The elites and mainstream media of the West are so addicted to double standards that spotting yet another one is hardly news. These are the people who have just given us genocide re-labeled as ”self-defense,” who abhor spheres of influence except when they are global and belong to Washington (with a sidekick role for Brussels), and who insist on the rule of law while threatening the International Criminal Court if it so much as dares look their way.

Yet there is something special about the latest case of Western ‘values’ schizophrenia, this time about the concept of ‘civil society’ in conjunction with two political struggles, one in the US and the other in the Caucasus nation of Georgia.

In the US, students, professors, and others are protesting against the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and against American participation in that crime. In Georgia, the issue at stake is a proposed law to impose transparency on the sprawling and unusually powerful NGO sector. Its critics denounce this law as a government power grab and as somehow ‘Russian’ (which, spoiler alert, it is not).

The very different reactions to these two cases of intense public contention by the West’s political and mainstream media elites show that, for them, there are really two kinds of civil society: There is the ‘vibrant’ variety, with ‘vibrant’ an almost comically ossified cliche, used by the Washington Post Editorial Board, in EU statements, and by White House spokesman John Kirby, to name only a few. It is almost as if someone had sent around a memo on proper terminology. This vibrant, good kind of civil society is to be celebrated and supported.

And then there is the wrong kind of civil society, which must be shut down. US President Joe Biden has just expressed the essence of this........

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