Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/17/23 Kit Klarenberg on the Georgia Uprisings and the National Endowment for Democracy

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Kit Klarenberg is back to provide some important context for the uprisings in Georgia. They start with the Eastern European country’s transition after the fall of the Soviet Union and the influence that the U.S. has enjoyed there since. That brings them to the recently proposed legislation that would have required Georgian organizations to disclose funding from any foreign governments. The proposal was met with sharp condemnation from Western officials who labeled it a threat to the Georgian people’s ability to fulfill their own economic and social aspirations. Scott and Klarenberg talk about how ludicrous this assertion is and pull back the curtain on what really explains the protests that erupted as a result.  Discussed on the show: “Dare Call It A Coup? CIA Front Threatens Color Revolution In Georgia” (MintPress News) Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got kit clarenberg again he is an investigative journalist and contributor at mint press news and previously he's written for the cradle declassified uk and the gray zone And here he is at Mint Press News with Dare, call it a coup. CIA Front Threatens Color Revolution in Georgia.

Welcome back to the show, Kit. How you doing? Yeah, well, thanks. Well, great. Happy to have you back on the show here. So we talked with Dan McAdams last Friday about this, but you've developed the story a little bit further. And I think this is a really important one for people to keep track of.

I was asked about this actually on OANN on TV last Friday. And I took a moment to clarify for the audience. We're talking about former Soviet Georgia in the Southern Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Because it's actually true. I've heard anecdotes like this that when we talk about Georgia, a lot of times people think you're talking about the state between Florida and South Carolina. And particularly one anecdote I heard was that when Russia, you know, counterattacked against Georgia in August of 2008, that people thought Russia was invading Georgia. That was what TV said. And our Georgia is the only Georgia a lot of Americans have ever heard of in their life.

So instead, we're talking about 8,000 miles away from here. It couldn't possibly be in the interest of anyone listening to this, but it absolutely is in the interest. of our government to intervene over there. So why don't we start with that? Since the American people don't, why, Kit, does the U.S. government care who's in charge of former Soviet Georgia? Okay. I mean, it's interesting what you just said

because I was at university when the war between Russia and Georgia happened and I had several American friends who were, yes, convinced that Russia had invaded the U.S. and were urgently phoning home to make sure everyone was okay. But I mean, so, I mean, Georgia is a very small country. It's a population of less than four million estimates of area of its size.

But this was a fundamental part of the Soviet Union for, you know, the best part of a century. And, you know, Stalin was originally from there. And in effect, the, in the wake of the, well, the, you know, the end of the Cold War, it became to be led by an individual called Edward Shevardnadza, you know, as it was independent. Now, he was a long-time Soviet apparatchik and had served as the kind of the Soviet commissar for Georgia for many years,

but he was also, in many ways, the West Guy. So he had been heavily involved in Mikhail Gorbachev's end of Soviet Union reform program, and had effectively ended the Soviet Empire as it existed in Europe. He had withdrawn Red Army troops from the Warsaw Pact countries, Poland, the Czechoslovak as it was then. He had signed arms control treaties with the U.S. He ended the Soviet war in Afghanistan. And he was on very friendly terms with James Baker, somewhat ironically, given what would later transpire, he was in the meeting with Gorbachev and

Baker, where Baker said that NATO would not expand the one inch eastwards. And I said, say this is ironic because when he came to power in 1992, he immediately, in Georgia, sorry, he immediately set the country on a, on a program of kind of radical westernizing reform. So the economy was heavily privatized, which greatly benefited European and American oligarchs. He was a, he altered the law to allow foreign funded organizations to operate with pretty much total, you know, a total lack of oversight or restriction in terms of the, in terms of their activities. And he also was pushing towards the end of the, the 20th century for EU and NATO membership for Georgia. So, but I mean, in the midst of this, there was an individual

called Mikhail Saakashvili, who he was a lawyer who'd trained on a State Department scholarship at Columbia of all places. By the way, I'm sorry, I have to interrupt here. to say it's the show's old friend, the other Scott Horton, who in the Bush years is absolutely heroic on torture issues and stuff like that, but is a severe anti-Russia hawk. He was Shokkashvili's professor at Columbia. Oh, really? So if anybody ever reads that I taught Mikal Shokashvili at college, I dropped out of ACC.

That's the other Scott Horton. Sorry, go ahead. And no, in fact, other Scott insists that Shokashvili started out as a lot of. a good guy and was really just, you know, you mentioned his anti-corruption crackdown. You know, in a lot of places, an anti-corruption crackdown just means picking on your enemies. But apparently, he really believed and, you know, had read some Mises and understood, you can't have market capitalism with all this corruption in the state. You have to have real protection of property rights and things like this.

And so he really tried at first to make things better, but then eventually, you know, he wasn't a businessman. man. He was a president. And so he did what all presidents do, do his very best to turn into a power mad warlord and ended up going completely crazy and eating his tie on TV. Oh, yes. I mean, but I think that Sakishvili always had a bit of that in him. And so in, in 2000, George Soros visits to Blissy, which is the capital of Georgia. And he meet, this was at Shevard Nadz's express invitation. And he was a guest at the presidential palace and he opened a Georgia Division of Open Society Foundation. Now, on this trip, Soros also met with Sakhishvili,

who was at the time the government's justice minister. And not long after Soros departs Georgia, suddenly Sackishvili becomes a vociferous anti-government critic and quit his post and started up a party called National Movement, which then very quickly began. receiving Western funding and Soros funding. And then, so you fast forward to 2002, where all of these kind of Soros-funded opposition media outlets

have been intensifying their anti-Shevard Naze coverage. And there's an election in November that year. It was ostensibly won by a coalition of pro-Shevard Nazi parties, but some polling, which had been commissioned and conducted by the National Endowment for Democracy, indicated that the result was actually very much in the opposition's favour. So there had been a falsification of the result. Now, this led to nationwide protests and this student activist group called Kamara was at the forefront of them.

And they bust all of these protesters into Tbilisi to cause havoc outside the parliament building. And they had a large TV screen and speakers broadcasting and Soros-funded media. and such was the fraccar and also the threat that this, you know, peaceful protests would erupt into violence, Shevard Nadezay resigned. Now, it was only subsequently that it was admitted that this was entirely the work of the NED. Now, I mean, just to get your listeners up to speed, NED was founded in 1983 following a series of very embarrassing scandals for the CIA. And its express purpose was to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, which is, fund opposition parties, opposition media, activist groups, and other kind of anti-government elements

in countries of interest in the State Department, which is all of them, you know, pretty much. And apart from maybe Israel. And then therefore create these kind of shadow armies of regime change operatives who could be mobilized to stir up unrest if a government didn't act as Washington required. Now, I mean, by that point, it already, NED had already pulled off a similar ruse in Serbia in 2000, where they'd used this exact blueprint. They'd funded a student group called OPPOR and then trained them in communication strategies

and funded them to plaster Belgrade with anti-Molosovic graffiti and posters. And then this was all funded by the US, and it started to be exported to other portions of the former. Soviet sphere, as it were. But then, yes, so that you have the election of Sakhashvili in January 2014, and he further intensifies the Western push of Georgia. And yes, it seems did drastically increase the country's gross domestic product and average incomes, although poverty remained quite high. I think it was about quarter of the population lived underneath the internationally recognized poverty line. And so, I mean, in 2000, I mean, he'd been, you know, a Western

darling throughout this. In 2008, with the, with U.S. encouragement, he started shelling civilian areas of two, there are two breakaway regions on the periphery of Georgia on its border with Russia. And there's Abkhazia and South of Setsia. And they are populated by people who do not identify as Georgian. And their relationship ever since independence has been extremely strained. I mean, you know, Shevardnadza came to power at a time when a brutal and bloody civil war was being fought by the, you know, kind of Georgia's rather puny and armed forces versus breakaway militias from these two regions. And so in 2008, he had the Sakashvili with direct US encouragement and the promise of kind of unconditional support if he did this, started

shelling these areas. Now, Russia intervened and it was an absolutely brutal routing. I mean, you know, Russia is, it literally shares a border with Georgia. It was very easy for them to invade. They have, you know, a much bigger, more powerful, best equipped armed forces. It was over in five days. I mean, even that led to, you know, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people and, you know, hundreds or indeed thousands of deaths. And then it seems, you know, Sakashvili very much fell out of favor with, with the Georgian public. It was revealed that prisons would basically become these politicized hotbeds of rape where his rivals would get sent. and then they would be, you know, tortured, you know, at his request.

It was clear that he was having his political rival, rival assassinated. This included, you know, oligarchs who were in opposition to him. And so in 2012, he lost fair and swear despite support from NED. And then he, you know, resigned and was praised for his democratic principles by the US. But ever since then, a party called Georgian Dream has, led a coalition government at the biggest party. Now, they are attacked for being pro-Russian by their detractors, which includes a lot of any defunded groups, as it were. And also, I mean, I'll get into this later in more detail. It's very clear that the West really doesn't like them.

And they are slammed as being, yes, pro-Russian in the pocket of Putin. The reality is that they are straddling a quite difficult tightrope. between, on the one hand, pushing for greater integration with the West, while also, you know, are trying to maintain peaceful coexistence with Russia. Now, Russia is Georgia's second biggest trading partner in terms of imports and exports. It has, you know, significant, there is a large amount of money flows from Russia back to Georgia in the form of remittances. They have, you know, they do much of the chagrin of much of the population, I would imagine. They do have close, historical, cultural and other ties. So it doesn't make sense in that context for them to be

enemies. In fact, actually, it's very much too, you know, we're seeing in Ukraine what happens when Russia feels that it's security interests of being threatened. You know, it's just, it's just a pragmatic approach. Now, they have come under enormous pressure since the war in Ukraine began to impose Russian sanctions, which overnight would destroy their economy. You know, I mean, quite literally, it would just be, you know, there would be a deep and coherent financial crisis from which they would, you know, not emerge, or at least, you know, sorry, never emerge, or at least, you know, not anytime soon. And so they've also been subject to enormous pressure, apparently directly from Kiev, to send weapons to Ukraine and open, if not open, a dedicated second front in the war with Russia. and they have steadfastly refused, which has not gone down well with Zelensky or it seems the Biden White House. Now, one has to wonder in this context whether they were pushing ahead

with this. It's called an anti- NGO law or a foreign agent law. But I mean, really, it's neither of those things. What it would necessitate would be if an organisation receives over 20% of its income from outside Georgia, it would have to disclose that. And then there would be an accompanying label that they were a foreign, that they were a foreign agent of influence. But, I mean, it's just, you know, basic disclosure. And it would be, you know, the context in which they would have to disclose, it would be limited.

And, you know, this effectively acts as a permit to operate. Now, this triggered absolutely, sorry, one has to wonder whether the government pursued this because they were worried about another Rose revolution, similar to the one that overthrew Edward Shevardanza, coming to the policy again. And so, I mean, and, you know, they weren't wrong because, if so, because these incendiary protests which broke out in the second week of March and, you know, just got ever, ever more incendiary.

I mean, there were, you know, protesters burning things down, engaging in violent clashes with police, daubing anti-Russian graffiti on every available surface. And on social media and in the news media in Georgia, there were all of these individual and organizations very viciously condemning this proposed legislation. All of them, pretty much, were in receipt of funding from NED, which is a very, very striking feature.

And you also have it during this time, people like Samantha Power that notorious rather charmless Warhol and Ned Price, the State Department spokesperson, who were pretty much directly threatening Georgian lawmakers saying

this law is contrary to the vision that we have for Georgia and to democratic values and if you pass it you will be, you know, you will be personally responsible for destroying Georgia's Euro Atlantic integration ambitions.

And, you know, there was similar, there was some similar allulations and rhetoric about, you know, freedom and democracy and human rights issuing from these organizations that would be affected by this law, which is particularly odd, given that a lot of them publish this information voluntarily anyway. So, I mean, you know, typically in the modern day when we hear, when questions, suggestions of foreign interference,

in unrest in a in a country abound or a government is overthrown or a president deposed uh yeah like suggestions that this was in some somehow orchestrated by the u.s empire one way or another are typically dismissed on the basis of appeals to the protesters individual agency and their legitimate grievances um it is completely inconceivable that people were so righteously concerned minor legislative amendment that they would take to the streets like that. I mean, it's just inconceivable to me, and I can't imagine, you know, that this would be, the similar scenes would play out, yes, you know, in Israel, if the government passed a similar law, because NED doesn't operate there. You know, and so in effect, the government was successfully

bleed and pressured into backing down. I mean, again, they might have worried that the initial protests would lead to, you know, attempts to overthrow the government. The protesters were on the verge of entering Georgia's parliament building, as happened in 2003. And, I mean, I wrote in my article from Min Press, I concluded this with, you know, a kind of very stark warning, which is that the threat of an NED-sponsored colour revolution in Tbilisi has not gone anywhere. And in fact, will remain as long as NED operates on its soil. You know, fast forward to yesterday and a publication called Georgia Today, the former editor of which is now an NED fellow and also a Fox News anchor interviewed a Lithuanian MEP who previously spoken at an NED-sponsored event at the European

Parliament. And he said that, yes, that voters must choose between Georgia and dream or EU membership. You can't have both. And yes, there are indications that there are clashes between anti-EU elements and pro-EU elements on the streets of Tbilisi. So, I mean, particularly in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, where even the mainstream media is beginning to admit that far from this epic, heroic, miraculous David and Koliath success for Ukraine, This is actually a bloody quagmire. They are losing, and they're losing badly. And, you know, the U.S. is also kind of in a position where it needs to decide what it does next,

whether it goes all in or it withdraws its support for the proxy war. And there's, you know, talk of NATO potentially helping Ukraine try to take Crimea. In that context, opening a second front has probably never been more urgent from the perspective of the warhawks in Washington and London and other centers of imperial power. So, yeah, I mean, will we see another attempted color revolution in weeks come? I mean, quite possibly, quite possibly, and, you know, the installation of a government that is willing to sanction Russia and indeed is willing to open a second front. Yeah, sorry, hang on just one second.

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Get tickets now. Okay, so there's a lot there, but I mean, one of the main factors here is that the president, who was elected with the support of this party. She happened to be in the United States at the time for International Women's Day or something like this, but she is very clearly supported by the United States.

And so it's not really an attempt to overthrow her. It's just an attempt to overthrow or limit the power of the party that had helped support her rise to power, but that she's not necessarily obligated to, isn't that right? Well, yeah. I mean, I think that the Georgian presidency is ever since Sackashvili left office because he, I mean, just again, this is important to underline because this is so often a narrative in, you know, color, U.S. sponsored color revolutions. Chevard Naza was when the U.S. atoll turned on him, transformed from, you know, a semi-autocratic

post-S.-soviet leader to, you know, Hitler and Kahn. Right. When Sachsvili came to power, he, he, um, centered, you know, um, all power in his own hands. Like actually, you know, Shevard Nardza was, you know, was neither brutal nor was he, you know, a dictator in the, in the, in the authoritarian sense, you know, that he was, you know, far from perfect. But, um, you know, Sakashvili effectively turned Georgia into his own personal fiefdom. And ever since he left office, there had been efforts to greatly roll back. the power and competency of the president's office. Now, the Georgia's current president, she was handpicked by Sacchusvili. She's a fellow Columbia graduates to serve as a foreign

minister, I believe. And, you know, her background was she was born in France, lived there all her life, and then served as ambassador, France's ambassador to Georgia, you're coming, herself from a diplomatic background. She doesn't speak Georgian very well. And indeed, it's a regular subject of ridicule in the Georgian media that she can't speak Georgian very well and makes all sorts of verbal gaffs that make George Bush look positively articulate. And, you know, her daughter works for France 24, which is, you know, effectively France's BBC. And all that implies. And not only that, but she is the head of the White House International Press Court. So, you know, and yes, the president just so happened to be in the US while all of this unrest was kicking off and, you know, posted videos of herself standing in front of the Statue of Liberty talking about how she opposed this legislation.

Of course, you know, in a country that has very well established foreign agents laws of its own. And yeah, I mean, that's a very bizarre, I mean, this is just a kind of farcical aspect in this. But another, you know, truly ludicrous feature is that on top of U.S. officials condemning this law in the most kind of menacing, ferocious terms imaginable, the EU got involved as well. And so there was Joseph Borrell and all these other, you know, pen pushers who were saying that, oh, and if Georgia adopts this, it will be in, in, stark contravention of the EU values of liberty and democracy and fridly, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Pretty much the second the Georgian government announced that they were shelving this law, the EU announced that it was going to pursue foreign agent legislation that was almost identical and would require organisations in the EU to disclose if they receive funding from, you know,

elsewhere in the world. And, you know, they were, they were specifically, under the legislation, specifically organizations like Transparency International would have to register as foreign agents. I mean, that's how, you know, wide ranging and sweeping it would be. So, you know, we've gone from, oh, you can't join the EU if you force NGOs to disclose their foreign funding to, oh, well, we're going to do it and you're going to have to implement this yourself if you're a member. Right. I mean, it's just, it's absolutely ludicrous. Well, and the proponents of the bill said that they were basing it on the American Foreign Agents

Registration Act of 1938 which they had apparently read because they knew that it was past the same years that horrible gun control law and everything. So, you know, they knew what was the time with that. And of course, probably virtually

every sovereign nation on the planet has a foreign agents registration act. Or it, the American position is it absolutely must be legal for every national, sovereign government on the planet to allow other national sovereign governments to spend unlimited amounts of money intervening in their politics. Really? Yeah. I mean, I think that this is something to bear in mind is that, you know, like Georgia remains, you know, a very

poor country in, you know, in international terms. And, you know, a tiny, even a few thousand dollars would go, you know, a very, very, very long way. I mean, that would be, you know, many orders of magnitude in excess of their, you know, average, you know, monthly wage. And so, you know, in the circuit, if you were to, you know, flip this proportionally to the US, so for instance, you know, the, the NED, US aid and the State Department, and probably the CIA and, and other US government agencies, too, spend around 40 million that we know of to try and get rid of Milosevic. And then, you know, at this time, the average wage in Yugoslavia, as it then was, was about $30 a month. Now, if this was, yeah, so, I mean, so, you know, regime change soldiers were

very easily recruited indeed. But then if this was in reverse, this would be equivalent to Belgrade spending several billion to influence the outcome of a US election. Now, not only would that be not tolerated for a second by, I mean, you know, I mean, quite rightly, by any American citizen. It would also be completely illegal under U.S. law. Right. You know, the, the activities of the NED would not be allowed on the U.S. soil and people would face, you know, criminal and civil penalties.

Hey, Kit Clarenberg, man, I'm witness to just in the last week, Congress demanding to Matt Taibi. Oh, you deny that they intervened by buying some Facebook and Twitter ads, most of which were after the election and most of which had nothing to do with politics and was all a hoax and the internet research agency was always just a clickbait farm and wasn't Russian intelligence anyway and whatever. And this supposedly discredited Matt Taibi because he's unwilling to tow the line on this complete nonsense. And that was supposed to amount to a Russian coup d'etat an overthrow of the American government and installation of Donald Trump in power.

imagine if they had actually intervened what the reaction would have been if it wasn't all just a giant hoax perpetrated by the Democrats and the secret police and their allies in the media of course of course

and look I want to get back to something that you said there earlier it's in the article too and I wrote about this in the book already that this whole thing as you mentioned about agency there you can name any of 50 coups

America's done in the last, you know, 75 years since the end of World War II, in every case, there are actual humans in the country who are the beneficiaries of the coup. Obviously, they all appreciate it. But the point is, they wouldn't have got the power if America hadn't intervened and handed it to them. So this whole thing about, oh, you're denying their agency. Yeah? Just like the orange revolution, when America's guy lost, and then they just canceled the election and held another one and made sure that America's guy won. What does the agency of the sock puppets in the crowd have to do with that other than they play their useful role with their little orange flag, you know? Yeah. I mean, I think that, I mean, there's several points to make,

there. I think, you know, number one, the same people who cry, um, uh, who make appeals to people's agency. See when there's an NED coup abroad, I mean, are the same people who literally thought that a buff Bernie meme had, you know, successfully manipulated people to vote for Donald Trump. You know, I mean, as peddled by the Internet Research Agency, you know, apparently people don't have agency when, yes, things that they don't like occur in domestic politics in the US and Britain. But I think that also as well is, I mean, if you want to talk about agency, you know, I, where I am now in Serbia, I mean, it remains, you know, a poor country where wages are pretty terrible and the, you know, the cost of living is rising constantly due to, you know,

European-wide sanctions on Russia. I mean, Serbia's are not, not past them yet, but they're being pressured every single day to do so. I mean, and so, you know, in that context, actually, yes, as I mentioned, you know, recruiting regime change activists is actually very easy and often it's unwitting. So I know people out here who have in the past, much of their, you know, shame and regret worked for NED funded, you know, rights groups or even media outlets because, you know, they're one of the biggest employers here still. And, you know, in that context, when you are part of their network, you will receive emails or you'll be part of some, you know, WhatsApp group where you'll be, you know, other, you know, other people working for NED orgs of every

strike will receive this too. And you'll be asked by head office. or, you know, someone like Samantha Power to, oh, you know, it'd be really great if you went along to this protest or, you know, it'd be really great if you could tweet about this awful thing that's happening. And, you know, it seems relatively innocent on paper. But, like, in reality, this is creating, you know, this creates an artificial ecosystem of voices who are all, you know, pushing in the same direction and giving the appearance that there is this, you know, civil society-wide unanimity are, you know, like, on, you know, particularly, issues of interest to the US when, you know, it's either niche or people don't care.

And I think there is a very, and, you know, I, I, Serbia like Georgia is being subject to, as I say, enormous pressure to take an anti-Russian line, which, you know, the overwhelming majority of the public, not least due to to Russia intervening to prevent in the, the NATO Yugoslav war in 2000, and intervening to prevent the, the kind of western-backed terrorist group, the KLA and NATO forces from pushing past pre-agreed lines into more of Serbia, which they were trying to do. The population would never, ever accept this, but yet the government is being buffeted and being threatened with sanctions directly and indirectly by the EU and the US.

Now, last September, there was a bit of a confuffle because the Belgrade City Council received an application from a European Pride organisation to hold an event in the city. This was originally overruled by the City Council and then the organisers, because their EU back, just went ahead and did it anyway. This created quite off anger, not because there was a Pride parade happening,

because their government had literally been overruled from overseas. And, you know, I mean, Serbs in general find it very annoying living in a country where they feel they have no power and that they're really controlled from, you know, Brussels and Washington. So there was some, you know, strife in the street. There was, you know, a bit of upheaval, but it was very mild despite the fact that there was, you know,

a lot of anger. And in my, the kind of circles that I move in here, there are a lot of people who would have, you know, one way or another voiced their displeasure with their government being overruled. But they decided to, you know, just, to let it go, because they know that the slightest bit of internal strife can be weaponized against them, can be used to justify, you know, hostile measures or indeed, you know, outright

intervention one way or another, you know. And so they're choosing the hills that they die on very, very carefully. Quite clearly, this isn't the case in Georgia for, you know, all of the free agency-wielding NGOs funded so lavishly by the NED and USAID and others. But, I mean, I think that that's, but that perspective is probably shared by Georgian Dream because, you know, war with Russia would be absolutely catastrophic for them. But, you know, the people who the U.S. is backing probably figure they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from it taking place. All right. Hey, listen, I'm really short on time here.

But one last question, real quick, if you can. Was there any indication that you saw at all or even an argument made as to how this law was a Russian law? Because all the media said that, and I guess the protesters were saying that. But I never saw in any news report, even an explanation as to why I was supposed to believe that, other than the Americans thought that if their paid groups were somehow limited, that that would benefit Russia. Well, I mean, the most ludicrous aspect of this is it would apply to Russian-funded organizations of which there are, you know, very few. And it would, you know, allow, I mean, for people who are currently opposed to Russia and Georgia,

they would, I mean, you would imagine that they would welcome this. I mean, you know, it would, of course, detonate the notion that Russia, you know, that Russia wields all of this, all of this insidious influence over their, over their politics. But, I mean, yeah, this, the critics charge that this is, modelled on Russia's foreign agent war. Now, it does seem that, that, you know, this legislation has in Russia been used quite arbitrarily and it's led to, you know, people who teach French being branded foreign agents and being subject to harassment by authorities. I mean, that's been reported, whether it's true or not, we don't know. But I would suggest in general

that Russia was the very first country to ban NED. And it was, I think that was when there was a major shift in the way that the media reports in this stuff. Because, you know, you can't have, you can't admit that what this evil government is saying a US government agency does. You can't admit that that's what it actually does anymore. And, you know, I mean, there is so much in the, in the public domain, it, you know, very much indicating that, you know, that the NED is a CIA front and serves to destabilize governments. Yeah, that all needs to be memory hold now. I mean, it's quite a remarkable turnaround. And I think, yes, that in that context, you need to frame any crackdown on foreign influence or somehow, you know, an attack on civil society and, you know, draconian authoritarianism

and, you know, despotism unchained. But, you know, the reality is, is that Russia led the way on this. More countries are following. Venezuela, Iran, China have all taken measures to limit the or even just outright ban the activities of NED in their soul. They're setting an international example, as they are in many other matters. And Washington. and hates it. So, of course, this needs to be demonized. So anyone following this example can be demonized on those grounds as well. Okay, great, man. Well, thank you so much for your time on the show, Kit. Really great article, really great interview. Appreciate you. Yeah, Cheers, Scott. Take care, me. All right, you guys, that's Kit Clarenberg. He's at mintpressnews.com.

And this is a really good one. It has lots of background on, you know, Ukraine previously, Georgia previously, the overthrow even of Milosevic in 2000 and the Bulldozer Revolution, lots of good stuff in here. It's called Dare Call it a Coup. CIA Front threatens color revolution in Georgia. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, antiwar.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.com. org.