Like clockwork, once again, a color revolution coup leads to an USAID handshake.
It's par for the course, but I'm highlighting this particular report because a month ago, when the former Bangladeshi PM was ousted and some Bangladeshi member on here was mounting emotionally charged defenses of the new coup regime, I didn't want to state the obvious, that every single popular protest since the Arab Spring had been subverted to establish a new US-aligned comprador government or attempted to. Every movement had its legitimate grievances against a "corrupt government," every single one thought their protest was "pure" and "untainted" by foreign meddling. Even a soc-dem like Victor Bevins was able to recognize the harsh truth of the so-called 2010s "decade of protests" in his book "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution", that any unorganized mass movement, leaderless and directionless, will be inevitably taking marching orders for those better organized, i.e. Washington.
I recall that member's impassioned arguments even won over plenty of people here towards the coup government's narrative of events and there was a sporadic debate for a while whether this would break the mold and was actually a popular coup that would maintain its national sovereignty. To be clear, it's not that their grievances aren't real and their desire for some kind of change is misplaced, that part is often genuine. No one wants to think their popular movement is a sucker and a chump, hand-crafted to be a pawn for US interests. However, when the dust settled, it was laughable that some freak who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the ultimate comprador badge of recognition, for establishing a concept that would make even IMF economists blush like "microcredit and microfinance" chosen as the new "interim government head" wouldn't end up as the poster boy image of a US toadie-in-waiting, just as he was long groomed to be when he was first given that "prize" back in 2006.
This should be a sobering lesson because subverting the energy of "student-led protest movements" into color revolutions has been the bread and butter of the US playbook. The hijacking of local grievances and the emotional appeals for sympathy with a moral cause are all features, not bugs, of this playbook.
[1] "The exclusive report in today’s Economic Times carrying Sheikh Hasina’s first remarks after her ouster from power [...] citing Awami League sources implied that the hatchet man of the colour revolution in Bangladesh is none other than Donald Lu, the incumbent Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian affairs who visited Dhaka in May. This is credible enough. A background check on Lu’s string of postings gives away the story. This Chinese -American ‘diplomat’ [...] played a similar proactive role during his past assignment in Kyrgyzstan (2003-2006) which culminated a colour revolution. Lu specialised in fuelling and masterminding colour revolutions, which led to regime changes in Albania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan (ouster of Imran Khan)."
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