Hope and Democracy” event hosted by Dalai Lama in 2016, and celebrated Dalai Lama’s 85th birthday and spoke up for his “Tibet Independence” activities in 2020. On 13 November 2018, NED organized a seminar on Tibet-related issues in the United States, and invited Lobsang Sungen, then “Kalon Tripa” of the “Tibetan Government-in-Exile”. Lobsang Sungen made irresponsible remarks at the event, falsely alleging that the ultimate goal of China’s aid program was to colonize Tibet, and that the international community needed to draw lessons from Tibet’s experience and see China’s hidden ambitions under the Belt and Road Initiative. On 16 June 2021, NED hosted an interview between Penpa Tsering, the new “Sikyong” of the “Central Tibetan Administration”, and Josh Rogin, journalist and columnist with The Washington Post. During the interview, Penpa Tsering claimed that the new “Kashag” will work to resume the stalled “Sino-Tibet dialogue” to find a “lasting, mutually beneficial and non-violent solution”, and will “strengthen international outreach and advocacy”. 

NED’s Tibet-related programs focus on strengthening the “Tibet independence” forces and hyping up the Tibet issue internationally. In 2019, NED provided 600,000 US dollars of grants for Tibet-related programs. Major programs include the program of “Strengthening the Tibetan Movement—Campaigning, Training, and Strategic Organizing” designed both to boost “Tibet independence” elements’ ability to launch social movements in Tibet, and to lobby and push the international community to interfere in Tibetan affairs; the program of “Strengthening International Support for Democracy and Human Rights in Tibet” aimed at cultivating local “Tibet independence” forces, enabling closer collusion between forces in and outside China, and planning and implementing social movements in Tibet; the program of “Strengthening Youth Political Participation” aimed to cultivate the next generation of “Tibetan social movement leaders”; the program of “Create Conditions for Dialogue and Negotiations” aimed to promote “Tibet independence” through so-called academic studies. In 2020, NED provided one million US dollars of grants for Tibet-related programs. Major ones include the program of “Tibet Times Newspaper” which published Tibetan-language newspapers, operated and maintained Tibetan-language websites, and provided the platform for activities of the “Tibetan Government-in-Exile” and “Tibet Independence” organizations; the program of “Strengthening International Support for Democracy and Human Rights in Tibet” which collected evidence about human rights questions in Tibet and smeared the Chinese government’s Tibet-related policies at the UN; the program of “Strengthening Awareness about the Panchen Lama” designed to misguide and misinform the international community about and seek support for the so-called “11th Panchen Lama”, and attack China’s policy on freedom of religious belief; the program of “Strengthening Tibet Monitoring and Information Networks” aimed at closer monitoring and tracking of human rights in Tibet and producing negative Tibet-related report; the program of “Promoting Informed Voting among the Tibetan Electorate” designed to get Tibetans to participate in the so-called election and decision-making of the “Tibetan Government-in-Exile”.

3. NED gives full support to “Hong Kong independence”. It has long carried out projects on so-called “labor rights”, “political reform” and “human rights monitoring” in Hong Kong, and was behind almost all street demonstrations there. According to a research into the NED official website by a Hong Kong public opinion analysis agency “Hong Kong Insights”, since 1994, NED has funded opposition organizations, student movement groups and media outlets in Hong Kong such as the “Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor” and “Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions”, and manipulated them to stage demonstrations and protests. And according to statistics by Du Jia, a researcher with the Consilium Research Institute of Chongqing University, NED has funded Hong Kong projects every year since 1994, investing altogether over 10 million US dollars by 2018.

Since 2003, NED has covertly organized, planned, directed and funded many large-scale street movements in Hong Kong, including the illegal “Occupy Central” movement and the violent demonstrations over proposed legislative amendments. In the anti-amendment turbulence in 2019, NED went from behind the scenes to the front line, directly engaging with major anti-China destabilizing forces in Hong Kong, and offering subsidies and training to those involved in the riots. In May 2019, individuals attempting to sow trouble in Hong Kong including founding chairman of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party Martin Lee, founding chairman of “Demosisto” Nathan Law and former chairman of the “Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China” Lee Cheuk-yan visited the United States to attend an NED event titled “New Threats to Civil Society and the Rule of Law in Hong Kong”, openly begging for US intervention in Hong Kong’s proposed legislative amendments.

In September 2019, NED recruited anti-China elements in Hong Kong to join the board of directors of the Washington-based “Hong Kong Democracy Council”. The establishment of the organization exposed the symbiotic relationship between those anti-China forces and Washington. Most of its board members are leading figures for destabilizing Hong Kong, while its advisory board comprises mainly members of non-governmental organizations such as NED. During the anti-amendment movement in 2019, NED arranged for those forces to wage a propaganda campaign on the international arena, financed activities of their organizations, and frequently sent personnel to Hong Kong to guide protests on the ground. In September 2021, NED held the so-called “The Fight for a Democratic Future” symposium, where Nathan Law made a lie-laden speech to distort the truth and defy justice. Leading organizations in the anti-amendment turbulence such as the “Civil Human Rights Front”, “Demosisto” and “Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions” all received NED funding. In 2021, NED further ramped up support for Hong Kong separatists in exile.

In 2019, NED invested about 640,000 US dollars in projects in Hong Kong. To be specific, under the “Strengthening Civil Society and Human Rights Protection” project, it used human rights as a pretext for colluding with pro-independence and so-called “pro-democracy” groups and politicians to accuse the Chinese Central Government of violating human rights; under the “Promoting Evidence-Based Dialogue and Policy-Making” project, it established a so-called “evidence-based dialogue” mechanism purportedly based on Hong Kong citizens’ views about political and economic issues, with the aim of amplifying the voice of pro-independence elements; under the “Expanding Worker Rights And Democracy” project, it assisted Hong Kong trade unions in enhancing organizational, negotiation and propaganda skills, in the name of promoting democracy and the development of civil society in Hong Kong; and under the “Defending Rule of Law and Freedom in Hong Kong” project, it colluded with local troublemakers and anti-China forces in the international business community and government departments to meddle with the rule of law in Hong Kong and concoct reports on the relationship between Hong Kong’s prosperity and its rule of law and freedoms.

V. Producing disinformation and playing up anti-government narratives

1. Circulating provocative rhetoric to arouse anti-government sentiments among the public. In 2021, Cuba experienced its worst economic crisis in 30 years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and tightened sanctions by the United States. Inflation intensified, and food, medicine and power shortages spread across the country. On 11 July, large-scale anti-government demonstrations broke out in many cities, including the capital Havana. Investigations by the Cuban government found close ties between US government agencies and the demonstrations, in which NED played an important role. In the weeks before the demonstrations, anti-government messages surged on social media, which effectively manipulated public sentiments, caused dissatisfaction and incited protests. In the days shortly before the demonstrations, a large number of new accounts popped up on Twitter, which liked and retweeted unverified anti-government posts, all with the hashtag #SOSCuba. According to the Cuban foreign minister, investigations showed close links between these accounts and a company based in Miami, Florida.

2. Fabricating Xinjiang-related lies to fuel the momentum for containing China. The NED-funded “World Uyghur Congress” and “Human Rights Watch” started and spread such rumors as “genocide” in Xinjiang and “the detention of one million Uyghurs in education and training centers”. After interviewing only eight people, the NED-backed “Chinese Human Rights Defenders”, based on such an absurd small-sample “research”, applied the estimated ratio to the whole of Xinjiang and concluded that one million people were detained in the “re-education detention camps” and two million “forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions”, thus disseminating rumors about Xinjiang. Starting from January 2019, the US State Department and NED launched a household survey of Uyghurs working, studying and living in the United States. Respondents were asked if anyone in their family was in an “education and training center” in Xinjiang, and were instigated to come forward to make accusations, in an attempt to incite protests against the Chinese government.

3. Spreading the “political virus” and politicizing COVID-19 origins-tracing. Since the start of the pandemic, the NED-funded “Uyghur American Association” and its affiliates continuously peddled right-wing conspiracy theories, blaming China for the pandemic and all related deaths, and circulating rumors that China is waging a “virus war” on the world and “purposefully, intentionally exporting the virus to cause the pandemic”. Such rumor-mongering fed anti-China and anti-Asian sentiments in the United States and other Western countries.

4. Fueling tensions and hyping up the concept of “sharp power”. In November 2017, NED’s Vice President for Studies and Analysis Christopher Walker and Senior Program Officer Jessica Ludwig wrote an article on Foreign Affairs titled “The Meaning of Sharp Power: How Authoritarian States Project Influence”, marketing the concept of “sharp power” for the first time and whipping up a new round of “China threat theory”. In December 2017, NED issued a report titled Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence, demonizing China and Russia by alleging that for more than a decade, the two countries have spent huge funds on influencing target countries or groups with non-conventional means such as division, purchased loyalty and manipulation in an attempt to shape global opinion and perceptions.

5. Provoking controversy and stigmatizing China’s press policy. The NED-funded “Reporters Without Borders” has long instigated the international community, advertisers, press unions and foreign governments to treat Chinese media differently and be vigilant against their so-called “threat”. Since COVID-19 struck, the “Reporters Without Borders” made such irresponsible remarks as urging China to “stop censoring information about coronavirus epidemic” and warning against the government’s “increased repression” against journalism. It also fabricated rumors that many Chinese journalists face “years of detention in prisons, where ill-treatment can lead to death”.

VI. Funding Activities and Academic Programs for the Purpose of Ideological Infiltration

1.NED has created various “democracy awards” to encourage dissidents in other countries to help the US “export” democracy. Since 1991, NED has been granting the Democracy Award annually to political activists and dissidents in countries including Russia, China, DPRK, Myanmar, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and Ukraine in recognition of “defending human rights and democracy”. Since 1999, it has been giving out the Democracy Service Medal annually. In 2002, the medal was awarded to Wu Shu-chen, wife of the then Taiwan authorities leader Chen Shui-bian. In 2010, the medal was awarded to the 14th Dalai Lama，the so-called “Tibetan spiritual leader in exile”. NED also uses the global assemblies of the World Movement for Democracy to grant the Democracy Courage Tributes. Since the Eighth Global Assembly in 2015, names related to China has begun to appear on the list of recipients. Anti-China organizations and individuals seeking independence for Tibet or Hong Kong or related to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) have successively received the Tributes. For example, an Eighth Assembly (2015) recipient is Nathan Law, a “Hong Kong independence” separatist; a Ninth Assembly (2018) recipient is Jin Bianling, wife of the so-called “human rights lawyer” Jiang Tianyong; and among the Tenth Assembly (2021) recipients are Hong Kong Watch, a British anti-China organization seeking to disrupt Hong Kong, Students for a Free Tibet, a “Tibet independence” organization, and Campaign for Uyghurs, an ETIM-related group. Among the recipients, Nathan Law is the founding chairman of Demosistō, an organization pursuing “Hong Kong independence”, and is wanted by Hong Kong police for law-breaking activities aimed at destabilizing Hong Kong. Jiang Tianyong is the mastermind behind disinformation such as “detained lawyer Xie Yang was tortured”, and was involved in meddling in and playing up sensitive cases, inciting illegal gatherings to cause public disorder and collaborating with overseas forces, seriously endangering national security and social stability. Hong Kong Watch has received a warning letter from Hong Kong police for suspected violation of Article 29 of the National Security Law on “collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security”. Students for a Free Tibet sent eight of its key members including then Executive Director Lhadon Tethong to China in 2008 to conduct sabotage activities. Campaign for Uyghurs, a group of Uyghur separatists in exile, is a branch of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an ultra-nationalist organization, and its mission is to subvert China and establish an “East Turkestan” nation state.

On 4 June 2019, NED exploited the 30th year since the 1989 political disturbance to give the 2019 Democracy Award to the Tibet Action Institute (TAI), the WUC and ChinaAid, organizations seeking independence of Tibet and Xinjiang or related to ETIM and “democracy movements”. 

2. Since 2004, NED has held the Lipset Lecture Series annually in the United States and Canada, and published the lecture in its Journal of Democracy. While most of the lecturers are well-known political scholars, the lectures are heavily ideological. For example, the 2020 lecture was titled “Totalitarianism’s Long Dark Shadow over China” given by American political scientist Pei Minxin.

3. NED makes grants to the Egyptian Democratic Academy, an NGO, for ideological infiltration in Egypt. In June 2011, the then US ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson acknowledged that her country had spent no less than 40 million US dollars to “promote democracy” in Egypt since February 2011. 

4. In October 2013, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), one of NED’s core grantees, received over 300,000 US dollars from NED to “improve the communication skills of political activists in Venezuela”. Before Venezuela’s local elections in December 2013, the NDI hosted seminar outside Venezuela to provide “expert advice” on the use of technology and social media for citizen outreach and engagement. Moreover, NED created a virtual toolbox, offering “online customized capacity-building courses on a range of issues relating to political innovation”, which remains active today. These measures did make an impact on Venezuela’s 2015 legislative elections: The Democratic Unity Roundtable, the opposition coalition, claimed a historic National Assembly majority.

5. At the end of 2016, NED sponsored Edward Leung and Ray Wong, separatists seeking “Hong Kong independence”, to study at Harvard and Oxford respectively. In 2017, Johnson Yeung, the former convener of the Civil Human Rights Front, an organization seeking to destabilize Hong Kong, participated in an NED visiting fellows program, in which he talked with civic groups and protesters from South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, and learned from their experience of democratic and social movements. 

6. For years, NED has been funding the Interethnic Interfaith Leadership Conference, which has been held 15 times as of November 2020. Many participants are members of separatist groups seeking independence of Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong and Taiwan or with Falun Gong. In a keynote speech at the 13th Conference in December 2018, the then NED President Carl Gershman asserted that “China today poses the greatest threat to democracy in the world” and clamored for “supporting for the development of democracy” in China.

7. On 3 June 2019, NED hosted a conference themed “China’s Repression Model”, which claimed that China’s model is eroding the western democratic system through a new generation of technology.

8. From 27 to 30 March 2022, current NED President and CEO Damon Wilson led a delegation to Taiwan, and announced during a press conference that NED would co-host the 11th Global Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy with the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy in October 2022 in Taipei, giving support to the “Taiwan independence” forces under the disguise of democracy.

9. NED makes grants to “civil rights” organizations on a regular basis in the name of funding academic seminars and training. Detailed NED grants to Tibet and Xinjiang in 2020 showed that groups such as the Tibetan Youth Association and the WUC, organizations seeking independence of Tibet and Xinjiang, had received funding from NED for workshops, which provided forum to Tibetans in exile and “Tibet independence” separatists inside China, and for capacity-building training for young Uyghurs to spread a narrative of “Uyghur crisis” in local communities.

10. NED has long provided funding for the training of “politically active” Sudanese young people. In 2020, the Regional Center for Training and Development of the Civil Society (RCDCS) received the Democracy Award for training hundreds of young people across Sudan on “democracy” and activism.

this lower mandible had cut marks proving that neither rank nor status governed who was used for food in those hellish final days of the Franklin expedition.

Interesting to see the agriculture versus huntgather dialectic. And also the sedentary versus pastoral dialectic within agriculture.

There are a handful of statist places: Vietnam, China, Italy-Greece and a few others, but mostly anarchs.

Iceland, Madagascar, and New Zealand are virgin to man.