Of Integrity Initiative, the Soubry incident, the SRN, Brexit, and control of the message on the internet; Part One
There is a little detail, in all the noise emergent from it, that suggests that the “burning”, or the compromising of Integrity Initiative at the end of 2018 was a “limited hangout”. It is the notion had by the agency’s spinners (for promoting anti-Russian feeling), expressed amongst the documents hacked, or possibly leaked (as the Briefing Note on Integrity Initiative by the Working Group on Syria Propaganda and Media accepts could be the case), that, as part of a post-Skripal psyop (as RT described it), “‘striking images’ of Skripal in hospital might ‘help the public relate’ more to the story”.
The problem is that Sergei Skripal was never in a hospital bed, nor so much as an overworked accident and emergency department, for reasons explained extensively at FBEL (please use “Skripal” as the search term in box at the top of the page) and also because otherwise – and we can be damn sure of this – that particular image under discussion would be all over corporate-media. There wouldn’t be any need for a “private” spy/PR-consultancy hybrid intelligence detachment to think the idea up. What is achieved for the benefit of Government, in the end, when RT or anyone else covers this aspect of the Integrity Initiative story, is that the talk is about the social media manipulation as the psyop, and not the hoaxed Novichok poisoning itself.
Another indicator of a limited hangout is that it appears as if nothing will come of the leaked documents: nothing, it seems, is to be resolved, or proved. It doesn’t lead anywhere. One of the emergent talking points has been the idea that a group of paid shills can influence public perception by forming “a critical mass of individuals from across society (think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is… mutually reinforcing.” [from the Briefing Note]. A list of names appears in the documents, and it can be inferred by their presence there that these individuals are the “perception shapers” that Integrity Initiative have recruited into their ranks. However, this is simply dealt with by the issuance of a denial of sorts:
Many of the names published were on an internal list of experts in this field who had been considered as potential invitees to future cooperation. In the event, many were never contacted by the Integrity Initiative and did not contribute to it.
And the Briefing Note on Integrity Initiative explains that
When [David Aaronovitch was] asked over Twitter whether he knew of or had had contact with Integrity Initiative, Institute for Statecraft or the UK Cluster, Aaronovitch replied
“I have never heard of any of these three exotic entities. I think you have been hoaxed.”
If, in these respects, the documents are no evidence for anything that can’t be swatted away with nothing more than a giggle, then why should they be different in any respect? Also, note how this exchange is played out over the public forum of Twitter (Aaronovitch was not the only name to be contacted, presumably, by the Working Group on this medium) instead of through official correspondence: could it be in order to maximise the carnival for the enthralled audience?
What is useful, however, about the leak is that it represents an opportunity for a universal acknowledgement that the paid shill does indeed exist. There is nothing new about the idea that an influencer of public opinion in media would be working for a unit inevitably affiliated with British intelligence, but when the concept is presented in a black and white document from the servers of such a Government-funded unit, then no more can anyone be accused of imagining them. It is the author’s theory that anyone who puts their head above the parapet in media dealing with political current affairs, is approached by such outfits (sinisterly staffed by “ex”-intelligence, ex-military or one-time Government apparatchiks), and his expectation is that it is the rare producer of alternative media who engenders a big audience without the help that only this special sort of a sponsor can produce. The point is this: what we could call “airspace”, or the medium into which content creators are “broadcasting” to shape perspective, is potentially (and actually) crammed with material that has no real significance and is meant to cause people to chase their tails.
Indeed, from casual observations, we can see that the results brought forth from the supplying of files belonging to Integrity Initiative into the public domain can mainly be identified as follows: a) the reinforcement of the gross delusion that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Establishment folk hero; b) an extra wind turned into the spring in the clockwork of the Skripal tail-chasing industry; and, c) the apparent revelation that elements of Government are indeed actively stoking anti-Russian feeling in the public through social media to match the official line on Moscow. A rule of thumb that one might be guided by in these matters would be this: you only get the stories that won’t do the Government any fundamental harm (whereas it might damage a party in office, but that would always be the intention). And it is entirely reasonable that Government would introduce “proof” of its own intrigue so that it can lead, and control, the reaction to it. This sort of exercise also affords prestige and following from an alternative media audience to the people who have been assigned to peddle the material – and the useful idiots who propagate it for the sake of the bandwagon. The objective is to sacrifice the affordable losses (that which is relatively insignificant), for widespread and energy and time wasting consumption, in order that there is no interest in, or inclination to examine the stuff that Government doesn’t want to be discussed – or even noticed.
While, if the truth be told, alternative media has always been weak in terms of its significance and quality (although there has always been an abundance of it), things are much worse in these days where a complete jackass can live-stream on Facebook and call it citizen journalism. Understand, dear reader, that all such content is by necessity lumped together as alternative media, along with the more substantial and remarkable, for a good reason; the Government talks about restricting social media for content, but it always means the broader alternative media, and in particular, the producers it can’t control.
This brings us to James Goddard, who may or may not describe himself as a journalist (there is not that much interest in these quarters to know), although he is certainly, by his actions, an activist by social media, and he is definitely not uncontrollable. He has also been called the leader of the so-called UK Yellow Vests (although there really can be no equivalence between this circus and the French original). Goddard, of course, is the man who got all the flak when a string of jackasses harangued Anna Soubry, and chanted “Soubry is a Nazi” to the tune of “Ossie’s going to Wembley”.
For reasons that will become abundantly clear, we are going to come at this incident via Delingpole, of which a little background reading has been written at FBEL in the past. Writing under the headline, “MP Anna Soubry’s ‘Nazi’ Scare Is Pure Remainer Propaganda”, Delingpole notes that Remainer activists and political pundits (whatever they are) were ever-so-conveniently present at the incident to make a mountain out of a molehill:
Anna Soubry has been milking the story for all she is worth… So have the fellow Remainer activists who were handily there to witness and then big up the incident — paid EU shill Femi Sorry and Care Bear Communist Owen Jones.
This is all true, but Delingpole is missing something out and let us not be surprised at this. And do not be taken in by the fact that their main man tacks a different course from ex-employees and long-time helpmates (an explanation of this in a moment) by branding the likes of Goddard “saddos”; Breitbart is playing a broader and slightly more subtle game of left versus right. When discussing the incident in the way Delingpole does for the purposes of blaming “Remain, the left, and the supposedly unbiased mainstream media” (i.e. the “other side”), the provocateur can have no other design than he is an accidental idiot. The point is this: maybe the likes of Owen Jones coincided with Goddard and Soubry at the same spot because everything had been arranged that way? We can certainly say that Jones and Soubry wouldn’t have talking points that Delingpole complains of if Goddard et al had not made such a fancy gift of them. Bearing in mind the discussion that has constituted the most part of this article thus far, it would be fair to make room in analysis of this incident for a scenario where the same people are running both sides for the purpose of producing an impression that Brexit is a racist endeavour.
This would make Goddard a tool in the wider programme (of discrediting Brexit by association with the “far-right”) that FBEL has been attempting to relate for the most part of 2018 [again, please perform a search to find a list of articles]. Indeed, Goddard has supposedly spoken at a rally in support of “Tommy Robinson”, and this would explain a reported association with Raheem Kassam, who was very much involved in the design to have people on the streets in the name of “Free Tommy”. Kassam is very much of the same Cameron-generation Tory, faux anti-establishmentarian set that was evidently deployed to disarm a libertarian dismantling of the LibLabCon political fixture that became manifest in UKIP. His vehicle Breitbart, of course, as well as serving as an arena to display manufactured tension within UKIP (starring Douglas Carswell, of the same Cameronian Conservative Party’s Policy Unit cadre), has also been central in stoking anti-Islamism in line with a Government strategy of tension primarily produced by false-flag terror blamed on Muslims. Goddard, according to the reporting of corporate-media, travels along the same political continuum.
Goddard is purported to advocate the deportation of Muslims from the UK (playing on that notion held by the seemingly irredeemably ignorant that a caliphate is poised to take over in the UK – countered here), evidently with no regard of their nationality nor the number of generations by which they have been rooted in the country or its empire. He reportedly talks in terms of defending the “indigenous” of the UK against Muslims, and from the context of the expression of these ideas, it is easy to form the conclusion that Goddard is an archetypal Breitbartian white supremacist (see the comments section under any article there) who thinks that race is more significant than nationality, and who doesn’t care about the cultural disintegration of a country as long as the culturally incompatible diversity is all white. These are the author’s impressions, and whether or no they prove to amount to the reality of the case, the important thing is that the corporate-media has certainly not been slow to condemn Goddard as a far-right racist. The corporate-media also never fails to point out that Goddard is a proponent of the UK leaving the EU, and herein lies the objective of the entire exercise: to portray Brexit as a racist endeavour.
Moreover, Goddard’s harrying of an MP in the streets also helpfully gives scope for occasion to conjure up the “ghost” of Jo Cox and reinforce the construction based on the incident in Batley in which the Government maintains that she was killed (and what was, in fact, a false-flag at the very beginning of the operation to assocatiate Brexit with racism [again, dealt with extensively at this site]) that people who want to leave the EU are extremists and terrorists:
In December Mr Goddard filmed himself verbally abusing Ms Soubry as a “traitor” – the same word used by neo-Nazis to label the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox.
The predictable outcome of Goddard’s Facebook mach schau Westminster exploit has been his expunging from his broadcasting platform, and the means by which his audience can express its braying-sea-lion-clapping appreciation for the stinking fish it is thrown: by which is meant PayPal.
This is ultimately related to the other objective of the exercise: the control of the message on the internet – of which more will be written in the second part of this series.
N.B. Feature image by Alamy Live News (via a Daily Mail article).
