Connexions Other Voices - Destabilization and Regime Change

May 7, 2016

The May 7, 2016 issue of Other Voices, the Connexions newsletter, is now out. The theme of this issue is Destabilization and Regime Change.

People looking at the United States from the outside tend to assume that life is easy when you're an imperialist superpower in command of the world's largest military forces, backed by the world's most powerful economy. With so much power concentrated in your hands, what could possibly go wrong?

More than you might think, in fact. One problem arises from the widespread persistence of the institutions of parliamentary democracy. Modern parliamentary democracies, it's true, have a number of points in their favour. For one thing, they are better at managing public services and the economy than dictatorships, military or otherwise, which tend to be both corrupt and incompetent. And they provide a (somewhat) plausible facade of democratic accountability which helps to disguise the unpalatable fact that almost all important decisions are made behind the closed doors of corporate and institutional boardrooms.

But the trouble with democratic forms like voting and elections is that every so often, real democracy breaks out and propels parties and people to office who don't play by the rules of the game. The most outrageous offence, from the perspective of imperial power, is pursuing policies that help ordinary people at the expense of transnational corporations and local elites.

When a government goes so far as to govern in the interests of its own population, it clearly has to be stopped. The mainstream media – those owned by the local elite as well as those in the imperial centres – start to churn out propaganda, day after day, about the 'extremism' of the government, now referred to as a 'regime.' Western NGOs, funded by the U.S. government and activist billionaires, become a funnel for money that is poured into the country to pay for a massive destabilization campaign. Meanwhile the U.S. embassy intensifies its ongoing contacts with opposition leaders and military officers, many of whom have been trained and indoctrinated in the United States.

The goal of a destabilization campaign is to overthrow an elected government without having to resort to direct outside military intervention, which looks bad and often fails to produce a stable pro-western regime (e.g. Iraq, Libya). In recent years, the preferred means have been massive funding of conservative middle-class political parties, groups, and media (e.g. Ukraine, Venezuela), and 'constitutional coups.' A constitutional coup is a means of nullifying an undesirable election result by making use of the levers of judicial and executive power to get rid of a leader or government who has too much popular support to defeat via the ballot box. The constitutional coups which overthrew the governments of Honduras in 2009 and Paraguay in 2012 are examples, as are the current attempts to impeach the elected presidents of Brazil and Venezuela. One might also include the American Supreme Court decision after the 2000 election, which handed the election to George W. Bush, and Stephen Harper's proroguing of the Canadian Parliament in 2008, aided and abetted by the unelected and unaccountable Governor-General, as instances where 'constitutional' means have been used to set aside election results.

Destabilization and regime change are the focus of this issue of Other Voices. We feature a number of articles and books, as well as Bill Blum's handy list of the instances since 1945 when the U.S. has overthrown, or attempted to overthrow, a foreign government. We also feature "The Anti-Coup", by Gene Sharp and Bruce Jenkins, which outlines strategies and tactics which popular movements can use to prevent and block coups d'état and executive usurpations of power.

Other Voices is available by email, or on the Connexions website at http://www.connexions.org/Media/CXNL-2016-05-07.htm

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