COLOR REVOLUTIONS AND CULTURE: PATRIOTISM VS. NATIONALISM

Andrew Korybko

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to Color Revolutions and culture, but we don’t have the time to do so comprehensively so I’m just going to focus on how Color Revolutions manipulate patriotism in order to create destructive nationalism, but also, how genuine patriotism can be used to repel this fake nationalism. Before going any further, I’d like to quote our Russian President who said in April that “Nationalism is hatred of other peoples, while patriotism is love for your motherland.” If we proceed from this understanding, then everything else will make sense.

Nowadays the US is practicing what I call Fifth Generational Warfare, or the weaponization of things that were previously thought to be unweaponizable. For example, we see how they use protests and immigrants as weapons of war, but they’re also doing the same thing with culture. In the past, the US would focus on promoting so-called “Western Liberal-Democratic” values in order to engineer cultural clashes with the majority of the population that believes in traditional values, and they still promote this agenda to a large extent. However, the newest trend has been to cultivate extreme nationalism in the targeted states and ride the wave of anti-systemic resentment that has arisen against the status quo in recent years.

In particular, we see how they pulled this off with maximum success in Ukraine during the outbreak of urban terrorism internationally known as “EuroMaidan”. The US spent years organizing so-called “non-governmental organizations” to spread this ideological virus and weaponize it, and they finally deployed it at the preplanned time that they had thought was most advantageous for their regime change goals. But, at the same time, there’s another side to this coin. In the Republic of Macedonia, pro-government protesters have used patriotism as their rallying cry for opposing the regime change movement, and they’ve actually been very successful with this, even though most international media outlets haven’t reported on their victories.

What can thus be seen by these two examples is that US-fomented nationalism is a destructive weaponization of culture that’s used to overthrow targeted governments, while organic patriotism is a very effective defense against this fifth generational warfare weapon. Both of these ideologies might look very similar on the surface, but everyone needs to remember President Putin’s words about how “Nationalism is hatred of other peoples, while patriotism is love for your motherland” in order to identify the key difference between them. Nevertheless, because of their many commonalities and considering the current political context in many places across the world, especially in Europe, these styles of thinking are very attractive to a potentially large base of recruits.

In promoting the weapnization of culture and the mutation of defensive patriotism into aggressive nationalism, the US employs a wide variety of allied NGOs within the targeted state. The key trend has been to create the illusion that these groups are not funded from abroad or have any Western support, so the US provides “seed funding” to create what are technically “domestic organizations”, even though their managers are trained outside of their home country and accept orders from international organizations that oftentimes serve as intelligence fronts. To paraphrase a common slogan, they’re “national in form, international in content”.

The US tries to influence all types of organizations that represent every form of a country’s culture, which is why it’s involved in environmental, civil society, political, and other sorts of groups. Its goal is to build as wide of a web as possible so that it can activate the entire network when it decides to initiate a Color Revolution or launch a test run to probe its viability. The plan is to assemble as diverse of a group of protesters as they’re able to in order to create a critical mass that quickly overwhelms the authorities and destabilizes the state apparatus. Also, by activating so many different protest groups at the same time, the US is promoting “creative chaos” in an operational environment and identifying which groups and ideas are the most attractive for regular citizens to rally behind during the manufactured crisis. In response, the US can then know which groups are worth investing more resources into and which don’t warrant any further expenses.

The strategic situation is a bit different when it comes to the defensive measures that states can promote in safeguarding against this aggression. The most important thing that the authorities can do is promote a patriotic education among the youth and remind the citizens of their country’s unique history. The point here is to instill a sense of pride for one’s homeland that could help deter the temptation that a citizen might have to join one of the US’ regime change movements. It is also instrumental to raise awareness about the means in which the US tries to deceive a targeted population into inadvertently carrying out its policies, such as through the use of these front organizations that really receive their orders from abroad, even if most of the rank-and-file is naively unaware of it. Furthermore, all citizens should be reminded of the World War II experience and how false “patriotism” was used as a disguise for aggressive nationalism.

Through the proper synergy of state policy, patriotic NGOs, and authentic civil society movements, the population can hopefully learn to resist the US’ Color Revolution tricks and not allow their patriotism to be perverted into nationalism. If Russian experts can properly master this complex interplay of defensive technologies, most of which are already naturally occurring within the country but all of which can be systematized and patterned, then Moscow can become the global leader in opposing Color Revolutions all across the world by training its allies’ students, experts, and civil society leaders in these methods. The most important thing is to remember that nationalism is not patriotism and patriotism is not nationalism, and that while US-supported nationalism will only destroy a country from the inside out, organic patriotism will strengthen it and enable the state to repel all external threats against it.

Извор: “Katehon“