Tag: regime change

Israel Also Sponsored a Genocide in Guatemala

Known as the “Silent Holocaust,” the genocide in Guatemala is seldom mentioned in modern history.

The United States, with support from Israel, backed yet another violent crusade against an indigenous population as well as against communism.

The Guatemalan genocide — preceded by a C.I.A.-instigated coup d’état of the Guatemalan government in 1954 and the ensuing civil war — saw hundreds of thousands of the Mayan Indigenous peoples and alleged communists massacred or disappeared.

Jennifer Harbury, an attorney, author and human rights activist, witnessed the horrors of the genocidal campaign waged by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military. Included in these horrors was the torture and disappearance of her husband, Mayan rebel leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez (known as Everardo) by C.I.A.-backed Guatemalan military officials.

Harbury joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to dissect the brutal history of the genocide as well as recount her own experiences, including several hunger strikes in Guatemala and Washington, D.C., that ultimately led to the exposure of the C.I.A.’s complicity in the atrocities.

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Political Scientist Warns Color Revolution Underway In Serbia

Perko Matovic, a Serbian political scientist and a former advisor to the country’s Prime Minister warns that a Color Revolution is underway in Serbia, adding that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is leading a struggle against foreign-backed unrest, in defense of democracy and national sovereignty.

In an article published in the Turkish publication, Daily Sabah, Matovic wrote, “The events that have been transpiring in Serbia over the last few months are a clear example of a planned Color Revolution aimed at overthrowing the government without holding elections, completely undermining the democratic process and the will of the Serbian people.”

The Serbian political scientist drew parallels with the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey that sought to overthrow the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “They attacked Erdoğan because he embodies a sovereign and patriotic leadership style and does not take orders from foreign powers,” he wrote. “He always puts the interests of his people first, works to improve Türkiye’s influence in the world and actively revives the Turkish economy through his policies.”

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What’s The Most Realistic Scenario In Which The West Might Replace Zelensky?

They might wait until after Russia agrees to a ceasefire (if it ever does) since replacing him with Zaluzhny while hostilities still rage could further weaken Ukraine to Russia’s benefit.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) published a report in late July alleging that the Anglo-American Axis organized a secret meeting in the Alps with Zelensky’s Chief of Staff Yermak, GUR chief Budanov, and former Commander-in-Chief-turned-Ambassador-to-Britain Zaluzhny over Ukraine’s future. According to them, Yermak and Budanov agreed with the Anglo-American Axis’ proposal to replace Zelensky with Zaluzhny, which could be advanced on anti-corruption pretexts and “reset” Ukraine’s ties with the West.

Sputnik shared the following assessment of SVR’s report by former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter: “SVR and its press service are ‘not a media outlet,’ Ritter pointed out. ‘They’re not there to inform the public when they release information. It’s usually done to achieve an objective or purpose’ – in this case signalling the desire to ‘inflict the most harm on Zelensky at a time when he is deemed to be most vulnerable,’ and ramp up divisions within his government, and between him and Zaluzhny”.

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Russian Intel: US and UK Working to Oust Zelensky and Enthrone Zaluzhny – Ukrainian General Is Portrayed in the Pages of Vogue

The ousting of Kiev regime leader is ongoing – and today, the successor was anointed in the pages of Vogue.

After three and a half years hailed as the heroic defender of democracy and a present-day Churchill, Kiev regime leader Volodymyr Zelensky rapidly fell out of favor with both the exhausted Ukrainian population and with his masters in the West.

We reported today here on TGP how the EU has frozen all aid until the independence of the anti-corruption agencies is restored.

(The problem is that the agencies were investigating people on Zelensky’s and Andriy Yermak’s circles.)

But, according to Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the US and Britain not only want to replace Zelensky with General Valery Zaluzhny as president of Ukraine, but they are already plotting it, discussing it at a secret meeting in the Alps.

Until February 2024, Zaluzhny held the post of commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Here he became famous as the organizer of meat grinders for Ukrainian troops.

Sputnik reported:

“In March 2024, due to a conflict with Zelensky and unwillingness to give him decision-making on army actions, he was removed from his post and sent as the Ukrainian ambassador to London. He probably carries out Kiev’s main communication with [British Intelligence] MI6.”

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First it was regime change, now they want to break Iran apart

Washington’s foreign policy establishment has a dangerous tendency to dismantle nations it deems adversarial. Now, neoconservative think tanks like the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and their fellow travelers in the European Parliament are openly promoting the balkanization of Iran — a reckless strategy that would further destabilize the Middle East, trigger catastrophic humanitarian crises, and provoke fierce resistance from both Iranians and U.S. partners.

As Israel and Iran exchanged blows in mid-June, FDD’s Brenda Shaffer argued that Iran’s multi-ethnic makeup was a vulnerability to be exploited. Shaffer has been a vocal advocate for Azerbaijan in mainstream U.S. media, even as she has consistently failed to disclose her ties to Azerbaijan’s state oil company, SOCAR. For years, she has pushed for Iran’s fragmentation along ethnic lines, akin to the former Yugoslavia’s collapse. She has focused much of that effort on promoting the secession of Iranian Azerbaijan, where Azeris form Iran’s largest non-Persian group.

Shaffer’s views align with a recent Jerusalem Post editorial which, amid the euphoria of Israel’s initial strikes in this month’s war against Iran, called on President Trump to openly embrace Iran’s dismemberment. Specifically, it urged a “Middle East coalition for Iran’s partition” and “security guarantees to Sunni, Kurdish and Balochi minority regions willing to break away.” The same outlet is on the record calling for Israel and the U.S. to support the secession from Iran of what it calls “‘South Azerbaijan,” (meaning the Azeri-majority regions in northwestern Iran).

Meanwhile, the foreign affairs spokeswoman for a centrist liberal group in the European Parliament convened a meeting on the “future of Iran,” ostensibly to discuss the prospects for a “successful” revolt against the Islamic Republic. The fact that the only two Iranian speakers were ethnic separatists from Iran’s Azerbaijan and Ahwaz regions made clear her agenda. Since the European Parliament unilaterally cut all relations with Iran’s official bodies in 2022, it has become a playground for assorted radical exiled opposition groups, such as monarchists, the cultish MEK (Mojaheddeen-e Khalk), and ethnic separatists.

Yet Iran is not some fragile patchwork state on the verge of collapse. It is a 90-million-strong nation with a deep sense of historical and cultural identity. While proponents of balkanization love to fixate on Iran’s ethnic diversity — Azeris, Kurds, Baloch, Arabs — they consistently underestimate the unifying force of Iranian nationalism. As the scholar Shervin Malekzadeh noted recently in the Los Angeles Times, “There is a robust consensus among scholars that politics in Iran begins with the idea of Iran as a people with a continuous and unbroken history, a nation that ‘looms out of an immemorial past.’ Nationalism provides the broad political arena in which different groups and ideologies in Iran compete for power and authority, whether monarchist, Islamist or leftist.”

Decades of foreign pressure, from sanctions to covert operations to war, have only reinforced this cohesion. The idea that stirring separatist sentiment will fracture Iran is a dangerous fantasy — one that deliberately overlooks how schemes hatched, in major part, by pro-Israel neoconservatives, have backfired in Iraq and Syria leaving chaos in their wake.

Such a strategy also exposes its proponents’ deep ignorance of the realities on the ground. Shaffer, the champion of Azerbaijani irredentism, has gone so far as to cheer Israeli airstrikes on Tabriz, the cultural and economic heart of Iranian Azerbaijan.

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White House doubles down on ‘regime change’ with call for Iranian people to rise up against the Ayatollah

The White House doubled down on ‘regime change’ with Iran amid concerns the Islamic republic could retaliate after America’s military strike, saying the Iranian people have the power to decide if they want to keep Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as their leader.

‘Why shouldn’t the Iranian people take away the power of this incredibly violent regime that has been suppressing them for decades,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox & Friends on Monday morning.

Leavitt was echoing President Donald Trump‘s Truth Social post from Sunday, where he floated the possibility of ‘regime change.’

‘It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!’ the president wrote. 

Leavitt said the president was ‘raising a good question that many people around the world are asking.’

‘The president believes the Iranian people can control their own destiny and what he said last night makes complete sense,’ she said. Leavitt also noted the president ‘is still interested’ in a ‘peaceful diplomatic solution.’

The double down comes after some administration officials tried to walk back any talk of regime change.

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Trump Admits Iran Strikes A “Regime Change” Operation After US Bombed Three Nuclear Sites Saturday

President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social on Sunday, saying it’s “not politically correct to use the term ‘Regime Change,’” before admitting that’s exactly what the U.S. and Israel have in mind when it comes to the ongoing military operations targeting the Middle Eastern nation.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” he wrote.

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The regime change maniacs are back: Iran is in their sights, and they’ve learned nothing

In 2002, the Bush administration was met with scant resistance from the mainstream media or wider establishment as it drummed up the case for toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. But there were a handful of dissenters, above all Brent Scowcroft. The two-time former national-security adviser (under Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush) urged the nation to consider the law of unintended consequences — and to open its imagination to nightmare scenarios.

A similar imagination is desperately needed today, as hawks in Washington and Jerusalem gleefully fantasize about collapsing the Iranian regime. It’s a bewildering replay of the same overconfidence that gave birth to the Iraq catastrophe — with some of the same figures who pooh-poohed counsels of caution and restraint back then doing the same thing today.

An invasion of Iraq, Scowcroft argued early on, would distract Washington from the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the actors behind 9/11. Drawing on his experience as the elder Bush’s adviser during the Gulf War, he warned that regime change would mean “occupation of an Arab land, hostile Arab land”. Not for months, but for years. In short, Scowcroft predicted everything that went wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The war’s advocates quickly dismissed his warnings. Reuel Marc Gerecht, the ex-CIA officer turned uber-hawk writing in 2002 in the now-defunct Weekly Standard, insisted that “these fears for the war on terrorism are unfounded”. While William Kristol, speaking to the New Yorker in 2005, “laughed” about Scowcroft’s emphasis on foreign-policy realism and Middle-East stability: “When things go bad, realists look good, until things look really bad.”

By the time Kristol made those remarks, optimism about regime change in Iraq had begun to curdle. An insurgency, incipient at the time, would grow to expand Iran’s influence in Iraq and give rise to what became the Islamic State. This new jihadist group would go on to carve a vast swath across Iraqi and Syrian territory, massacring and enslaving Iraq’s Christian and Yazidi communities, and prompting America to extend its presence in the region, where it remains still.

More than two decades on, all but a few unreconstructed war boosters consider the project a costly, colossal mistake. Contra Kristol et al, the realism of Scowcroft — his anticipation of potential nightmare scenarios — was on the money. Yet here we are, in 2025, poised to attempt the same in Iran: a country that is vaster, more populous, and significantly more complex than Iraq. And we’re doing it with even less planning and forethought.

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US Reinstates Funding to Propaganda Outlet NED

The brief freeze and rapid partial reinstatement of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding in early 2025 helped expose it as a US regime-change tool. Created to rebrand CIA covert operations as “democracy promotion,” the NED channels government funds to opposition groups, meddling in their internal affairs.

Regime change on the US agenda

In 2018, Kenneth Wollack bragged to the US Congress that the NED had given political training to 8,000 young Nicaraguans, many of whom were engaged in a failed attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Wollack was praising the “democracy-promotion” work carried out by NED, of which he is now vice-chair. Carl Gershman, then president of the NED and giving evidence, was asked about Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who had been re-elected with an increased majority two years prior. He responded: “Time for him to go.”

Seven years later, Trump took office and it looked as if the NED’s future was endangered. On February 12, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk froze disbursement of its congressionally approved funds. Its activities stopped and its website went blank. On February 24, Richard Grenell, special envoy to Venezuela, declared that “Donald Trump is someone who does not want to make regime changes.”

Washington’s global regime-change operations were immediately impacted and over 2,000 paid US collaborating organizations temporarily defunded. A Biden-appointed judge warned of “potentially catastrophic harm” to (not in her words) US efforts to overturn foreign governments. The howl from the corporate press was deafening. The Associated Press cried: “‘Beacon of freedom’ dims as US initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither.”

However, the pause lasted barely a month. On March 10, funding was largely reinstated. The NED, which “deeply appreciated” the State Department’s volte face, then made public its current program which, in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, includes over 260 projects costing more than $40 million.

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USAID: Hungary Claims U.S. and EU Gave over $63 Million to Anti-Orbán Media in Bid to Topple Government

The head of Budapest’s Office for the Protection of Sovereignty claimed that tens of millions of dollars from the United States and the European Union have funded left-leaning media institutions over the past three years, with the intent of overthrowing the conservative government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

Supposedly independent media outlets in Hungary have been propped up by money from the now-axed United States Agency for International Development (USAID), other State Department programmes, as well as from the European Commission, Tamás Lánczi said this week.

The top man at the Office for the Protection of Sovereignty said that the globalist influence schemes were intended fund “propaganda” in the hopes of toppling the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, one of the leading opponents of the neo-liberal open borders and socially far-left agendas favoured by elites in Brussels and Washington.

According to Lánczi, the American government and the European Commission — the executive arm of the EU — gave over HUF 23 billion ($63.5 million) to media outlets, which he claimed were in fact political pressure groups, over the past three years, alone.

“It’s not micro-donations, it’s not reader support, it’s not a voluntary offering, it’s money from foreign powers… It’s not charity, it’s a HUF 23 billion foreign intervention. This money was used to buy media workers, activists and politicians,” he said per the Magyar Nemzet newspaper.

The watchdog said the majority of the funding came from the European Commission, accounting for HUF 19.5 billion ($54 million) of the total. However, Lánczi said that USAID — under the Biden administration — directed HUF 3.5 billion ($9.7 million) to fund anti-Orbán media.

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