Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance

by F. William Engdahl

George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, is a masterful fictional account of a state which imposes cognitive dissonance on its citizens to control their perception of reality. It is summed up in the statement, “War is Peace; Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength.” The story of this book, Manifest Destiny, is an account of how agencies of US intelligence including the CIA and State Department, in collaboration with private “democracy” NGOs, developed and refined techniques of Orwellian doublethink or cognitive dissonance to create a series of regime changes around the world that sounded noble, democratic, but in reality were not. William Engdahl describes the background beginning in the 1980’s with Reagan’s CIA Director leading to creation of a series of private NGO’s to covertly manipulate aspirations for freedom and democracy from Poland and other communist countries in the late 1980’s, to the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia and China. The book details the refinement of what came to be called Color Revolutions by the early years of this century in Ukraine, Georgia and later with the US-orchestrated Arab Spring. It’s an account of how elite circles in the USA and Europe along with their think tanks refined methods to impose a new tyranny on countries from Ukraine to Egypt to Libya and beyond. The aim was to use democratic aspirations of ordinary people, often youth, to topple regimes resisting what David Rockefeller once called a One World Government, a global corporate tyranny. This is an almost incredible chronicle of how select NGOS speak about freedom, human rights, democracy in order to bring war, violence and terror. The book is a must read for anyone wanting to truly understand world events of the past three decades or more.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, American History

274 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 29, 2018

About the author

Frederick William Engdahl is an American writer based in Germany. He identifies himself as an "economic researcher, historian and freelance journalist." He is known for his views that the September 11 attacks, the Arab Spring and the theory of global warming are all conspiracies. He has written extensively for the LaRouche movement, Russia Today and GlobalResearch.

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Washington regime-change operations came to be called ‘color revolutions’ because of the distinct Madison Avenue color-logo themes each destabilization brought with it – the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Green Revolution in Iran, and so forth.” What this represented was “an attempt to replace former communist leaders with hand-picked, Washington-corrupted political leaders who would be willing to sell their national crown jewels and their people to select Western financial predators, such as billionaire speculator George Soros or Western banks and multinational corporations.”

In 1991, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman told Army Times, “I’m running out of demons. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” The new US solution was to make financial war through “fake democracy nongovernmental organizations (NGO’s) that would be used to covertly create por-Washington regimes in strategic parts of the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.” The goal? To “loot the vast state-owned resources of the collapsed communist world.” Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are only nominally “human rights” organizations; if HRW was all that and a bag of chips, Soros wouldn’t be giving it tons of money. Note that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has been behind every Washington-backed regime destabilization. NED law author Allen Weinstein wrote that, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” Its mission is “to doctor systemic US propaganda as a weapon to unseat regimes around the world who were not willing to cooperate with Washington’s overall agenda.” The NED’s job is to provide “a second layer of insulation” of plausible deniability for US funds. The CIA was getting tired of their engineered coup d’états being exposed in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), or Chile (1973). The answer was calling whatever they were doing “democracy promotion” – how could ANYONE be against democracy promotion?

“Washington’s goal after the dissolution of the Soviet Union was to split the Soviet Union into fragments which it then could control so its corporations could loot in mass privations”. Sellout Yelstin and his advisors were called Washington’s “dream team” by known douchebag Larry Summers. Mortimer Zuckerman of the Council of Foreign Relations, referred to the US-led looting of Russia under Yelstin as, “the largest giveaway of a nation’s wealth in human history.”

US takes out Poland: In 1982 Reagan met with the Pope and they made a secret agreement to “bring down the communist Warsaw Pact.” [I’m not here about the rampant pedophilia in the Church, John Paul, mum’s the word, but wonder if you’d dig intentionally weakening a sovereign nation together that did neither of us wrong so we can siphon off its value?] Millions of dollars of CIA money were thrown at Lech Walesa and US liberals bought his deification on cue. “Walesa was clearly Washington’s man in the Polish destabilization”. Then Sachs and Soros pulled their odious shock therapy on the Polish people. Sachs gave the project a Polish name to help with acceptance. Austerity hit and thousands were thrown out of work. Poland’s crown jewels were sold off. Then came the corporate fire sale to the west: one company Huta Warszawa had its $4 billion-dollar steel facility sold off for a mere $30 million.

US Rape of Russia: Then the “CIA, the NED Harvard and Soros Foundations launched the rape of Russia.” This was done by “a corrupted circle of treasonous Soviet KGB generals” (who took their cut and were turned into “billionaire oligarchs”), Western banks and three US Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton. Three months after the KGB general’s coup, Gerashchenko, head of the state bank of the USSR announced that most of the USSR’s 2,000 to 3,000 tons of gold had gone missing. Gerashchenko, had created an offshore entity in the Channel Islands to launder the $37 billion deal. “To cover the trail of the missing gold and give his government the pretense of innocence, Yeltsin, on the advice of two former KGB generals announced he had hired a top detective agency (a CIA dummy front company) Knoll Associates. Knoll was connected with AIG, another CIA front company (damn, who knew AIG is CIA?). The US called this wholesale theft what was now Russian federation assets “shock therapy” (thanks to Soros & Sachs). Between 1991 and 1997, the Russian GDP collapsed by 83 percent. Farm production down 63%. Investment in the Russian economy down 92%. “More than 70,000 factories were closed down. That led to Russia’s producing 88% fewer tractors, 76% fewer washing machines, 77% less cotton fabric, 78% less TVs”, etc. If you still worked, you had your wages cut in half. Check out Joseph Stiglitz, “The Ruin of Russia” in the Guardian in 2003 or “the Harvard Boys do Russia” in the Nation in 1998. Yeltsin resigns and Putin becomes President and immediately denounces the oligarchs and US meddling.

Part of Washington’s anger against Putin is that he came along and cut off this US neoliberal gravy train a.k.a. the rape of Russia. Your therapist might call US a chronic gold-digging boundary pusher. Bush II seals the three President’s crimes in Russia with Executive order 13233; we the people will never be allowed to know the truth – in fact, we the people are never encouraged to examine the long history of the US provoking Russia for more than a century.

President Carter fires 800 CIA agents who Bush I will reactivate as “the Enterprise”; this group and related companies “were soon responsible for the CIA-financed coup that brought down Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in 1991.” The Enterprise did all the KGB bribing, and they became known as the Russian Oligarchs. “Their looting included the entire gold reserves of the Russian National Bank in the early 1990’s.” Note that Western media never mentioned that those greedy Russian oligarchs and Russian Mafia were “paid or made rich by the West.” Or “by the good old boy CIA networks loyal to” Bush I. Osama Bin Laden was a “Saudi CIA asset.” The CIA did the Tiananmen “destabilization protests” two months after Bush I goes there.

Soros and the Harvard boys go to Russia to get neoliberal on its economy and “unleashed one of the greatest criminal looting operations in history.” Bush’s Operation Hammer was given billions of unauthorized by Congress funds to bring down the Soviet Union. “The funds reportedly came from a secret CIA war chest of undisclosed gold seized from Japan after WWII.” Emperor Hirohito had buried it in the Philippines in case Japan lost the war. Marcos finds it and launders it through Adnan Khashoggi, not knowing he was a CIA asset. Khashoggi rats on Marcos, Marcos is driven out of office by the CIA, the NED throws millions at rich bitch Aquino to get her elected and bingo – the US has the gold.

This Marcos gold is funneled through Barrick Gold and “priceless assets of the former Soviet state are sold at pennies on the dollar.” Dick Cheney was the guy who “deleted eighty-six pages detailing CIA assassination operations” from the Rockefeller Report. [note: Operation Hammer is the CIA’s Rape of Russia] Look at 1992 when Bush I leaves office, how he shamelessly gives Barrick Gold Nevada mining rights worth $10 billion for the fire sale price of $63 million. “Barrick Gold has ‘spook’, as in CIA front company written all over it.” No one yet knows how much money the KGB generals got paid for committing treason, but more than 300 KGB officers fled to the US or Israel. Because after you shamelessly commit high treason, why not flee to one of the two known rogue states? Now how did the US get all that money out of Russia? “For the Bush CIA network, the aim was to permanently drain the funds out of Russia into accounts in the West at their pre-chosen banks” (like Riggs Valmet).

Tiananmen Protests and Gene Sharp: “The US state department was up to its eyeballs in the attempted student destabilization called Tiananmen Square. The department’s propaganda arm, the VOA, beamed radio programs and support for the protestors in mandarin Chinese.” The CIA’s NED “sent or helped fax thousands of letters from Washington to recipients in China.” I once read Gene Sharp wrote this great book “From Dictatorship to Democracy” which allowed non-violent dissent somehow to lead to a wonderful Arab Spring. What rubbish. Gene Sharp is “the architect of the CIA’s strategy of ‘nonviolence as a weapon of warfare’.” Gene is known as the Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare. Gene’s book became the text for “every major government-backed color revolution since 1993.” Gene was at the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, but got kicked out by Chinese authorities - some say that’s why “the US destabilization failed”. Freedom House is another CIA front these a-holes worked out of – former CIA director James Woolsey once was its director. Tiananmen was thousands of students trained by NED and AEI operatives. A Hunger Strike was coordinated to time with Gorbachev’s arrival with “student posters stating they were willing to die for democracy”. “Incredible as it was, there never was a government massacre of thousands of even tens of students at Tiananmen Square on June 4.” That was the CIA and Ambassador Lilley pulling a fresh lie from their posterior. A Washington Post reporter couldn’t find proof that ANYONE died. And so, the attempt to “bring down the communist party apparatus in China failed.”

Yugoslavia: The dismemberment of communist Yugoslavia happens under Bush I. This also was done as a “fake democracy revolution”. Yes, it took ten years, killed 133,000 people, and destroyed a country, but the US got Camp Bondsteel, the largest military base since Vietnam, 955 acres of exceptionalist arrogance in Kosovo. The US collects bases like a gold-digger collects jewelry. Prime Minister Thatcher’s chief Balkan expert wrote, “The war on Bosnia was America’s war in every sense of the word. The United States administration started it, kept it going, and prevented its early end.” Yugoslavia had always been an ethnic melting pot “pasted together by victorious allies”. This war’s job was justify NATO, to bring NATO closer to Russia, and get a free permanent base in Europe. By the late 80’s, The NED was studying the planned balkanization of Yugoslavia, and IMF under Bush I imposed economic conditions that “using debt as a club, US interventions deliberately brought Yugoslavia to financial catastrophe.” In 1988 shock therapy had forced Yugoslavia to have $21 billion in foreign debts.

The US creates a law that breaks up Yugoslavia: the Bush I era, 1991, Foreign Operations Appropriation Act 101-513. It penalized economically big time any part of Yugoslavia that didn’t declare independence within six months of the act. Serbs became the US target in Yugoslavia because they were the ones most resistant to the US breaking up the country. Milosevic was hated by the US for the same reason, he wanted Yugoslavia kept together. “Before that US law, there had been no Civil War in Yugoslavia.” Imagine the US going to war against Abraham Lincoln for the crime of him wanting his own country, the US, to stay together.

In the 80’s, the US was deploying radical Islam as a weapon against Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Uzbekistan. Bush Senior brings “the Mujahideen terror-war model” into Yugoslavia. Washington PR firm, Ruder Finn, is hired to lie to the American people, to make sure no American citizens had a clue what was going on there. Ruder Finn even got the most influential Jewish organizations to oppose the Serbs. This was an amazing about face, as anyone who knew history knew it was the Croatians and Bosnians and not the Serbs who killed “tens of thousands” of Jews in Croatian death Camps during WWII. The malicious US propaganda was bought, and quickly the Serbs and not Croatians and Bosnians were labelled Nazis by Jews. The US smuggled and denied the smuggling of arms to Muslims fighting there, and Clinton blocked all peace moves, because Jesus would do the opposite. To help destroy a country, the US smuggles in 4,000 to 20,000 “Islamic jihadists.” Funny how, the US loves radical Islam, and every dictator on Earth, as long as it/they do our bidding. From 1992 to 1995,” the Pentagon and the CIA” acts as the “Bekins” and “Atlas Van Lines” of moving Islamic jihadists around the globe to further US exceptionalist goals. It got so bad, that a Der Spiegel reporter remembers seeing even Osama Bin Laden several times in Sarajevo between 1993 and 1994. No doubt he was only there to pickup his dry cleaning. At the time, Egyptian intelligence called Bin Laden “a key player in the Bosnian jihad.”

The longer the Bosnia-Herzegovina war went on, the more the US could inflate NATO’s importance. The endless stories of Serbian rape turned out to be fabricated, meant to distract you from remarking on the “appalling atrocities against Bosnian Serbs” blacked out by the NYT which demonized the Serbian Army. Christiane Amanpour was a famous sell-out who pushed the anti-Serbia lies when she was married to a guy high up in the State Department. Americans were never told how popular Milosevic was, because we needed to topple Europe’s last remaining communist-era leader, increase NATO to increase our own power, and steal choice land for a military base that could attack the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Crimea whenever we wanted. The US spends $41 million of US taxpayer monies for Serbian regime change by boldly interfering with elections of another sovereign nation. This was run from the US ambassador’s office. What kind of budding ambassador says, “Gosh, as US ambassador I hope I get to shamelessly force illegal regime change and injure the country I’m pretending to care about.”
My country apparently can’t help its own citizens back home because it spends most of its time and taxpayer money intentionally destroying other countries and stealing from them. WTF?


“US taxpayers paid for 5,000 cans of spray paint used by student activists to scrawl anti-Milosevic graffiti on walls across Serbia.” The name of the US hand in the Belgrade Coup of 2000, was called “Otpor!” and it was the first “democratic” revolution successfully brought off by the US. Using GPS and manipulating local youth with swarming techniques developed at RAND, the US could make their youth stay one step ahead of the police. The Iraq War was military, Yugoslavia was using Gene Sharp’s ideas to achieve the same result never disturbing the conscience of US liberals. Endless failures in Iraq and Afghanistan taught US planners that “the ‘civilian’ application was far more effective than the overtly military.”

Milosevic dies under suspicious circumstances in a detention center; can’t have him testifying saying stuff like the truth. Note that the Hague couldn’t find enough evidence of war crimes committed by Milosevic to convict him. Western Mainstream Media had endlessly called him Hitler, without reason, and US liberals dutifully bought it all. Once Milosevic was out of power, the US could install Camp Bondsteel to control oil distribution and threaten Russia. The 1999 bombing of Serbia was a smokescreen to “justify the artificial division of Kosovo” and justify the base creation. Removing Milosevic was a US victory for the new Gene Sharp non-violent regime change. The beautiful thing (if you had no morals) was with this technique you could remove either democratically elected or popular leaders abroad to the sound of crickets back home. This Serb Optor! Revolution was the template for the upcoming Color Revolutions which were nothing more than “destabilization programs”.

This book on p.135 provides ample proof (including statements from the US ambassador of the time) that the US clearly promised to never move NATO on inch eastward. Even Baker used the term “ironclad guarantees” to Moscow. In 2002, Bush II lets the ABM treaty expire which (if you study it) is a remarkably hostile “action” and a clear provocation to Russia. The ABM treaty’s job was to slow the arms race. Who wouldn’t want that? The US. The US wanted a ring of missile defense shield in many countries surrounding Russia all pointing at it. Imagine Russia putting missile defense shield along the Canadian and Mexican border pointed at us; would we find that threatening?

Ukraine and Syria: Washington’s problem with its own Ukraine Coup of 2014, was that it brought Russia and China together more and Russia became more self-reliant in agriculture. Note that all these US led color revolutions around the world brought not a single country closer to a true democracy. Note that the US loves to call Assad a dictator, but will never say a word about Saudi Arabia having a far worse dictator.

Color Revolution Background: Rand’s studies on swarming began with Fred Emery’s 1967 “insights” about swarming of crowds, and then the 1968 student uprisings in France which destabilized the French government. The US wanted to control what happened in France to work anywhere on the planet to cause regime change should any government care more for its own people than US interests.

The US-led Color Revolutions: Washington and PR consultants come up with their color revolution logo: a clenched fist with a different color for each revolution. Georgia became the Rose while Ukraine became Orange. Mmm… If the US forced regime change on Scotland, would it be the Plaid Revolution? Anyway, the Rose and Orange Revolutions first intent was to injure Russian security. Graham E. Fuller, a CIA Mujahideen specialist was kind enough to clearly explain this policy: “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power.” Et voila…

Because this book is so amazing and the longest review I've ever written, the rest of it continues in the comment section. Here's the last paragraph: Unbelievable book. One of the most important books I’ve reviewed or read. I know no other book that explains so many color revolutions and what was the US role in applying Gene Sharp’s regime change techniques against other sovereign nations regardless of the clear negative effects on their citizens and the world at large. Bravo.

[Erik Martenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

DINO: Democracy in Name Only

Ever since reading Myths, Lies, and Oil Wars I’ve been hooked. Here is a man who has seen behind the curtain and witnessed what’s really going on in the world. He’s not afraid to tell the truth about our natural resources, the world’s superpowers, and how the only remaining superpower has acted to stay at the top, and the tremendous cost for all living beings except the super rich & powerful.

Only after reading some of his books do you realize the lies you’ve been fed by your school, your parents, the legacy media, and your country’s top politicians.

I wish Manifest Destiny was even more up to date about the situation in Ukraine, but now at least I understand what caused the war.

Read the book and find out, if you dare.

[Pinel Getu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a really eye opening book. It clearly indicates how the us and the west in the past have forced regime changes in different countries to install a puppet they can control and increase there hegemony over the world all in the name of democracy. Sovereign countries are destroyed and the people are bombed and slaughtered using the democracy pretext. This book gave me a great insight in what’s been happening in my own country Ethiopia.

[Yohannes Fassika · Rating 5 out of 5]

In short, the book left me speechless. It is a well-researched book with 99% of its assertions backed by evidence. I highly recommend it to people who seek to understand the current coordinated campaign by the western media and international organizations on Ethiopia. It did shed light on many issues and made me shiver.

[Christopher Covey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great author, impeccable research!

I wish that I could have had the privilege of learning from professors like Mr. Engdahl when I was a college student in Political Science. I'm going to read almost all of the books he has available on Kindle. Thank you, professor Engdahl!

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Begins in the late 70’s -1980’s with the planning of destabilizing the USSR and ends with the planned , ongoing destabilizing of Syria. A very concise, informative explanation of NGO’s beginning in the 1980’s, NATO & Mujahideen in Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, and its movement eastward into former Soviet republics , assisted by CIA trained and funded Mujahideen from Afghanistan. How NGO’s overtly facilitated regime change, the planning and process behind The Arab Spring, 40+ years of planned Chaos! Democracy and Humanitarianism had nothing to do with it!

[Petar Zoretic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Puzzle pieces gives big picture

Some facts after years, are finally clearly connected to paint and reveal big picture. There is no enough space to go in details with description but overall knowing some not so distant facts will help you understand power of misleading information presented via mass media and powers who stands behind all this mess. Question for all of them when they come to end of their lives should be: are you proud of your role and blood on your hands? Author clearly connects chronologically all key points. Highly recommended.