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- Photo by Jonathan Harrison on Unsplash I get that there will always be a certain degree of effort put out by governments to shape public opinion. The White House press office tries to spin stories in a manner most beneficial to the president, whoever that may be at the moment, and other entities do similar things.
However, that’s all above board. We know they have a slant, so we can take that into account when we hear what they have to say. With the Biden administration, we might not have known who chose the official line, but we knew it was inherently lefty and thus probably not something we’d agree with.
Tilting At Windmills is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. But there’s something different going on when a government for a supposedly free nation—note that I said “supposedly”—is funding a psyop designed to manipulate what people think and feel.
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While the streets of Belfast were ablaze with anti-immigration protests last week, behind the scenes a group of spies, spinners and soldiers were deploying the ‘dark arts’ to try to defuse tensions.
The name of the secretive Government propaganda unit trying to manipulate events makes it sound like an innocuous back-office operation – the Research, Information and Communications Unit, or RICU.
But the dull moniker is part of the deliberate camouflage of an outfit which uses deception and skulduggery to try to manage the ‘challenges’ of multiculturalism.
Its techniques range from planting stories in the media, using undercover operatives to lay flowers at the scene of terrorist attacks and even, in one case, sending a pop group to sing anti-extremist songs in Muslim schools.
The 22-strong unit was established in 2007 by the late Charles Farr, a former MI6 officer, as part of the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy.
Modelled on the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit established by the Attlee government in 1948 to blacken the names of communists and other political opponents, RICU operates out of the Home Office’s Westminster headquarters.
While its original purpose was to monitor and challenge the spread of Al Qaeda propaganda and to vet the language used by public officials when describing terrorism, its tentacles now stretch far across Whitehall – to the extent that critics say it risks strangling free speech.
Now, there is probably a certain amount of this that can be done completely above board. Trying to combat Islamic extremism, for example? Totally cool. You’re not trying to even tell people what to think, just that it’s retarded to blow themselves up over it.
Because it is.
Still, they didn’t stop there, and there’s evidence they’re going way beyond that in the here and now.
A Muslim commits a terrorist attack? Spread images of a Muslim woman in a Union Jack hijab. A Sikh stabs a boy to death, and the police let him bleed out? Cajole the father into releasing a soothing statement. An activist leads people in complaining about the two-tier justice system? Smear him as a terrorist.
A source said: ‘They are working with the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s C3 intelligence unit to identify those posting the online ‘calls to protest’ in Belfast and other areas, as well as giving strategic messages to the police to ensure that the protesters were portrayed as unsympathetic thugs, rather than activists, and effecting behavioural change.’
The source said that the unit had also been advising the police in Southampton following the horrific murder of Henry Nowak by Vickrum Digwa – who falsely claimed he had been racially abused and had acted in self-defence – saying: ‘RICU made sure that the liaison team dealing with the family were well briefed.’
It has also been claimed that the unit intervenes to write statements by the families of victims of potentially racially linked incidents to stop them from inflaming tensions further with their remarks.
The source said: ‘You can see their fingerprints all over the statements released by the families of victims in these volatile situations – they usually have a similar tone.’
It’s the sort of thing that works, until it doesn’t. You can spin things all you want, but if reality constantly contradicts the Narrative long enough and often enough, people eventually lose their tolerance for being gaslit. It can take years for that to happen, since people really don’t want to believe that their society is falling apart, and that their government is making that happen, but people do wake up.
And when they wake up, they are angrier than they would have been, because they were victimized by the perpetrators and by the people who are supposed to protect them.
What they do is, apparently, try to spin things like terrorist attacks and push atmospheres of “grief,” rather than anger, which is a perfectly reasonable reaction to a truck killing a bunch of people in the name of Allah. Angry people demand action. Grieving people, less so.
In other words, when a “migrant” in the UK does something awful, these are the chumps tasked with downplaying it and trying to frame everyone who is righteously upset as somehow being in the wrong.
They manipulate media and messaging to present cases like the murder of Henry Nowak as something no one should be angry about. A young man was stabbed, then when the police arrived, the man who stabbed him claimed he’d been verbally abused by Nowak, and when Nowak said he’d been stabbed, the cop said, “I don’t think you have, mate.”
And no one is supposed to be angry?
I have no problem with Sikhs, generally speaking. My interactions with them have been positive, but any group of people is going to have some bad apples. Had this been framed as a case of being mad at the responding officers for failing to properly assess the situation and to simply take the killer’s word for what had happened, that would have been one thing, but they didn’t even do that. They just did everything they could to try to demonize those who were angry.
A young man was murdered, was treated like the perpetrator, and could have been saved if the police had just done their damn job properly, but God forbid that people might have an opinion about the crime that the government doesn’t like.
In Belfast, a Sudanese immigrant tried to behead a man in the middle of the street. This after every other act of migrant violence—to say nothing of the entitlement of some of these people who showed up in the UK and expect the British people to provide them with everything—up to and including the grooming gangs, and is it really shocking that people are angry?
It’s one thing to try to calm them down.
It’s another to step in under the radar and try to manipulate public opinion.
The thing is, this might work, but as Hot Air’s David Strom noted above, it won’t work forever. Sooner or later, people will wake up and recognize what’s going on and work to fight back against it. Share At this rate, though, they won’t stop at just pushing back against the messaging. They’re likely to burn the entire country to the ground, and I’m not sure I can actually say they’d be in the wrong to do so.
When you push people far enough, the only thing they can do is respond in the only language likely to be heard. If that’s burning down everything, so be it. The UK government could have protected its people; it’s actual people. Instead, they’ve demonized them, attacked them, and manipulated them.
They should get what they deserve, and they should get it good and hard.
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