Thanks for those links, Der. Had a look at the Brown paper, skim-reading some of it. It mostly comes across as whining about missing 'context' which wasn't relevant to Smith's argument, eg: the make-up of anti-communist struggles in eastern Europe. One salient point, if true, is his claim that Sharp went to Lithuania after the declaration of independence, and his manuals were translated and printed after that event, and therefore couldn't have been causative (though I expect they were influential in the ongoing process). Otherwise it's a lot of strawmen, including the one from the Zunes letter denying the influence of 'just one lonely western analyst' (paraphrasing) and accusing Smith & other critics of being patronising or racist for supposedly not accepting the agency of populations rising up against the various 'dictators' or 'tyrannical regimes'. No: the point is about the effect of western efforts at exercising 'soft power' to undermine rival powers, and Sharp's role in this, which was such that he managed to turn up in person at every single one of these uprisings, hawking his wares.

The supposedly anarchist leanings Brown mentions are pretty weak sauce IMO, and seem more like generalised, waffly hand-waving to cover his neoliberal tracks, eg:

'Expansion of both consumers’ and workers’ ownership and control; establishment of new firms to provide alternatives to existing ones whose size and practices are viewed as undesirable; maintenance of the independence of small privately-owned firms from takeovers by massive corporations; changing specific practices and products of existing firms when they are deemed to be of poor quality or otherwise harmful; and promotion of economic decentralisation to enhance the population’s economic well-being, independence, and ability to withstand crises. To the degree that a society transarms from military means of defence to civilian-based defence, the freeing from military use of resources, production capacity, labour, and expertise for civilian needs could have highly beneficial economic results' - p.19

and:

'People need to have a sense of participation and control in the running of their own economic lives, that they will not be determined by some distant board of directors, government decision, or impersonal forces perceived variously as beneficient or malevolent. This requires explorations of new very different ways to structure and own our economic institutions. We need to bypass both the models of massive investor-owned corporations and of State ownership, and instead explore seriously and experiment with different forms of ownership and management. These include ownership and management by consumers, workers, and technicians, and by small-scale private incorporated groups or individuals' - p.20

Whatever, man. Where's your investigation of the neoliberal hell-holes your strategies resulted in, time after time? Doing the fascist's work for them, indeed. And of course, we have the obligatory mention of Rojava (p.93), albeit noting that they 'should not be romanticised or idealised' and have been accused of 'breaches of international humanitarian law', but no mention of the utility to the US of having a Kurdish separatist group in the north of Syria and poised to cause problems for Turkey - emblematic of Smith's critique of Sharp even if they don't adhere to strict nonviolence.

Depressing how easily people can fall for these kinds of psy-op. I should know, having fallen for a few of them in my time!

Interesting topic, thx.
I