National Endowment for Democracy Recognizes Unelected Heads of State and Honors Russian Traitor Who Lobbied for Sanctions on His Own Country in Alliance with Billionaire Con Man
Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), both war hawks and advocates of regime change around the world, were among the honorees at the annual “Democracy” awards gala of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on June 13.
The NED is a CIA front organization founded in 1983 that specializes in political propaganda. It offers grants to groups that publicize the human rights abuses of governments that the U.S. targets for regime change, and that agitate for “color revolutions.”[1]
McConnell was recognized for his leadership in supporting “pro-democracy” advocates in Hong Kong, Ukraine and Burma where he has championed regime change.
Saying that he feels at times like the “only Reagan Republican [i.e., neo-con] left,” McConnell has tried to stand up to the isolationist/libertarian wing in his party that has called for cutting the billions in military aid to Ukraine.
Nancy Pelosi was praised at the NED awards ceremony for supporting democracy in Ukraine and Taiwan, and for criticizing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) treatment of the Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hong Kongers.
Pelosi is a well-known China hawk who made an overtly provocative visit to Taiwan in 2022 that threatened to completely undermine U.S.-Chinese diplomatic relations.
Pelosi’s husband Paul participated in multimillion-dollar insider stock trading in a semiconductor firm just before Congress voted to give $52 billion to chip manufacturers in the U.S., called the CHIPS Act, in an attempt to undermine China’s semi-conductor industry (an act of economic warfare).
At the gala, Pelosi referred to her close friendship with NED founder Carl Gershman, a former grade-school classmate. Gershman is a neo-conservative propagandist skilled in advancing fake atrocity stories in support of U.S. imperialistic interventions.
Pelosi also bragged during her acceptance speech about her tight relationship with Tibet’s Dalai Lama, who has long been supported by the CIA in efforts to destabilize the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Pelosi recalled visiting a Tibetan village a few years ago and being given a “Potemkin village-style tour” that masked hidden atrocities.[2]
Championing Tibetan and Belarusian Freedom
Pelosi was introduced by another NED honoree, Sikyong Penpa Tsering, the speaker of Tibet’s parliament in exile and second democratically elected head of the Central Tibetan Administration under the Dalai Lama who claims that China is committing cultural genocide in Tibet when the whole world is moving toward multiculturalism.
The Tibet Action Institute, an NED-funded NGO that issued a report about Tibetan boarding schools and supports Tibetan sovereignty, also received a major award at the NED ceremony.
Tibet Action Institute’s director, Lhadon Tethong, who was born and grew up on the west coast of Canada, praised the supposedly heroic resistance of Tibetans against China’s alleged illegal occupation of the Tibetan homeland under his holiness the Dalai Lama.
Lhadon further spotlighted the horrors of the boarding school system where Tibetan children are sent to schools to learn the Chinese language, history and culture.
Tibetans have faced oppression at the hands of the Chinese government; however, China has also brought significant economic development to Tibet, which possesses a treasure trove of minerals, and has historical claims over it.
The Dalai Lama supports restoration of a feudal/monarchical order, and Tibetans have allowed themselves to be used by the CIA/U.S. government/NED as part of its anti-China/destabilization agenda, which has not served their people’s interests.[3]
Kyle Ferrana wrote in Why the World Needs China: Development, Environmentalism, Conflict Resolution & Common Prosperity that “the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) spends millions of dollars per year to foment unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang [home of the Uyghurs] through NGOs composed of exiles and expatriates, whose reactionary leaders are expected to form new comprador governments that will open these regions fully to the iron fist of neoliberalism and the tyranny of exploitation of international finance.”[4]
Ferrana’s analysis about reactionary leaders applies to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a Belarusian opposition politician whom the NED recognizes as Belarus’s head of state, even though she was the losing candidate in the country’s 2020 elections, where she won only 10% of the vote.[5]
Calling for more aggressive imperialist intervention into Belarusian politics, Tsikhanouskaya was backed by the NED and U.S. State Department and its interlinked NGOs in leading an attempted “color revolution” against Belarus’s long-standing socialist leader, Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.
Lukashenko helped save Belarus from the ravages of “shock therapy” privatization programs that decimated Russia and many post-Soviet economies after the end of the Cold War and has been praised by the World Bank for keeping poverty and inequality rates low.[6]
Tsikhanouskaya advocates for a neo-liberal economic program that would undo all of Lukashenko’s achievements, and is a staunch supporter of the fascistic Zelensky government in Ukraine.[7]
Slava Ukraine
Predictably, another of the award winners at the NED gala was a Ukrainian NGO that helps war victims. The NED has been a huge supporter of the war in Ukraine, pouring vast sums of money into assisting Ukrainian NGOs. Among those is the Regional Center for Human Rights, which documents alleged Russian war crimes.
Its director, Kateryna Rashevska, a Ph.D. fellow in international relations at the National University of Kyiv, was on hand at the NED gala to accept an award and to raise awareness about the plight of nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children who have allegedly been kidnapped by Russia and indoctrinated in Russian schools.
Rashevska introduced Valeria Sydorova, 17, a Ukrainian girl from a town on the bank of the Dnieper River, who says she was forced to declare Russian as her native language after being kidnapped[8] and was given a false history by her teachers at a Russian school.
The teachers allegedly told her that the Chernobyl disaster was a fabrication, that the Holodomor (Ukrainian famine in the 1930s) was not caused by Stalin (which many credible historians also believe), and that Russia is the strongest country in the world because it defeated Napoleon at the turn of the 19th century.
Sydorova told the gala audience that she has now returned to Ukraine after escaping from her school and walking through a minefield, though she says that she is suffering from chronic stress disorder because of her ordeal.
Sydorova provides an effective propaganda tool because she makes it seem like the Russians—like China in Tibet—are kidnapping children from Ukraine and are intent on committing cultural genocide.
This narrative obscures the fact that it was Ukraine’s banning of the Russian language in the Donbass and attempt to impose Ukrainian culture on children there that initiated the Donbass’s drive for autonomy following the 2014 Maidan coup, an act that precipitated the war.
If the NED were consistent in its commitment to upholding human rights, it could have counter-balanced Sydorova’s story with that of a teenager from the Donbass who had experienced the reverse of what Sydorova went through.
The NED further showed its true colors as a war propagandist in its claims about wide-scale Russian child abductions, a basis for the issuance of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of Russian Federation leader Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights.
The child abduction allegations have been disputed by independent journalists who suggest that many of the children said to have been kidnapped were actually sent to Russia by their parents (who were predominantly ethnic Russians) so they could escape the war environment in the Donbass, and that others had been orphaned by the war and were being saved by Russia.
John McCain’s Pallbearer
The final major award of the NED’s gala went to Evgenia Kara-Murza, the wife of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a pallbearer at John McCain’s funeral who is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence in Siberia for sedition.
Kara-Murza and McCain worked together on pushing through Congress the Magnitsky Act of 2012, which triggered the new Cold War by imposing crippling sanctions on Russia.
The Magnitsky Act was named after Sergei Magnitsky, an accountant who died in prison after supposedly blowing the whistle on a Russian government scheme to defraud American hedge-fund manager Bill Browder of $230 million.
In reality, Magnitsky was an expert in assisting foreign capitalists like Browder to offshore their money, and helped Browder defraud the Russian government of the $230 million.
Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his anti-Putin columns in The Washington Post, Kara-Murza appeared before European parliaments frequently with Browder to lobby in favor of the Magnitsky Act, promoting false claims about Magnitsky and Russian government conduct.
Ode to Freedom Fighters in Venezuela
Kara-Murza’s lionization at the NED gala was par for the course for an organization that has a long history of weaponizing human rights.
The evening ended characteristically with a musical tribute to the “freedom fighters in Venezuela.” They oppose the country’s supposedly tyrannical socialist government, which has actually won legitimate elections praised by the Carter Center and cut poverty rates significantly, similar to Lukashenko’s government in Belarus.
The NED featured a clip from opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has been disqualified from running for public office.
Supported by Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) of the Cuba lobby, Machado has only a small base in Venezuela among the extreme right and comes from one of the old oligarchic families that has been discredited.
An advocate of “open markets,” she is considered a traitor because of her support for U.S. sanctions, like Kara-Murza, and the violent overthrow of Venezuela’s government by a foreign power.
In 2014, Machado helped coordinate right-wing “Guarimbas” that vandalized government buildings and residences, ransacked public transportation hubs, barricaded major highways and assailed shipping trucks transporting gas and food as part of a regime change operation targeting socialist Nicolas Maduro.[9]
Danny Shaw, a former professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that, “if Machado did what she did in the U.S., she would be in jail.”
The latter is true of a number of other NED honorees, whose hero status correlates only with their geo-strategic utility to the last Western empire—the U.S.
- See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “If the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Is Subverting Democracy—Why Aren’t Some of the Left Media Calling It Out?” CovertAction Magazine, March 4, 2022.
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Potemkin village was a reference to the Soviet Union where travelers were taken to factories where the workers were supposedly happy and were kept away from the Siberian gulags. The term goes back to the era of Catherine the Great and villages that were set up to impress her in the 1780s. ↑
-
For an insightful discussion, see F. William Engdahl, Target China: How Washington and Wall Street Plan to Cage the Asian Dragon (San Diego: Progressive Press, 2014), 45. The CIA began training Tibetan Khamba rebels loyal to the Dalai Lama back in the 1950s. ↑
-
Kyle Ferrana, Why the World Needs China: Development, Environmentalism, Conflict Resolution & Common Prosperity (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024), 198. ↑
-
A poll rated Tsikhanouskaya, who lives in Lithuania, the fourth most popular opposition figure in Belarus currently. She is a teacher who became a political figure after her husband was jailed by Lukashenko for inciting sedition. ↑
-
See Stewart Parker, The Last Soviet Republic: Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus (London: Trafford Publishing, 2007). ↑
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Zelensky’s government has banned 12 political parties and imprisoned and murdered dissidents extending into Russia. He has also opened Ukraine’s economy to Wall Street vultures, privatizing industries and undermined workers’ rights. ↑
-
Sydorova alluded to being sent on a bus to Russia by her grandmother, who had custody of her after her mother died, so it is unclear if she was actually kidnapped. ↑
-
Anya Parampil, Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of U.S. Empire with foreword by Jorge Arreaza (New York: OR Books 2024), 20. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
