Gene Sharp, the “Machiavelli of nonviolence,” has been fairly described as “the most influential American political figure you’ve never heard of.” Sharp, who passed away in January 2018, was a beloved yet “mysterious” intellectual giant of nonviolent protest movements, the “father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action.” Over his career, he wrote more than twenty books about nonviolent action and social movements. His how-to pamphlet on nonviolent revolution, From Dictatorship to Democracy, has been translated into over thirty languages and is cited by protest movements around the world. In the U.S., his ideas are widely promoted through activist training programs and by scholars of nonviolence, and have been used by nearly every major protest movement in the last forty years. For these contributions, Sharp has been praised by progressive heavyweights like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times, compared to Gandhi, and cast as a lonely prophet of peace, champion of the downtrodden, and friend of the left.
Gene Sharp’s influence on the U.S. activist left and social movements abroad has been significant. But he is better understood as one of the most important U.S. defense intellectuals of the Cold War, an early neoliberal theorist concerned with the supposedly inherent violence of the “centralized State,” and a quiet but vital counselor to anti-communist forces in the socialist world from the 1980s onward.
With the rise of the Reagan-era foreign policy of communist “rollback,” Sharp began promoting “strategic nonviolence” internationally through his Albert Einstein Institution (AEI). Sharp co-founded AEI with his former student Peter Ackerman, who was simultaneously right hand man to the notorious corporate raiding “junk bond king” Michael Milken. Later, Ackerman was a Cato Institute board member and advocate of disemboweling social security. AEI spent the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s training activists, policymakers, and defense leaders around the world in Sharp’s nonviolent methods, supporting numerous “color revolutions”—again and again in state socialist countries whose administrations were attempting to oppose the privatization, austerity policies, and deregulation being pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and U.S. Treasury-led “Washington Consensus.” Sharp’s “people-powered” nonviolent “ju-jitsu” would prove surprisingly effective, distinguishing itself as a powerful weapons system in the U.S. regime change arsenal. While AEI was an independent non-profit, it had significant connections to the U.S. defense and intelligence community. One prominent AEI consultant was Colonel Robert Helvey, former dean of the National Defense Intelligence College. AEI’s regular funders included U.S. government pass-throughs like the U.S. Institute for Peace, the International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
The same year the NED was founded, Gene Sharp launched the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI), a public-facing non-profit dedicated to advancing “the worldwide study and strategic use of nonviolent action.” Thomas Schelling, Sharp’s Cold War mentor from the CIA at Harvard, would sit on the board of directors. With neoliberalism at home and communist rollback abroad, Sharp and AEI staff would spend the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s tracking, studying, consulting with, and training nonviolent social movements calling for “democratic freedoms and institutions” around the world.
According to its own annual reports, AEI did not prioritize fighting dictators and promoting “democratic freedoms and institutions” in US client states like Saudi Arabia, Zaire, Chile, El Salvador, or Guatemala. These countries are either never mentioned, or mentioned only in brief passing, in two decades worth of AEI annual reports. Rather, AEI and its adjuncts consistently focused their efforts in countries where political leadership was resisting NATO’s geostrategic priorities and/or the economic liberalization programs being pushed by the World Bank, the IMF, and U.S. Treasury’s “Washington Consensus”: countries like the Soviet Union, Burma, Thailand, Tibet, Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and post-collapse Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. In a number of these cases, the movements trained in Sharp’s methods successfully executed nonviolent revolutions—sometimes called “velvet revolutions” or “color revolutions,” for the telltale use of an official movement color.
Follow-up articles:
Thanks: I was oblivious to any fascist Italian involvement.