Britain’s Propaganda War

 17.12.2020 Author: Vladimir Odintsov

Column: Politics

Region: Europe

As the no-deal Brexit looms large, the COVID-19 pandemic in the Kingdom rages on and warnings have been issued to Britons, as reported by UK’s MailOnline, about rats potentially invading their homes this winter, the current political elites in Great Britain have seemingly chosen not to solve the nation’s pressing socioeconomic problems in order to survive but instead to continue waging an information war against their opponents.

During a crisis, rumors and falsehoods spread especially quickly. This is a well-known fact to many, particularly to the Brits, whose government has long made it a habit to deceive and promote Russophobia. In fact, many Britons have written about this, as for instance, in the book “British Intelligence and Covert Action” by Jonathan Bloch and Pat Fitzgerald or in the article by Sanchia Berg, “‘Fake news’ sent out by government department” on the BBC website.

“When people are unsure and fearful, they try to gather as much information as possible in order to better assess the situation,” points out Kate Starbird, who “conducts research on crisis IT and crisis communication at the University of Washington”. “It used to be difficult to find out anything at all – today you learn more than you really wanted to know. The problem is information overload,” she states.

Some British media outlets use all of this as well as the Internet’s and social networking sites’ broad capabilities for spreading misinformation and desired propaganda from the current political elites of the kingdom to their advantage, as they diligently try to portray the country as a supporter of high-minded ideas, e.g human rights and democracy principles. However, research conducted by South Africa’s online newspaper, Daily Maverick, clearly shows how the public is being misinformed about the UK’s foreign and military policies.

According to the aforementioned article, “key British foreign policies, particularly in the Middle East, are being routinely under- or un-reported in the UK national press”. In addition, there are few articles about the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia despite fairly close cooperation between these two countries. Daily Maverick states there is a lack of news reports on Saudi Arabia’s dependence on UK’s support in the military sphere. In fact, very few of them describe the Yemen conflict, which has resulted in numerous deaths among civilians, for what it really is “given the extent of the UK’s military role — a British war”. After all, Great Britain has been known to export arms to Saudi Arabia. Even the 2018 report entitled “UK personnel supporting the Saudi armed forces – risk, knowledge and accountability” by researchers Mike Lewis and Katherine Templar was not broadly covered by the mainstream media. According to Daily Maverick, the national press, in general, seem to promote the “government’s false claim that it is ‘not a party’ to the war” in Yemen – “an assertion likely made for legal reasons to avoid being held complicit in war crimes”.

In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that the United Kingdom has been waging an information war in Syria, “where attempts to replace the current regime by military means”, and to subsequently create and “prop up opposition forces, and even terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and DAESH” (ed. note: both organizations are banned in Russia), have not yielded the desired outcomes for either Washington or London for many years.

According to The Grayzone website, leaked documents, which recently came to light, show that “UK government contractors developed an advanced infrastructure of propaganda to stimulate support in the West for Syria’s political and armed opposition.” These files also “reveal how Western intelligence cutouts played the media like a fiddle, carefully crafting English- and Arabic-language media coverage of the war on Syria to churn out a constant stream of pro-opposition” reports. The article also states that the documents “provide clear insight into how the Syrian opposition was cultivated by Western governments with imperial designs on Damascus, and was kept afloat with staggering sums of cash that flowed from the pockets of British taxpayers” In addition, the Grayzone report says that the leaked files “consist mainly of material produced under the auspices of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. All of the firms named in the files were contracted by the British government, but many also were running ‘multi-donor projects’ that received funding from the governments of the United States and other Western European countries”. According to the article, “the UK Foreign Office and military crafted plans to wage a comprehensive media war on Syria,” and in order “to establish an infrastructure capable of managing the propaganda blitz, Britain paid a series of government contractors, including ARK, The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), Innovative Communication & Strategies (InCoStrat), and Albany.”

For instance, in one leaked document, ARK (Analysis Research Knowledge) “took credit for the ‘development of a core Syrian opposition narrative’.” The firm also “trained all levels of the Syrian opposition in communications, from citizen journalism workshops with Syrian media activists to working with senior members of the National Coalition to develop a core” narrative. Basically, ARK “flooded Syria with opposition propaganda”. “ARK products promoting HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) priorities by fostering attitudinal and behavioral change are broadcast almost every day on pan-Arab channels,” the firm bragged. The leaked files also confirm that ARK played a role in “popularizing the White Helmets in Western media”, and helped “turn the Western-funded group into a key propaganda weapon of the Syrian opposition”.

Another document that came to light “shows the Western government-backed firm ARK revealing that, back in 2011, it worked with another government contractor called Tsamota to help develop the Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability (SCJA)”. “In 2014, SCJA changed its name to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA)”. In fact, “The Grayzone exposed CIJA as a Western government-funded regime-change organization whose investigators collaborated with al-Qaeda” (an organization banned in the Russian Federation) and its extremist allies “in order to wage lawfare on the Syrian government”.

The author could have provided even more unflattering information about the role played by the British media outlets in initiating information and propaganda warfare for the benefit of the current political elites in the kingdom. Recently, France’s Madame Figaro (a magazine supplement to the Saturday edition of the newspaper Le Figaro) published an article about the UK’s propaganda generators that include “The Sun, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express”, which together “form the powerful family of English tabloids, seductive, amoral, aggressive even cruel”.

Vladimir Odintsov, a political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

]https://journal-neo.org/2020/12/17/britain-s-propaganda-war/