Eurasia Notes #2

The NED gets a new boss, A Quiet American, but we all serve the same corporations.

Jul 2, 2021 – Tbilisi¹

Damon Wilson, the NED’S new CEO (Photo courtesy Atlantic Council)

The National Endowment for Democracy has a new head after 40 years. Damon Wilson moves from the Atlantic Council, where he’s served as executive vice president, and from the tenebrous stations of the executive cross including the National Security Council and chief of staff at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Wilson has worked closely with the three main stakeholders that finance the Atlantic Council as a think tank seeking to influence NATO. These are the oil and gas industry, investment banks active in the post-communist and transition economies of Eurasia and the Mid-East, and the weapons manufacturers. I think it’s wrong to look at him as “a NATO guy” because the language coming out of NATO reflects only one element of thinking on the part of those who promote and hope to benefit from its expansion.

Like all of us his first postings will have had a lasting influence, in Wilson’s case the months of 1995-96 that he spent in the immediate aftermath of the regime change in Rwanda, after which he got a job at NATO. If any event in recent times represents the sublimation of our need for natural resources, and the imperative to act first without compunction in the new Great Game for Africa, then Rwanda is it.

This is no mere corporate land grab by the descendants of the family tree of United Fruit (now Chiquita Brands), nor the securing of a port by a would-be imperial power. As Event Covid progresses, we see more clearly the societal transformational that heaves into sight. The corporate will has divested itself of the fig leaf of national interest and roams freely across the world’s forests and metaphorical goldmines.

Politicians, international financial institutions and world forums are speaking with one voice, though mostly in slogans. Deconstruct these slogans and you will find the drive for resilient cities and new corporate structures with features of the city states of old. You cannot fail to notice the demoting of nation states and legislatures, and the the rise in their place of technocratic “centers of excellence” based more on a shared intellectual heritage than on an institutional structure. This seems ad hoc but it is not spontaneous. The framework has been decades in the planning and is described in the publications of think tanks and foundations, most recognizably, those of the Rockefellers.

Delve further and the economic underpinning is a concept of worth not wealth, based on contribution and consumption. This sees humans diverging down two paths: one transient and fleeting as ever; the other reaching for immortality. Not the immortality of science fiction, although that has its part, but the timeless endeavour of stamping ones imprint on the world, whether one lives or not.

It’s only minimally speculative to think that David Rockefeller and Prince Philip died with the knowledge that their will would outlive their mortal bodies.

The evolution of the National Endowment for Democracy and its new chief must be seen in this light. The NED inherited many of the activities of the CIA in regime change and “making the world safe for democracy.” We still inhabit a world of competing interests but they are no longer national and only those who stand closest to the most powerful interest groups are fully aware of this evolution.

Wilson’s career outside the conventional ladders of bureaucracy will serve him well.

Commentators spend a lot of words on his looks. Everyone likes a fresh face and Wilson fits the bill. The section that follows is a tangent and does not reflect directly on Wilson. It is relevant, however, to those who operate on the borders between think tanks, lobbying and making things happen.

A QUIET AMERICAN

The book hit home. It caused the American diplomatic corps to respond with a book of painful self-criticism, The Ugly American, to try to change the behavior and image of the American abroad.

What Graham Greene had spotted was not a question of manners. However much the Europeans might sneer at the gauche New World, and however awkward Americans might feel back in the Old, that was not it.

Greene’s point was political. Alden Pyle, the 32 year-old with the Economic Aid Mission used his apparent innocence, consciously or not, as a cover. That shield became, for Greene, a morbid attraction.

“He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.”

Pyle is characterized as superficial, clutching his Yale textbook that he believes contains the answers to the world, and lacking any knowledge of Southeast Asia before he piles in to change it. Greene is, in part, criticizing the cookie cutter, domino theory that dominated State Department thinking at the time.

“Pyle was very earnest and I had suffered from his lectures on the Far East, which he had known for as many months as I had years. Democracy was another subject of his—he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world.”

There is something deeper, however. I suspect Greene was not saying, “Americans are like this,” but that Americans put on a certain mask and demeanour when they confront something unfamiliar.

In this Event Covid we’ve noticed that certain people continue to prefer a mask even when no longer mandated. Asked why, excuses range from, “I no longer have to fix my make up” and “saves on shaving,” to feelings of safety, strength, of a uniform invisibility and a sociopathic immunity from the consequences of ones actions.

This is what I suspect Greene had sensed in the fresh-faced Americans he encountered in Indochina.

Let us do a spot check. The hair is a military buzz cut or, for the Yalie look, a dapper fringe to one side. The tone of speech clipped in military style or with a faint but affected drawl. The gait falls into drilled briskness or a barely perceptible lack of decision, hands in pockets, the disguise of a tourist – what many would recognize as the George H.W. Bush presidential slouch.

So far we have two types: military intelligence and civilian intelligence.

The clothing gives less away: the button-down collar and tie, white shirt and clean-cut suit has none of the foppery of the European: no pink shirts, stripy socks, double-breasted blazers, ostentatious brogues and that awful modern British habit of going tieless in a collar that’s too loose and exposing a couple pounds of chicken meat.

Now, what do our quiet Americans have in common: the gaze is assured, if a little too studied. I suspect this is what Greene mistook for innocence. The eyebrows are elevated as if plucked, conveying a misleading astonishment.

Pyle was too young but the corners of the eyes are a nest of secrets. When Greene was writing, smoking and drinking were a part of the job. It was common to develop early the imprint of crowsfeet which, along with a gravelly voice, gave an alluring mystery to women as much as men. It was used to great effect by actors and those with a need for disguise. Much of this is lost in the new age of temperance.

Light-emitting diodes burn our eyes at every turn. Long hours at the screen stab our white sclera with streaks of red and make the eyelids twitch.

Botox to the rescue, the modern suit is more likely to have smoothed out the skin around the eyes, deadened the nearby nerves and partly shuttered that window to the soul. There is less to risk but less to gain. Eyes are harder to read.

The motor skills have always been more important to master. The switching of gaze is smooth, like a focus pull, with no sudden eye movements to betray nervousness, much less alarm. That is training.

The jaw is locked, holding the lips steady. This has always been easier for Americans who form their vocal sounds in the back of the throat, which incidentally adds resonance and gives rise to the misconception that Americans shout a lot. Europeans use the front of their mouths to form words, to convey nuances and express emotions like smiling approval or the hiss and spit of disgust. Unless, that is, they adopt the military tradition of a stiff upper lip, but then that also may expose one.

A trained individual will avoid expressing emotions precisely because they give way to involuntary motions in the face but it is not necessary to go full Soviet grimace.

In the early noughties I once made the mistake in front of a Russian minister-oligarch of cracking a joke. My side of the table being largely British was keen to get discussions started and I volunteered to break the ice. I was later cautioned: humor might be taken not just as a sign of insubordination or a lack of respect but actually make traditional Russian bosses nervous. The expression of any kind of emotion could trigger an unintended response that would render them vulnerable.

The classic stone face of the Maoist-Stalinist apparatchik is well known but it dates back much further in cultures where trust is earned over time. One expects to meet frozen features except in personal acquaintances. That was true in its own way of the British class system. Greene was describing the contrast of the apparent American openness.

The communities of religious dissenters in the American settlements exemplified this paradox: exceptionally open to their brethren but with good reason to suspect outsiders. I am not fully happy with this shorthand but let us posit that the cohort of a religion evolved into a nationalist spy, as opposed to the British or Soviet representative of a class.

This gives our Quiet American some advantages. He combines the obedience to his religion with his oath to his country, bound together and rationalized as an exceptional mission. And if he is the child of cynics and atheists he still grows up with that example before him.

You could say I grew up with some such people as a diplomat’s child in South America but it was later that I came to question the bright-eyed boys and girls when I saw them in action in post-communist Europe.

I knew a few Ukrainians, Russians and Belarussians who worked for the blandly-named NGOs arranging academic exchanges and sposoring aspiring economist-politicians. Those who worked for the NGOs walked a fine line, drawing suspicion from domestic security services who would demand information about the Americans and those who worked for them.

Never once to my knowledge did a local recruit venture information that could compromise their colleagues – not that there was much to give; it was pretty administrative. Then, when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia, the Americans shut up shop and walked away. Those who had stood by them were out of work and blacklisted by the authorities. Way to go, NED! How to win friends and influence people.

Greene takes a kinder view, though never short of religious analogy, he pins Pyle like a butterfly to a board.

“That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

A man as well-connected as Graham Greene, descended from the explorer of disparate cultures Robert Louis Stevenson; his brother rising to become director general of the BBC; was not naive. He shared a fondness for Ezra Pound with the poet T.S. Eliot.

“Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.”

Immediately you can see the disarming power of apparent innocence as perhaps a cover for something deeper. The willingness to look death in the face. Greene claimed to have once risked Russian roulette with a loaded pistol.

Not only one’s own death, moreover, but unapologetically and coldly to conceive, weigh, observe and analyze the death of others. Greene did that, too, through his characters.

DOING THE UNTHINKABLE

If nations are the sum of their people then each corporation is an island unto itself.

The countries of Eurasia who experienced communist domination (and NAZI, too, let’s not forget) are proudly independent. They struggle in Russia’s shadow, as NATO would characterize it, partly because of their size. They are small and what wealth they have is tightly held in societies that are often corrupt as described below.

Economic independence is their best guarantee of solidarity at home and of projecting a stronger profile abroad. That cannot be achieved by one or two industrial champions, unless one of them is Gazprom and even Russia suffers from the lack of economic diversification and a narrow professional class.

What is the National Endowment for Democracy doing to help? Who are its allies in this effort to build resilient Western-friendly governments? Unless international corporations are open, non-monopolistic and willing to share their experience, they do not help. They tend to suck out resources.

By promoting decade-long sanctions against Russia, by far the biggest economy in the region, the NED and Congress keep shoo corporations away from the region.

Providing media training for compliant local journalists does nothing except provide leverage at the next election. It is wrong to blame the NED alone, for it represents what is best and worst about corporations, the American gift to the world.

The rise of the corporation in the past 150 years represents the cataclysmic remolding of our society and of the power structure.

The corporation’s role is to create “large, growing, sustained, legal returns for the people who own the business” and that is its legal obligation, according to Joe Badaracco, professor of business ethics, Harvard Business School.

There are two words we hear all the time, though their meaning is Tiffany-twisted: In a corporation the only stakeholders who matter are the owners. The only thing that needs to be sustainable are the profits.

They get more profitable by offloading any obligations onto the public. That means they privatize the profits and socialize the losses. If executives plead that they are obligated to save the environment, know that you the customer or taxayer are going to pay the bill. They are not allowed to volunteer it – legally.

The talk of sustainable, stakeholder capitalism and is the cry of a lady that doth protest too much. It is a game of euphemism and deception.

Originally chartered for the pursuance of a specific, temporary purpose corporations secured the rights of individuals by hijacking the 14th Amendment that granted property rights to recently-freed slaves.

Corporations have no morality or inherent sense of responsibility. Duty of care exists only in so far as a court can hold the corporation responsible. They have no cognizant center and, like the Tin Man, no brain. Responsibility is simply inconsistent with their obligation to make as much money as possible.

If you doubt, know that individuals account for 95 per cent of federal taxes in the U.S. Corporate and social responsibility (CSR) are not the same thing despite being lumped together for public relations purposes.

Corporations also approach reputation differently to individuals. When I was working in another post-communist country the corruption was obvious. But on closer study it was not worse than Western countries, they were simple more shameless. U.S. congressmen famously accept corporate contributions but they would angrily deny accusations of corruption. The flow is finessed. There are a myriad means of recompense and a fine mesh of charities and board appointments that is absent in transition economies. The mayor serving his term of office in a certain gorod knows he has limited time to make hay, and so blatantly fills his pockets however he can.

Corporations are like the mayor. Their motive is enrichment, as much and as quickly as possible. They’ll pay a public relations company to fill the press with stories of philanthropy. J.D. Rockefeller perfected the technique more than 100 years ago.

If you doubt, know that some of the largest U.S. banks and pharmaceutical companies routinely pay billions of dollars in criminal fines. U.S. defense contractors are rapped for fraud. Yet they continue. It is a cost of doing business. They don’t feel a thing called “shame”.

Thus talk of environmental and social responsibility in the context of a corporation is simply public relations if not outright duplicity. This easily can be shown by comparing the money and time lavished on the woolly, media-friendly topics of CO2 and meat consumption compared immediate action to curb pollution, landfills and chemical spills, transport of pointless products around the globe like bottled water, harm to human and animal health from pesticides or needless harm to workers. It seems the corporations would rather make you pay subsidies (to them) for your conceptual carbon footprint.

If corporations already dominate society, what is the Fourth Industrial Revolution in which corporations will deal directly with stakeholders --- and you will own nothing and be happy?

Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum is either deluded, which I doubt, or playing us for fools when he says the world is on the brink of transformation. It has already happened – politically, structurally and financially, in terms of who pulls the levers, assigns the resources, orders the work and reaps the benefits.

Corporations have taken over. The only question is whether we let them impose upon us their amoral, self-enriching, sociopathic world view, or whether we resist. In short, will we let them crush our humanity?

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