Troubling connection between democracy activism in Georgia and Burma

Well! I see that a history lecturer at Oxford has taken on the ghoul crowd, including George Soros.* I learned this when I came across a new blog by Mark Almond (H/T Slate), whose writing on Georgia for the International Herald I featured in yesterday's post.

The blog has only got two posts so far -- one titled Georgia: The strange silence of George Soros, which discusses Soros's part in Georgia's Rose Revolution and his silence in the face of the Georgia government's trammeling of democracy.

The second post is titled Black Roses: Georgia's reformers fall out.

Once you read both posts you'll see more clearly the webs of intrigue that have marked sham democracy movements in this century, and how the battle lines are being drawn between true democracy advocates and ghouls.

What I call ghouls are those in advanced democracies who play on the yearning of third-world peoples for democracy, but whose goal is to advance their business interests in a particular region. Nowhere have the ghouls been more active than in the post-Soviet Union regions.

The ghouls want control of Russia's energy reserves, or they serve those who want control, and will stop at nothing to achieve their goal even if it means restarting the Cold War. This includes fronting sham democracies and supporting any powerful clan, no matter how thuggish, willing to stand against Russia.

So the debacle in Georgia, as with the one in Ukraine, has ramifications beyond the immediate political situations in those countries. The question is whether Western governments will learn from situations which they had a hand in creating, or whether they will continue to treat the awful consequences of their actions as an anomaly.

The question is crucial because the machinations of the ghoul crowd are not limited to the former Soviet Union. It's because of the infamous tactics of the ghouls that my first post on the Burma protests was titled Western democracy activists, stay the hell out of Burma! protests and why I warned against labeling the protests a "saffron revolution."

My warning was far too late -- the protests were already underway, I had only just learned that Soros operatives were pussyfooting around Burma, and I did not know at the time how much Burma's expatriate democracy activists had come to lean on Western democracy activist organizations. Not to say that all such organizations are connected with Soros, but I got quite a turn last night while reading quotes that Almond provided in his Black Roses post from Georgia's ex-defense minister, Irakli Okruashvili:

[...] Many of the Western groups who funded and trained the so-called “rose revolutionaries” in Georgia in 2003 have been behind the scenes of the “saffron revolution” in Burma. If Burma’s military rulers should go the way of Eduard Shevardnadze will Burma fall through the floor into the same politics of corruption, drugs smuggling and backstabbing which have pock-marked Georgia’s tragic post-Soviet history[?]

Proponents of “People Power” from the Caucasus to South-East Asia ignore the poverty, oppression, disease and death which have followed events like the “Rose Revolution.” Western media like The Economist and so-called human rights watchdogs like the Council of Europe have a lamentable record of fellow travelling with successive corrupt and cruel regimes in Tbilisi since 1991. It is not too much to say that there isn't any bad situation which the nexus of Western intelligence agencies, media and human rights agencies cannot make worse, while singing their own praises as the proponents of a new dawn of human happiness.

The infighting and mutual accusations of crime, corruption and killings among the Rose Revolutionaries is the starkest case yet of the reality of a post-People Power country contrasting with the myth peddled abroad in the Western media. No journalists who painted a rosy picture of the new rulers of Georgia has yet come forward to correct, let alone apologise for their myth-making under the guise of reporting.[...]

That's saying a mouthful. However, Burma's junta doesn't need to be taught a lesson by Georgia on corruption and drug smuggling, and I can't imagine the installation of a Western puppet regime in Burma making the corruption and smuggling in Burma that much worse. Yet it is painfully obvious by now that Burma's rulers are as wised up about 'Color Revolution' putsch tactics as the mullacrats in Iran -- and it is a safe bet that many Burmese protestors who had no connection with outside democracy activists died as a consequence.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that the machinations of the ghouls have given despots and authoritarian leaders their most powerful argument for discouraging or outright repressing democratic opposition. Another tragedy is that they've made it hard for outside activists who are genuinely trying to help developing countries such as Burma democratize.

And the ghouls have given the concept of 'open society' an Orwellian shade -- just how Orwellian, read Mark Almond's Black Roses.

* Mark Almond is Lecturer in History at Oriel College, Oxford. He has visited Georgia a dozen times since 1992 on behalf of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group and (in 1995) the Norwegian Helsinki Human Rights Group. According to a note on his blog the opinions he expresses in his writings are his own.