EU Paid 'Green' NGOs to Create Grassroots Pressure for 'Green' Action

Meanwhile in Brussels, EU Commissars used Maoist tactics to create the illusion of mass support for their suicidal 'Green™' policies, as the Dutch daily De Telegraaf revealed a week ago

Every now and then, legacy media reports on important stuff—and that happened earlier this week when the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf revealed that former EU Commissar Frans Timmermans was funding environmentalist activist groups with EU subsidies to create the illusion of grassroots support for his megalomaniacal ‘Green New Deal’.

We don’t really need to ask ‘pointed questions’ here; Brussels is a cesspool inhabited by swamp critters large and small, and the only thing that reliably deters bad behaviour is—massive fines and jail time, perhaps adding the functional equivalent of the pillory (‘perp walk’) and parading these nefarious actors around the road and letting people express their sentiments (perhaps using rotten eggs to do so).

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

---

Brussels Lobbying Scandal: EU Secretly Paid Environmental NGOs to Promote Green Plans

By Alexander Bakker, De Telegraaf, 22 Jan. 2025 [source; archived]

How spontaneous were the environmental movement’s expressions of support for [EU Commissat] Frans Timmermans’ ultra-green proposals? That question comes into play now that it appears the European Commission was paying subsidies to environmental clubs to lobby for its own green plans.

How did the support for Frans Timmermans’ ultra-green plans come about?

Brussels used money from a billion-dollar pot for climate and environmental subsidies for the shady lobby [it’s called a ‘mass line’, more on this below]. The environmental clubs also have to answer. For instance, the European Environmental Bureau, the European umbrella organisation of green organisations whose members from the Netherlands include Milieudefensie [translates roughly into Environmental Defence; it was originally founded by the Club of Rome, says Wikipedia] and Natuurmonumenten [Society for Preservation of Nature Monuments in the Netherlands, which is part of the European Environmental Bureau, an umbrella organisation of 180 ‘citizens’ organisation’ (sic) in 40 countries, and it is a member of the ‘core’ of the netherworld of ‘Green™’ NGOs, says Wikipedia], was explicitly ordered to provide at least 16 examples where the European Parliament made green legislative texts more ambitious thanks to their lobbying.

Former EU Commissar Frans Timmermans’ controversial Nature Restoration Law [sic, this is an EU ‘law™’, which means its coming from the Commission, and it was quite ‘controversially’ debated last year] was also to be ‘promoted’ by the umbrella of 185 environmental clubs [associated, or gather under, the umbrella of the European Environmental Bureau]. Furthermore, the contract, which De Telegraaf had access to, shows how 700,000 euros of subsidies was to be used to steer the farming debate in a green direction, for example [click here if you wish to learn how the EU ‘works’].

Signals for Some Time

There have long been signs that Brussels is trying to push through its own green plans via other clubs. In June 2023, for instance, De Telegraaf already wrote about how companies received tips on how to manipulate doubting politicians in the EU Parliament to vote for the Nature Restoration Act via the EU Business & Biodiversity Platform. Especially in the Netherlands, there was a lot of resistance to this law for fear of a second legal nitrogen crisis [in Austria, Climate Minister (sic) Leonore Gewessler (Greens, of course) broke both the constitution and almost blew up the federal gov’t over her assent (nothing happened, legally speaking, to her)]

‘There were even lobby lists with names of politicians to be approached’, says NSC MEP Dirk Gotink. As a member of the Budget Control Committee, he and several colleagues are now investigating subsidy contracts with green clubs over the past five years [it would likely be better to study this going all the way back to the Club of Rome’s founding, I’d suggest]:

This is not a smear campaign against the environmental movement. Of course they are allowed to lobby. I am aiming my arrows at the European Commission. This appears to be a highly orchestrated collusion between a green coalition led by Timmermans and a left-wing majority in the EU Parliament. [‘there appears to be…’ is a bad start; objectively worse, I submit, is the fact that the issue here appears the misappropriation of funding for this kind of agit-prop, yet I think what’s way, way worse here is that this is done despite the EU Commission being the de facto executive with legislative powers (in cahoots with the EU Council, or soviet, which is the assembly of the heads of gov’ts)—and that means that the heads of gov’ts and the EU Commission are devising ‘laws™’ for which they know little, if any, popular support, let alone the consent of the governed, exists—and to manufacture a modicum of ‘support™’, these apparatchiks then pay NGOs to raise a stink, which is then independently covered by sympathetic journos™]

MEPs Delve into Secret Documents

That MEPs are going digging into secret documents has not gone unnoticed. Last autumn, the newly appointed EU Commission suddenly sent an ukas [see, I’m not the only one who likens these shenanigans to the style and MO of the defunct USSR] to the environmental movement: no more lobbying with subsidy money at the EU institutions [imagine the callousness, or chutzpa, involved here: it’s as if the Donald Trump would issue an executive order banning weapons manufacturers with gov’t contracts from using (sic) their federal funding for, say, lobbying on Capitol Hill]. On Wednesday, there is a debate on the issue in the European Parliament [I’ll have yet to see how that one went—that would have taken place on 29 Jan. 2025, if I’m not mistaken].

Gotink: ‘I want to know if this also plays out in other topics, such as migration [what a creative mind, eh? My ‘hunch’ is—of course; I’d also like them to consider Big Pharma and the EMA, by the way]. Brussels is the lobby capital of Europe: is this a rotten apple or is it a practice that is widespread?’ [the question is, I’d submit: how widespread is this: here is The Economist writing about—in their words, not mine (although I share these sentiments)—‘the swamp at the heart of Europe’] He also believes it would be good to put rules in place to prevent the European Commission from carrying out this kind of practice again with taxpayers' money [I’m all in favour of this, but there should be public trials with massive fines and, yes, prison time, for Mr. Timmermans and his co-conspirators: nothing controls behaviour better than the prospect of jail time and loss of assets].

‘More level playing field’

The European Environmental Bureau responded to the criticism and developments in an open letter. ‘A thriving democracy requires resources that allow citizens’ voices to reach decision-makers’, writes secretary-general Patrick ten Brink, adding:

Unlike resource-rich actors such as foreign governments and multinationals, European citizens and their civil society organisations often lack resources. EU support is needed to ensure a more level playing field [in case you wondered if the EU Commission is ‘all-in’ on the equity—which means socialism, just to be sure—scam, there you go: it is the EU Commission that determines who is ‘worthy’ of their support and who isn’t; in other words, whoever controls the spigot is picking winners and losers]

The environmental associations fear that they will lose their fixed grants totalling €15.5 million a year and stress that they actually want to help [sic] the European Commission. ‘We believe that our involvement has helped strengthen the EU’s reputation as a world leader in the necessary global transition to a pollution-free, carbon-free future.’ [‘let me help you spend the public’s money on—me and my buddies, but we’ll also help you to send the people into an economic crisis the likes of which has not been seen since the 1930s, deal?’]

‘Ban EU Lobbying Practices’

Newly appointed Polish EU Commissar Piotr Serafin (Budget) finds the lobbying contracts unacceptable and wants to put a stop to such practices towards co-legislators: ‘It is inappropriate to enter into agreements obliging NGOs to lobby MEPs’, the centre-right politician told De Telegraaf, adding:

Unfortunately, such practices have occurred in the past and must be eradicated. Measures have already been taken to address this problem and I can assure everyone that they will not happen again.

Serafin informs De Telegraaf that NGOs need not fear that they will no longer be allowed to participate in public debate:

When making decisions on environmental issues, it is essential to take into account the input of both organisations representing business interests and those advocating environmental concerns.

---

Bottom Lines: A ‘Mass Line’

To understand the EU and ‘European Integration’ as it is invariably called, is to understand the history of the collusion between Big Gov’t, Big Business, and High Finance since the third quarter of the 19th century.

Basically, we can reconstruct two main ‘answers’ Europeans devised to deal with the problems of mass society and the emerging gargantuan power deriving from using increasing amounts of (mainly hydrocarbon) energy that powers our industrial-technological progress (sic): incrementalism and revolutionary change.

As regards the latter—revolution has been on the minds of many ever since what historian today call the ‘Transatlantic Revolutions’, typically conflating the US and French examples of the late 18th century, adding, invariably, from the following roughly contemporary developments: Poland-Lithuania, Haiti, and Latin America. There are more or less discreet lines of thought connecting these events with the more recent upheavals esp. in Russia (1917) and China (1949), most prominently, I’d add, is Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge UP, 1979).

By contrast, the incrementalist version is typically called a variety of names, incl. ‘social democracy’—after the world’s largest labour party, the German SPD, at their 1906 Mannheim party convention, abandoned ‘mass strikes’ as a tool to achieve political ends and joined the ranks of ‘bourgeois’ parties—, progressivism, or progressive liberalism (think about both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies, foreign and domestic), or Pan-European integration, which lies at the heart of the present-day European Union.

And this is where it all gets ‘juicy’, and I’ll let someone who knows these things very well do the ‘splainin’ in plain English what the above shenanigans actually are:

Leadership formulates policy based on theory, implements it based on the people’s real world conditions, revises the theory and policy based on actual practice, and uses that revised theory as the guide to future practice. This process is summarized as leadership ‘from the masses, to the masses’, repeated indefinitely.

Not a bad characterisation, eh? It’s from the Wikipedia entry about ‘Mass Line’, an invention invariably described to a variety of leaders of the Chinese Communist Revolution—and a core tenet of Maoism.

If you wish to deepen your understanding of this—I’d argue essentially—Maoist policy tool, please see ‘Chairman Mao’s Teachings on the Mass Line: Combining Communist Leadership with Masses’, via the extremely helpful Marxists.org website (which I often peruse to learn new things about Communism and their agit-prop as they are very open about their activism—which I disagree with fundamentally—but it’s helpful to decode and understand what’s happening). Mao’s considerations were first published in The Call, vol. 5, no. 34 (Dec. 1976).

In his important work, “Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership” (Selected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 117-122), Chairman Mao said that “to combine the leadership with the masses” was one of the methods which “we Communists must employ in whatever work we do.” He added that: “However active the leading group may be, its activity will amount to fruitless effort by a handful of people unless combined with the activity of the masses.”

See, basically everything the WEF/Club of Rome/Agenda 2030 cabal dreams of is worthless ‘unless combined with the activity of the masses’, hence:

Chairman Mao wrote: “In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses,’ This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study rum them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action.”

I submit to you that this is a quite accurate description of what De Telegraaf reported on: environmental NGOS were funded by the EU Commission to create what looks like ‘grassroots support’ for their ‘green™’ ideas (which really are a power grab) and now we have people posting online, e.g., that they like to eat bugs, have become vegan, or participate in ‘direct action’ (climate protests).

Chairman Mao pointed out: “The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.”

We’re quite ‘there’, isn’t it? Let’s not forget that this is a carbon copy of Lenin’s infamous essay ‘What is to be done?’. Penned in 1901/02 and revised in 1907 after the failed 1905 Russian Revolution, Lenin considers the necessity of what he calls a ‘vanguard’, i.e., enlightened, conscious leadership, to drag along the ‘backward’ masses of Russian peasants, kicking and screaming, and if they don’t want to led to the Communist utopia dystopia, then they will be exterminated like ‘the Kulaks’ or the Ukrainians in the 1930s (on which I highly recommend Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow).

The EU Commission is that vanguard. The environmentalist groups nurtured by them are the ‘active elements’ Mao spoke about.

I submit to you that it might appear a tad odd that the WEF/Club of Rome/Agenda 2030 cabal might use these considerations to effect policy changes.

It is not, I’d argue, for, as Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s eventual successor at the helm of the CCP, infamously held:

It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.

It merely means that these de facto Bolshevik revolutionaries will employ whatever means necessary to achieve totalising control over all of society and its productive capabilities.

If you wish to learn ‘more’ about these nefarious (GO)NGO activities in yet another field—‘education’ reform and the spreading of ‘European values™’—I point you to my 2023 long-form essay ‘Germany Gate’ over at Free21.org in which I discuss, at some length, the tentacles of EU, state-level, and philanthropist funding across a vast swath of ‘educational’ NGOs, or ‘civil society’ groups to affect ‘civics™’ education across the EU/EEC bloc:

How many [people] know—or care enough—about their body politic being systematically influenced by foreign governments and transnational institutions, such as the Council of Europe, the EU Commission, or the German Government…

If we consider a democratic régime to mean that these organisations should (must) transparently reveal their funding streams so that citizens can make truly informed decisions about whom to celebrate or trust, uncomfortable questions about the health of ‘our democracy’ and ‘our values’ emerge…

These streams of money often remain hidden, perhaps left so unintentionally by those working in legacy media, journalists who simply shun taking the time and making the effort required to disentangle these connections.

And remember: he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Also: abolish the EU.