Eurasia note 102 - Politicians Fail Georgia's Youth

Objectives & hopes not articulated as leaders play dumb

Dec 04, 2024

Georgia's protesters deserve better leaders and honest media
They lack defined objectives or an opposition figure to rally them
European politicians visit Tbilisi but cannot articulate what the EU offers Georgia
The West cheers on change with no explanation as to the cost and the benefits
Identitarianim is the advertising technique of corporations dressed up as politics
Dismantling traditional society as a Trojan horse for commercial exploitation
Politicans act dumb out of fear and ambition in the late-stage despotism of empire
The U.S. despises European leaders as much as those of Russia
It treats any challenge to hegemony as rewriting the history of WW2

(2,200 words or 11 minutes of your company)

“Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Tbilisi, Dec 4, 2024

It is painful to watch a narrative follow such naive tropes, and yet risk ending in tragedy.

The Tbilisi protests are following the Color Revolution ™ play book in terms of street action, but the declaration of intent is lacking.

This is not like Kyiv's Maidan, where there were rival loans from Russia and the World Bank/IMF — and the coup forced through the latter, along with lifting the ban on private ownership of land. [1]

There is no clear demand from the Georgian protesters beyond chants of "Russia Man Bad" such as were levelled at the first Trump administration. Nor is there any obvious political figure to rally the crowds.

There is a paucity of debate. This is not unique to Georgia or anywhere, really. I remarked at the time of the Brexit referendum in Britain in 2016 that nobody seemed to know what they were talking about.

Politicians and journalists were not informed or interested in the workings of the European superstructure — so they made Brexit about the simplest and most inflammatory topic, immigration, and called each other names.

Georgia badly needs a debate on development, but that's complex. So they make discontent at living standards into a protest about the simplest and most inflammatory topic, Russia, and call the government Putin-lovers.

Oh, to be sure, there is an agenda! You are simply not told. The politicians, as we shall see, are playing dumb.

Worse than that, the Western media amplifies these misleading talking points.

Tensions in Tbilisi are dangerous enough without media repeating the propaganda that Georgian Dream called off accession talks with the European Union.

This is the pretext for the protests and it is a lie. Brussels halted the process in June, before prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze confirmed the same on Nov 29th. [2]

The law on transparency of foreign influence is not a "Russian law." It is modelled on the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) which dates from 1938.

Phony war

Tucker Carlson is back in Moscow. He had tried, and failed, to find an official in the Biden administration to discuss stopping WW3. The U.S. secretary of state has cut off all contact with Russia.

Over two years there was one brief conversation by defense secretary Lloyd Austin with his counterpart after a U.S. missile killed beach goers at Sebastopol in June.

Carlson tried to interview Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskiy but the U.S. embassy refused permission.

Having worked in leading TV newsrooms, I can tell you it goes like this: producers write to a script that comes from Reuters, AFP or AP. If the news agencies supply the pretext for a coup or war, the media repeats it without question.

So Carlson has gone to Moscow to interview the Russian foreign minster Sergei Lavrov.

The interview has not been published at time of writing, however, Sergei Lavrov has said the talk of a ceasefire in Ukraine is simply to give president Volodymyr Zelenskiy time to acquire more long-range missiles; while the parliament, the Rada, still has a ban on any direct talks with Russia.

Emotional reasoning

Humans seem to interact very approximately, using ideas and narratives that are "good enough" to justify their actions.

Psychologists have argued that often we act on emotion and that reasoning comes later. This is particularly the case when we are angry at someone when we cannot list anything specific that they have done.

It seems not to matter if feelings or reasoning have any basis in reality. Once we are invested in a cause, no facts will challenge our sense of righteousness.

As Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals (1971): “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Corporations and Western government have adopted Alinsky's strategy in pursuit of profit and power.

Destabilising was not invented by Saul Alinsky or the Bolsheviks. Nor even by the Jacobins. It has been perfected over centuries by rival elites in government — the commercial interest, banking houses, the spy masters and their playwrights — long before even the Tudors studied the Medicis.

See Maxwell Case: Surveilled And Silenced ( Dec 10, 2021)

En marche to…

And so a popular protest can stretch from days and, with interruptions, into months without anyone saying exactly what is the objective.

We can excuse young protesters for being swept up in the excitement without knowing why they are there, beyond a few catchy slogans.

But the protests in Georgia do not even have a leader to articulate their objectives. That is why the outgoing president, a 72 year-old Frenchwoman, has been pressed into the role, but she can't articulate either. Salome Zurabashvili has withdrawn from parliament, claiming that renders it illegitimate — but it's her action.

Will she march young people into bloodshed on the basis of vague phrases like it's "a Russian government" and we Georgians, "are Europe"?

Domestic and foreign media, such as the BBC, trade in the same inanities. The youth deserve better leadership. They deserve an honest and hard-working media.

I sense that I make myself a target for responses like "Putin apologist" but that's just as inane.

In for a penny, in for a pound; I may as well quote him.

As president Vladimir Putin told journalists during a three-hour question and answer session at the Valdai Club: "... the green agenda. It's a noble cause, of course, but scaring everyone and then imposing solutions that will be unworkable is not very honest with regard to voters..."

The United Nations is guilty of the same misdirection over climate change, energy and food policy: cow farts and crisis everywhere.

See UN Terrifies Youth To Push 'Polycrisis' (Sep 24, 2023)

Waiting for Godot

The lack of specifics lead me to suspect that the protesters do not know the real objectives, which are unspoken.

I don't want words to bring bad things into being but the trajectory, if it continues to follow the Kyiv path, will lead to bloodshed.

So I listened to a diplomat, a former U.S. ambassador to Georgia, hoping to gain an insight.

Ambassador Ian Kelly (2015–2018) spoke openly and warmly about Georgia on Twitter Spaces but he also talked from a script.

He began from the assumption that Georgia should be in the European Union and perhaps but less certainly, NATO.

Everything else followed: the government is anti-American, the presence of Russian émigrés is destabilising. Georgia's politicians are looking to the Hungarian model, one party rule with a strong man at the head.

Protests attract the young — Kelly calls them self organised. They are not willing to live in the traditional type society that ruling Georgian Dream presents as being more traditional that might be less homosexual, less Western.

The U.S. he said should have sanctioned Georgia earlier, when it passed the "foreign agents" law, just as it should have given Ukraine more weapons, and earlier.

And so on.

Nowhere in this discussion is any mention of whether the dissolution of traditional society would benefit Georgia, or how the EU would help.

For those who don't know, Georgian families are very small-c conservative and largely orthodox Christian. They are protective of children, especially their daughters, in a way that has vanished in most of the West.

Asian and Mid Eastern families choose to holiday in Georgia for this very reason, and send their children to study in Tbilisi in preference to London where they fear they would fall under more licentious influence.

Ambassador Kelly takes it seemingly as a given that Western "pride" and social justice must be imposed.

This chasm in understanding explains the hollow core of the demonstrations in Georgia.

Western politicians and media are wedded to "change" in president Barack Obama's vacuous phrase which he never explained, leading to its ridicule as "hopium."

I leave it to others to place it in neocolonial terms, as the imposition of an ideology that does not build society but which divides it by the politics of identity: a Trojan horse for commercial exploitation.

The slicing and dicing of cohorts is nothing but marketing — the advertising technique of corporations dressed up as politics.

It is also used to bring about social change, as journalist Alan Macleod has revealed with regards to similar activities in Cuba. [3]

In Tbilisi, this includes the "Georgian Media Partnership Program" to train local journalists, with of course the correct outlook.

The US Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors) runs Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and in-house local language outlets, and also participates in training.

More aggressive are the Color Revolution activists such as CANVAS (formerly Otpor) who train Georgians in street action and strategies.

See Eurasia note #84: Georgia Warns U.S.-Backed Groups Plotting Unrest - Economic interests seeking control of land to reshape energy routes (Oct 04, 2023)

Civil elite

Georgian "civil society" (a Soros-Popper term) is dominated by foreign-funded Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) resulting from former president Mikheil Saakashvili's 2004-2013 neoliberal administration.

This sought to offset the influence of established families and modernise government by outsourcing policy and social functions to NGOs.

It created an upper middle class (by Georgian standards) that looks outwards to its funders for money and direction. The current clash is partly because this self-regarding elite thinks it is more modern and better able to run Georgia than parties which appeal to traditional Georgian society.

This cohort absorbs and transmits not so much Western values as the closed-circuit of the Washington and Brussels think tanks and the intergovernmental institutions. While Georgian politicians have access to one or two outlets, the self-regarding elite is provided a megaphone with the full volume of the international media.

In Georgia, as in Syria and in Ukraine the West cheers on change with no explanation as to the cost and the benefits. In Palestine its silence is deafening.

Refer a friend

Seven countries, five years

The U.S. has been trying to overthrow Syria for 13 years, under Operation Timber Sycamore. Countries including Lebanon, in Syria, Somalia, in Sudan, in Libya are being destabilized yet it is never admitted; presidents do not discuss it, Congress does not vote on it.

There is unrest in Georgia, in Romania and talk of increasing unrest in Moldova through institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy, as professor Jeffrey Sachs points out. The presence, or not, of NATO in Ukraine has no implication for U.S. security and yet it has been a core aim of the deep state since 1994.

“This is the problem with our political system: it is secretive, true national security issues meaning the ones which put us in profound insecurity like the danger of nuclear war are not discussed at all.”

Playing dumb

The politicians today are puppets not statesmen. Lacking in substance they have only narcissism to drive them, the twin impulses of fear and sick ambition.

Not so fast!

Some of them have truly impressive credentials. So how can they behave with such despairing stupidity? The author Slobodan Despot points out:

“Supidity is an official outfit, a shield and a career engine. It is a common trait with Soviet apparatchiks. Or, more broadly, with the satrapy of all authoritarian and decadent regimes.” [4]

European leaders are terrified for their survival — not out of fear of the Russian bear but the American eagle, and through Stockholm syndrome. They comply with sanctions and blow their budgets on the Ukraine war because they are ordered to, and because their careers and wealth depend on compliance.

What they won't admit is that the U.S. has little more regard for European leaders than it has for those of Russia.

Moscow's push for a multipolar world in which the major powers entreat is, in Washington's view, an impertinent challenge; an attempt to revise the outcome of WW2.

Likewise any disagreement by Europe with U.S. hegemonic power is regarded as questioning Washington's winning of the Cold War.

Europe's attempt to crawl out from under America's occupation, from US European Command headquartered in Stuttgart, to Ramstein also in Germany, to Lakenheath in Britain, to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, will be answered with the detonation of the Nord Stream gas pipeline and the de-industrialising of the continent.

The European Union doesn't earn any thanks from the U.S. for fighting Russia in Ukraine. It was Germany's president who awarded president Joe Biden Germany's highest honour, in October, the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for his most excellent detonation of Nord Stream and the spiralling descent of Germany’s economy.

“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”
— Heinz "Henry" Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State, 1973-77.

This suggests that the resource magnates, the oiler-bankers and their military henchmen do not compromise, and that they will never stop trying to conquer other countries.

Short of an unlikely defeat, or a shattering of nation states along with the international economy, the only option is to finally negotiate an end to WW2 and the Cold War on the basis of a truly equal global order.

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