How to Rent a Riot - The History of 'Nonviolence'
How CIA-Adjacent Institutions Strategically Steer Activists and Agitators
This is the second in the ‘How to Rent a Riot’ series, wherein we flesh out what nonviolent action is, how it has evolved, and what organizations are driving these operations. Start with Part 1.
Nonviolent action = engineered mob violence
The CIA, the DoD, NATO and all of their surrogate institutions have long since perfected the art of infiltration, radicalization, and steering of activist groups.
This article will delve into the history of nonviolent conflict and how it’s been used to further the long term goals of the foreign policy elite.
Gene Sharp, Champion of “Nonviolent Action”
Gene Sharp is a name that not many are familiar with, but almost everyone has witnessed the fruits of his life’s work. In a nutshell, he’s the guy who wrote the playbook for “nonviolent” regime change.
Sharp is considered a preeminent scholar and practitioner of nonviolent action, often called the "Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare," or the "Machiavelli of nonviolence" for his detailed theories on civilian-based resistance and its strategic implementation.
Sharp wrote many books on the subject, and developed the 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, all of which are employed by organizations like USAID and USIP.
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. Scholars of nonviolence and activist training programs in the United States have extensively promoted his ideas, which have been implemented by nearly every significant protest movement over the past four decades.
Gene Sharp's impact on the U.S. activist left and international social movements has been substantial. However, he is more accurately recognized as one of the most significant defense intellectuals of the Cold War in the United States.
While he is often billed as a people’s champion, Gene Sharp has strong links with a variety of US institutions, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and Republican-related institutions, such as International Republican Institute (IRI), RAND Corporation, and the National Endowment for Democracy.
In the mid-1960s, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear theorist, recruited 29-year-old Sharp to join the Center for International Affairs (CIA, how cheeky) at Harvard, a bastion of the high Cold War defense, intelligence, and security establishment—often referred to as “The CIA at Harvard.”
Harvard’s CIA nurtured such esteemed deep political luminaries as Henry Kissinger, future National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and future CIA chief Robert Bowie.
Sharp founded the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), an organization that has virtually no connection to Albert Einstein—a known pacifist—except for Gene Sharp, with whom Einstein corresponded very briefly in the final years of his life.
Interestingly, Sharp launched the AEI in 1984, the same year that the National Endowment for Democracy was created to carry out operations formerly associated with the CIA.
Coincidence?
AEI has played a key role in training and deploying youth movements around the world to help prepare the conditions for coups through fostering the impression that the targeted governments are deeply unpopular, and through destabilizing those governments through their demonstrations and the like.
In 1985, Sharp published another consequential book: Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-based Deterrence and Defense, wherein he advocated for NATO to adopt his methods of nonviolent action to its defense strategy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and its satellites (think Orange Revolution and the 2014 Coup in Ukraine, Otpor! in Yugoslavia, etc.).
Sharp’s strategy included exploiting existing social fissures, promoting news and views hostile to the Soviet regime, translating guides on nonviolent struggle, distributing them among the target population, and providing financial support to opposition groups.
NOTE - For big-time deep political history buffs, you could think of Gene Sharp’s approach as a modernization of a strategy employed in the early 1800s by Giuseppe Mazzini, who organized the Young Italy movement, which would spawn similar movements across the Western world, including Young France, Young Germany, Young Poland, Young Switzerland, and Young America. Even the original Young Turks would be inspired several decades later by these movements.
The Arab Spring
One of Gene Sharp’s greatest hits was the Arab Spring, a series of antigovernmental protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions that spread across much of the Arab world in the early 2010s. The Arab Spring is often cited as one of the quintessential examples of the usefulness of nonviolent action, and Gene Sharp was at the center of it.
In January of 2011, we were told that a "spontaneous," "indigenous" uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East.
It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings, and that they were anything but "spontaneous," or "indigenous."
NOTE - An in-depth dig on the Arab Spring is beyond the scope of this article, but I do recommend that you look deeper into it if you are unfamiliar. Ghost of Based Patrick Henry did an episode on the subject.
An April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," detailed the US’s involvement with the Arab Spring, and some familiar organizations were mentioned:
"A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington."
All three of the listed organizations are major nodes in the network, with International Republican Institute (IRI) representing CIA influence over the Republican party, and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) representing CIA influence over the Democrat party. We covered both of these organization’s personnel and roles in greater detail in Two Wings, One Ugly Bird.
The article would also add, regarding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—the CIA grantmaking body—as well as the IRI and the NDI:
"The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations.
The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department."
So, now you know who the godfather of nonviolent action is, and how he connects to the CIA/DoD plausible deniability network. Everything we’re discussing here is downstream from his work.
The Otpor! Movement
Another quintessential example of the power of nonviolent action in the context of subversive geopolitics was the prominent civic youth movement and political organization Otpor! in Serbia (then part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia).
After the Cold War had officially ended, both NATO and Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute found new purpose in the breakup of the multi-ethnic socialist state, Yugoslavia.
The former Soviet satellite had accepted development loans from the World Bank and other Western financial institutions during WWII, and by the late 1980s, Western creditors, led by the IMF, were using their leverage to push Yugoslavia toward neoliberal economic restructuring.
In January 1991, Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia, signed a law behind the backs of international creditors that required Serbian-controlled national banks to issue $1.8 billion worth of new money to pay pensioners, farmers, and avoid industrial bankruptcies, in defiance of these policies.
Naturally, the ruling class in the West was none too thrilled about a populist nationalist upstart daring such a brazen move. The international press turned against Milosevic, the U.S. terminated aid to Yugoslavia, and even threatened to use its veto power at the World Bank and IMF to suspend credit.
NOTE - TO BE CLEAR, I am not commenting on whether or not the Arab Spring or the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic were justified, this is all to show one thing: how the West uses “nonviolent action” to affect regime change and the primary institutions involved.
The following decade was characterized by atrocity.
Yugoslavia was essentially compelled into the violence of the Yugoslav Wars. The Central Intelligence Agency “helped to train” the separatist Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army—previously considered by the U.S. to be a terrorist group—and,
“…encouraged them to launch a rebellion in southern Serbia in an effort to undermine the then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.” — 'CIA's bastard army ran riot in Balkans' backed extremists, The Guardian
NATO imposed numerous rounds of economic sanctions, refusing to relieve them unless Milosevic agreed to permanent NATO occupation and the complete privatization of the economy. This demand was "deliberately" made "to provoke rejection by Belgrade."
When Milosevic refused, as designed, NATO launched a 78-day ariel bombing campaign.
Western Europe viewed Milosevic’s regime as an obstacle to integrating the Balkans into the European Union—a longtime goal of the EU, UN, NATO, etc.—and despite the West’s attempts, Milosevic was still in power at the end of the century, so a new strategy was to be implemented.
Enter: Otpor!
Otpor! was initially a civic protest group from 1998 to 2000. It evolved into a movement that adopted the title Narodni pokret (the People's Movement).
Like any successful movement, it was infiltrated, co-opted, and steered by Western forces.
For over a decade prior, Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute had been actively reaching out to “Slovenian democrats” and “Albanian students,” culminating in a workshop on nonviolent action that took place in March of 2000. The funding for the workshop came from none other than the CIA’s right-wing NGO the International Republican Institute (IRI)
Otpor! would become the model for similar movements in the US and abroad, complete with the clenched fist, menacing aesthetics, and psychologically manipulative slogans and chants.
NOTE - The above Documentaries are highly instructive if you care to learn more about how rent-a-riots are employed and the kind of messaging used to make them appear benevolent.
Even back then, Otpor! was suspected of being a largely Western endeavor, and as time went on, this belief became irrefutable.
The West’s interest in overthrowing Milosevic makes more sense when you look back at it from present times, through the lens of NATO’s desire to continue the Cold War against Russia—and eventually dominate the Eurasian landmass—since Milosevic maintained close ties with Russia, who supplied arms and diplomatic support.
The connection between Otpor! and USIP is a man named Daniel Serwer, the director for the institute’s Balkans Initiative at USIP.
Serwer came right out of the CIA/DoD Civil society pipeline, having been a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, you will see him featured prominently in the above documentary.
Sharp’s Politics of Nonviolent Action were translated and compiled as the “Otpor! User Manual.”
Freedom House, another U.S. "democracy promotion" NGO and consistent recipient of NED funds, funded the translation, production, and distribution of 5,000 copies of Gene Sharp's user-friendly pamphlet for nonviolent revolutionaries, From Dictatorship to Democracy. These works would be disseminated to 70,000 activists and operatives in Serbia.
(Source for all above statements: A Force More Powerful)
NED would end up pouring millions of dollars into Otpor.
So you have the fingerprints of the IRI (CIA’s Republican-focused NGO), the USIP, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and Freedom House all over this “movement”—all of which are major nodes in the NATO/CIA/Pentagon’s NGO proxy network.
Again, this network was erected to carry out the functions that were typically ascribed to the CIA before its dirty laundry was made public.
And so, Otpor! would be the Western proxy that carried the “nonviolent action” that finally toppled the Milosevic regime. The group was not only filled with radicalized civilians, but trained operatives as well.
This is how it works.
Milosevic was removed from office in September 2000. In 2001, he would be apprehended for war crimes and, despite assurances to the contrary, transported to The Hague for trial.
All told, the NED spent $41 million to topple Milosevic in “the Bulldozer Revolution.”
Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.
What resulted was a sort of January 6th scenario on steroids—trained operatives leading hundreds of thousands of civilians to overthrow their government.
Today, the countries of the former Yugoslavia, which benefited from political freedom and a relatively high standard of living under socialism, are consistently among the most impoverished in Europe.
In the interim, Otpor! has become a favored model for protest movements in the United States.
The Orange Revolution and EuroMaidan
Perhaps the most relevant examples of nonviolent action in the 21st century are the storied Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004-05, and its sequel, the Maidan Uprising of 2013—both of which can be seen as the precursors to the Russian invasion of Ukraine that is ongoing today.
Countless essays, articles, books and documentaries have outlined these events in great detail, but to skip to the punchline, these were both US sponsored regime change efforts utilizing the power of nonviolent action to undermine the democratic process.
These uprisings—as well as the Otpor! movement in former Yugoslavia—make a lot more sense when viewed through the lens of the Western foreign policy establishment’s undeclared second Cold War against Russia.
(Many geopolitical events tie back to this, from the ousting of Imrahn Kahn in Pakistan to the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal)
Scratching the surface, you will hear the Orange Revolution was a series of protests and political events in the immediate aftermath of the run-off vote of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election between leading candidates Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych.
Digging deeper, you’ll learn that it was the opening salvo in a broader U.S. strategy to pry Ukraine away from Russian influence, install compliant pro-Western leaders, and weaponize non-governmental organizations (NGOs), media, and civil society as tools of "soft power" intervention.
It was a highly consequential election for Ukraine. Yushchenko represented pro-Western, democratic reforms and closer ties to Europe and NATO, whereas Yanukovych had a good working relationship with Vladimir Putin. Official results declared Yanukovych the winner with 49.5% to Yushchenko's 46.6%, but widespread allegations of fraud—much like the 2020 election in the U.S.—ignited mass protests in Kyiv's Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti).
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, donning orange scarves and flags (Yushchenko's campaign color), occupied the square for weeks in freezing winter conditions, demanding a revote. The Supreme Court annulled the results, and a rerun on December 26 saw Yushchenko win with 52% of the vote.
He was inaugurated in January 2005, marking a temporary shift toward EU and NATO integration.
From a neutral historical standpoint, the revolution is often celebrated as a triumph of people power, rooted in Ukraine's post-Soviet quest for independence and democracy. However, they eerily echoed the template used for Otpor! and similar color revolutions, like Georgia's 2003 Rose Revolution, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, and Armenia’s Velvet Revolution, etc..
The uprising was celebrated in Western media as a brave and powerful example of what can happen when the public comes together to oppose their government, but not everyone was so elated; skeptics ranged from presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela to Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, columnist Patrick Buchanan, and left-wingers in the Nation and the Guardian.
The accepted surface-story that a bunch of feisty Ukrainarinos came together, self organized and affected dramatic political change in their country, falls apart once you know the playbook of the State Department’s shadow network.
The truth is that the Orange Revolution was yet another Western-orchestrated uprising, containing all the hallmarks of a U.S.-backed color revolution and linking back to all of those familiar NGOs and GONGOs we know and love.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, and our old friend Internews. (You might recall Internews from our post The Information Imperium)
You had the NED, USAID, and other "democracy promotion" outfits pouring millions into Ukrainian civil society, training activists in protest tactics, media manipulation, and election monitoring. Groups like Pora (a youth movement central to the protests) received direct funding—e.g., $30,000 from the Canadian embassy as an initial seed.
In a Dissent Magazine article, Mark R. Beissinger remarks on how overthrowing governments has become an international business and links Pora to these efforts:
“…has now become an international business. In addition to the millions of dollars of aid involved, numerous consulting operations have arisen, many of them led by former revolutionaries themselves. Since the Serbian revolution, for instance, Otpor (youth) activists (trained by Helvey) have become, as one Serbian analyst put it, ‘a modern type of mercenary,’ traveling the world, often in the pay of the U.S. government or NGOs, in order to train local groups in how to organize a democratic revolution.
A number of leaders of the Ukrainian youth movement Pora were trained in Serbia at the Center for Nonviolent Resistance, a consulting organization set up by Otpor activists to instruct youth leaders from around the world in how to organize a movement, motivate voters, and develop mass actions. […] After the Rose and Orange Revolutions, Georgian and Ukrainian youth movements began to challenge Otpor’s consulting monopoly. Pora activists even joked about creating a new Comintern for democratic revolution.”
Since the Orange Revolution was modeled on previous successes, Serbian activists from Otpor (Bulldozer Revolution) and Georgians from Kmara (Rose Revolution) were brought to Ukraine to coach organizers.
These movements weren't isolated; they formed a "revolution school" where lessons from one fed into the next, often with Western support from groups like the NDI and Serbia's Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), co-founded by Otpor! leaders Srdja Popović and Slobodan Djinović.
The Orange Revolution's "success" was pyrrhic: Yushchenko's government fractured due to infighting, paving the way for Yanukovych's 2010 return and the 2014 Maidan events that followed. The Maidan uprising was yet another U.S. orchestrated coup using the exact same tactics and funding mechanisms.
Still don’t believe that the CIA/DoD/State Department runs the color revolution business?
See the table below, linking all of the usual suspects to all of the major uprisings of the last 30 years:
Closing
The intricate web of engineered civil unrest, as explored throughout this article, reveals a troubling reality: what often appears as spontaneous, grassroots activism is frequently the product of calculated manipulation by powerful institutions.
From the CIA’s historical operations like COINTELPRO and Operation Ajax to modern-day proxies like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the mechanisms of “nonviolent action” have been honed into a sophisticated tool for advancing geopolitical and domestic agendas.
These efforts, cloaked in the language of democracy and peace, exploit genuine societal grievances to steer public sentiment, destabilize governments, and maintain the influence of a select nexus of high finance, intelligence, and military interests.
This is not to dismiss the validity of public dissent or the need for social change. However, the evidence suggests that citizens must approach mass movements with a critical eye, questioning who stands to benefit and who is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
As we navigate an era of increasing polarization and unrest, awareness of these tactics is crucial. The public must demand transparency from organizations like USIP and NED, scrutinize the funding and motives behind mass movements, and resist being unwitting pawns in psychological operations.
Only through such vigilance can we reclaim the authenticity of collective action and ensure that our voices, not those of hidden manipulators, shape the future.
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CIA has to go.
God Wins!
God Bless!!!
I wonder what the name is for the US color revolution that has been going on since 2015?