I made the above documentary in 2014, as spoilt Hong Kong youngsters were planning to bring the city to a standstill with their ‘Occupy Central‘ protest.
Instead of being a homegrown or grass roots movement, as its supporters claimed, it was a byproduct of the National Endowment for Democracy’s policy of disruption and division aimed at regime change in ‘problem‘ countries. It has brought nothing but lawlessness, corruption and conflict, but its plans for Hong Kong failed.
Now the NED appears to have been axed in Donald Trump’s money-saving DOGE purge. On February 25th, the NED released a statement saying it “is currently unable to access its Congressionally appropriated funds, which sustain nearly all of its grantmaking and operations”.
The statement was not without the kind of nonsense that was used to justify meddling in the affairs of foreign democracies, or anywhere else it seemed fit, like Hong Kong, one of the freest and safest cities in the world: “The disruption is hitting hardest in highly repressive environments, where dedicated frontline organizations have been forced to lay off staff, curtail operations, and, in some cases, face increased security threats.”
It’s unlikely NED staff will be subject to security threats greater than those experienced by Libyans, Syrians, Ukrainians, Egyptians, etc, as a result of NED meddling in their countries. The ‘Arab Spring’ was its crowning achievement.
My programme included shots of Victoria Nuland begging Ukrainian protesters to take bread and cakes from her (see above excerpt). It’s an absurd scene, shot while she was in Kiev to discuss who would be the next leader of the people accepting her gifts, removing any doubt about their democratic right to choose for themselves.
Two years after my programme was broadcast, Nuland testified before Congress about how deep the US was running Ukraine’s government after the 2014 coup.
I have no idea how much money from US taxpayers (and those in the rest of the world) was spent propping up Ukraine for decades, but it seems Trump is determined to stop it. His criticism of Volodymyr Zelenskyy is justified.
Zelenskyy scrapped the last election because of the war with Russia. He was voted in based on his popularity as a comedian and it’s unlikely his appalling record while president would have seen him return to power. It’s been one sick joke after another.
According to Tucker Carlson, Zelenskyy’s arrogance is just the tip of a pile of unpleasantries about be exposed in DOGE’s spring cleaning.
Effectively, Zelenskyy is a dictator and should probably not be so confrontational with the leader of a country that has been bankrolling his since the 1990s, especially while begging for more cash for war.
The ungrateful Ukrainian was supposed to sign a mineral deal with Trump - a step up from giving Ukraine money for nothing. However, Democrats told him to shove the deal, which he seems to have done before getting thrown out of the White House.
Of course, these issues are rarely raised by the media or Trump-haters, but Matt Goodwin on BBC’s Newsnight summed up the situation nicely.
In its press release, NED claims: “When people around the world live in freedom, they can build more prosperous societies—making America safer, more secure, and more competitive.”
None of that happened as a result of NED’s meddling and hopefully, this is the end of an insidious organisation. For anyone fed up with the biased media that promoted it as a force for good, there’s always this option:
