SEEDS OF DISSENT
Govt-Linked CSIS Urges DC To Partner with Social Media Firms To Promote
Protests Movements
Widespread protests were a feature of 2020, engulfing 68 nations. However,
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a pro-regime-change
think tank based in DC, is most preoccupied with those in China and Russia.
by Alan Macleod
March 08th, 2021
Mint Press
By Alan Macleod
WASHINGTON D.C. A new report from Washington D.C.-based think tank the
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) concludes that the
U.S. government should work closely with social media companies to ensure
that protest movements around the world result in an outcome more conducive
to American interests. Along with intern Riley McCabe, the organizations
senior fellow, Samuel Brannen, argued that the White House, State
Department, and intelligence community must explore deeper coordination with
major tech companies that provide global media platforms:
The U.S. government should think creatively about public-private
partnerships that can expand its toolkit to defend the legitimate rights of
political protestors globally, including preserving the digital rights of
peaceful democratic activists while muting harmful mis- and disinformation
from violent state and nonstate actors seeking to tip the balance in various
countries.
While the language used couches the potential move as defending democracy,
the rest of the article makes clear that the fight of the future lies
between the democratic U.S. and other like-minded governments versus
authoritarian states especially China and Russia.
Widespread protests were a feature of 2020, engulfing 68 nations, according
to the CSIS. However, they appear to be most preoccupied with those in China
and Russia. The CSIS applauded American sanctions on Russia that followed
the imprisonment of anti-Putin politician Alexei Navalny, calling them a
step in the right direction phrasing which suggests they want to see far
more aggressive action taken against Moscow. Beijings moves against the
Hong Kong protests, meanwhile, amounted to the totalitarian conclusion and
the destruction of democracy in the city-state.
The U.S. has been intimately involved in protest movements against its
enemies. In 2014, then-vice-president Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine to gin
up the protagonists of the anti-Moscow Maidan Revolution, with senior U.S.
official Victoria Nuland even photographed handing out cookies to
protestors. Washington was also a major actor in the Hong Kong protests,
funding and training many of its leaders, and spending at least $29 million
on pro-democracy projects in the region.
More Americans were arrested after barely a week of protests following the
killing of George Floyd than in over one year of demonstrations in Hong
Kong, and protest organizers and journalists alike are still facing lengthy
sentences for their roles in them. Yet, the CSIS presents the U.S. response
to internal strife as exemplary, stating that the United States is uniquely
positioned to make its own handling of political dissent and protest a
centerpiece of U.S. outreach to the world, claiming that it can lead not
only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.
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A bastion of neocon thought
The CSIS is one of the most influential and well-connected think tanks in
Washington. War planners like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski,
military commanders like Brent Scowcroft and James L. Jones, and former
Secretaries of Defense such as William S. Cohen and Harold Brown occupy key
positions on its advisory board.
The organization is also funded by virtually every Western government, major
weapons contractors including Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing, as
well as the foundations of notable billionaires like Pierre Omidyar, Bill
Gates, and Charles Koch. It can also boast current Secretary of State
Anthony Blinken as a former senior fellow at the think tank. It is,
therefore, reasonable to assume that its output represents a dominant strain
of thinking within the foreign policy establishment.
John Bolton CSIS
Regime change advocate and war hawk John Bolton, left, is a frequent guest
at CSIS events. Pablo Martinez Monsivais | AP
The CSIS masquerades as an independent, objective think tank, but has
historically close ties to U.S. intelligence and the military industrial
complex, Tim Shorrock of The Nation told MintPress News in 2019, its
abundantly clear that everything it does reflects the interests of its
government and corporate donors, which include every major U.S. defense
contractor.
The think tank has also supported regime change through protest movements
before. In Bolivia, for example, it applauded the far-right takeover of the
country in November 2019, falsely suggesting that the previous months
elections were fraudulent while presenting the military handpicking obscure
senator Jeanine Añez to be president as according to the Bolivian
constitution, which it certainly was not.
A few months earlier, it went past just promoting protest movements in
Venezuela to hosting a secret conference exploring the feasibility of a U.S.
invasion of the country in order to finally overthrow the ruling United
Socialist Party.
Cyber wars
The United States is already engaged in online warfare against its enemies
and long ago enlisted the support of Silicon Valley corporations. On the
advice of similarly hawkish think tanks, Twitter and other social media
platforms have taken action against what they claim were foreign government
attempts to game their services, deleting hundreds of thousands of accounts
supposedly linked to enemy regimes, be they Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Cuban
or Venezuelan. Yet they appear to never be able to find the American
government or its allies doing the same thing, despite the fact that it was
revealed 10 years ago that the U.S. has similar influence projects.
In their book titled, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People,
Nations and Business, Eric Schmidt and fellow Google executive Jared Cohen
wrote, What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and
cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first, suggesting that the
new battleground is virtual, and that big tech companies are willing to be
the U.S. top weapon in maintaining global supremacy.
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The Hong Kong protest movement is the ugly face of a long-standing policy of
the United States to destabilize a long-time economic foe: China
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While that prediction might have seemed surprising eight years ago when the
book was first published, a number of moves in recent years suggest that
Schmidt and Cohen will be proven correct. In 2018, Facebook announced it was
partnering with a NATO cutout organization, the Atlantic Council, to root
out disinformation and promote accurate data. Last month, it went further,
hiring a former NATO press officer as its new intelligence chief. Meanwhile,
Jessica Ashooh left her job as a Deputy Director of Middle Eastern Strategy
for the Atlantic Council to join Reddit as its Director of Policy.
One notable case of the U.S. government directly working with social media
to inflame protests was in Iran, where the Obama administration convinced
Twitter to delay a temporary maintenance shutdown of its operations in order
to aid the coordination efforts of anti-government demonstrations. Last
year, the Trump administration ordered Facebook to suppress any positive
mention of Qassem Soleimani on its platforms. Trump had recently given the
order to assassinate the statesman, sparking global indignation. Facebook
complied with the request, stating that, We operate under U.S. sanctions
laws, including those related to the U.S. governments designation of the
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its leadership. Soleimani was
widely beloved in the country (a U.S. poll found over 80% of the public held
a positive opinion of him). This meant that Facebook was suppressing the
speech of Iranians talking to other Iranians in Farsi, sharing a majority
opinion, all at the behest of the American president.
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Figures
The numbers now make clear that the US has responded to the George Floyd
protests with more force and arrests than China did in Hong Kong.
MintPress News | Alan Macleod | Jun 5, 2020
It is a standard response of authoritarian governments the world over to
claim that protests against them are illegitimate, and spurred on by outside
enemies intent on seeing them destroyed. This even happens in the U.S.,
where senior politicians have suggested that political strife of all sorts,
from Colin Kaepernicks kneeling to the George Floyd protests, to the
storming of the Capitol Building on January 6, had been amplified by Russia.
This latest CSIS offering will only add weight to those governments who see
an American hand behind domestic dissent.
Feature photo | An anti-China protester stands wrapped in an