The Disinformation Game

ByChris Trotter

WHEN IT COMES to the disinformation game, the Russians have got “form”. Perhaps their most nefarious exercise in deceiving the world is the evil concoction known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The harm this antisemitic tract has caused since its publication in 1902-03 is incalculable. Adolf Hitler was enraged by it. The American automobile manufacturer, Henry Ford, was convinced by it, and caused hundreds-of-thousands of copies to be distributed throughout the United States. Even after the Second World War, the publication could be still be found in anti-Zionist bookshops across the Middle East. Tragically, the Internet has given the document a whole new audience to deceive.

Thousands of people around the world remain convinced that The Protocols is an accurate account of an actual secret meeting of Jewish leaders in a Prague graveyard! The purpose of this covert conclave? The systematic subjugation of the entire human race to the will of “International Jewry”.

The true authors of The Protocols were agents of the Okhrana – the Tsarist Secret Police. Antisemitism was rife throughout the Russian Empire, especially in those parts of Eastern Europe where Jewish communities had, over many centuries, established themselves. Whipping up hatred of the Jews was a time-honoured way of diverting the anger of the Russian peasantry away from their aristocratic masters and onto their defenceless neighbours. The Protocols were created with the express purpose of fuelling that anger. Bloody pogroms followed its distribution in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Not only did the “success” of The Protocols demonstrate the alarming effectiveness of propaganda based on conspiracy theories, but it also shows how little most people understand about the origins and purposes of the communications that excite and motivate them. Certainly, the lessons learned by the Tsar’s secret police were not lost on the secret policemen of the Soviet state which replaced the Russian Empire – nor on their successors in the security services of today’s Russian Federation.

Not that the Russians are the only people capable of concocting and distributing disinformation. When it comes to the operations of the “Deep State”, Britain’s secret services have been practising the dark arts of deception since at least the sixteenth century.

In 1924, for example, His Majesty’s spies concocted what became known as the “Zinoviev Letter”. This out-and-out forgery purported to prove that the Soviet Government, hand-in-glove with the Communist Party of Great Britain, was planning to take advantage of the recently-elected Labour Government’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union to step-up its revolutionary agitation throughout the British Isles. Published in the Tory-aligned Daily Mail, the Zinoviev Letter played a crucial role in bringing down Britain’s first Labour Government.

There can be little doubt, however, that the British disinformers’ finest hour came as Great Britain battled on alone against the triumphant forces of the Nazi Reich. Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, knew that Hitler could only be defeated if the United States entered the war on Britain’s side. Accordingly, he and the secret services were prepared to throw everything they had into a top-secret struggle to persuade the American people to abandon their isolationism and join the fight against Hitler.

Britain’s “man in New York” was a remarkable Canadian-born businessman, William Stephenson. From June 1940 until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Stephenson oversaw an astonishing, multi-million pound campaign of disinformation and media manipulation designed to change America’s mind about the war.

Stephenson’s propaganda offensive, chronicled brilliantly by Henry Hemming in Our Man in New York: The British Plot to Bring America into the Second World War, involved fake news agencies distributing carefully-crafted fake news. It commissioned world-class forgers to produce bogus German plans for the subversion of South American governments. It infiltrated America’s leading polling agency where its agents were able to insert “useful” questions in its opinion surveys. Best of all, Stephenson was able to enlist the support of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the man who would later set up the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, Hemming makes a pretty strong case for the CIA, along with its forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services, being designed in London, by London, for London.

In 1948, the newly-established CIA was ready to show its British teachers what an attentive pupil it had been. Determined to prevent the election of a Communist Party-led government in the Italian elections of that year, the CIA unleashed a no-holds-barred propaganda campaign designed to undermine the Italian Left and secure victory for the Christian Democratic Party and its backers in the Catholic Church and the Mafia. The CIA poured millions into US-controlled newspapers, US-influenced trade unions, and US-made newsreels – often featuring appeals from prominent Italian-Americans like Frank Sinatra to resist the communist menace!

So, the next time the United States Congress complains long and loud about Russian interference in American elections, the rest of the world would be wise to pose the question: “What took Moscow so long?” After all, the American-designed-and-executed campaign to secure the re-election of the Russian Federation’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, took place in 1996! The Russians waited 20 years before using carefully-crafted propaganda and conspiracy theories to help secure the election of America’s worst president – Donald Trump.

 

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26 Comments

  1. Good article.

    Shows up the scumbags on all sides.

    Good to see a mention of OSS, – was an avid reader years back in my jujitsu days of guys like Lieutenant Colonel Rex Applegate who wrote the book ‘Kill or get Killed’, and his British counterpart William Ewart Fairbairn,…

    —————————-
    Rex Applegate – Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Applegate

    William E. Fairbairn – Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Fairbairn

    —————————–

    These are the sorts of ruthless people sent by even more ruthless people to do their bidding and to train others to do that ruthless bidding, – while we plebs go on , day to day , worrying about how we are going to pay the rent or mortgage this week…

    Articles such as this are the MEAT, – not the milk.

    And contrast greatly with the absolute and utter crap that passes for ‘news’ that is fed to us daily like an opiate to shut us up and make us servile and compliant. Crap such as the latest sex scandals to hit parliament with all the fake concern and ballyhooing that goes along with it in parliament. When in truth they dont give a rats shit. So long as it isnt them who are in the spotlight.

    Anyone who does not learn the lessons of the past is doomed to repeat them.

  3. Really Chris you’re going to fall for that chestnut? h.r.c and the other losers from the DNC started a conspiracy theory about russia and the idiots on the left keep lapping it up. Some Muppet keeps finding new ways to push this fubar conspiracy theory. It’s sad. But if you want to waste credibility on following hollow lossers down a rabbit hole of conspiratorial shit fuckery, then by all means be my guest.

    Because in the real world, h.r.c ran a really shit campaign, and because of that – lost. When you have a husband who allegedly rapes, you can’t call out the other guys misogyny. When you are a hawark that laughs at people being killed by your military, its hard to look sympathetic. And the biggy, when you have an economic policy which is more of the shitty f*&k working people Liberal B.S. – you wonder why you loss the working class vote.

    But no – Russia did it. Batshit crazy conspiracy theory – well at least the left has them too.

    2. Ignatius and others, it seems like you’ve read the title and the first sentence, and jumped to some totally incorrect conclusions about what this article is about. Can I suggest you try reading the article – the whole thing – before you post comments?

  4. “The Russians waited 20 years before using carefully-crafted propaganda and conspiracy theories to help secure the election of America’s worst president – Donald Trump.”
    Admittedly I’m near autistic when it comes to discerning sarcasm…but was this a sly example of the very disinformation you write about?
    America is the nation that took up psychotherapy with unrivalled enthusiasm
    An offshoot of that was the advertising industry(how best to manipulate human emotions to influence behaviour), and from there the PR machine that has so steadily pervaded and wrecked the Fourth Estate.
    A degraded education system that doesn’t encourage critical thinking has completed the job

  5. Thanks for the historical background, Chris, but in America it’s money that decides who will be president (plus the accuracy of marksmen who remove unsuitable candidates during campaigning or shortly after election).

    It’s always been that way, from the time the landowners and slave traders declared independence, through the banker-controlled decades of the early nineteenth century to the railroad-and-oil- company decades of the late eighteen hundreds, to the banker-controlled years of the early twentieth century, to the military-industrial-complex days Eisenhower warned of (when it was already too late). In recent times big-ag, along with the big-[non]health, and big[non]education, and the casino boys of Wall Street have joined the club that decides who gets to be president and how long he remains in office. (No shes yet, and the US wont hold together long enough for there to be one.)

    Oops, I nearly overlooked the billionaire-own newspapers and Faux News, that churn out misinformation by the second to keep the ‘slaves’ in the right frame of mind…which is unquestioning compliance to corrupt, inefficient, ineffective systems that are essentially rotten to the core but are able to trade under the slogan of ‘freedom and democracy’.

    As George Carlin so poingnantly pointed out, “It’s a big club, and you and I are not in it.”

    Now since this ‘big club’ comprises of looters, polluters and exploiters, it naturally follows that they have to protect themselves from ‘nasty’ things like egalitarianism, civil rights, environmental protection and dare we even mention it? communism. Therefore, when things go wrong it is clearly the fault of the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Arabs, the Iranians, the Mexicans…and now the Europeans.

    Yes, the CIA was set up by Truman, as a secretive enterprise, which soon morphed into an out-of-control monster with its own army, assassination squads, drug-running and money laundering divisions etc.

    https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/history-of-the-cia/index.html

    A bit like the FBI, which quickly exceeded its mandate under Edgar Hoover

    ‘Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was found to have exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI,[2] and to have used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders,[3] and to collect evidence using illegal methods.[4] Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others, including multiple sitting presidents of the United States.[5]’

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

    I think we are going to hear a lot more “The Russians did it,” or “The Chinese did it.” etc. from the clowns and criminals that control the US.

  6. And by the way, it’s a pleasure to read your articles.
    They always throw a welcome light on the latest “outrage news” meant to manipulate us into hating our new enemy

    1. As per ‘Two minutes of hate’ (every day) so superbly depicted in the film version of ‘1984’.

  7. Today’s Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/30/russia-aligned-hackers-running-anti-nato-fake-news-campaign-report-poland-lithuania
    Here we have the headline
    “Russia-aligned hackers running anti-Nato fake news campaign – report”
    and further in the text we have this
    “The attribution of hacking attacks is notoriously difficult, but the research firm said it was evident that the arguments made were “aligned with Russian security interests”, and that given that none of the culprits had been immediately detected, it would imply that “the actors behind the campaign are relatively well resourced”.
    So it was impossible to know where the hackers came from or who they were ….so..jump in logic … they must be state sponsored .Russssiaa!
    Anti Nato sentiments are not confined to Russia they are widespread in Europe and the ME….for good reasons

    1. The Russians are coming -Auckland’s nineteenth century gun enplacements.

      The Russians are coming -widespread support for anti-communist forces following WW1.

      The Russians are our friends -early phase of WW2.

      The Russians are coming -late phase of WW2.

      The Russians are coming (and some of them are already under our beds) -1950s McCarthyism.

      The Russians are our friends -admission to G8 .

      The Russians are coming -souring relations after Russia stands up to US dirty tactics and bullying in the Middle East and Ukraine.

      “Nyet!” said Khrushchev when America positioned missiles aimed at Moscow in Northern Turkey.

      “Nyet” said Putin, I’m out of here, when the US and the criminals and clowns that made up the other representatives of the G8 met in Oz to waffle on about nothing.

  8. It never ends, its relentless, it will never stop,…ever since the beginning its always been the same,…always the powerheads who never learn the lesson and never will…

    Led Zeppelin – Immigrant Song
    https://youtu.be/RlNhD0oS5pk?t=13

    If one could only see those dark shadow things directing human activity…then the lesson would be learnt.

      1. Of course only the indolent need to refer to a so called ‘fact checking’ website to determine the veracity of any article.
        Why can’t you do your own research and see if you can find fault with SCF’s article?

        1. Because its pretty much impossible to do? That’s why we have specialists.

  10. A brave new world, or should we say a brave older world revisited,… nothing directly to do with the subject at hand , however covid may be being politically ‘weaponized’.

    An interesting look at the spread of the Black Death,… however they got the numbers wrong, the Spanish flu killed far more than the Black Death, however per head of population the Black Death trumps it. We now have around 600,000 deaths from covid.

    And as the Black death shifted boundaries and political allegiances and affected economic / labour revolutions in society, so too will covid influence fake news, create unrest , toppling of govts and old accepted’orthodox’ ways of trade and social hierarchy’s.

    An interesting observation is the fact that it was trade routes that spread the Black Death, much as the refusal of people in other country’s to adopt NZ’s position and tarry with lockdown’s with covid and premature lifting of lockdowns to facilitate trade that caused the deaths, …so again dont listen to the right wingers with their fake news.

    History of the Black Death – Full Documentary
    https://youtu.be/HYNB4sAxemk?t=1545

    On a lighter note,… and no we’re not doomed,…

    Doomed
    https://youtu.be/V7NlFWh7Sz8

  11. Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, knew that Hitler could only be defeated if the United States entered the war on Britain’s side.

    Or, more likely, he understood that the USSR was going to win no matter what and that, afterwards, the whole of Europe would be Russian – until the next war.

    And, yeah, England and her colonials have been interfering in other nations politics for centuries. They don’t have a problem with it when they do it but when its done to them then they get upset.

    Its the normal double standards that we should expect from corrupt people.

    1. Didn’t Russia lose more than twenty million citizens fighting antisemites in WW2? If you want to talk disinformation and ingrained hate, look to the Americans. Their current president has apparently released more than 10,000 non factual statements since taking office, their media outlets are an outlet for the military and corporates who just cannot be believed, and some of their citizens are simply hate group members (at all levels of society) who exist to disseminate racism, violence and disinformation. This was a fact yesterday not a hundred years ago.

      1. Didn’t Russia lose more than twenty million citizens fighting antisemites in WW2?

        Yep:

        It is estimated that the Soviet Union lost 27 million military and civilians in World War II.

        But it would still have been inevitable that they would have won even without the US/UK. They simply had more people and more resources and they were learning to wage war much better.

  12. Hi i would be quite interested in your thoughts on Billy Te kahika’s use of the term ‘globalist’. This is a term most notably used by Alex Jones who got the term from Bill Cooper. In his book ‘behold a pale horse’ Bill reprinted the protocols and simply added a note that readers should replace the term Zionist with Globalist. Billy probably doesn’t realise it but he is repeating anti Semitic propaganda.

  13. Hi i would be quite interested in your thoughts on Billy Te kahika’s use of the term ‘globalist’. This is a term most notably used by Alex Jones who got the term from Bill Cooper. In his book ‘behold a pale horse’ Bill reprinted the protocols and simply added a note that readers should replace the term Zionist with Globalist. Billy probably doesn’t realise it but he is repeating anti Semitic propaganda.

  14. Hi i would be quite interested in your thoughts on Billy Te kahika’s use of the term ‘globalist’. This is a term most notably used by Alex Jones who got the term from Bill Cooper. In his book ‘behold a pale horse’ Bill reprinted the protocols and simply added a note that readers should replace the term Zionist with Globalist. Billy probably doesn’t realise it but he is repeating anti Semitic propaganda.

    1. I guess it depends what you mean by the well abused term “antisemetic”.
      Jones and Te Kahika both have little to offer that is useful and clutter the net with false narratives.
      They both get a following of the misled.
      Have a go at finding information that is strongly evidence based, well tested across every aspect preferably by reputable science based institutions.

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