Regime Change and Colour Revolutions Part 1: Mrs. Humanitarian Intervention Goes to Budapest
Regime Change and Colour Revolutions Part 1: Mrs. Humanitarian Intervention Goes to Budapest
Introduction to the series, Samantha Power and Humanitarian Intervention, R2P, Libya, and her recent visit to Budapest, Hungary
The above tweet is courtesy of Michael McFaul, the US Ambassador to Russia from 2012-14. He posted this tweet on August 23, 2020 for all to see. Rarely has so much been said in so few characters. What he meant to say in that tweet is open to interpretation, a task that this series of essays will now proceed to undertake.
This series is necessary. I have been meaning to write on the subjects of regime change and colour revolutions for some time now, as I have been tracking and monitoring them for exactly a quarter of a century. The material available for research is massive, and no single essay can do the subject justice. To produce a comprehensive treatment of this topic would require a thick book, so please forgive me if I do not cover some items, and only take a glance at others. My omissions, whether intended or not, will provide you plenty of fodder for discussion in the comments section here and elsewhere. I encourage you to critique this essay, suggest additions, and so on. Like everything that I choose to write, this is a work in progress.
“Why are you writing this now?”, you may ask. Here’s why:
Samantha Power decided to take to social media to share with everyone what she was doing in Budapest, Hungary. She followed up this tweet with another one five days later:
Pay very close attention to the wording in both of these tweets, and make note of the following terms and concepts:
locally-driven initiatives
independent media
corruption
civic engagement
civil society
challenges to democracy
securing respect for the rights and dignity of all people
We will decode these concepts in a bit, but first let’s take a look at who Samantha Power really is in order to understand why her visit to Budapest matters to us all.
Mrs. Humanitarian Intervention
She’s a very, very powerful woman. She’s also a true believer in liberalism and the idea that the mission of the United States of America should be to spread it globally, even if it requires violent intervention. A charitable description of her would be that that she has a strong aversion to perceived injustice and a permanent fear of genocide erupting anywhere around the world. An alternate take is that she is little more than a thug for US Empire.