10 Rules for Understanding Civil Society Imperialism

They cleave to a basic set of rules to guide their analyses of governments that have disrupted property relations that once favoured Western investors, banks and corporations. Once you know the rules, you can predict what either Zunes or Bond are going to write with astonishing accuracy.

Rule 1. All governments are bad, especially those that pursue traditional leftist agendas of placing control of a country's resources and productive property in the hands of its public, its government, or its domestic business class. The leaders of these governments deceptively employ socialist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist rhetoric to win and then to hang on to power. They enjoy enormous privileges secured and defended by corruption and abuse of authority. Governments, by nature, are corrupt, authoritarian and thoroughly rotten, particularly those that call themselves leftist and anti-imperialist. There has never been a truly leftist, anti-colonial or anti-imperialist government, and can never be one. All revolutions are betrayals and no one should expect that anything good can ever come from left and anti-imperialist forces taking power. The only good revolution is the one that has never happened, or the ones that have been financed by wealthy individuals and the US government.

Rule 2. Civil society is the main wellspring of hope. Non-governmental organisations funded by the US Congress' National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department's USAID, Britain's Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Germany's Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and other Western "democracy promotion" agencies, are independent organisations that are working to build a better world. Leftists should look to these groups to understand what's going on in countries led by nominally anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and socialist governments.