HEADLINE: “The NGO Menace”, By EUGYPPIUS
“The NGO menace has become a tired theme, but I don’t care. I am going to write about the NGO menace anyway. I am going to write a whole post about it, and it is going to be a long post.”
The NGO Menace
APR 18
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PAID
The NGO menace has become a tired theme, but I don’t care. I am going to write about the NGO menace anyway. I am going to write a whole post about it, and it is going to be a long post. And I am going to do this mainly because I have been reading Björn Harms’s new book on The NGO Complex, and his book has filled my head with thoughts.
My original plan was to review The NGO Complex as part of my general campaign to bring book reviews back to the plague chronicle, but I realise now that a review is the wrong format for what I have to say. I don’t want to discuss, as Harms, the minutiae of NGO funding, the specifics of their activism and their manifold individual absurdities. Instead, I want to outline my own broad theory of the NGO phenomenon. I want to explain what NGOs are, what they are for, what they get up to, why they are bad and finally also why they are so profoundly dumb. What follows will be unburdened by citations and overmany specifics, although it is inspired in loose ways by Harms’s observations and also by a great many other things I have been reading these past few weeks.
The TL;DR is this: The NGO phenomenon, while far from great, is also very far from being the sole malignant force in Western politics. NGOs became a potent force in politics only after the Cold War, and they seem above all to cause states to persist in doing ridiculous inadvisable things that nobody wants them to do – even when these things become counterproductive or harmful to the broader vision from which they emerge. NGOs also make our political discourse highly repetitive and tedious, and beyond that they do a lot of pointless and verbose things that nobody much notices or cares about. This is because NGOs represent a full-employment programme for otherwise unemployable pink-haired leftist activists. This is perhaps the nearest we can come to describing their true purpose in a single sentence.
While NGOs have been objects of fear and loathing since I’ve been online in my eugyppius incarnation, their political influence became a topic of particular interest in January, when the Trump administration began dismantling the United States Agency for International Development.
As everyone knows, USAID was a massive vector for NGO funding across the world, with a 2023 budget in excess of $40 billion. In the wake of the attacks on USAID, many began to speak of NGOs as if they provided a complete theory of everything that has gone wrong with politics in the Western world. Perhaps it is not so much that Cthulhu only swims left, they said; perhaps it is more that bureaucrats in a few well-funded government grant-making agencies just pay for rafts of leftoids to do and say leftoid things. There emerged a general optimism that it might even be possible to unplug the left simply by closing a few funding spigots.
I find this view exaggerated, but I readily admit that NGOs can be a potent political force. Consider what’s been happening here in Germany: Precisely as the USAID drama was playing out on the other side of the Atlantic, Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz of the CDU put his toe across the most important principle in postwar German politics, which is the firewall against any form of cooperation with the evil Nazi fascists of Alternative für Deutschland. He and his party brought a piece of anti-migration legislation to the floor of the Bundestag, and they voted with the AfD in a failed effort to pass it. The Greens and the Social Democrats immediately lost their minds, and there ensued nationwide protests “against the right” – and “the right” in their rhetoric now included not only the AfD, but also the centre-right Union parties. A wide variety of organisations, many of them NGOs funded by the German government, took open responsibility for organising and promoting these protests. They scared the hell out of the plodding, uninspiring careerists in CDU and CSU leadership, who merely wanted to gain negotiating leverage over the left and had no intentions of pursuing a political revolution. These spineless men immediately backed down and swore never to so much as think about the AfD in offhand moments ever again. Their capitulation was not totally complete, however, for they also prepared and later submitted a list of questions to the German government, inquiring about the role of NGOs in these protests. This set off a new wave of leftoid hyperventilation; the SPD even threatened to walk away from coalition talks with the CDU – all because they had dared to ask what this whole plague of NGOs was getting up to and whether their activities were strictly legal. Their message was clear: We, the rabble, are not allowed to know to what extent the German government is funding political activism and why certain government-funded organisations are organising pseudo-organic protests against us. Apparently nothing could be more undemocratic than transparency in this area.
Now, all of this seems to suggest that leftist NGOs and their semi-affiliated paramilitary street thugs in Antifa have all of German politics by the balls, and while this isn’t entirely wrong, we should avoid overhasty conclusions. The political influence of NGOs varies enormously across political issues and also across countries. General conclusions are dangerous here.
First, while it seems undeniable that German NGOs are a major pillar keeping the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland in place, their influence is not uniform across the entire spectrum of our politics. Rather, NGO activity is confined to a few specific domains, which I’ll enumerate below. Nor does anybody really direct or command NGO efforts in the moment, as many imagine. Rather, NGOs operate as semi-autonomous organisations that receive only the most general of mandates from their state funders. As we’ll see, keeping the AfD out of power is one of the highest goals of the German NGO apparatus – and this for reasons not of ideology but of self-interest. They lose their minds at any hint of rapprochement between the mainstream cartel parties and the AfD, in this area as in many others driving our rulers to adopt terrible strategies that in the longer term actually work against their interests.
Second, the NGO phenomenon differs drastically not only in countless details but also in general significance from country to country. In Germany, our NGO system is largely home-grown and devoted above all to domestic political manipulation. Countries at the bleeding edge of Atlanticist geopolitical ambitions have a different and more potentially revolutionary NGO apparatus – one that is awash in foreign money and that expresses the plans of entities like the U.S. State Department. Still other constellations exist in other countries. Here I’ll be talking about NGOs in the Federal Republic, and as I imagine they exist (roughly speaking) in most developed Western nations. I won’t be talking about NGOs in countries undergoing Nuland-sponsored colour revolutions, which is a different thing entirely.
A lot of German reporting on our NGO scene is incredibly detailed, and for this reason it often loses sight of the forest for the trees. You could spend your entire life and fill a small library simply describing the various NGOs creeping across the edifice of the Federal Republic like black mould. Some of them are enormous enterprises with hundreds of employees and annual budgets of millions of Euros; others appear to be fictively relabeled parts of other NGOs for the purposes of specific grant initiatives; still others are like three people in a basement somewhere.
We must begin by asking, in the most general sense possible, what these things even are. Many write of NGOs as if they were a shadow government, or a secret power apparatus controlled by shadowy actors. I think it’s much better to conceive of them as a disorganised cloud of organisations formally tasked with political chores that stand somewhere on a spectrum between propaganda and ideological enforcement. They exist almost entirely in the open, but they are so institutionally complex and their output is so predictable and boring that many of them escape scrutiny. The entire system encourages inattention, not least because most NGOs, in themselves, are relatively insignificant if not entirely pointless.
Since 1945, liberal democracy has cultivated a weird kind of maximalist state that intervenes in all areas of human endeavour while simultaneously deploring what it calls “totalitarianism.” Some of these interventions happen in the economic sphere, via regulation, fiscal policy, social welfare and labour market fiddling. In the broadest sense, you could say that our governments promote not free markets but mixed economies, in which they subsidise favoured economic activity (like the construction of windmills) and tax disfavoured economic activity (like the consumption of fossil fuels). Our governments likewise intervene in what some unhappily characterise as the “marketplace of ideas.” Here, they use not taxes but things like censorship to discourage behaviours and thoughts they don’t like, and they eagerly subsidise those behaviours and thoughts they do like. This is where NGOs come from. They represent either your own government or somebody else’s government sticking its fingers in your political culture and trying to produce more of the specific political energy the government wants.
States that enjoy intervening in the economy also enjoy intervening in discourse, so if you live in a high-tax heavily regulated European country, the chances are great that your government sponsors a healthy swarm of NGOs to keep your politics drifting in the right direction. At least this is the way things are in Germany. Relatedly, those political parties that most advocate economic interventions tend to be the same political parties most interested in discursive manipulation. Thus, the many years Merkel governed in grand coalitions with the Social Democrats laid the foundations for most of the present NGO ecosystem of the Federal Republic, and the NGOs experienced an unprecedented algal bloom under the Social Democrat-led traffic light coalition after 2021. What would be very bad for the NGO scene in Germany, would be a coalition government of the AfD and the CDU, in which there would be no leftoid parties in power to keep NGO funds flowing. This is why the firewall matters so much to NGOs in the Federal Republic. Their careers are on the line here.
Unlike the poor, the NGOs have not always been with us. They first took off across the West after the 1980s, and my unstudied impression is that in Germany they did not became a serious political force until after 2000. You often read that their origins owe something to the leftist critique of corporate lobbying tactics. Once upon a time, Greens and the like were wont to complain that automobile companies (to take just one example) organised to influence politics on behalf of big mean environmentally destructive cars, but that there were no organised interests lobbying for the well-being of happy innocent forest creatures. Thus, the environmentaloids and other professional naifs began establishing their own lobbying operations and funding them directly from state coffers. In this way the government began actually to lobby itself, creating a weird recursive politics that is on the one hand forever stuck in the same vexing hackneyed space, and that on the other hand is given to strange, unpredictable and erratic behaviours like a spinning top suddenly caught in a groove.
That is, as I said, the conventional story, but I have some darker suspicions. In Germany, NGOs are frequently identified with “civil society,” or the “Zivilgesellschaft.” This is a loaded term that achieved currency towards the end of the Cold War, when it was claimed first by political dissidents in eastern countries like the DDR, and then by Western liberals to characterise the milieu that these dissidents represented. In the eyes of Western propagandists, this “civil society” existed in opposition to the Communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact. The dissident spokesmen of civil society were therefore the voices of the politically repressed people. Now I will venture onto a very thick and well-supported limb, to observe that a lot of political dissent in the Communist bloc was supported in ways direct and indirect by the liberal West. “Civil society,” in other words, became a way of talking about those pro-Western liberal dissidents in the Communist bloc whom the West itself encouraged and supported. After the Cold War, Western governments began to support similar “civil society” organs in their own countries by maintaining their own crop of domestic political activists at home, who would agitate no longer against the regime but on behalf of its policies. Thus the liberal state could take the lead in constructing the will of the mythical “people” whose wishes it claims to represent.
It follows that you mainly get NGOs in areas where the political establishment is trying to do something that nobody wants them to do and for which popular support must be enhanced or outright simulated via state subsidies. In Germany, NGOs operate almost exclusively in four major ideological areas. These are climatism, rainbow brigade sex and gender nonsense, migrationism and postwar anti-nationalism. The list itself is highly informative as to the post-Cold War nature of NGO political activity. All of these things became flashpoints of leftist concern only after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in their own way they each betray the unbounded liberal ethos that emerged as Wesetern ideologues came to imagine they had reached the end of history.
In each of their four domains, German NGOs organise street demonstrations to supply media-friendly images of “the people” demanding that politicians do whatever it is politicians already want to do; they organise, certify and deploy an entire “expert” class to steer media discourse and police the boundaries of acceptable expression via things like “fact-checking” and mass reporting (whether to censorious authorities or social media platforms); and of course they lobby the government to increase their funding, largely by exaggerating the importance of whatever it is they were formed to complain about.
Thus NGOs contribute to a repetitive and extremely tiresome circular discourse, after this fashion: In the first stage, state officials will declare that “the right” is a huge problem and fund NGOs to combat “the right.” In the second stage, affiliates of these NGOs will appear in the press confirming that “the right” is indeed a huge problem and demanding that the state do more to stamp out “the right.” In the third and final stage, literally the same government officials who steered funds to precisely these NGOs will wholeheartedly agree that “the right” is just terrible and pledge to do more about combating “the right.” The whole exercise is stultifying and idiotic, and it fills our airwaves with a lot of the same extremely wearisome verbiage on the same narrow range of topics always and forever. This is ultimately a bad thing for NGOs and their political patrons, because it makes the progressive liberal agenda in general seem hackneyed, retarded and overdone – the kind of thing no serious person will ever want to be a part of.
Of course, NGOs do a lot of other things that we don’t see. Probably most of their activity is entirely pointless. They write worthless reports that nobody ever sees, policy proposals nobody gives a shit about and books nobody wants. They organise conferences that nobody on earth would go to if they weren’t paid to attend and they pour all manner of money into designing bizarre niche websites that nobody visits.
All of this make-work hints at a deeper banal purpose. The great problem that leftist activists face, is that they can be enormously useful to politicians almost to the very same extent that they prove to be totally incapable of supporting themselves financially. Politicians who benefit from leftist activism are forever searching for ways to support their activist cadres. In the United States, university administrations began building out their Diversity, Inclusion and Equity staff in large part to provide careers to administration-friendly campus activists. In Europe, meanwhile, our states fund a wealth of activist NGO organisations for the same reason. Thus we see that NGOs do things simply for the sake of doing things, and even when the doing of these things is plainly counter-productive. Mass social media reporting, especially in Germany, may provide slight momentary advantages in terms of intimidating the political opposition, but in the long term it serves merely to discredit leftist politics and turn ordinary people against leftist politicians. It is however something concrete for NGOs to do, and until the money dries up they will never stop doing it.
The desire to keep the members of progressive-left NGOs fully occupied also seems to shape NGO activism itself. A great many NGOs operating in the field of migrationism claim to represent migrant interests and to further such things as integration; for this they receive millions of Euros, while also insisting and even protesting on behalf of open borders. It is hard to see their activism as anything but a full-employment strategy for themselves. Were the borders ever to be closed, our migrationists would be deprived of their entire professional purpose, particularly in prosperous European countries that otherwise lack serious cultural frictions or social problems that leftoids are always angling to redress. Relatedly, we notice anti-nationalist NGOs – those most committed to fighting against “the right” – striving to enhance their relevance by defining “the right” ever more broadly. Whether it is migration or fascism, NGOs strive always to create more of the thing they were dispatched to deal with.
A final curious feature of NGOs and the political ecosystem they create among themselves, is their entirely open nature. By this I mean that states don’t attempt to monopolise the funding of their domestic NGO ecosystem, but rather permit them to go panhandling for funds across the globe. In this way NGOs become a bizarre internationalising force, randomly dragging foreign agendas into domestic politics even when this serves no purpose. The Anglosphere is of course a massive source of funding, and here in the Federal Republic we see NGOs repeatedly recycling ideas from American and British activist academia – often (and this is always a telling clue) untranslated and in the original English. This has birthed a wide range of stupidities. To take just one example, German NGOs have been eagerly seeking Anglosphere grants in the field of anticolonialism, importing the entire anticolonialist discourse to Germany – although Germany had a relatively abbreviated colonial history and anticolonialism is misaligned with the imperatives our true original ethnic sin, which is the Holocaust. This has opened rifts within the older and newer segments of the anti-national NGOsphere itself, but nobody is in charge and the lobotomised leftoids overseeing this circus hardly notice.
BOTTOMLINE: “The Anglosphere is of course a massive source of funding, and here in the Federal Republic we see NGOs repeatedly recycling ideas from American and British activist academia – often (and this is always a telling clue) untranslated and in the original English.