TARGET VENEZUELA : When a Circus Comes to Town: This is What Democracy Looks Like (2011) http://colorrevolutionsandgeopolitics.blogspot.com/2011/09/when-circus-comes-to-town-this-is-what.html

According to Pulitzer prize winning writer Tina Rosenberg, the author of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World (W. W. Norton & Company, March 2011), the Centre for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) is “an organization run by young Serbs who had cut their teeth in the late 1990s student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic.” Rosenberg adds that after ousting Milosevic, these determined young Otpor activists, “embarked on the ambitious project of figuring out how to translate their success to other countries,” whom she notes, set their targets on “the world's autocrats” like for instance Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. Here one should add that it is unsurprising that Rosenberg should select the democratically elected Chávez as her first named 'autocrat' (read: US unfriendly leader) owing to her own connection to the US-backed Press and Society Institute (Instituto De Prensa Y Sociedad) -- a group which fulfills a vital role in the US-led propaganda offensive against Venezuelan democracy. According to Rosenberg, the two former Otpor activists behind the 2003 creation of CANVAS, were Srdja Popovic, who after ousting Milosevic became a Serbian “member of parliament”; and Slobodan Djinovic, an individual who had already “founded Serbia's first wireless Internet service provider in 2000 and was well on his way to becoming a mogul.” Rosenberg adds that Popovic “stepped down in 2004” from his parliamentary position, “preferring a career as an organizer and a revolutionary”; while today, Djinovic, “is head of Serbia's largest private internet and phone company and funds about half of CANVAS's operating expenses and the costs for half the training workshops out of his own pocket.”1

What remains unmentioned in Rosenberg's mammoth CANVAS puff piece are any details about CANVAS's close affiliation to Peter Ackerman's 'democracy promoting' International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), which arise through their former employment of numerous members of the ICNC's advisory board (including the board's chairman Professor Stephen Zunes).2 Writing in 2008 in response to Zunes' floundering defense of the ICNC, John Bellamy Foster points out that: Ackerman: clever "imperial brain trust" member“Ackerman is not only a founding director of the ICNC and sits on the Freedom House board, but is also a director, along with the likes of Colin Powell, of the "imperial brain trust,"

the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR -- where [former CIA Director James] Woolsey is also a prominent member). Ackerman sits on the key advisory committee of the CFR's Center for Preventive Action, devoted to overthrowing governments opposed by Washington by political means (or where this is not practicable, using political low intensity warfare to soften them up for military intervention). The CPA is headed by Reagan's former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General John W. Vessey, who oversaw the invasion of Grenada. The members of the advisory committee of the CPA, including Ackerman himself, have all been heavily involved in helping to fulfill US war aims in Yugoslavia,

and the Center has recently focused on overturning Chavez's government in Venezuela (see John Bellamy Foster, 'The Latin American Revolt,' Monthly Review, July August 2007). On top of all of this Ackerman is a director of the right-wing US Institute of Peace, which is connected directly through its chair J. Robinson West to the National Petroleum Council, which includes CEOs of all the major U.S. energy corporations. On the domestic front, Ackerman has been working with the Cato Institute to privatize Social Security. His colleague Woolsey is playing a key role in the Scooter Libby Defense Trust.”

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