By Cynical Publius | Commentary, X

America is currently in the midst of a color revolution designed to overthrow our Constitutional form of government. The only way to stop it is awareness.

(This is going to be a lengthy article, but please bear with me because I believe we all need to understand what is happening in the shadows.)

If you are not already aware of the treasure trove* of seditionist materials that @DataRepublican has uncovered, please stop now and review them, or at least listen to this audio describing the seditionist plot in the seditionists’ own words. Please come back to this article after you listen.

Are you back?

Great, thanks.

THAT, friends, is what a color revolution sounds like.

However, if we are all going to fight this rebellion with our own words and deeds, we need the knowledge to be able to spot exactly what the fight looks like. To that end, I am writing this article to educate American patriots on what a color revolution actually is, what its key strategies consist of, and how those strategies relate to what we are seeing being unleashed in the USA today.

What is a Color Revolution?

Wikipedia defines a “color revolution” as follows:

“[Color revolutions] are a series of often non-violent protests and accompanying (attempted or successful) changes of government and society taking place in post-Soviet states (particularly Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan) and the former Yugoslavia during the 21st century. The aim of the color revolutions is to establish Western-style democracies. They were primarily triggered by election results widely viewed as falsified. The color revolutions are marked by the use of the internet as a method of communication, as well as a strong role of non-governmental organizations [(“NGOs”)] in the protests.”

USAID and the CIA were instrumental in fomenting the color revolutions in Serbia (the “Bulldozer Revolution,” 2000), Georgia (the “Rose Revolution,” 2003), Ukraine (the “Orange Revolution,” 2004-2005), Kyrgyzstan (the “Tulip Revolution,” 2005), Lebanon (the “Cedar Revolution”, 2005), Belarus (the “Jeans Revolution,” 2006), Ukraine again (the “Revolution of Dignity” 2013-2014) and Armenia (the “Velvet Revolution,” 2018). These are only the ones we know about publicly, and there are also suspicions that similar U.S. governmental actions took place in the “Arab Spring” of 2010 to 2012.

While the main government players in all of this on the U.S. side were the CIA and USAID, “non-profit” NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy (“NED,” directly congressionally funded), the National Democratic Institute (“NDI,” funded by grants from USAID, the Department of State and NED), the International Republican Institute (“IRI,” similarly funded by grants from USAID, the Department of State and NED), Freedom House (also similarly funded by grants from USAID, the Department of State and NED), and a plethora of other NGOs (many funded by George Soros’s infamous Open Society network) have done most of the dirty work.

Understanding the role of NGOs in all of this is crucial—NGOs provide a way for U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund foreign policy actions that are difficult to track and often run counter to the intent of a majority of American voters.

These NGOs all have one thing in common—they are all vocally dedicated to “protecting democracy.” However, when examining their track record of fomenting revolution, it’s arguable that many of the regimes they overthrew were, in fact, democratically elected (at least to standards no more corrupt than America’s 2020 Presidential election). This is particularly true with respect to the Revolution of Dignity and the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected President, Viktor Yanukovych.

Far be it for me to uphold ex-Soviet oligarchs, but it appears that the devotion of these NGOs to “democracy” is actually to “democracies we approve of.”

We will come back to the NGOs.

How Do Color Revolutions Work?

There are numerous academic treatises on the features of color revolutions, but my personal research suggests that they rely upon six lines of attack:

1. Funding.

Those U.S. NGOs you see listed above operate by funding other NGOs and individuals inside the targeted nation. Dark U.S. money becomes even darker money inside the targeted nation. These organizations build parallel structures that can operate outside national control and coordinate/sustain protest capacity at a tightly-organized, high level.

2. Training.

The well-funded NGOs and individuals then engage in highly structured activist training programs. Often pyramidal in nature (i.e., “train the trainers”), these programs cover branding, the processing of parallel vote counts, actions that erode the legitimacy of existing governmental institutions and maintaining ostensibly nonviolent discipline to maximize activist legitimacy.

3. Narrative and Symbolism.

The narrative of government illegitimacy must be pushed and repeated over and over and over. Complicit media sources are essential to creating and sustaining this narrative (often with cash changing hands to publish a particular story). Very basic symbolism is also vital. The name “color revolution” itself refers to the use of an inspiring color to unify the activists and present a constant reminder of the surge of activism engulfing the country via clothing, signs and banners—the “Orange Revolution” is a perfect example. Logos, slogans, hashtags and similarly pithy symbolic expressions are essential in delegitimizing the targeted regime and present regime change as the only “democratic” outcome.

4. Electoral Trigger.

A big part of the dark money is used to deploy “independent” election monitors, create fake pre-election polling and fake exit polling, and rapidly publicize perceived “irregularities” to create a clear trigger for mass protests. NGO networks then convert the disputed vote into sustained mass street action. While the architects of color revolutions consistently highlight the “non-violent” nature of their protests, certain groups are designated to engage in covert (i.e., masked) violent action, and other groups are essentially sent to the slaughter in hopes that the government will violently crack down and create martyrs. (Although this name pre-dates color revolutions, such deliberate martyrdom is what I call the “Horst Wessel Strategy.”)

5. Elite pressure.

This is the process of relying on outside agents of high legitimacy to create public statements of support for the protestors and activists, create targeted sanctions or incentives for the current government to step down, and to quietly engage with military, bureaucratic, and business elites in the targeted government. The aim is to isolate the current government internationally and signal that cooperation with the old regime carries higher costs than accommodation with the protesters.

6. Defection of Security Forces and Military.

One of the main purposes of all of the above is to convince a nation’s military and security/police forces that they are a part of an illegitimate regime and that the only moral choice is to defect to the opposition. Ramping up violent protests such that these people must choose between firing on their own countrymen or defecting is a fundamental tenet of color revolutions, supposed “non-violent” practices notwithstanding. In high-trust societies where the military is well-respected, this is perhaps the most important tool in the color revolutionary’s tool box. When the military and police defect, the color revolution is over, and it wins.

These are the tools the U.S. government and its well-funded network of NGOs have been using for decades to foment the overthrow of disfavored national governments, all without approval or knowledge of the electorate. Then Donald Trump dismantled USAID, and it all stopped.

Or did it? All those ex-USAID employees had to go find something to do, and boy oh boy did they ever.

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