{"id":33466,"date":"2018-04-17T06:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-04-17T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33466"},"modified":"2018-04-17T06:00:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T11:00:17","slug":"british-propaganda-and-disinformation-an-imperial-and-colonial-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33466","title":{"rendered":"British Propaganda and Disinformation: An Imperial and Colonial Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"<header><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-responsive\" title=\"British Propaganda and Disinformation: An Imperial and Colonial Tradition\" src=\"https:\/\/www.strategic-culture.org\/images\/news\/2018\/04\/16\/or-40609.jpg\" alt=\"British Propaganda and Disinformation: An Imperial and Colonial Tradition\" \/><\/p>\n<h3><a href=\"https:\/\/www.strategic-culture.org\/news\/2018\/04\/16\/british-propaganda-and-disinformation-imperial-and-colonial-tradition.html\">British Propaganda and Disinformation: An Imperial and Colonial Tradition<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<p>When it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives, the British intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led the way for its American \u201ccousins\u201d and Britain\u2019s Commonwealth partners \u2013 from Canada and Australia to India and Malaysia \u2013 in the dark art of spreading falsehoods as truths. Recently, the world has witnessed such MI-6 subterfuge in news stories alleging that Russia carried out a novichok nerve agent attack against a Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 and his daughter in Salisbury, England. This propaganda barrage was quickly followed by yet another \u2013 the latest in a series of similar fabrications \u2013 alleging the Syrian government attacked civilians in Douma, outside of Damascus, with chemical weapons.<\/p>\n<p>It should come as no surprise that American news networks rely on British correspondents stationed in northern Syria and Beirut as their primary sources. MI-6 has historically relied on non-official cover (NOC) agents masquerading primarily as journalists, but also humanitarian aid workers, Church of England clerics, international bankers, and hotel managers, to carry out propaganda tasks. These NOCs are situated in positions where they can promulgate British government disinformation to unsuspecting actual journalists and diplomats.<\/p>\n<p>For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office \u2013 the Information Research Department (IRD) \u2013 carried out propaganda campaigns using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria\u2019s Bashar al-Assad, Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein, Libya\u2019s Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan\u2019s Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western destabilization and \u201cregime change.\u201d IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly \u201cThe Daily Telegraph,\u201d \u201cThe Times,\u201d \u201cFinancial Times,\u201d Reuters, \u201cThe Guardian,\u201d and \u201cThe Economist,\u201d ran media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers).<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>British Propaganda and Disinformation: An Imperial and Colonial Tradition When it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives, the British intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led the way for its American \u201ccousins\u201d and Britain\u2019s Commonwealth partners \u2013 from Canada and Australia to India and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[19825,3717,4546,655,8203,19826,776,14524],"class_list":["post-33466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-british-intelligence-services","tag-disinformation","tag-mi6","tag-propaganda","tag-strategic-culture-foundation","tag-subterfuge","tag-syria","tag-wayne-madsen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33467,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33466\/revisions\/33467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}