From "our protests aren't funded by anyone," to "being a US colony is still better than our current government!" - how Thai protesters backpedal as evidence of US meddling emerges.
September 14, 2020 (Tony Cartalucci - ATN) - As evidence continues to emerge that virtually every aspect of Thailand's current anti-government protests are funded by the US government and aim at destabilizing the country in a bid to roll back Thai-Chinese relations - a pattern of backpedaling and denial has emerged from among protest supporters who had said for months, even years that opposition groups were "organic," "self-organized," and that protests were "spontaneous" and not funded by anyone.
It is a 4 step process that ends with eventual, but rarely graceful, admission.
1. "Our protests are organic, spontaneous, self-organized and are not funded by anyone."
This is a lie as easy to expose as simply visiting the US National Endowment for Democracy's (NED) website and seeing virtually every core organization involved in leading the protests being funded by the US government.
This includes core leader Anon Nampa, a lawyer who works for Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR) which was funded under its own name by the US NED in 2014 - archived here - and continues to be funded to this day under the Union for Civil Liberty (UCL).
The UCL's own website lists TLHR at the bottom as a member alongside several other US NED-funded fronts including Human Rights Lawyers Association, the Cross Cultural Foundation, and the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL).
An organization called iLaw - listed on the US NED's website as Internet Law Reform Dialogue - is organizing a petition nationwide to rewrite Thailand's constitution. Its little tents, professionally printed banners, and staff collecting signatures can be found at virtually every protest - big or small - across the country meaning that it is always informed ahead of time of these "spontaneous" and "leaderless" rallies.
The iLaw website also discloses its US NED funding (scroll down for English) - just in case skeptics don't believe the US NED website is telling the truth.
Media platforms promoting the protests day-to-day and whose content can be found in the timeline of any protester's social media feed includes US NED-funded Prachatai. Not only is Prachatai funded millions of Thai Baht a year by the US NED, Prachatai's executive director Chiranuch Premchaiporn is listed on the US NED's website as an NED Fellow.
2. "Ok, the US NED funds Thailand's anti-government protests, but the NED isn't the US government."
The US NED was created by the US government, announced by US President Ronald Reagan on November 18, 1983, at Capitol Hill, Washington DC.
On its own website the US NED admits it is "funded largely by the U.S. Congress" and is overseen by both the US Congress and the US State Department as it sends "support" to "groups abroad."
Claims that a US government created, funded, and overseen organization is a a "private, nonprofit foundation" or is "nongovernmental" is simply another way of saying the US government is laundering money it spends on foreign interference through the US NED first before it reaches agitators worldwide.
An easy way to prove this and check one's own Western bias is to simply imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin announcing the creation of a "private, nongovernmental organization" funded annually and overseen by the Kremlin that will support political groups abroad. Would anyone for a moment claim groups funded by this "private, nongovernmental organization" were not Russian government-funded just because Kremlin money passed through it first before reaching these groups? No - of course not.
And in the very same way, groups funded by the US NED are most definitely US government-funded. The fact that the US attempts to conceal the origins of US government funding behind opposition groups in Thailand - a process best described as money laundering - is only further evidence that it knows what it is doing is wrong and that admitting it publicly would undermine efforts to interfere in Thailand's internal political affairs.
3. "So the NED is the US government, but the US just wants to help spread democracy."
The US government does not want to help "spread democracy." The US NED - chaired by representatives of America's oil, arms, financial interests, and even war criminals - does not want to help "spread democracy." The US has committed the worst crimes against humanity of the 21st century.
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| Image: Elliot Abrams is an advocate for US wars abroad in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and even eventually against Iran. He is a war criminal. He is also a board member of the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). |
READ MORE: What is the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED)?
The invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya and Syria from 2011 onward has killed over a million people, displaced millions more, and has left an entire region of the planet spanning from North Africa to Central Asia in perpetual chaos. No other nation on Earth in modern times even comes close.
The United States' role in facilitating Saudi Arabia's war on neighboring Yemen has created a catastrophe the UN itself calls "the world's worst humanitarian crisis."
It should be noted that it was the US NED who helped fund and organize the protests that triggered the so-called 2011 "Arab Spring" which eventually led to multiple US wars of aggression across North Africa and the Middle East.
A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.
Of all the things that "sprang" from the US-engineered US NED-funded "Arab Spring," democracy wasn't one of them.
The US has predicated its most recent crimes against humanity on "humanitarian interventions" and spreading "freedom" and "democracy." The US war on Iraq - sold on deliberate lies regarding alleged Iraqi possession of "weapons of mass destruction" - was literally codenamed "Iraqi Freedom."
So no, the US doesn't just want to spread democracy. It is demonstratably spreading chaos and hegemony and many other things around the globe merely behind the smokescreen of "promoting democracy." The US government's role behind Thai protests is no different.
4. "Being a colony of the United States is better than our current government!"
If a Thai protester hasn't simply refused to look at evidence or cursed you and stomped away while going through the first 3 stages of denying US government funding behind their mobs, this is the final and most extreme stage where their inability to simply admit they were wrong and that the protests they've invested themselves in were not what they thought - manifests itself in this extreme mania.
They will insist that the US meddling in Thailand's affairs - despite Washington's many and egregious crimes against humanity or the fact that it in turn backs the very worst human rights offenders in Thailand itself in the form of fugitive billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra and his abusive, violent political machine - is still somehow better than the current government or Thailand's growing ties with China.
It is the most irrational of all the stages because human nature makes it so difficult for any individual to simply admit they were mistaken and reverse their position. But their arrival at this stage will reveal to the vast majority of Thailand and the world's public that the protests and the people supporting them are not of sound judgement, are extremely dishonest, extremists themselves, and their cause is in no way just.
Without even the illusion of legitimacy it will become very difficult for these protests to sustain themselves. It also makes it much easier for the Thai government to arrest the protest's leadership and dismantle the foreign-funded fronts involved in organizing the unrest before the inevitable escalation toward violence all US-funded mobs aspire toward.
If the protesters did not want to arrive at this juncture, they should have picked their cause, leaders, organizers, and sponsors much more carefully. And for those that knew all along the US was behind their opposition groups, they need only look at Hong Kong and how US NED-funded agitators there not only failed, but how the US abandoned them once they did.
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