The British Media-Intelligence Complex

I take a deep personal disinterest in "the military-industrial" complex - partly because it doesn't really exist, and partly because if it did exist it would probably be a Good Thing.

I'm more concerned by what I think of as the media-intelligence complex. At the end of the day, pace Oliver Stone, power does not reside in a country's "war powers" (Lenin's "barrel of a gun"). George R R Martin in fact is nearer the mark with his line that power resides where people think it resides. To control people you don't need coercion: all you need to do is control their perceptions. 

Last year, The Daily Sceptic actually started doing some digging. Yes, indeed, who'd have thought it? Spectator hacks and "Tory" arch-sillies, taking an interest in the Real World! But, credit where it's due...

Non-Spontaneous Human Combustion 

Back in 2019, online outlet Middle East Eye published an excellent investigation into something called “controlled spontaneity”, a method of psychological control over the general population devised by the state following Britain’s last major riots of 2011.

Fearing more riots may erupt during the 2012 Olympics, should any terror attack occur during it, a project was designed with the intention “to shape public responses, encouraging individuals to focus on empathy for the victims and a sense of unity with strangers, rather than reacting with violence and anger” – in 2024 terms, that means holding up placards praising Bangladeshis for supposedly saving the NHS, rather than fire-bombing any more mosques.

The whole idea was to provide “an anaesthetic for the local community” by diverting public anger instead into becoming an orgy of saccharine “Princess Diana-esque grief”, with love being the drug considered to have the greatest soporific effect. Government psy-ops agents were co-opted to hand out free flowers to strangers in ‘impromptu’ displays of public-spiritedness, or paste up posters with pre-written, focus-grouped hashtags like #LoveWillWin or #UnitedAgainstAllTerror, designed to go viral online.

Within the current context, one wonders if the present 10-day wonder of #NansAgainst Nazis, which we are told was devised by a mysterious elderly Liverpudlian anti-fascism veteran known only as ‘Pat’, was another slogan designed by a PR expert then stored away just waiting to be unleashed as soon as ‘Nazis’, not Islamists, became the new temporary public enemy number one. (The nans have since magically multiplied like amoebas to defend random Muslims even further.) Here’s a handy list of other ‘heartwarming’ events from recent days printed by the Guardian: real or psyops? You decide!

[Were the 'Spontaneous' Anti-Racism Rallies Even Real? – The Daily Sceptic]

It should go without saying that "controlled spontaneity" is more normally associated with cult dynamics and high-control groups, with corporate and ideological "fun" cultures, with therapeutic and self-help settings, with propaganda and political rallies, and of course with abusive interpersonal relationships. It's not normally associated with accountable and open "liberal democratic" governments. So one would have thought that finding such a reliable tool of authoritarian movements being employed by HMG might have raised some eyebrows on the "liberal" Left. (But then again...)

As it happens, the tactics (not to mention the language) of the British secret state may have changed over the years, but the goal clearly remains the same: to preserve the King's peace by maintaining public order, by covert means if necessary as well overt. 

So, who exactly is behind the particularly creepy manipulation of the demos? Well, the list of suspects is not inconsiderable.

• Is it the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) at the UK Home Office - i.e. the people behind This is Woke, and including the controversial propaganda unit the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU)?
• How about the FCDO “Counter Disinformation and Media Development” unit - which funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and its organised boycott of UnHerd, amongst others?
• Don't forget the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)'s 2019 Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU), which is now (since 2022) known as the National Security Online Information Team (NSOIT). 
• And what about the MoD's Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee - who e.g. have been known to work with HuffPost, and who were last seen in 2017 trying to cover up the role played by MI6's Christopher Steele in the Trump-Russia hoax?
• Or could it be the Army's own 77th Brigade?

The BBC's relationship with the Deep State of course goes back to Orwell's time. After it had very much hit the skids with the Edward Snowden debacle, The Guardian's own relationship with SIS was evidently patched up not so long ago when Carole Cadwalladr proved herself just as willing a conduit of the MI6's own disinformation about Donald Trump as the Yankee MSM have ever been. (She's currently doing the same for Nigel Farage. Quelle surprise!) And of course there are any number of supposedly "anti-fascist" fanzines (e.g. Searchlight, et al.) where narcissistic hacks are more than happy to publish any amount of deep-state slop in return for not asking questions about where it came from.