News and View from Canada

Professor Sharp and the Albert Einstein Organization

Don Currie, Editor Focus On Socialism

Member of Editorial Board, Northstar Compass

January 4^th 2012

News reports arriving in Canada from the former socialist states of Eastern Europe indicate the growth of state sponsored fascism in the form of draconian anti-communist legislation. Communists and their supporters are routinely jailed for their views. The reactionary right wing forces promoting anti-communist legislation in EU-NATO countries are amply supported by US government funding via such conduits as the National Endowment Fund a CIA front for subversive activities. So blatant is their involvement that well informed and well intentioned forces reject such gross interference in the internal affairs of other countries.

There are others that do similar work but more sophisticated and more cleverly masked in the garb of disinterested promoters of democracy, freedom and ostensibly oppose totalitarianism and dictatorship. One of these is the Albert Einstein Organization (AEO) and its principal spokesperson one Professor Gene Sharp. His principal work, “From Dictatorship to Democracy, A Conceptual Framework for Liberation” [1] is cited by promoters in the USA as a factor in the Orange, Green and other colorful western sponsored counter revolutionary events. Professor Sharp’s work is touted as the universal model for events in Burma, Ukraine, Russia, Poland and the so-called Arab spring.

Professor Sharp’s influence is exaggerated. What is noteworthy however is that it serves to promote the idea among the gullible that the ideas of freedom, democracy and opposition to dictatorship are synonymous with the aims of the power elites of the USA.

It is important to be aware of such organizations and to critically expose their theses and connections in the global imperialist assault on real socialism. One of the principal targets of the AEO is the legacy of socialism in the USSR and in particular the role of Stalin in the building of socialism.  

This observer does not claim to have done an exhaustive exposure of Professor Sharp but offers the following as a heads up to our readers and to encourage others that can do this work much better, to expose it further.

A quick read of Professor Sharp’s principal work, and there is an updated version, will immediately cause the reader to wonder how such banal thinking can gain such notoriety in US academia as serious research. Its counterpart in Canada exists among an array of right wing think tanks both on and off campus.

Not being a scholar this observer nonetheless insists on the right to challenge Professor Sharp’s theses since he claims to speak for all who seek justice and liberation.

Professor Sharp hides under the mantle of such great and credible non-violent mass leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein and presents a shallow version of their ideas and accomplishments of their work. Among those lauded by Professor Sharp are the Dalai Lama, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and those disparaged include Che and Stalin among others.

First some comments about Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian Liberation Movement: I am not an expert and have a partisan view of those events which are far different than Professor Sharp’s.

Gandhi employed the methods of mass non-violent resistance against a real oppressor British imperialism, not because he was motivated by some divine universal revelation. Mass non-violence activism was a method of struggle adopted by one of the movements of Indian anti-colonial struggle based on the real political conditions prevailing in that country at that time. In my opinion it is wrong and unsupportable to assert such a method of anti-imperialist struggle has some universal application. Sometimes it works and other times other methods work. People fighting for progress prefer a peaceful path but it is rarely open to them.

British imperialism installed colonial power and exploited the Indian people ruthlessly for more than two centuries backed up by real military power both as an invading and as an occupying imperial power. Indian independence and the movement Gandhi led in alliance with other major political forces including a mass influential Communist party were preceded by a long and bitter and violent struggle of the people on the Asian sub-continent against British and other imperial powers that had wielded colonial power with brutal military force for several centuries. The British elites got very rich by robbing and exploiting the Indian people which accounts even to this day for Britain’s status as a major rentier imperialist state.  

The victory of that struggle attributed to non-violence is a misreading of Indian liberation. Liberation was preceded by revolutions in Russia and China that contrary to the shills of western propaganda greatly inspired the people of the Indian subcontinent and about which Indira Gandhi and her father Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi himself made reference to on many occasions. All of these figures paid tribute to Lenin as an inspiration to the Indian masses in their struggle for emancipation.

The victory of the Indian people against the British colonial power was finally made possible by the military defeat of the axis powers in WW2 a very violent event and necessarily so but its consequence permitted the Indian people to liberate themselves relatively peacefully (there were quite bloody episodes as well) and establish a capitalist democracy with some reform aspects to it. The case of the role of Indian in international affairs today is beyond the scope of this commentary.

Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King made great contributions to human freedom because the movements they led were first of all mass in character with identifiable concrete political goals and with openly proclaimed concrete programs of demands for the oppressed majority that the ruling elites could not ignore. There was much violence committed against the movement in the USA including the assassination of activists and Martin Luther King himself in spite of their proclaimed non-violence. In the case of the USA racist economic oppression was the root issue and was taken up by a determined people that chose non-violence because there was some scope in the US system of limited democracy for such a movement to arise the way it did. The movement produced it is own theory, strategy and tactics and was moving from civil rights to economic rights when it was side tracked. While winning some formal recognition of civil rights the economic battle goes on.

One wonders why Professor Sharp does not analyze the lessons of that struggle in his own country because it is arising once more in another form, the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The application of non-violent activism in India and the USA was due to objective conditions that permitted some scope for its success.  That is a benefit of having a modicum of democracy. But what are people’s to do where it doesn’t exist? Mr. Sharp glosses over that reality preferring to dispense some universal dogma that fits all.

Professor Sharp evades a factual discussion of what are the concrete identifiable goals of the many forces he lauds in his piece.  A man of his great learning should be able to discuss at least in a cursory way what the contending forces in all of the countries he mentions stand for. His analysis is devoid of any notion of the existence of contending classes. He prefers to evade that and speak in the abstract of a generic universal freedom, democracy, dictatorship and totalitarianism without concrete details of what is being advocated and by whom and in what interest. That is a sign of a true philistine. The Pope does it much better.

Today there are contending forces in all countries with separate agendas of self interest posing as defenders of democracy and appealing to the “international community” for help. One is called upon to probe the real agendas of such forces at work and not accept generalizations about demands for democracy and freedom at face value. Many are open advocates of US imperialism and others are covert promoters of feudal oppression.

For example we are supposed to be struck dumb whenever the corporate controlled mass media tells us we must support a cause because it has the support of the “international community.” What is the international community? Professor Sharp claims to know it well but fails to define what it is.

The international community is anything the corporate controlled media says it is. In one case it is the UN and when that doesn’t permit the type of regime change intervention that is sought after then it becomes an alliance of the willing or at another time NATO and then NATO and the UN. At one time some NATO members are in on the aggression and others out and some UN members are in and at other times some members out. This floating “international community” is nothing but contrivances of the most powerful G7 NATO states trying to manage the world by military force.

Today oil, fresh water, natural resources, markets, the labour of others, is the imperialist prize. When Al Qaeda or the Taliban are alleged to be attacking the USA it is the enemy. But when these same forces leave Afghanistan and go to Libya under cover of NATO bombers, landed from US military ships, armed with NATO weapons and assume positions of political power by raw military force such as the so-called new Libyan Transitional government they are liberators.

The fact that once in power they may begin to advocate for Sharia law accompanied by the suppression of the most elementary rights of women is of no account. The people of Libya demonstrated in all major cities that is true. What was not reported in the western press was that the largest of these demonstrations were pro-Gadaffi and were examples of non-violent activism. UN Resolution 1973 was supposed to prevent civilian deaths. It became the fig leaf for NATO regime change in which all those who could have prevented bloodshed by non-violent activism were never allowed to do so because of violent NATO intervention.

What does Professor Sharp have to say about that type of state violence and what non-violent activism can prevent it? Rather difficult to stop a laser guided bomb dropped from 40,000 feet by a Canadian CF 18 fighter jet directed to target by a US reconnaissance or sea based communication system. This is 2012 not Calcutta in 1947. Professor Sharp evades discussing how to apply non-violent activism on the battlefront of NATO warfare in the space age.

Professor Sharp avoids any discussion of such uncomfortable truths. The NATO Libyan scenario is now being played out in Syria and intervention is planned by the “international community”, this time by Turkey taking the lead as a member of NATO. Turkey has its own internal problems and wants a cause to justify the seizure of a big piece of Syria. Israel, the US client state in the Middle East (which receives about $1 billion a month in largesse) seeks a big piece of Lebanon and to further consolidate its grip on the Golan Heights. All Israeli regional policy is aimed at a Greater Israel at the expense of Arab nations it borders, the Palestinians in particular those in Gaza and to justify further Jewish settlement building.

The Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon are not sleeping and they will resist such a change in balance of forces in their region. What does Mr. Sharp propose those opposed to US policy in the Middle East do? Presumably they have no justifiable case and should just non-violently surrender. That is not reality.

A US-NATO-EU invasion of Libya, Iran and Syria has been on the Pentagon planning table for many years. Credible analysts not bamboozled by Fox News, are warning that a major war may start soon unless it can be stopped. This time Russia and China may cast the veto in the UN. This observer hopes they do as tens of thousands of innocent victims of war will be spared and a peaceful resolution might be possible. The numbers killed in the NATO bombing of Libya are deliberately being suppressed. The destruction of that country is staggering.

Prior to NATO intervention the Libyan government used its oil revenues to provide free health care, free education, each young couple who got married received affordable housing. Women were not subjected to Sharia restrictions and Libya was largely a secular state. The Libyan Government accessed aquifers to develop agriculture in Libya and shared that technology with other North African states, hence the numbers of black Africans in Libya as workers and students. Many of these innocent youth, under the cover of NATO were lined up and shot by “liberators” armed with NATO weaponry who claimed they were mercenaries when even CNN on the scene at the time knew they were migrant workers, many trying to get out and go home. How would Professor Sharp propose these innocent victims of NATO terror use non-violence to defend themselves?

Some websites report that there are at least 7000 of these unfortunate victims of real violence in Transitional government jails and their fate is precarious. At the same time we daily get lurid reports on the corporate controlled media and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) of alleged Syrian government violence. Most of these so-called journalists make their reports about Syria based on Downing Street and Pentagon news releases from the safety of Washington, London and Tel Aviv.

In Israel over the summer months and until recently there has been a relatively non-violent occupy movement involving hundreds of thousands in Tel Aviv and other major Israeli towns and cities demanding redress to onerous economic conditions. Where is Professor Sharp’s support for that manifestation? There is a media blackout in the west about such events.

The truth about events unfolding in Egypt is underreported and the Mubarak military is still in control of the government of that country in spite of massive and widespread relatively peaceful protest. The only violence comes from the army. No NATO intervention there to save civilians. Egypt is fertile ground for Professor Sharp to try out his non-violent theories if he can avoid being shot by Egyptian military still under the command of Mubarak generals. Saudi Arabia is another country awaiting Professor Sharp. There women have no civil or electoral rights but Professor Sharp gives the Saudi princes a pass when the question of achieving non-violent democracy is discussed.

Martin Luther King and Gandhi were assassinated in spite of their self proclaimed and courageous personal non-violent leadership. Today the USA military doesn’t have to resort to crude methods of assassination of its alleged enemies it can do it with a joy stick, viewing a monitor in the safety of a military base somewhere in the USA. How will those killed in this way defend themselves by non-violence? They can’t even see who to be non-violent against.

Professor Sharp’s premise is that the USA has the type of freedom, democracy, and state rule ostensibly completely devoid of dictatorship that everyone else in the world must have whether they want it or not.

Mr. Sharp has some explaining to do. He lists other states, countries and regimes he deems to be without question as being legitimate targets for his non-violent theories and tactics of liberation, all except the USA. What is one to conclude other than Professor Sharp considers the USA and by implication all the G7 NATO states that are its allies to be the universal global model. Professor Sharp has simply created an abstract universal image of ideals that don’t exist anywhere and never will because the people themselves will ultimately decide how they want to live in spite of all of Mr. Sharp’s nostrums and are quite capable of writing their own constitutions, laws and without his help.

Under former President George W. Bush, via the Patriot Act, most of the real formal freedoms of the US Bill of Rights and the Constitution were effectively annulled. To my knowledge that is still the case. Now US President Barak Obama has signed into law The National Defense Authorization Act permitting the US government to arrest anyone anywhere in the world and transport them to the USA for prosecution by military tribunals. [2] [3] The violent sinister intent of this legislation is opposed by the US Civil Liberties Association and has been thoroughly exposed by Professor Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research. [4]

For a peaceful country, held up by Professor Sharp as a non-violent model for the world, he has nothing to say about the fact that on a per capita basis the USA has more people in jails than most other developed countries. The USA has the most ramified system of police suppression of any G20 state.  Violence and pornography in the USA is promoted in all of its media and culture for the simple reason it makes billions of dollars for its media empires. The “three strikes you’re out”  draconian prison system in the USA is the model now promoted by the Harper Government in a massive prison building bill that criminalizes the youth at a time when all crime indices in Canada are actually falling. Professor Sharp has a lot to do in his own country as we do in Canada before presuming to tell other countries how to achieve freedom by non-violence.

To state such banal views in the name of Einstein is a travesty. Albert Einstein was an implacable anti-fascist and was a socialist. He was of course more than that, a great humanitarian and advocate of nuclear disarmament and real peace arising out of international agreements that had the support of all enlightened people. Einstein was a scientist and not a pacifist. He would certainly have preferred non-violence but understood the need during the Second World War to defeat Hitler militarily. I have his biography in my library and have read it and refer to it often. Einstein believed in peace arising from nuclear disarmament about which our learned Professor Sharp has nothing to say. Einstein didn’t endorse the political system in the USA nor in the USSR but neither did he repudiate them as does Professor Sharp the latter. Albert Einstein because he was a scientist and not a sophist realized and accepted that such modern societies are historically evolved in real terms and will further evolve in real terms as Mr. Sharp’s sophistry fades and is forgotten.

Dictatorship, freedom, totalitarianism, democracy are powerful words but trite and without meaning unless there is a concrete definition as to what these terms mean in practice for the people concerned and to what real existing situation they are applied. Society must live in an organized way. It cannot exist in chaos. Professor Sharp fails miserably to tell us what his non-violent activism will do to provide the billions that are starving with food and shelter and medicines and education when all of that is in the control of powerful state monopoly capitalist states and their right wing governments. Professor Sharp would have us plead with this power to cease being violent, to plead with them with them non-violently to please stop being profiteers? Professor Sharp has nothing to say about the type of organized society that people might aspire to with his non-violent activism. Will they eat better?

Professor Sharp and his institute promote the USA as a universal model for all humankind. What he is confident of, boundlessly confident we might add, is that everyone agrees with him. We would say he is short about 6.5 billion who have not heard of him and will not wait to struggle for progress or his explanation about he declares they must do to be truly free of imperialism.

Professor Sharp lacks credibility in the extreme except with gullible and self-interested supporters hoping to be rewarded by imperialist largesse. Professor Sharp talks about his great ideals in the abstract and his examples of the success of his theorizing are all asserted not proven. He is forced to say that he can with concreteness point to the violent crimes of Nazism because he could verify such atrocities as such and as many of us reading these lines saw them during and in the aftermath of WW2. All of his assertions about the alleged crimes of communism he has derived he admits from “reading accounts.”  Apparently there was nothing in his reading about the exploits of the Red Army that liberated Europe and saved North America from the scourge of Nazism.

Professor Sharp is deep into the demonization and equating of communism with Nazism one of the most gross forms of historical revisionism. More than 20 million Soviet citizens along with the western allies gave their lives to liberate Europe and defeat Hitler. Non-violent activism wasn’t an option in that conflict. Professor Sharp doesn’t discuss such examples of unavoidable violence nor comment on who was responsible for it and whether it was necessary or not. Nor does he comment on the fact that war is politics by other means and the USA didn’t get into WW2 until it was almost over and emerged from it with minimal losses and became the dominant military and most violent power in the world.   

When the Manhattan Project was in full swing the US general in charge told the scientists who thought they were producing a weapon to defeat Hitler that it was being developed to be used against the USSR. That to my surprise was revealed on a recent CBC documentary. Even Churchill asserted that Japan was already defeated before the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russia entered the war against Japan as it promised its allies and in six weeks defeated the Kwan Toon Japanese army and surrender talks were already underway when Truman ordered the bombs to be dropped. That terrible act was the first use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians and a war crime that one day will be prosecuted. Professor Sharp is mute on his country’s use of the nuclear weapon nor discusses how non-violent activism would have saved its victims. If he was consistent with his doctrine of non-violent activism he would be applying it in practice to help mobilize public opinion in the USA to support world-wide nuclear disarmament. If he would do that he would gain some credibility in the eyes of all people who want peace.  

Today the USA and NATO retain the doctrine of the first strike use of nuclear weapons the ultimate in a violent act.  Canada is a signatory to that NATO doctrine. This observer received a day or so ago a document released by Wiki leaks providing the wording of a statement of agreement between NATO and UN secretariats. Now the USA has even ensnared the UN into its doctrines of nuclear weaponry and Ban Ki Moon is now in clear violation of his mandate as UN Secretary General that prohibits the UN of engaging in war alliances. He is discredited and should resign.

We in Canada read Prime Minister Harper’s statement in his most recent meeting with President Obama that the enemies of the USA cannot be friends of Canada. One must ask, where does that leave Cuban-Canadian, Venezuela-Canadian, North Korea-Canadian relations and for that matter, Russia-Canadian relations, China-Canadian relations and now with US relations breaking down with Pakistan, Pakistan-Canadian relations. All of these countries to my knowledge bear no hostile intent against Canada but are now all our enemies according to Prime Minister Harper and against which we must be prepared to go to war if necessary. Prime Minister Harper claims he has the right to say such a thing on behalf of all Canadians proclaiming we are now therefore enemies with most of the non-G7 NATO states of the world since most of the world is not in support of recent US-NATO actions.  Canada has never been as discredited in the eyes of world public opinion as it is since the advent of the Harper Conservative Government.

Such rhetoric is typical of our Prime Minister and is a crude attempt to justify participation in any future NATO war and for an unprecedented build up at taxpayer expense of the Canadian armed forces to defend us from whom? Perhaps Professor Sharp should come to Canada and address Parliament with his non-violent message. The Harper Canadian government is need of it.

We ask Professor Sharp. Do people who disapprove of US diktat over their lives have the right to resist in any manner they choose or are they only allowed to use the non-violent activist methods prescribed by Professor Sharp?  And just how are they to use such non-violent methods while the USA maintains almost 1000 military bases around the world, deploys major nuclear equipped fleets in all major oceans, spends one half of its federal budget on armaments, and funds enumerable politically biased NGO’s on all continents presuming to tell other people of other countries how to conduct their affairs. And the US government does that while it fails to provide its own people with a decent health care system, affordable housing, jobs with a living wage and permits 1% of its elites of wealth and privilege to wantonly break the law while such financiers fleece the US citizenry with such schemes as the sub-prime scam. What is wrong with that picture Professor Sharp?

The biggest dictatorship in the world bar none is a handful of US finance capitalists of the USA and the EU demanding freedom for itself above all else in this world. The USA has backed murderous dictatorships on every continent in the world since WW2 and still does. It is a very long list and people have a long memory. The USA has fomented most of the regional wars since WW2 and is planning as we speak, to carry another against Iran and Syria and possibly North Korea, and if it does that, with the help of its client state Israel, the regional wars now underway in Iraq and Afghanistan will look like tea parties. As this is being written Iran is carrying out maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz close to its own territorial waters and the USA says it has no right to do that as it maintains a huge naval and military presence all over the region. One can only imagine what would happen if Iran sent a flotilla and carried out maneuvers in the Gulf of Mexico.

Perhaps Professor Sharp should get in a dinghy and go to the Strait of Hormuz and stand between the two protagonists and read his thesis. That will stop the impending disaster. If things continue to deteriorate and most serious analysts predict they will, because the people of North America are still sleep walking or in tacit support out of a perceived self interest from foreign wars, there will be more war and fairly soon. Such a war will be accompanied, and that is already happening in the case of Syria and Iran, with a massive propaganda barrage alleging that it is necessary to kill people in foreign countries so we can live at home in North America in safety and non-violence.

Such a war is unlikely to be stopped by any theory of active non-violence however perfect. It is irresponsible to assert such an idea in the name of freedom and democracy at such a time of grave peril to our planet. A nuclear war anywhere will have repercussions for us all and the corporate controlled media and their well paid shills cover that up and so does Professor Sharp.

The USA is heading into another Presidential election and every time it does into a so-called exercise in electoral democracy the extreme right wing begins to beat the drums of war. The US power elites did that in 1951 in Korea, again in Viet Nam and Cambodia in the 1960s, again in the Gulf War 1990, in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, then on to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2001 and Libya last year and now possibly Iran and Syria.

Finally Professor Sharp needs to be reminded to be reminded about dictatorships supported by the USA since the one that seems to preoccupy him the most is the alleged Stalin dictatorship. The Russian people are quite capable of sorting that out without Mr. Sharp’s help. The dictatorships that should be preoccupying Professor Sharp is the dictatorship of finance capital over all aspects of his country’s development.

Dictatorship when it has western backing is somehow benign but when it does not have western approval even when it is demonstrable popular with the people, it is intrinsically evil. Where was the success of non-violence in ending the dictatorships in South and Central America? The people there were forced to resort to arms and did so against oppressors armed by the USA. Where was the success of non-violence during the Spanish Civil War when the west claimed to be neutral while it allowed the fascist condor legions and the Goering’s Luftwaffe to obliterate Guernica which Picasso memorialized in his great painting. Where the victory of non-violence for the victims of the Nazi death camps where millions were piteously murdered men women and children even as they yearned to live.

We on the left have had enough in our lifetime of Professors like Mr. Sharp. This observer prefers those professors that stand with the people and their struggle for peace and socialism in all of its forms, peaceful and non-peaceful. The USA and now sadly our own government has no non-violent peace policy. The G7 NATO states only have a violent war policy and if our beautiful planet is to survive we need to oust such hateful governments and their powerful financial backers and soon.