I was unaware of the existence of the Army's 77th Brigade until this morning.
I suspect others are too.
This is well worth reading in that case.
It almost looks like the army has its own in-house right-wing think tank.
As if.....
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I have to say that this unit comes across as being at the disposal of any form of political ideology who happens to be in power in this country – Left or Right.
Genteel fascism has always had a home in the darker corners of the Establishment. Dig down and I imagine you would even find a sneaking admiration for policies based on ‘scientific’ techniques like eugenics. There will be many who will find your concerns laughable and you should anticipate a modicum of flak. The repudiation of your ‘wild ravings’ will point out that this is Britain and those kind of things don’t happen here. They do, and they have happened for many years. Those deniers should consider the large body of work by Duncan Campbell but, with regard to your comments, particularly the Echelon project. Mission creep is endemic in the secret world. It infects both civil and military agencies and secrecy is the corrosive ingredient, remember the moral turpitude of the Met police’s Special Demonstration Squad?
Wingate was a believer in the ‘Rapture’, where ‘True Christians’ are snatched up to Heaven before the Tribulation (although there are variations as to timing) . It is wide spread among American Right. With the belief that the world will end at any time, there is no incentive to tackle climate change and no incentive to find a solution to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
My Uncle was a colonel of the Gurkhas and had a low opinion of the whole Chindit episode.
Excellent article!
There is a gaping hole in our corporate media’s coverage of Government meddling in social media. It is routinely (and almost exclusively) assigned to nefarious foreign powers, almost always somehow ‘Kremlin linked’ (the Guardian are almost pathological in making this link nowadays).
But as the article states, the Snowden leaks showed GCHQ has extensive methods at it’s disposal for manipulating social media (see links below). The evidence that the CIA & MI6 have been manipulating the domestic media though increases with every years worth of declassified documents – from the socalled Operation Mockingbird in the 50s and 60s onwards (see Mark Curtis’s excellent Declassified Project’ for a wealth of UK examples.
The question for people who think that this does not go on now is when do you think it stopped? Under Thatcher? Major? Blair? Reagan? Either Bush? Clinton? Obama? Do me a favour.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jul/14/gchq-tools-manipulate-online-information-leak
https://theintercept.com/2014/07/14/manipulating-online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/
http://markcurtis.info/uk-declassified-documents/
Sixty odd years ago when serving at HQ 7th Armoured Division (tac sign a Desert Rat) on the General’s staff down among the admin’ lot somewhere in the barracks was a chap who dealt with the press and media at the time. As some of my officers had served in India, they referred to him as the “punkah wallah”. It was not a compliment.
A trade union for our armed services might help. The Germans have a sweetheart one of a sort. Things may have changed in the last 30 years. The Army was wide open to a potential coup in my time, though my flight in Teenie Weeny Airways (Army Air Corps) would have resisted. At the end of WW2 left wing drummers were allowed to travel about speaking. What constitutes the right in our armed services can be difficult to spot but general inculcation on Jonny Foreigner has a lot to do with it, along with general experience of policing actions. Wide democratisation of armed services and cops is essential to democracy. This would need more of us to serve and a change in ideas on that service. We have done nothing.
We all have to be deeply suspicious that the 77th Brigade could be used to influence domestic politics and is it in any way more acceptable that it would be used to influence the politics of other nations? It may just be coincidence, but its inception in January 2015 was in the immediate aftermath of the Scottish Indyref in September 2014.
Back then rumours were rife in Scotland about possible interference in the vote, mostly centring on the UK’s porous postal vote system. I’ve no doubt that there was also widespread surveillance and targeted infiltration of Yes-supporting individuals, groups and politicians. Now however, with a dedicated organisation whose sole purpose is interference in political affairs to spread fake news and influence thinking, it seems probable that it would be used against Scotland’s independence movement. If readers elsewhere in these islands think I’m being alarmist and it couldn’t happen here, just remember the Zinoviev Letter and MI5’s more recent attempts to bring down Wilson’s Labour Gov’t.