A decade of dissent: resistance and psyops

In the latest part of my retrospective essay on ten years of The Acorn, which I edit, I look back on its content in 2018. The online document covering the entire decade can be found here.

The Acorn year kicked off in January with a call-out for two big European protests.

The first was against the Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), with Swiss activists aiming to “take the future into our hands instead of leaving it to the rulers… Let’s put our resistance on the streets!”

The second was 500 miles to the north, in Hamburg, focusing on the chilling levels of repression unleashed by an increasingly fascistic German state against those who had protested at the globalist G20 summit in the city.

We wrote: “While the shocking images of police brutality may have faded from the public’s mind, the repression continues, with ongoing police raids, arrests and prosecutions.

“On December 5, police carried out 24 raids on leftist and autonomous infrastructure across Germany, seizing laptops, mobile phones, and other means of communication”.

A call for resistance came from Berlin’s Rigaer 94 squat: “The state will always end up demanding fascism. With the same tactics, they try time and time again to delegitimize resistance by branding it criminal, antisocial, and apolitical.

“The time of comfortable protests is long gone. Today, German society has arrived at an extreme it hasn’t reached in over 80 years. Determined and angry, despite the repression, we will fight against the ruling order!”

A couple of issues later we were relaying the call for protests against the global mafia’s G7 summit in Montreal, Québec.

Said the local resistance network: “What the G7 Summits actually do is decide the world organization of the capitalist economy according to the interests of the banks, and the oil, agri-food, pharmaceutical, technological, armaments, and other large conglomerates.

“The G7 is proving to be one of the neoliberal states’ symbolic meetings that legitimize the richest 1% of the world’s population by creating and maintaining social and economic inequalities”.

And we also gave advance notice of protests against the 2019 G7 summit in Biarritz, against the G20 and IMF in Argentina and against a fascistic and militaristic EU “security” conference in Salzburg, Austria.

We reported on a battle in a working-class district of Brighton, England, to stop a new housing development being built over a designated local nature reserve, protests which blocked the US air base at Ramstein in Germany, and the death of journalist and campaigner Steffen Horst Meyn during the eviction of an anti-mining protest camp in Germany’s Hambacher Forest.

We also featured a campaign in Italy against the environmentally-destructive Trans Adriatic Pipeline project which, with the help of a 1.5bn euro loan from the European Investment Bank, aimed to bring gas from Azerbaijan via Greece and Albania.

The Acorn highlighted protests against the Welsh government’s plan to build a new motorway south of Newport, costing taxpayers at least £1.5 billion, and against a 550m euro toll motorway project near Strasbourg, pushed through by the French state and its corporate chums Vinci in spite of public inquiries coming out against it.

We also covered a protest in Brussels which declared: “Free Farmers from Free Trade Agreements! MERCOSUR, CETA, JEFTA are a deathblow!”

Buoyed by news from France that the mighty battle against a new airport near Nantes had achieved victory, we insisted that “people power can defeat fracking”.

But there was still work to be done and we reported that “the fight against fracking in the north of England is to be dramatically intensified with three months of intense direct action against the sinister and toxic industry”.

We also interviewed an Irish frack-free campaigner, who asked: “How could our government even consider giving permission to an industry that industrialises vast swathes of countryside and that has left a toll of death and destruction in every community where it has gained a foothold?”

She added: “To learn just how corrupted our authorities have become by corporate power, I’d advise everyone to invest themselves wholeheartedly in an issue like fracking where the links between a corporate-controlled government, a corporate-controlled media and a corporate-controlled police force fast become apparent”.

We were, in 2018, initially encouraged to see the emergence “out of nowhere” of what appeared to be a dynamic new environmental protest movement.

But we were already citing “question marks” regarding the fact that Extinction Rebellion’s supporters included notorious fake-left shill George Monbiot and concerning the movement’s “strangely deferential attitude to the police”. More was to come on XR in 2019.

In 2018 a label that now features on our masthead first appeared in The Acorn, when we included an extract from my essay ‘Organic radicalism: bringing down the fascist machine’.

We examined an article on the ongoing US military occupation of the Japanese island of Okinawa and looked at the threat of 5G, “which is aimed to imprison us within a totalitarian Internet of Things, involving everything from automated cars to smart meters, tracking and controlling every detail of our home lives”.

The Acorn drew attention to news that Israel was arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

“The Tavor rifles being used by the Azov militia are produced under licence from Israel Weapon Industries, and as such would have been authorized by the Israeli government. This is just the latest instance of links between Israel and the extreme right in Europe”.

We also explored the then-recent emergence in the USA and then Europe of the term “fake news” and a US Senate report claiming that “social media platforms are a key conduit of disinformation that undermines democracies”.

This was unveiled by veteran Democrat politician Ben Cardin, known for his vehemently pro-Israel stance.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, “Cardin’s crowning achievement came last year when he authored a bill that would have made it a felony to support a boycott of Israel”.

Cardin launched the report at the HQ of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, which had been leading the propaganda campaign against so-called fake news, partly through its front organisation, the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

We wrote: “On Wednesday March 22, 2017, the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum was staged at the Microsoft Center in the Belgian capital. Many very worthy liberal and democratic organisations were represented, such as Google, ExxonMobil, Centrica, Chevron, BP, Deloitte, Raytheon and NATO.

“It must have been quite a party. US Special Operations Command were there, and the US National Counterterrorism Center. And Israel Broadcasting. And the Mission of Israel to the European Union. And the European Association of Mining Industries”.

It’s that familiar single global mafia again!

France had already witnessed, in 2015, the shocking conviction of 12 protesters for “hate speech” which consisted merely of wearing T-shirts declaring “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel”.

And its president, former Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron, now announced plans to counter “fake news” during elections by allowing state judges to block websites or user accounts.

Somewhat letting the cat out of the bag regarding the real political agenda behind the “fake news” meme, he declared: “Thousands of propaganda accounts on social networks are spreading all over the world, in all languages, lies invented to tarnish political officials, personalities, public figures, journalists”.

Greenwald had previously reported that Facebook had admitted to deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments.

The Acorn also took a look at the propagandising efforts of a London outfit called 89up, which described itself as “Europe’s first impact agency” and was involved in spreading allegations of “Russian propaganda” affecting British politics.

Michael Harris, sole director of 89up, extolled the virtues of billionaire globalist George Soros in a 2016 newspaper article and admitted: “Yes, many of the campaigns I’ve worked on previously have been part-funded by Soros”.

And he tweeted in 2018 that Soros “is in my humble opinion one of the 20th centuries [sic] great heroes”.

Our investigations further touched on the Philip Cross scandal, in which Wikipedia entries had been systematically edited for political ends by some kind of self-appointed thought police, and the issue of police infiltration of dissident political movements.

Mixed in with all this, we said, was a witch-hunting phenomenon which, under cover of being on the “left”, “condemns others as being somehow right-wing, reactionary or, increasingly, ‘anti-semitic'” – a smear being rolled out “with desperate regularity”.

We added: “But the truth is the exact opposite. The witch-hunters are themselves part of a pro-war, pro-US, pro-Israel, neoliberal network and are attacking their targets not from the left but from the right. They in fact object to anyone who is critical of the neoliberal system and its imperial wars”.

More light was shed on this issue by Greenwald’s investigation, based on classified documents, of the UK’s GCHQ and its initially secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group).

He wrote: “These agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

“Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.

“The official document lists different kinds of operations it uses against dissidents: Infiltration Operation, Ruse Operation, Set Piece Operation, False Flag Operation, False Rescue Operation, Disruption Operation, Sting Operation”.

Anyone wondering why radical groups (known to be heavily infiltrated by the state), so often split and fall apart may be interested to see the emphasis on “destructive organisational psychology” and on “identifying and exploiting fracture points”.

Making several references to stage magicians in its presentation document, JTRIG proudly showcases its “Gambits for Deception”.

The dirty tricks used by the corrupt global mafia go a lot further than that, of course, and a good example came from documents just released by the Irish government under its 30-year rule, we said.

These included a 1987 letter from the loyalist terrorist group the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) addressed to the Irish PM Charles Haughey.

The loyalists claimed their organisation was used by MI5 and MI6, backed up by British Army special forces, from 1972 to 1978 and again in 1985.

The UVF told Haughey: “In 1985 we were approached by a MI5 officer attached to the NIO (Northern Ireland Office) and based in Lisburn, Alex Jones was his supposed name… He asked us to execute you”.

The Acorn remarked: “The existence of these pseudogangs and psyops, and the way they are deployed by the secret state, is key to understanding the world around us”.

[Audio version]