When I was a young journalist I was a poor journalist and hungry for any opportunity. And any meal, really. At The Sunday Leader I got paid maybe $300 a month, if I got paid. I didn't even get a paycheck, just envelopes of cash, and it was never timely. The paper could barely make ends meet after the founding editor, Lasantha, was shot in the streets. It ended shortly after my editor went into exile. Like I said, journalism was a precarious existence. People got into it because they really cared, but at some point, who cares? You just want to eat, and maybe a treat.

There's a joke that Sri Lankan journalists only come to your press conference for the food. This is true in the sense that it happens, because journalists often don't know where their next meal will come from. Such hunger is a hotbed of corruption insomuch as you don't even register it as such. Free lunch is just lunch to the hungry. I wasn't one of those journalists—I came from a richer family and my parents would still feed me—but I was still susceptible to treats, chief among them being the foreign junket. And that's where they got me, though I think I was thrown back for being too minnowy.

As a poor journalist, I accepted a free junket to be trained in regime change by the US government. I didn't think of it this way at the time, but in hindsight, that's exactly what it was. I'm quite embarrassed and ashamed by this now, and I suppose it makes me suspect, but I'll tell you the story because it happened. If you like it then toss me a sub, ideally a paid one. I'm still a poor writer.

In 2011 I was recruited in the sense that I recruited myself. I was looking through an online messaging board and I saw “Madrid Workshop on Citizen Journalism and Civil Resistance.” This was a four-day thing, all expenses paid. The subject was really the Arab Spring, which had just sprung, and they had a real, live Arab Springer to comment on it. I was quite interested, I applied, and I was accepted. Next stop Madrid, my first time on the fake continent of Europe.

Who was paying for all this? The International Center for Non-Violent Conflict, which was run out of Washington DC of course. They love non-violent conflict because they can then swoop in with arms (or the IMF) and play spoiler to any revolution. But I'm getting a decade ahead of myself. I did not ask any of these questions and really could not conceive of them. I still thought American were good guys who sometimes did bad things and hadn't soured on the entire category.

Anyways, these people flew us in from all over and put us up in a lovely hotel in lovely Madrid. I didn't ask where the money came from, I just took it. After sessions we would wander around the plazas drinking and eating tapas. I met a Mexican George Clooney and a hilarious African-American woman and we laughed a lot and had fun. We went to El Prado, which was awe-inspiring. We wined, we dined, and we felt like we were doing good. Little did I know the whole thing was a honeypot.

I didn't even bother to look it up at the time (I was not a good journalist) but the President of the organization running it, Jack DuVall, was a former US Air Force officer with a deeply swampy resume. He was a Washington creature through and through, funded by a Wall Street insider trader, Peter Ackerman. It was real cabal shit, and I casually strolled into it, basically because I was bored and curious.

I didn't realize at the time but this is precisely how they overthrow governments. Meal tickets. Cocktail parties, junkets, awards, grants to make bad art, such is ‘civil society’. What civilization does this refer to? Western Civilization. What society? Their society. Then there's the soft power projection of all these conferences, meetings, seminars, all the work done by NGOs, which is a misnomer. These are not non-government organizations, they're just not your government. I didn't realize what I was being really trained in and I didn't have the natural suspicion I do now of Americans. Hell there was an 'Israeli' on the program, but I thought we could all just get along. Boy was I wrong.

In hindsight, we were just useful idiots, creatures with Black skin and white masks as Fanon said; forming a useful third column to overthrow our government on behalf of their government, and doing it for nothing in the end. The Egyptian guy I referenced ended up almost homeless in San Francisco, after meeting with the US Congress and all the groups actually oppressing his people. His good intentions were used up and thrown away. We were being trained to be pawns in the end.

I barely remember the training I got, but I remember some of the personalities. The main trainer was Al Giordano, a sort of reverse Homer Simpson. He was a former anti-nuclear campaigner who seemed to be in it for the proximity to young women, as later sexual harassment allegations have shown. There was a girl much younger than him following him around, and he was obviously pulling far above his slumpy self using his ‘trainer’ status. As the Boston Globe reported,

The testimonies portray the school [a different training] as an alcohol-fueled retreat with a “fraternity vibe.” The former students and faculty said Giordano selected female applicants based on their appearance, encouraged them to drink alcohol, and propositioned them for sex. If they rejected him, he would “excommunicate” them from the school community and accuse them of being spies.

I suppose it's fitting that broader political predation enables such sexual predation. Just as the the dying White Empire used good intentions to recruit people like me, this dying White guy used good intentions to recruit young women. It was real colonial shit, in hindsight, sending sub-tier elites to subdue the natives via dubious education.

Another trainer was someone who helped overthrow the Yugoslav government (on behalf of NATO) and they had an Egyptian Arab Springer (Ahmed Salah). Salah was really the main draw. He conducted an informal talk in a nearby park which I remember more than anything.

The main thing I remember (from the main talks) was this idea of power as a sort of Parthenon structure, supported by multiple pillars. They taught us to target the pillars of our governments, not the top necessarily. There's a whole book about this, A Force More Powerful, but I didn't read it. They also taught us basic social media and video work, which I realize now is the recipe. What they never taught us was to target the actual top of what I now call the White Empire. No, this was just about overthrowing Oriental Despots, to let their civilizing influence take over.

What I realize now is that they were teaching was how to overthrow governments but not how to govern. There was no ideology like Marxism-Leninism, just vibes and being female or gay or whatever. Just overthrow your government and let Freedom© and Democracy™ liberally flow. I realize now that this was the same imperialism justified by Oriental Despotism before. I was quite naive, and that's how they get you. They weaponize good intentions and use them for control.

My only redemption in all this is that they didn't get me. Not because I wasn't easily corruptible—I had good intentions and poor earnings capacity—but because nobody wanted to corrupt me. They don't actually have that much funding for this, and you usually need to get brainwashed by a few Master's degrees, not just one training. And on this training, I got into some fight (first verbal and then on Facebook) with Giordano because I thought he was being rude to the Yemeni guy, whose country was just being bombed. Nobody from their cynical spook-tank ever contacted me again and that workshop, for me, was a one-off. And yet I could see its effects long after, to my embarrassment and horror.

Analysis of effects is for paid subscribers, though you can see well enough from recent events.