Ray McGovern: Expert Anti-Communist and Nonviolence as Counterinsurgency
The Counterinsurgency infecting the left
This Document is the second part of a series exposing the PSL/ANSWER connections to the CIA/FBI.
Series Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction and Key Terms—A Primer
Part 2: Ray McGovern: Expert Anti-Communist—Nonviolence as Counterinsurgency
Part 3: John Kiriakou: Butcher and Torturer — the Farce of Whistleblower Allies
Part 4: Worker’s World Party: a confidence scheme
Part 5: Unmasking the Hydra: relationships between the “anti-war left” and the WWPSLCIA
Part 6: Ramsey Clark and the afterlife of PHOENIX, COINTELPRO, and MH CHAOS
Content Warnings: Discussion of genocide and imperialist war crimes (not graphic)
Synopsis
McGovern is a man who spent decades providing “unbiased” intelligence to the united states to help the CIA sabotage communist movements, from henry kissinger to george hw bush. He was a high level CIA agent giving advice directly to the president and his cabinet. In this, he played a direct role in the deaths of millions of 3rd world peoples. This man is not a hero he is a butcher.
Even though he has marketed himself as an anti-war activist, he still supports amerikan imperialism and his CIA oath to defend the country. In spite of this, he is intimately connected to PSL, ANSWER, and Veterans for Peace. His current politics are an extension of Gene Sharp’s Department of Defense (DoD) funded “non-violence” ideology. He, along with many others, implement those counter-insurgent strategies within organizations to keep their anti-imperialist / anti-war politics from becoming anything that might remotely disrupt the empire. Indeed, his politics could be better understood as new form of libertarian-Strasserism that is being funded by his CIA-affiliated friends in Silicon-Valley.
Ray McGovern’s relationship with the PSL and ANSWER
Ray McGovern has deep connections with the ANSWER Coalition and has been a keynote speaker at their events for over a decade. He maintains close relationships with PSL and ANSWER leadership and has played a major role in developing their lines and propaganda regarding “US Foreign Policy”.
He has been a keynote speaker at multiple ANSWER events: in 2010 in Virginia; 2011 in New York and again in 2011 in Atlanta; 2014 in Washington D.C.; and 2017 in Washington D.C. At the same time McGovern was also doing interviews with Alex Jones on Info-wars in 2011 and again in 2014.
He has been a signatory to multiple ANSWER Coalition Open Letters: an “Open Letter to Iran” in 2015 in which they explain that sanctions against Iran are unconstitutional; a letter on Syria in 2016 that concludes: “We need jobs, healthcare, education and an end to racist police violence here at home, not U.S. wars abroad!!” ; a letter calling for “non-violent protests against the war in Afghanistan” in 2017. All these positions are fundamentally counter-insurgent positions that do not challenge the state but simply say the Amerikan government is ‘doing it wrong’ (‘it’ being imperialism).
Ray McGovern wrote an article for the ANSWER Coalition website in 2015 titled “Why Iran Distrusts the US in Nuke Talks”. In this article he makes the case that sanctions against Iran are illegitimate because the five eyes intelligence community lied about Iran developing nuclear weapons. McGovern doesn’t have a problem with genocidal sanctions, his only problem is five eyes lying. He is also cited by ANSWER branches as a reputable source as recently as 2021.
Ray McGovern has also been a frequent guest on Brian Becker’s podcast “Loud and Clear”, showing up 30 times between January of 2016 and September of 2017. Becker is a co-founder of the PSL, and the director of the PSL-affiliated ANSWER coalition. In multiple circumstances, he interviewed with other members of the upper echelons of PSL/ANSWER including: Jane Cutter (founding member of the PSL), Gloria La Riva (2016 PSL Presidential candidate); Eugene Puryear (PSL vice presidential nominee in 2012 and 2016); Sarah Sloan (National Staff Coordinator of the ANSWER coalition); Mike Prysner (PSL member and key propagandist who co-produces Empire Files). He has also appeared on Loud and Clear with other “anti-war” intelligence operatives, NSA agent William Binney; FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley; and CIA Analyst John Kiriakou.
McGovern is also a member of the advisory board of Veterans For Peace (VFP), a close ally of the ANSWER Coalition and the largest “Anti-war veteran” organization in the united states. These are not the kind of anti-war soldiers who used to commit “fraggings” against their officers in Vietnam, nor do they share anything in common with the anti-war activists who were bombing military training facilities and ROTC buildings in the 60’s. In fact, VFP was founded in 1985 for the purpose of demilitarizing anti-war resistance into a “nonviolent force for change”. Their charter explicitly states: “members of Veterans For Peace pledge to use non-violent means.” We will return to the counter insurgent nature of “nonviolence” in the second half of this article.
Ray McGovern— a career of crushing communism
Ray McGovern worked at the Central Intelligence Agency for 27 years from 1963 until 1990. He does not talk much about his time there but the media has made a point to advertise his “expertise.” His actual descriptions seem to change depending on who Ray is being interviewed by, so we have included a number of them:
The Independent “McGovern worked near the very top of his profession, giving direct advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era and preparing the President's daily security brief for Ronald Reagan.”
Peacewatch: “Ray McGovern was a member of the CIA for 27 years and he served as the “All Intelligence Agent” during the Reagan administration. He was responsible for briefing the President, the Vice President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Cabinet and National Security Advisor.”
New York Times: “Ray McGovern, a retired C.I.A. analyst who briefed President Bush's father in the White House in the 1980's”
The Boston Globe: “Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine service”
Former Clinton Advisor Sydney Blumenthal: “Ray McGovern, former CIA chief for the Middle East”.
Journalist John Pilger says: “Ray McGovern, a former senior C.I.A. officer, distinguished as a Soviet specialist and cold warrior, a man who counts himself a personal friend of George Bush, the president's father”
His website biography says “Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985.”
This is an incredible resume. If we match his bio with the claim from Peacewatch, then Ray McGovern was personally responsible for briefing Reagan’s entire National Security Council which includes “Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs”. Ray would have been deeply connected with every single intelligence brief and national security directive going in or coming out the Reagan White House.
During an interview in 2007 he says that he retired from the CIA after the collapse of the Soviet Union because Soviet policy was “my favorite substantive target”. We can conclude that he was an expert on providing intelligence about communism and communist movements. Upon retiring, per his bio, he was awarded the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medal “For the performance of especially commendable service or for an act or achievement significantly above normal duties which results in an important contribution to the mission of the Agency.” There are only 3 other publicly known recipients of this award.
He began criticizing George W. Bush’s use of intelligence in 2002 and began to give dozens of interviews about US foreign Policy—this began his career as an “anti-war activist”. He founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) in 2003 with Kiriakou and Clark among others. An incomplete list of VIPS letters can be found here. To get an idea of VIPS imperialist agenda, this is an excerpt from a 2015 letter:
“An independent group for intelligence analysis would be free to produce for you and your National Security Council the medium- and long-term strategic intelligence analysis that can help our country steer clear of future strategic disasters. And we offer ourselves as advisers as to how this might be accomplished.”
ANSWER’s golden boy and John Kirkiou offering to work for Obama to better defend the Amerikan empire.
Lastly, Ray McGovern is a founder of Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, “a movement of former CIA colleagues” that gives cash awards to “a member of the intelligence community or related professions who exemplifies Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth – no matter the consequences.” This group has little information and explicitly says they are not a 501c3, so their financials are unknown. Who funds their enourmous parties?
McGovern’s criticisms of America only extend so far as the belief that the CIA has been “hijacked” with “corrupted intelligence”. Ray McGovern admits that he is still an agent of empire in a 2007 interview where he remarks that he and other members of VIPS “feel strongly about the oath we took to defend and protect the constitution of the United States”. As recently as 2013 he gave a speech at Oxford University explaining he “still believes in the American Dream” and “the fifth estate… Wikileaks and whistleblowers, can save the America.”
A Note on Methodology:
Ray McGovern rarely speaks about his time at the CIA and there are very few leads to any specific activities. This is incredibly suspicious but leaves us with a limited ability to identify what he did while working for the empire. Publicly available CIA documents have redacted all names.
However, as he was the “All-Intelligence Agent” personally preparing intelligence briefs for the Reagan National Security Council from 1981-1985, we can assume that any National Security Intelligence Directives (NSID) coming from the Reagan office during that time were known about, prepared by, and approved by McGovern. We can also assume that any National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) publications, which he chaired from 1980-1988, would have his input and seal of approval. Both of these positions had Top Secret Clearance, the highest security clearance level in the us government.
We make no claims as to what Ray McGovern 'believed' or agreed with while he was advising Kissinger and later Reagan. But the fact that he remained working in these positions demonstrates his approval of their policies as well as his usefulness to them planning their strategies. During a 2006 interview discussing the lies about Iraq’s WMD’s, McGovern said "Back in my day, I like to think we would have got up and walked out…Cooking intelligence is a cardinal sin in the intelligence world." It is incredibly telling that McGovern didn’t “walk out” during his years advising the genocidal policies of Reagan, Nixon, and Kissinger. He considered advising and assisting in their crimes against humanity as a "correct use" of the intelligence that he provided and analyzed.
Henry Kissinger
A brief rundown on *some* of Kissinger’s imperialist crimes:
-Kissinger personally approved the bombing runs in Cambodia that killed 150,000 and 500,000 people in Cambodia, as well as sending mercenaries to and arming the genocidal anti-communist Khmer Rouge who murdered over a million Cambodian people.
-Kissinger directed the CIA to send weapons to Pakistani dictator Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan to use in murdering 1-3 million Bengali people. Historian Gary Bass suggests that “Kissinger's policy was meant to maintain the alliance with Pakistan, which was an anti-communist bulwark in the region.”
-Kissinger supported the “Dirty War” in Argentina against communists and so-called dissidents.
-Kissinger armed the Indonesian military when they invaded East Timor in 1975 and murdered “300,000 East Timorese—nearly half the population” to crush the communist independence movement.
-Kissinger pressured Nixon to sponsor members of the Chilean military, financially and militarily, to coup socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973. Kissinger and Nixon helped plan the coup and subsequent rise to power of the Fascist Augusto Pinochet. The Journal of Cold War Studies shows how the CIA actively supported the military Junta after the overthrow of Allende.
-Kissinger also guided the CIA in their policies of sending American and Portuguese mercenaries to participate in the Angolan civil war in the 1970’s. Additionally, providing military training for the anti-communist group National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Their plan was to crush the socialists People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
Ray McGovern’s intelligence work contributed to National Security Decision Directive 122 titled "US Policy toward Angola" that outlines Reagan’s continuation of Kissinger’s plans over a decade later.
This brings us to the specific intelligence work that can be tied to McGovern.
McGovern at the CIA
During his time chairing the National Intelligence Estimates board, Ray McGovern helped put together intelligence analysis about Communist movements around the planet. This intelligence was then used by Reagan to support far right death squads and anti-communist counterinsurgency around the planet.
Published in 1982 "Short-Term Prospects for Central America" is part of the CIA’s Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) which McGovern chaired. This document analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of "Marxist-Leninist communists" "communist-supported insurgencies" and "Marxist revolutionaries" and "Leftist terrorists" in Latin America to "United States National Security" and "US Interests" specifically focusing on Cuba and Nicaragua.
Another McGovern NIE report in 1985 “Soviet Problems, Prospects, and Options in Afghanistan in the Next Year” that references Operation Cyclone and arming the Mujahadeen. Shortly after this estimate “Resistance effectiveness against aircraft is likely to increase substantially” the US sent 2300 Stinger Missiles to Mujahadeen fighters.
Another document is a Presidential briefing from Oct 23, 1983 recomending US intervention in Grenada. Two days after this briefing, the United States invaded Grenada to crush any chance for the people of Grenada to build Black Power there.
The remaining NIE documents published during McGovern’s tenure have been posted here already. They represent an enormous project of mass murder and regime changes in favor of Amerikan imperialist interests. It is difficult to understate the importance of such documents to imperialist foreign policy.
Gene Sharp and the CIA Non-Violence Operation
Note: The following section references heavily from Marcie Smith’s piece Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Archive). Her piece is class-reductionist she seems like a social democrat (see: populist fascist), however it is well researched, so we will use some of it for our purposes.
Gene Sharp is considered “The father of the non-violence movement” and has published over 20 books on non-violence. His organizations and those of his disciples, have been involved deeply in the modern “non-violent left”. His works are so frequently cited by “activists”. He was also a CIA asset. His Magnum Opis The Politics of Nonviolent Action, published in 1973, was funded by the DoD and written while he was working at a CIA created center at Harvard.
In Politics of Nonviolent Action there are a few important components. First, Sharp explains at length, why “the introduction of sabotage will seriously weaken a nonviolent action movement…the idea that sabotage is compatible with nonviolent action must be rejected.” This idea that liberation can come without sabotaging the organs of empire and kapitalism is so patently false that it is not worth arguing. However, this has since become the dominant organizing line ever since the collapse of the New Left. It remains the case today and, as anyone who has attended a PSL/ANSWER protest can attest to, is their official policy and stance.
Secondly, he proposes tactics such as “use of symbolic colors, parades, vigils, use of banners written in English for international consumption, mock awards, protest disrobings; forms of economic non-cooperation like boycotts, divestment campaigns, and strikes; political non-cooperation, like refusing to assist law enforcement; and psychological interventions like fasts.” It must be noted that of these are exactly the same strategies employed by PSL, ANSWER, and their orbiters.
Second, he pushes the idea that fighting back against the oppressor is unacceptable: “Nonviolent actionists must be prepared to endure the opponent’s sanctions without flinching… to suffer in order to advance their cause.” Sharp’s argument is that hundreds of years of brutal slavery, colonization, genocide, is not enough—“nonretaliatory suffering” is, apparently, the key to victory. This is some evil shit.
Gene Sharp’s story begins in 1965 at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard. The center’s original managing co-directors were Henry Kissinger, and Robert Bowie who would become chief National Intelligence Officer from 1977-1979. This came to be known as “the CIA at Harvard”. Smith writes:
[F]rom 1965 to 1970, Sharp participated in the intimate and highly significant Harvard-MIT Joint Arms Control Seminar, a discussion group convened by Kissinger, Bundy, Shelling, Bowie, Pool, and Rostow, among others, whose policy recommendations constituted one of the CIA at Harvard’s “most important and durable contributions to international relations.”
Gene Sharp —Architect of Color Revolutions
During the Reagan regime Sharp created the Albert Einstine Institute (AEI). It was created the same year as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which Allen Weinstein, its cofounder, described “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Since it’s inception, the AEI has worked very closely with the NED.
From Smith:
Sharp and AEI staff would spend the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s tracking, studying, consulting with, and training nonviolent social movements calling for “democratic freedoms and institutions” around the world.
According to its own annual reports, AEI did not prioritize fighting dictators and promoting “democratic freedoms and institutions” in US client states like Saudi Arabia, Zaire, Chile, El Salvador, or Guatemala. These countries are either never mentioned, or mentioned only in brief passing, in two decades worth of AEI annual reports. Rather, AEI and its adjuncts consistently focused their efforts in countries where political leadership was resisting NATO’s geostrategic priorities and/or the economic liberalization programs being pushed by the World Bank, the IMF, and U.S. Treasury’s “Washington Consensus”: countries like the Soviet Union, Burma, Thailand, Tibet, Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and post-collapse Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia.131 In a number of these cases, the movements trained in Sharp’s methods successfully executed nonviolent revolutions—sometimes called “velvet revolutions” or “color revolutions,” for the telltale use of an official movement color.
…
Rather, in most cases submission to neoliberal structural adjustment followed: selling off state assets, deregulating and privatizing state and worker-owned industry, cutting taxes, rolling back social spending, forcing tight monetary policy, removing price controls, removing capital controls, forcing markets open to Western investors, and establishing free trade zones. For this reason, the late radical Brazilian political economist Moniz Bandeira would argue in his final book, The Second Cold War: Geopolitics and the Strategic Dimensions of the USA, that it was Gene Sharp’s ideas that “lay at the heart” of the U.S.’s “Second Cold War” regime change policy.
In 1985, Sharp published Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-based Deterrence and Defense. Smith summarizes the book:
“[H]e urges NATO to apply his methods of nonviolent action to its defense strategy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and its satellites. But in the spirit of rollback, Sharp also points out that NATO governments might use nonviolent action offensively: 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… since sanctions did not involve direct violence, e.g. dropping bombs or assassinating heads of state, they were nonviolent.”
Sharp was working with Kissinger, the CIA, and the NED to destabilize communist countries and further NATO imperialism. His theories and strategies were central to color revolutions and the current on-going NED strategy of funding “opposition groups” in countries whose governments the US doesn’t like. Gene Sharp was absolutely an anti-communist CIA intelligence asset. Importantly, it is impossible that Ray McGovern would not have known about Sharp and his strategies. In fact, it is highly likely that they collaborated on multiple anti-communist government overthrows.
For example, in 1986, the Marcos government in the Phillipines was overthrown by a “nonviolent” revolution. According to NED’s own financials, this overthrow was heavily funded by the AEI and NED. Marcos was a brutal dictator, but his replacement Corazon Aquino was no better. Reagan supported Aquino’s privatization policies immediately after she came to power by providing “$100 million in economic aid, the most recent installment in $ 505 million approved by Congress for the Philippines in fiscal 1986." In the documentary film A Rustling of Leaves1, members of the Communist New People’s Army explain that Aquino promised socialist reforms but “deceived” them and turned towards privatization—and significantly more collaboration with the United States empire. The film shows anti-communist death squads, funded and endorsed by the Aquino regime.
The NDD documents (image below) coming out of Reagan’s White House, under McGovern’s intel guidance, mimic Sharp’s language directly. The two of them shared common interests and strategies. It’s no wonder McGovern still uses the same counter insurgent propaganda language today.
Gene Sharp: Domestic Counterinsurgency
Gene Sharp’s strategies for non-violence were used in an entirely different way domestically. In other countries, his strategies effectively toppled governments because the non-violent protestors were supported logistically by NED and CIA money and operatives. In the US, Gene Sharp’s non-violence would quite effectively disarm and sabotage the left.
The original non-profit non-violence operation in the US was founded in 1967: The Movement for a New Society (MNS) cofounded by George Lakey. Sharp helped Lakey write his thesis, the two presented papers together, and were in frequent communication helping each other build “nonviolence theory” through the decades.2 The primary strategy of MNS was creating a “nonviolent training movement.” Trainings here would replace Political Education, a practice rooted in communist tradition. Smith writes:
MNS offered trainings on an array of topics, but of central importance were those trainings on “nonviolent direct action” (NVDA), alternatively termed “strategic nonviolence.” … Gene Sharp’s new quasi-scientific and seemingly secular theorization of nonviolence was essential to presenting nonviolent action as a credible, “strategic” route to revolutionary change. Throughout MNS resources on NVDA, Sharp’s theories are highlighted. Butcher paper from 1970s MNS trainings, transcribed and digitized by Swarthmore College, include discussions about “Gene Sharp’s Theory of Power” and “Gene Sharp’s Categorization of Methods of Nonviolent Action,” with no other intellectual given similar treatment.
These useless “non-violent direct action” trainings have become hyper-prevalent among the contemporary left and its not hard to see why. Lakey’s resume and reach alone is enourmous. According to his bio “[Lakey] has led over 1500 social change workshops on five continents, and he founded and, for fifteen years, directed Training for Change.” MNS dissolved in 1987, but as Smith explains, this only expanded nonviolence counterinsurgent influence by creating dozens of new non-profits:
[Executives of MNS] started new Sharpian strategic nonviolence training organizations for activists, like Future Now, New Society Trainers, and most importantly, George Lakey’s Training for Change. Since its founding in 1992, Training for Change has worked with hundreds of organizational clients around the world, including major unions like SEIU.195 In turn, the late 1990s and 2000s saw the creation of new strategic nonviolence training institutes informed by Sharpian and MNS strategy, often with relationships to Lakey’s Training for Change: the Ruckus Society, Social Movement Technologies, the UK-based Campaign Bootcamp, The Wildfire Project, and the Center for Story Based Strategy (formerly smartMeme).196
One prime example is Momentum Community, an organization created in 2015 in response to Ferguson riots. According to IRS filings, Momentum receives 2 million annually. They are a primary force of this nonviolence training industry: "Previous participants in Momentum trainings come from groups doing some of the most important movement-building in the U.S., including Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, BYP100, United We Dream, Showing Up For Racial Justice, 350.org, National People’s Action, PICO, Sunrise, and more."3 These are enormous organizations (with deep connections to corporate interests) that dictate “resistance” movements. Smith writes
Sharp’s unquestioned influence on the U.S. protest left is a problem because his supposedly neutral theories are not neutral. They are a constitutive, legitimizing mainstay of a rarely named post-war, anti-communist ideology, revolutionary nonviolence — an ideology which has been consistently antagonistic to political strategies that cultivate class consciousness with an eye to state power. In practice, Sharp’s “tactics and strategy” have served to obscure, scramble, and ultimately sideline such class politics. Unsurprisingly, revolutionary nonviolence has a very weak record with respect to effectively confronting capital.
The CIA at Harvard, Gene Sharp, and his disciples, were dedicated to creating propaganda wings that couldn't be directly linked to government. The disciples of that group were then diffused to do "trainings" for leftist movement around the country and build "working groups" with "changemakers" (see: rich people). This is the father of the social justice/activist Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC). There are a few other progenitors but none of those would have power without that origin point of DoD, CIA, and henry kissinger.
This is a partial explanation of how we have arrived at this bizzare point with the contemporary amerikan protest left that loves healing circles and nonviolence peace police and is plugged directly into organizations that receive shadow money which originates from "philanthropy groups" like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Goldman Sachs etc. McGovern and PSL/ANSWER have their own roles to play in this project. But, what we are describing here is bigger than PSL/ANSWER and bigger than any one city or set of organizations.
Sharp, McGovern, and Veterans for Peace
Gene Sharp’s work shows up on various VFP pages here, He even spoke at VFP event in 2014. Their bylaws mimic his language: “members of Veterans For Peace pledge to use non-violent means”. McGovern faithfully pushes the CIA Sharp agenda in VFP giving speaking gigs for organizations run by Sharp disciples.
McGovern spoke at an Occupy DC event in 2011 saying “You can have a bloodless revolution. You can have lots of reform and call it a revolution. But I think nonviolent direct action that Martin Luther King Jr. suggested is what we need.”
McGovern leading a 2010 VFP protest, a 2014 VFP protest, a 2015 VFP protest, a 2017 VFP Webinar, VFP hosted a “nine-city speaking tour” for McGovern in 2015
In 2018, McGovern spoke at the Kateri Peace Conference founded by John Amidon, a member of VFP and Sharp acolyte.
McGovern spoke at Massachusetts Peace Action #FreeAssange event in June 2021 and on their webinars in August 2021 and again in October 2021 ; Peace Action is another large non-violence non-profit repeating Sharp’s philosophies. Their board of directors includes Ann Wright another ‘ex-intelligence officer’; she herself has also been a keynote speaker at PSL/ANSWER events.
The connections here are clear. People can no longer ignore or dismiss McGovern as simply a “useful fool” or a “dissatisfied soldier”. His connections are deep and his strategies overt.
Tying It Together: Libertarian-Strasserism
McGovern’s political stance can be precisely summed up by his statement halfway through this hour long 2018 speech (that has a quarter of a million views) Russia-gate: Can You Handle the Truth? for Veterans for Peace: “For justice to emerge…the truth needs to prevail". As a good Sharpian, he of course digs up the grave of Martin Luther King Jr. for this sentiment by citing the Letter from Birmingham Jail. This ideology is, however, a settler-colonial libertarian ideology that feeds back into amerikan exceptionalism, and hence fascism.
The line of thinking goes: “If only people knew the truth” then they could make the right decisions and support a nebulous concept of justice. This is fascist because it blatantly ignores CLASS INTERESTS and the role of anti-colonial struggle. So-called “free markets” are always dominated by those with the most kapital and the most guns. The “free market of information” functions the exact same way. Suffering becomes a fungible good to make points and reinforce political goals.
This libertarian ideology naturally positions the “truth telling” activist-liberal NGO complex as the only solid and unassailable base from which to combat fascism.
This is not merely theoretical. In this article, “The Wub”, outlines how Assange and his truth-telling conservative libertarianism directly ties into an emerging Silicon-Valley crypto-fascism that, of course has ties to the CIA:
Assange’s kind of “insurgent” conservative libertarianism that would be refined into a much more potent form with the likes of Alex Jones … We have Assange gassing up the Pauls and the Tea Party as the “only hope” for “reform” (not revolution, even of a reactionary variety) and doing so as an ostensible victim of the surveillance state. But what do you know, the Pauls and Tea Party are largely possible through the contributions of [Peter Thiel CEO of Palantir] who made their fortune building the surveillance state?
Assange’s two pronged approach of being a state asset while simultaneously promoting himself and WikiLeaks as something radical have deep roots which intersect with those of Kalle Lasn of AdBusters and, later, Occupy Wall Street.
Remember here, that Ray McGovern has a history of working with Alex Jones; he is close friends with Assange; and he is widely loved by the Libertarian party. So, McGovern’s goal is not “Red-Brownism” but more akin to “Strasserism”, a type of fascism born from the Nazi politician George Strasser. McGovern, Assange, and others in this cohort seem to share this exact definition of strasserism (our emphasis):
Strasser’s foreign policy, with its European federalism and rhetorical opposition to ‘militarism‘, we find no principled support of national liberation, but the same obsession with a stable and natural order transfigured and purified by the so-called second revolution. It is the same “anti-imperialism” of paleoconservatives, and their offspring in the alt-right, which opposes war only insofar as it mingles populations and disrupts the natural boundaries of the national community. It was not the stirring of independence in the colonies which roused Strasser’s sympathy, but the antagonism between imperialist nations.
So when Ray McGovern cites Ron Paul as a criticial anti-war advocate, this is because they are both playing the same game: Libertarian-Strasserism. Nazism has never been far from amerikan politics. As Saniya Shakur tells us in Stand up, Struggle Forward: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings on Nation, Class, and Patriarchy "Amerika is what Nazi Germany wanted to be." McGovern does not support National Liberation Movements, and why should he? He spent decades crushing them.
In order to cut through this libertarian-strasserite “truth-telling as justice” NGO version of anti-fascism, we must return to the wisdom Amilcar Cabral: “Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.”