USAID Files Expose Knot In West's Throat

Graham Greene killed the do-gooder in Vietnam

Feb 08, 2025

Myth of neutral media - thousands of journalists financed by U.S. government
Ignorant of civilisations, Graham Greene shows how we 'improve' them
'The deep state is far preferable to the Trump state,' says Bill Kristol
USAID manipulation of reporting & funding has centralists on the hop
Those who wear heart on sleeve are forced to confront the purchase of conformity
Democracy is sacrificed on the altar of saving democracy

Series:
USAID Regime Change Revealed - Eurasia note #105: Georgia's Color Revolution (Feb 04, 2025)
USAID Files Expose Knot In West's Throat - Graham Greene killed the do-gooder in Vietnam (Feb 08, 2025)
USAID's Fist In A Velvet Glove - Cass Sunstein's malevolent hand (Feb 09, 2025)

Related:
From Coup To War, Ukraine's Historical Parallel - interventions reveal the intent of 'the players.' (Nov 01, 2022)
Setting The Silk Road Ablaze - From Kyiv to Samarkand, are geopolitical arsonists lighting multiple fires? (Jul 04, 2022)
Happy 'No Deference' Day - Down those 4th July hotdogs as the war horses charge (Jul 04, 2024)
Assange In Final Battle Against Extradition - Truth and disinformation are a hall of mirrors (Feb 21, 2024)
Can I Vote Against The Bombe? - War's monetary motive in the implosion of nations (Oct 28, 2024)

(2,000 words or about 10 minutes of your company.)

Feb 8, 2025

“I’m not involved… It had been an article of my creed,” Thomas Fowler boasts in The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s novel of Western descent into the cauldron of 1950s Vietnam.

Fowler is a British journalist, and neutrality is his brand. Not simply a marketing lie, but one that the audience believes because on one level it reinforces the liberal viewer’s complicity.

"Not involved... the only sensible position in a world of imperfect options." [1]

And yet the unravelling of USAID is telling a different story: that vast numbers of journalists are on the dole, the handout, the take, in return for telling the establishment version of events.

USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets and 279 "media" NGOs, which includes 90% of the reportage out of Ukraine. It was giving direct donations or buying subscriptions to boost the reach of NPR, the BBC and Politico. [2]

Liberals, who wear their heart on their sleeve, but are ready to change their overcoat at the drop of a hat — when standing up for the freedoms of others costs them personal and financial comfort.

We should identify with Greene's message, as I. S. Berry writes, "that the human and global are hopelessly intertwined."

Deep state

I would rather stand with the deep state than with the electorate. So said the standard bearer of the neo conservatives.

"The deep state is far preferable to the Trump state," said Bill Kristol.

Kristol is a promoter of the Clash of Civilisations - an endless war that keeps in play the oil-rich lands of South West Asia, aka Middle East, suiting the oiler bankers.

How does this evolve into policy?

The U.S. will always say that it is standing with Israel even though prof Jeffrey Sachs says the Democratic Party lost the election largely because of the appearance that the Biden administration had lost national control of its foreign policy.

The current scandal is USA-ID, or USAIDs, so rendered in any number of memes.

The serious point is that the U.S. is wedded to a policy of taking out governments in SW Asia (Mid East) as General Wesley Clarke described in "seven countries in five years."

So far Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon have been checked off, leaving Iran.

Which raises the question: what is the point of regime change?

As we'll see, even the think tanks that form the thinking muscles of the deep state, are not agreed on the benefits.

Three USA-IDs

Ninety per cent of the alt media in countries that the U.S. envies or despises, are financed by the U.S. government.

Russia Today was banned in much of the West because it is state funded media. It turn out that not just the Western legacy media but much of the alternative media is on the payroll of the U.S. government or its proxies.

The $60 billion USAIDs behemoth does some grounded, charitable work: clean water, tents for refugees etc.

However it is an instrument of foreign policy: it helps those who help the USA.

Thirdly it is the deep state. It funds Color Revolution and the alternative media that "springs up on demand when a government needs to be otherthrown," as Sachs says.

Closing USA-ID if only temporarily has exposed how much of the "alt" media and the charity sector is on the deep state payroll.

Greene view

On one level, diplomats and agencies pry open countries so that corporations can sell more goods. It is little different, superficially, to how McDonald's or Coke sell their products.

When effecting whole-of-society change, the hypothesis, methods and outcomes are more complex than Coca-Cola profiting while target nations shoulder the burden of childhood obesity.

Some argue that missionaries produce the same by product of Westernising, though with a different goal.

In an already globalised world, however, the reach of commerce or scripture hardly require nations to fall. The purpose of regime change is more abstruse.

For the perpetrators it must by fun, flying from one country to the next, overthrowing governments, without knowing the people or the language, yet forthright in the vagueness of one's cause.

This is what Graham Greene captured in his 1950s novel The Quiet American. The character of the title, Alden Pyle (said to be based an officer of the Economic Aid Mission, suspected by the French to be a cover for the CIA) seeks to save democracy in late-colonial Vietnam.

See Eurasia note #64 - From Coup To War, Ukraine's Historical Parallel - Past interventions have some ominous implications as to the intent of 'the players (Nov 01, 2022)

Though not noticeably religious, Pyle — a Harvard graduate of government theory, like Henry Kissinger and Klaus Schwab — is zealous, "obtuse and destructive" according to contemporary criticism.

Although U.S. readers considered Greene's book a sleight, the diplomatic community took note and a cautionary tale, The Ugly American, would be published three years later depicting the failures of the U.S. diplomatic corps in Southeast Asia. It became required reading.

Today we still witness Harvard graduates of government theory, such as Klaus Schwab, with their wrecking balls, building back better.

Plus ça change

In Georgia, in the Caucasus, you may bump into American missionaries occasionally but theirs is not the righteousness you'll find motivating the students on their midnight rambles of street protest.

There is an overlap between some missionaries and the CIA - see Defending Democracy Together Institute and Mormon Women For Ethical Government.

The modern day Pyle, however, is not carrying a copy of York Harding's 'The Role of the West.' He is Woke.

Who decided that LGBTQ2IA+ and diversity, equity and inclusion mirrors the nation of Georgia which they seek to change?

Greene's theme throughout The Quiet American is the tragic consequence of blundering, unknowing foreign interference.

The rise and fall of powers leads to the construction of hypotheses: to explain history and to approach the future.

To quote Harold Sprout of Princeton University (Geopolitical Hypotheses in Technological Perspective, 2011):

"One characteristic of most of these activities has been a persistent search for the “master variable” that would provide a simple yet plausible and satisfying basis for explaining or predicting the ordering of political relationships among nations."

In practice there is no one hypotheses but a series of hypotheses - and the process of technological or social change brings on attrition, as well as the observer effect - in scientific terms the act of observation alters the behaviour of the particles being observed.

The foreign agent, or Pyle, is an imperfectly chosen tool, who does an approximate job, while changing prevailing conditions - not least with the bicycle bombing that so outraged American readers.

A series of hypotheses gives us not only different yardsticks by which to select options in the present; it gives us a vision of different world maps, not just ethnographic, topographic but in space and time.

We still seek to identify universal values, as did Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) that give us a framework to approach multitudinous nations.

In his era the spread of European commerce around the globe drove mercantilists to seek a universal language of trade - seen in the work of Adam Smith.

The East India Company college in Hertfordshire provided an education "fitted to the training of East India Company recruits prior to their departure for India."

Will the public get to see debate on this level? Will they have a say in the policy that follows?

Does it work?

The objection to regime change is partly empirical. The American Conservative wrote in 2017 that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were evidence of a failed strategy.

It isn't a strategy, though. It's merely a tactic or, strictly, two: foreign funding to destabilise a government, or economic blockade followed by military invasion.

We have seen the Taliban in Afghanistan replaced with the Taliban, and Syria split between Israel, Turkey and al-Qaeda.

Illogic of change

The target is declared hostile because it does not lay itself open to free trade with Western corporations, or is protectionist of national assets, or its political system is intolerable to neighbours.

The first example was Iran, with the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953. Incoming decades Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Syria would follow. Largely secular states were overthrown by foreign destabilisation or military force. In no case was change democratic.

In each case some group complains about human rights violations which allows the U.S. to intervene and install a new fellow, who then deliver real human rights violations.

Each region was turned, whole or in part, into religious-dominated fiefdoms. This while the global elitist institutions - the UN and such - claim they are committed to "world interfaith harmony" and even a one-world church.

It is an abuse of trust - of the regional hegemon and, above all, of the target population, who never get the promised fruits of democracy.

The Western Atlantic alliance creates ever more bodies to advertised the promised democracy - the National Endowment for Democracy, Alliance of Democracies Foundation, the Democratic Order Initiative, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Western Balkans Democracy Initiative... you can see where this is going.

Many of these are funded by USAID and the U.S. State Department, including the National Democratic Institute and the Bureau of Democracy. Many more don't have democracy in their title but work in the same orbit: Human Rights, and Labor, the Middle East Partnership Initiative, the Millennium Challenge Corporation etc.

One of the latest is the European Democracy Shield. This is supposedly just a talking shop on how to strengthen the public's resilience to disinformation and to combat foreign manipulation of information. [3]

It fits, however, into the glove of the NATO;the “soft power” by which NATO seeks to wage hybrid war — as much on its own population as on foreign enemies.

NATO created with the Pentagon and Britain’s Ministry of Defence, along with the European Commission, a political warfare infrastructure based in Germany, Ukraine and the Baltic states, as described by Mike Benz.

See Assange In Final Battle Against Extradition - Truth and disinformation are a hall of mirrors (Feb 21, 2024)
Can I Vote Against The Bombe? - War's monetary motive in the implosion of nations (Oct 28, 2024)

In the Western Balkans the above named proponents of democracy annulled the Romanian election, excluded overseas ballots in Moldova's vote, and seemingly tried to assassinate the Slovakian prime minister.

The European Commission shoe-horns Georgia into the Western Balkans, which is why we witness a "democracy initiative" underway in Tbilisi.

It is easy to miss the intent of regime change. Instead we are lured into Monty Python's Argument Clinic - and a tennis match of gain saying.

This leads us to seek verification from the past, at the expense of focus on the present.

The NED is the spawn of organisations set up after WW2 to "market democracy."

The phrase captures the economic objectives behind marketing Western "values" as a means to pry open more traditional societies for profit.

The CATO institute suggests five incentives behind regime change:

the powers' predilection for quick, cheap and easy short term solutions - "who will rid me of this turbulent priest";
the opposition leaders in the target country make the objective seem easy and worthwhile - mainly because they profit from it;
policymakers' cognitive bias leads them to dismiss the downsides;
covert operatives like the CIA focus on the job in hand, and consider the task completed with the overthrow;
the delusion that a new political incumbent will change the socio-cultural expectations and pressures. [4]

Moneycircus

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