Comment submitted by Jack DuVall:

I’m glad to be able to add a few words here, in reply to Will’s lingering concern about my organization’s role in transferring knowledge about nonviolent struggle to activists in countries around the world (Venezuela being one of about 70 such countries). On another page on this blog, Will quotes Thomas Paine: “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” As a collateral descendant of Thomas Paine, I am happy to embrace that sentiment as my own. Any good that the ICNC does is confined to the content of the documentaries, books, articles, and workshop curricula that we have disseminated, because sharing that content is all we do. (You can ask for and we will send you any or all of these materials.) We don’t take money or guidance and have never met with anyone from the CIA, and all our money comes from a single family foundation, as our internet-posted IRS returns attest. I can’t speak for AEI, but just as we’ve been criticized by supporters of Hugo Chavez for sending our materials to Venezuelan activists in response to their requests, we’ve been criticized from the other side of the ideological spectrum for having transferred knowledge to Palestinian, Sahrawi and Egyptian activists resisting governments supported by the U.S. For us, it’s simple: We want to universalize easy access to the best ideas and strategic practices from all the nonviolent movements and campaigns of the past, because what Gandhi did, what the people power movement did in the Philippines, what Czechs and Slovaks did in the Velvet Revolution, and what African-Americans, Poles, South Africans, Salvadorans, Mongolians, Serbs and scores of other peoples have done to liberate themselves really must be shared with the entire world. My own view is that once this knowledge is everywhere, the days of oppression, injustice and political violence anywhere will be numbered.

Comment submitted by Stephen Zunes:

My doctoral dissertation actually looked into the Guatemalan and Iranian cases of U.S. intervention in some detail, and I can assure you that these interventions involved the winning over of elite groups which were predisposed to support such an alliance with U.S. imperialism in the first place. This is very different than winning over the large coalitions of political groups and the hundreds of thousands of individuals necessary to bring down a government in a nonviolent pro-democracy revolution. Of course, U.S. interests will try to take advantage of whoever and whatever they can. But this idea that somehow Burmese or Serbs or Tibetans or Ukrainians are so incapapable of organizing themselves that they will only rebel if some Americans tell them to — a line advanced by both the right and some elements of the far left — is indeed, in my view, racist.