Michael Milken Crony Helps Soros Topple Governments Around the World

George Soros no longer bothers denying that he funded and helped organize the so-called Rose Revolution — the uprising which toppled Eduard Shevardnadze from the presidency of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in November 2003. Soros' role in the coup has become common knowledge (see, for instance, "Georgia Revolt Carried Mark of Soros" by Mark MacKinnon, Globe and Mail, November 26, 2003 and "Georgia on his Mind – George Soros' Potemkin Revolution" by Ambassador Richard Carlson, The Weekly Standard, May 24, 2004).

Now a cover story in the April 25 issue of The New Republic provides an additional piece to the puzzle. It informs us that one Peter Ackerman assisted Soros in his Georgian adventure.

The article "Regime Change, Inc." by TNR senior editor Franklin Foer offers an admiring portrait of Ackerman, a one-time Sixties radical turned investment banker, who worked closely with junk bond wizard Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert until the 1989 scandal erupted which sent Milken to prison for regulatory infractions.

Unlike his boss, Ackerman evaded prison. "Even though he contributed $80 million to Drexel's settlement with the government, Ackerman walked away from the disaster with few scars and a net worth of about $500 million," writes Foer. "The financial press began referring to his `Teflon' coating."


"Nonviolent Conflict"

Ackerman turned his energies to the cause of "non-violent conflict" or bloodless revolution — a topic which had intrigued him since the Sixties, when his activities as a student radical at Colgate University included "storming an administration building in protest and chauffering Stokely Carmichael around campus," writes Foer. He continues:

"After Colgate, Ackerman joined a graduate program at Tufts University's Fletcher School, where he met Harvard's Gene Sharp, the academic who would become his mentor. … At a time when Susan Sontag was visiting Hanoi and Che Guevara was becoming a t-shirt icon, Sharp challenged the romantic image enshrouding Third World revolutionaries. Marxists, he contended, misunderstood the nature of power. They asserted that oppressive regimes survive because they monopolize violence in their societies. But Sharp, borrowing from Hannah Arendt and Max Weber, argued that regimes can survive only if they obtain the consent of society. `Obedience is the heart of political power,' Sharp wrote. If even the most authoritarian regimes depended on consent for survival, it followed that citizens could topple them simply by withdrawing their consent.' "

As the Drexel scandal heated up in 1989, Ackerman wisely left investment banking, moved to London, took a position with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote a book called, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, and produced a documentary called A Force More Powerful that showcased nonviolent resistance movements.


"Nonviolent Conflict"

Meanwhile, George Soros was stoking the fires of insurrection in Yugoslavia. Since 1991, he reportedly spent over $100 million building a resistance movement against President Slobodan Milosevic. The militant youth group Otpor ("Resistance") grew quickly to 70,000 members and assumed leadership of the Serbian resistance. According to Foer, Ackerman was intrigued to discover that Otpor leaders were studying the teachings of his one-time mentor Gene Sharp.

Milosevic fell in October 2000. To what extent his overthrow helped or harmed U.S. interests remains a matter of dispute, as Julia Gorin notes in a FrontPage article of March 16, 2005 titled, "A Jewish Albatross: The Serbs." However, the Serbian uprising doubtless helped the cause of Gene Sharp and his disciple Peter Ackerman. Foer writes:

"Otpor would become the textbook example of Sharp's theories translated into praxis. … [Otpor] had heeded Sharp's chief injunction: They had cultivated the police and military. … As Ackerman and [his partner Jack] DuVall wrote in a recent op-ed, `Regimes fall when their defenders defect.'"

In 2002, Ackerman teamed up with public television executive Jack DuVall, whom he knew from his campus activist days, to launch the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (icnc). "The Center has translated Ackerman's material into eight languages, paid to disseminate it around the globe, and taught his techniques in seminars with activists from Iran, Iraq, and Palestine…," writes Foer. "The Rose Revolution — and the nonviolent movements it inspired in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and, to a lesser extent, Lebanon — represented a vindication for Ackerman and his ideas."


"Regimes Fall When Their Defenders Defect"

Ackerman next produced Bringing Down a Dictator — a documentary giving a step-by-step account of the Serbian uprising. The film was destined to play a critical role in Georgia's Rose Revolution.

The Soros-controlled television network Rustavi-2 began preparing the Georgian people for revolution months in advance, by airing Ackerman's documentary every Saturday. In the last ten days before the uprising, Rustavi-2 stepped up the pace of the broadcasts. One rebel leader told The Washington Post after the coup, "Most important was the film. All the demonstrators knew the tactics of the revolution in Belgrade by heart because they showed [the film].... Everyone knew what to do."

Foer notes that Peter Ackerman has developed a cozy relationship with the U.S. State Department. We should be wary, however, of concluding from this fact alone that Ackerman is working in America's best interests. Recall that George Soros too enjoys State Department support — at least from those elements of the diplomatic corps dedicated to multilateralist "global governance" and opposed to President Bush's vision for a Pax Americana (see "Soros Operatives Infiltrate State Department, CIA").

Moonbat Central will adopt a wait-and-see attitude toward Mr. Ackerman. If he is helping America in time of war, we thank him for his assistance, whatever ideological eccentricities he may nurture privately.

Still, we note with concern that, by ingratiating themselves with the State Department and CIA, George Soros and Peter Ackerman — wittingly or unwittingly — have closely followed the course Gene Tharp recommended for would-be putschists; that is, to cultivate, befriend and ultimately subvert the target regime's vital defenders, be they police, soldiers, diplomats or intelligence officials.