Georgia: The Color of Foreign Influence
Friday March 10, 2023
There is a distressing and familiar sight in the nation-state of Georgia. Young protestors have take over a central area and are chanting anti-Russia slogans, often obscene and in English, as they wave Ukraine and EU flags and clash with the police.
At issue, a now-withdrawn draft law on foreign influence which would require that entities receiving more than 20 percent of funding from abroad register and explain their funding source. This received overwhelming support in the legislature, though the largely symbolic pro-Western President said she would veto the legislation, however the legislature had a veto-proof majority. The legislature of Georgia, which has a large border with Russia and has so far remained relatively neutral, is under attack from angry anti-Russia mobs. While we are supposed to believe nefarious Russian influence reaches into everything, the sheer fact that this legislation which would treat all foreign interference equally is seen as being a Russian influence ploy shows that there is massively more US and EU influence in Georgia. As ever, “democracy” simply means doing whatever the Western oligarchs want.
It seems we are looking at what is known as a “Color Revolution,” where US soft-power funds pro-Western protestors to overthrow the government of a former Soviet state. The legislature was wise to withdraw the legislation in an attempt to calm the situation, though it did not cause the protestors to leave the streets. This is a rare time my piece will be about how a government’s decision is correct. Escalating is the worst decision the Georgian legislature could make now that this conflict has arisen, and they will find that if they can simply deal with the internal pressure and let time pass, they should be able to wait out the Russia-Ukraine War and then carefully look at their options for reducing outside influence on the country.
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