cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50538886
On January 29, 2026, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) participated in an event at the National Endowment for Democracy which launched former City University of Hong Kong Professor Hon-Shiang Lau’s book “Tibet Was Never Part of China Since Antiquity.” The book launch included a panel of Tibetan leaders and experts who discussed Tibet’s historical sovereignty and refuted the People’s Republic of China (PRC) narrative that Tibet has always been a part of China. Professor Lau’s groundbreaking scholarship clearly dispels PRC propaganda that Tibet has been a part of China by analyzing official Chinese documents and definitively establishing the historical fact that Tibet had for centuries until 1950 been independent and sovereign.
Former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom (and United States Senator and Governor of Kansas) Sam Brownback delivered keynote remarks highlighting Tibet’s long history as a free and sovereign nation and warning about the growing cultural genocide the PRC is committing against the Tibetan people. On a panel moderated by the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin that included Lau, Sikyong Penpa Tsering of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), and ICT Research and Monitoring Head Bhuchung K. Tsering, Brownback contextualized the importance of Lau’s scholarship within the larger Tibetan movement. The PRC’s forcible assimilation of historically independent Tibet lays bare the hypocrisy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s anti-colonial rhetoric. The CCP fears religious freedom more than any weapon, Brownback observed, because it undermines the weak foundation of the state.
Lau noted his purposeful choice of publicly available, Chinese-sourced official documents created before the 1950 occupation in hopes of credibly refuting the CCP’s false narrative around Tibet’s historical sovereignty. For example, China has not historically played, or sought to play, any role in the selection process of the Dalai Lama.
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Ahistoric. The term color revolution emerged a decade before Euromaidan. The fact that NED orchestrated revolutions in former Soviet republics in the years following the dismantling of the Soviet Union is incidental. The CIA had been conducting regime change operations covertly long before NED came into existence. NED came into existence after the CIA’s covert ops were publicly exposed and they promised to change. The change was to create NED, have the USG openly fund it, and continue doing the same things in NED that they were previously doing in the CIA.
Again. This is all a matter of public record and the sources are all US sources and all of them are from before Euromaidan. There’s no need to invoke Russophobic notions of evil nor engage in “conspiracy theory” to support this position.
You really, really should watch the video (series) I linked. It’s long, but it says everything I’m about to say. It’s really important to watch it if you genuinely believe that George Soros and the NED caused the Euromaidan.
Second, it is not russophobic to criticize Vladimir Putin. He is a murderer who has killed hundreds of thousands of Russians with his failed color revolution attempt in the Donbas.
Now let me point out the historical facts that your comment missed.
The US had no part in “dismantling” the Soviet Union. It was the communist coup attempt, the Afghanistan War, and an overdependance on oil exports that ended the Soviet Union.
The CIA did overthrow governments during the First Cold War (as did the tankies).
However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a complete shift in the US’s foreign policy under the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, which lasted up until the new Cold War we find ourselves in. The US did not overthrow any South American governments during the 90’s-2010’s. The two American attempts at regime change in the 2000’s, Iraq and Afghanistan, were much more heavy-handed than the Cold War era coups, and were explicitly pro-democracy, albeit imperialistic. The failures of Iraq and Afghanistan led to extreme apathy for international conflict in the US, there was zero will from Americans to interfere in Ukraine, even if the US had the resources to do it (they don’t). The US has had universal hegemony, there was no point for them to spend money invading countries.
The National Endowment for Democracy, founded in the 1980’s, has not had any part in any “Color Revolutions”, all it does is give grants to pro-democracy politicians and groups.
The fact of the matter is that “color revolution theory” is a conspiracy theory (aside from some overzealous political science authors during the Iraq war). This conspiracy theory is 99% promoted by the Russian ruling class to justify their bootlicking for Vladimir Putin.
Russians could have had democracy, but they threw it away, and now all the Russian Tsarists have left are stupid conspiracy theories saying that democracy is a Jewish hoax.
It’s almost like you don’t read. I know about the insanity of LaRouche. I’ve seen that video. It’s totally irrelevant to the conversation. The only thing that could possibly be connected to LaRouchism is that any cult and any false narrative must always have elements of truth to it. You can’t just discard true things because LaRouche incorporated them into his worldview.
I never made this claim. I don’t know why you’re bringing it up. NED’s activities started in 1980, not 2014
Correct, it’s not. What you claimed is that because I critiqued NED as a CIA carveout, you called me Vladimir Putin, and then you doubled down and said:
Meanwhile, the video essay you wrote literally says this:
And then it goes on to spin a yarn about the psychology of how kooky people got this weird idea that the US had been training counter-revolutionaries in all over Eastern Europe.
Except, we know that’s true. Operation Gladio is part of the historical record. The CIA and NATO engaged in covert operations to organize, fund, arm, and train neo-nazis and other fascists literally all over Eastern Europe. What do you think happens when the NED is founded to do the same American foreign policy openly?
So how are we to take this? We know for a fact that the CIA literally trained fascist militias in the hopes of using them to fight against the Soviets and regain hegemony over those countries. And we know for a fact that the NED in 1990 is doing what the CIA used to do in 1965. And we know that classified operations remain classified for about 50 years. We will have access to the first docs regarding the collaboration of NED and the CIA in the 2030s. Until then, we have to use our understanding of history to evaluate these things.
What we know of history is that the US is a brutal, white supremacist, genocidal, mass murdering psychotic belligerent. It’s actions in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Korea should be sufficient to convince anyone of that. But we can also look at Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. If that’s not enough we can look at the School of the Americas and their training of death squads that committed atrocities all over South America (and some still do today).
So, what’s NED all about if that’s how the US operates clandestinely? NED is about openly convincing locals to fight against their own governments to achieve the same objectives that the US has when they send in racist jarheads led by psychotic genocidal generals. The US wants control over resources, over economics, over entire countries, and they don’t care who has to die to make it happen. NED is the friendly face of that. I don’t mean that poetically. That’s what all the documented evidence from NED itself says.
But, you might say, NED is an NGO and not part of the US government.
And what’s the White House and Congress been up to?
Bush/Cheney - Iraq, Afghanistan
Obama/Clinton - Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia
Trump /Pence - Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia
Biden/Harris - Gaza, Somalia, Yemen, Syria
Trump/Vance - Somalia, Gaza, Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Yemen
And this is just our hot conflicts. The sanctions regimes are BRUTAL and bi-partisan. In the last 50 years, US (and Euro) sanctions have killed 38 million people.
So what does it mean for NED to be a USG-founded NGO, funded by the USG, dependent on the support of the White House and Congress, designed to do US foreign policy outside of the military, and literally replacing some of the functions of historical CIA covert operations?
None of this is coming from LaRouche, Pavloski, or Putin. This is coming from inside the house. It’s also not a conspiracy. As NED says, it’s all out in the open, because being open about it is part of the way they make it defensible.
And now let’s go through your list of historical facts that you think I missed:
Correct. The US had no part in dismantling the SU. It was dismantled by its leadership. I did not miss this fact.
The idea that the CIA only overthrew governments during the First Cold War is ridiculous. The US government was overthrowing governments before the CIA was even formed and the CIA and USG has been overthrowing governments literally up to today.
More ridiculous is the idea that the two camps were talking about here are the CIA and “the tankies”. Your lack of sincere intellectual honesty is very clear and it makes sense why the Sarcasmitron video was so compelling to you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change#1991–present_day
It FAILED in its attempts to overthrow the government of Venezuela. That’s not representative of a change in foreign policy, it’s representative of a change in the effectiveness of US regime change operations against contemporary forms of resistance.
You have got to be kidding me? Explicitly pro-democracy? No. They were propagandistically pro-democracy. They were 100% about dominance, control, wealth accumulation, resource management, and strategic military positioning.
You are so delusional. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/
This is not a historical fact. This is an assertion you’re making. Who defines these groups as “pro-democracy”? What does it mean when the NED acting president says they’re doing what the CIA was doing? All we need to do is look at Venezuela to dismantle this assertion.
The US isn’t a democracy. It’s an oligarchy. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
https://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/idr.pdf
Well, I’ve seen much less nuance and knowledge from other lemmy.ml users, so I appreciate your thoughtful take and arguments.
I’m gonna be honest, I don’t really want to spend time going into all the details here on an online forum.
That’s a good Wikipedia you posted, and I think we can both agree on that as a historical record of the US’s soft/hard power foreign policy.
I think you’re reading too much into Operation Gladio and the “goal” of the NED. Don’t watch what people say, what what they do.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were definitely imperialist and I wanted to point out the psychological differences between the US public’s support for those wars, and the CIA coups of the First Cold War, as well as the war fatigue afterwards, but I guess you understood that.
One thing I also wanted to point out is that the foreign policy of the different political power centers in the US can be very different. Even if the CIA and the president think that they should use financial aid or sanctions against a country, that doesn’t mean that congress or the NED will necessarily follow along.
But yeah, Iraq is basically what a “successful” Ukraine war would have looked like for Putin, and it was obviously a massive failure and decade of shame for the US. It is a tragedy that the war crimes committed there were not prosecuted properly.
For what it’s worth, I also don’t defend the modern Trump/Biden America. There were some good achievements and progress in the Bushes/Clinton/Obama years, but there are also some really stupid and destructive people in the US during all administrations.
My main point was just that color revolution theory is a hoax and that the NED didn’t overthrow any governments, and I stand by that.