Brunswick on Nostr: As a former boardmember and later secretary, treasurer and finally president of a ...
As a former boardmember and later secretary, treasurer and finally president of a "NGO" founded in the 1980's; after decades of fighting for equal regard under the law, we were faced with a harsh reality and a hard decision.
Either we continued lobbying the government for change and continue to write amicus briefs for legal appeals, or we turn our limited resources to public education. After much reflection, about 20 years ago, it became apparent the government and its judicial branch would not change direction because they had built up many profit centers and beneficiaries around then present systems of injustice. This is why we decided to focus on how to shift the Overton window toward awareness of this systematic violation of essential human rights within the borders of our supposed bastion of freedom.
It was a daunting task, a battle with many fronts. We started out as the foci of disdain due to the Clinton's attorney general's efforts having demonized fathers; all oppressed by the family courts and attacked through finances from state departments of health. You can thank ours and other unknown organizations and friends, like Kassie J., for today's improved attitudes around the role of fathers in rearing and necessary protection of children.
My point being, there are many NGOs not connected to government finances, simple groups exercising their legitimate right to speech and free association. It is this legitimacy the IC hides behind with their invented and phony NGOs that twist public opinion toward their leftist will and away from sanity in order to launder government funds to line their pockets. Most legitimate and effective NGOs are not well funded and function primarily on the dedication of its volunteers.
(Re-posting for those clients that don't honor amethyst edits)
Either we continued lobbying the government for change and continue to write amicus briefs for legal appeals, or we turn our limited resources to public education. After much reflection, about 20 years ago, it became apparent the government and its judicial branch would not change direction because they had built up many profit centers and beneficiaries around then present systems of injustice. This is why we decided to focus on how to shift the Overton window toward awareness of this systematic violation of essential human rights within the borders of our supposed bastion of freedom.
It was a daunting task, a battle with many fronts. We started out as the foci of disdain due to the Clinton's attorney general's efforts having demonized fathers; all oppressed by the family courts and attacked through finances from state departments of health. You can thank ours and other unknown organizations and friends, like Kassie J., for today's improved attitudes around the role of fathers in rearing and necessary protection of children.
My point being, there are many NGOs not connected to government finances, simple groups exercising their legitimate right to speech and free association. It is this legitimacy the IC hides behind with their invented and phony NGOs that twist public opinion toward their leftist will and away from sanity in order to launder government funds to line their pockets. Most legitimate and effective NGOs are not well funded and function primarily on the dedication of its volunteers.
quoting nevent1q…89tjJulian Assange explains the 2025 USAID debacle, eleven years ago:
‘The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this sector are respected by actors from government and the “private sector,” leaving a safe space for NGOs and nonprofits to advocate for things like human rights, free speech, and accountable government.
This sounds like a great idea. But if it was ever true, it has not been for decades.
Since at least the 1970s, authentic actors like unions and churches have folded under a sustained assault by free-market statism, transforming "civil society" into a buyer's market for political factions and corporate interests looking to exert influence at arm's length. The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.
It is not just obvious neocon front groups like Foreign Policy Initiative. It also includes fatuous Western NGOs like Freedom House, where naïve but well-meaning career nonprofit workers are twisted in knots by political funding streams, denouncing non-Western human rights violations while keeping local abuses firmly in their blind spots.
The civil society conference circuit—which flies developing-world activists across the globe hundreds of times a year to bless the unholy union between "government and private stakeholders" at geopoliticized events like the "Stockholm Internet Forum"—simply could not exist if it were not blasted with millions of dollars in political funding annually…’
Text from Sep 2014, before he was imprisoned in Belmarsh. Extracted from his book, “When Google Met WikiLeaks”. Full text and images for the first chapter are available for free here:
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
(Re-posting for those clients that don't honor amethyst edits)