Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
One is that the DoD, CIA, etc are coopting others' scholarship, tactics and organizations when it suits their purposes.

As usual.
The range of possibilities you suggest should, in fairness, include the option that Gene Sharp is just what his writings themselves seem to indicate.  The best way to evaluate that option is to read a piece or two of his writings, to sample fairly his ideas.
That's the position I have arrived at.

Then ask yourself if they lend themselves to CIA destabilization efforts.
I think, if I were an agancy analyst, I would see utility in his work. So --yes, I agree that co-option  could easily be happening, even likely.
I do not, however, find an iota of evidence that Dr. Sharp has himself willingly aided any project of any of the alphsabet soup purveyors of perfidy and cynicism. The symbol of Jesus has been co-opted for truly evil purposes.
But Sharp's tactics are, in the end, far more of a hazard for the agency than an asset, I think. If so, then what the signers of the letter above saw as a campaign of character assasination also makes sense.
The two positions are not mutually exclusive. at all, and are in fact common in the Machiavellian world of spooks.  

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.

by geezer in Paris (risico at wanadoo(flypoop)fr) on Wed Feb 23rd, 2011 at 10:16:24 PM EST
[ Parent ]
My suspicion is that Gene Sharp is a genuine scholar of long-standing on non-violence strategy and tactics and that the US DOD is interested in studying his work in order to use it for their own purposes.  Sharp's motivations are not those of the DOD or the NYTimes or even of the protesters in Egypt, Libya, and Wisconsin who may be using his ideas for their own purposes.

Solar IS Civil Defense
by gmoke on Sun Feb 27th, 2011 at 05:14:10 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Display: