In The Blind Spot: Dario’s takeover bonus

DARIO’S COMMENT: These claims follow polling conducted by Western marketing companies, which dramatically undershot the high level of support for the Georgian Dream party that led to its victory, amongst other irregularities.

Georgia’s EC vs Europe’s EU and their allies

Georgia’s electoral commission has since confirmed the result, following a “partial recount” that “didn’t lead to a significant change to previously announced official results.” However, this has done little to appease the opposition, or the EU, with the latter stating it cannot recommend opening membership talks “unless Georgia reverts the current course of action which jeopardizes its EU path.”

The NGOs and Georgian opposition parties being cited by Western authorities and media, including the pro-Western President of Georgia, Salome Zourabichvili, agree with this assessment. The President even declared she did not recognize the election results because the country had fallen victim to a “Russian special operation.” This included Moscow-operated media outlets spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories, including allegations that the U.S. was planning to deploy snipers to shoot at protesters to escalate tensions in the country.

Western blind spots

But is Georgian Dream really leading the country down a pro-Russian path, or do these claims instead unearth a typical Western blindspot – the inability to see our own dark geopolitics and the deadly consequences that follow from this bias?

Georgian political tension has been increasing since the drafting of the “foreign agents bill” that was passed this summer. This law would require NGOs receiving more than 20 percent of their funding outside Georgia to register as foreign agents with the government. Western media, NGOs and governments had joined together in denouncing this as a “Russian law” since a similar law drafted in Russia resulted in the banning and imprisonment of thousands of pro-democracy and pro-Western activists in Russia. It’s worth noting both the EU and the U.K. are also working on introducing similar foreign influence registration laws for individuals or entities involved in political or public policy activities influenced by foreign governments.

The Cold War long game

We all know Russia is no saint. In addition to its brutal invasions of neighbouring countries, it has proven its ability to prosecute any whim of democratic opposition inside (and outside) its borders. Besides, Russia has several vested interests in maintaining Georgia on its good side. Not only because Russian goods can transit through Georgian borders to Turkey and Armenia, but also to avoid another bordering country joining the NATO alliance. Russia can, has, and will intervene in Georgia – either through trying to manipulate its elections or invading its territory (as it did in 2008).

But this Russian interest conflicts with others: The United States, for example, wants Georgia to host NATO weaponry and missiles to threaten Russia, and for it to join in the isolation of the Eastern giant. And the European Union seeks to continue absorbing the Georgian market. Therefore, what our Western authorities and media miss is that the West is doing the same thing as Russia in Georgia: The pursuit of our self-interests, primarily, those of the United States.

And there’s nothing mysterious about this Western bias; it’s all over the reporting. It was primarily American pollsters like HarrisX, a subsidiary of marketing firm Stagwell, or Edison that undershot the support for Georgia Dream by around 10 percent and predicted the party would receive from 40.9 percent to 42 percent. On the other hand, government-supported polls like Imedi TV’s exit polls gave Georgian Dream a far more accurate 56 percent. In effect, these American pollsters crafted the casus belli which allowed the opposition and Western leaders to cry foul.

Going further, observe the spate of Western-sounding ‘Georgian’ institutions cited by Western articles that also protest these alleged election irregularities. One example is the “International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy”, which claims to be a non-partisan Georgian NGO. However, this NGO worked under USAID’s Elections and Political Processes Program for Georgia’s elections in 2020. USAID, the American government’s foreign development arm, is unique in being the only Western development program that explicitly outlines its furthering of American foreign policy interests abroad.

Is it a stretch to speculate that NGOs, which rely on Western governments for funding, or Western marketing agencies that primarily operate in Western countries, may be leaned on by sketchy individuals tied to Western intelligence agencies, for example, to fudge some pro-West results? 

Unlike our ability to spot Russian foreign policy lurking behind supposedly non-partisan or independent Russian-aligned media, we in the West seem unable to do the same for ourselves. This is despite the United States’ interests and history of foreign intervention being just as obvious – if not more so – than Russia’s.

Georgia’s internal problems and the Western machine

None of this means that Georgian Dream is innocent of the crimes with which they are charged. The OSCE, notable for being a significant inter-country NGO that also includes Russia and Belarus as members with veto power, drafted a remarkably neutral analysis of the Georgian elections that still found numerous instances of voter intimidation at the ballot box by Georgian Dream partisans. Furthermore, this was the first year in Georgian history that electronic ballot boxes were used to submit and count votes. As Venezuelan opposition leaders constantly claim, electronic ballot boxes can be key weapons in authoritarians’ hands, allowing them to seamlessly manipulate vote tallies.

But as a since-deleted article on the Carnegie Endowment convincingly claimed, Georgian Dream is neither pro-West nor anti-Russia. Rather, they are trying to position Georgia on neutral ground between the two powers. And, above all that, like any political actor, Georgian Dream fights for itself. 

Going beyond whether Georgian Dream is guilty or not (and it’s entirely plausible that they are), such controversies overseas gives us a glimpse into the myopia of the Western media and institutional machine. Despite clear foreign policy incentives for Western agencies to manipulate or influence members of the opposition in Georgia – just like Western media claim Russia does with the Georgian Dream party – our reporting is exclusively one-sided, favors the Georgian opposition, despite its minority support among the Georgian people (even when looking at Western pollsters), and ignores key Western interests. 

You’d be hard-pressed to find arguments that correctly label Georgia as a battleground between Western and Russian interests. Instead, we get the same old “good guy versus bad guy” story and the legacy of wars and death that follow it. Ukraine, for instance, bought this Western narrative. And years after being offered a ceasefire by Russia, it continues emptying its manpower and economic reserves fighting a losing battle against a giant thrice its size, with NATO merely watching from the sidelines. All because swathes of the Western population (and Ukrainians) were convinced that fighting against Russia was a good thing, and peace was not.

DARIO COMMENT: The troubles in Martinique, which began in September, speak not only to the ongoing societal issues in French overseas territories but also to the potentially unintended consequences of European free trade agreements. 

What was first seen with either the revolt of so-called Francafrique — the former French colonies of Africa, and the recent riots in French New Caledonia, is now coming to Martinique. Disenchanted locals, fed up with decades of distant French administration, have grown increasingly tired of high prices and perennial unemployment. 

Not only are these French overseas territories far poorer than the French mainland but the prices of foodstuffs are also elevated, with prices in Martinique being around 40 percent higher than in mainland France. Tragically, this increase in prices stems not only from these islands’ reliance on imports, but also from an old French tax on ocean-bound transport. Despite decades of French overseas mobilization against these high prices and the tax regime, which became particularly pronounced in 2009, nothing has changed.

Azerbaijan’s fingerprints

And as has become commonplace whenever a French overseas territory begins protesting, Azerbaijan’s fingerprints seem to be all over it. As we’ve written before, Baku initiated a “Decolonization Conference” in the summer of 2023 with representatives of liberation movements from most French territories. While French media outlined that Azerbaijan-funded groups played a prominent role in the New Caledonian protests, their penetration of Martinique’s civil society remains far more limited. But Azerbaijan’s willingness to throw almost unlimited funds at these liberation groups means their influence will only increase with time.

Unequally implemented regulations

This crisis would be severely exacerbated by the ongoing attempts by the EU to ratify the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement, despite active lobbying against it by French authorities. French lobbyists rightly point out that increased competition from Brazilian and other South American rum, banana and sugar plantations risk wiping out the only viable industries in their overseas territories. And they make some fair points. While French overseas industrialists are forced to rigidly abide by the EU’s stringent controls on Eco-labelled agriculture, the EU-Mercosur agreement would see European authorities grant an Eco-label equivalence to South American producers. This is problematic since South American regulators are far less stringent than European ones, and their industries far less controlled and more prone to corrupting officials to avoid these controls. 

Should EU-Mercosur go through, it would be foreseeable to expect even more troubles in these French territories. 

What’s the blind spot?

While the conventional expectation is that France is suffering from their pullout from French Africa, and struggling to piece together a coherent governance framework for its overseas territory, we suspect the truth is more complex.

French Africa and the French overseas territories used to play an incredibly important role in the French economy, but their significance as a percentage of French GDP has been nosediving since the mid-20th century. This has led to suspicions among French elites that the Macron government is intentionally allowing such discord to arise in order to disentangle France from these overseas commitments that are increasingly expensive in terms of monetary maintenance of armed forces, but also in the expenditure of political capital, especially in comparison to their decreasing strategic relevance.

After all, while these islands do allow France to have military bases in all corners of the world, they don’t need that many – a single base in Guadeloupe, north of Brazil, would arguably suffice to cover the Caribbean region, for instance. France could foreseeably grant independence to these territories but maintain an armed presence there, reminiscent of Britain’s recent deal with Mauritius over the Chagos islands, while washing its hands of the highly complex societal issues present. While this is far from certain, it is evident that some kind of French disentanglement from these overseas troubles will continue to occur in the coming decades.

DARIO COMMENT: Such claims must be handled with kid gloves – that’s a given. However, there’s no denying that a substantial section of the internet is increasingly convinced weather wars are a thing, and anyone reluctant to consider the legitimacy of these theories must address that, in many cases, those espousing them also bear the receipts. Given the potential externalities of such programs, rather than being shunned by the media, it’s time to demand the topic receives proper public scrutiny.

Weather modification history re-cap

As we noted in our newsletter of April 20, large-scale weather modification programs have been under serious study by major militaries the world over since at least the 1950s. There are many prominent military examples to list, among them Operation Popeye, which was a military cloud-seeding project where the US Air Force extended the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail to disrupt NVA military supplies by causing landslides and softening road surfaces. 

Government bodies also studied the use of weather modification for agricultural purposes. In December 2020, China announced a huge expansion of its weather modification program, which is set to cover about 56 percent of the country’s entire surface area by 2025. China will use cloud seeding, spreading chemicals like liquid nitrogen or silver iodide into clouds to manufacture good weather conditions for crops, or to prevent natural disasters, ostensibly. 

One recent example were weather modification practices that, in 2019, started helping reduce damage from hail in Xinjiang province by 70 percent. CIA Director John Brennan also talked about these efforts in June 2016, where he gave a positive view on “geoengineering” – “strategic aerosol injections (SAI) … that could potentially help reverse the warming effects of global climate change.” These SAI particles could supposedly be spread over the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s heat.

Why the media needs to step up

We’re not here to argue that DANA was caused by weather modification programs. I haven’t run into any suggestive or conclusive evidence that could support these allegations. But theoretically, considering the large-scale efforts of several countries spanning decades and billions of dollars, and our ignorance regarding the particulars of these efforts, it’s the media’s duty to explore and scrutinize the possibility. 

While DANA was likely not caused by weather modification efforts, weather modification efforts are real and their consequences have the potential to be dangerous to civilization. Fear of being stigmatized as mentally unsound is a poor reason not to investigate the matter.

After all, following two decades of Western media propagating the reality of man-made climate change, why can’t we investigate the most obvious type of government-led man-made climate change?

Without the centre ground taking responsibility it probably won’t be long before the ever politically innovative, right-wing populist parties of Europe begin taking up the issue of weather modification as another example of deception by government elites.