[Militant No. 653, 1st June 1981, p. 9]
By Lynn Walsh
Under Thatcher’s orders, the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence are engaged in “the most concentrated propaganda campaign to be launched in Britain in peace time.” And this comes from the Tory Sunday Telegraph.
The Tory leadership has been shaken by the growing protest against the build up of nuclear weapons, and especially the decision to buy Trident and allow Cruise missiles to be sited here.
Dirty tricks
When Heseltine moved to the Ministry of Defence he set up a special department (known as DS19) to counter CND and the anti-cruise missile campaign and to justify the Tories’ £16,000 million a year defence policies.
Imagine the howls of protest from Fleet Street and the Tories if a Labour government launched a similar official campaign, using public funds, to explain the need for an extra £16,000 million to be spent on schools, hospitals, housing and welfare services!
However, “this burgeoning Whitehall apparatus of political persuasion” (as the Sunday Telegraph puts it) is only part of it. Running parallel is the Tories’ own propaganda machine, based on the Tory Central office and run by Harvey Thomas and Winston Churchill.
In the last few months, it has become clear that the Tories’ anti-CND campaign has been working hand in hand with the so-called Coalition for Peace through Security (CPS). This is undoubtedly a propaganda machine worthy of Dr Goebbels and has resorted to a number of dirty tricks.
Churchill vehemently denies that the Tories are involved in the CPS’s campaign to smear CND. They have had to admit, however, that Tory Central office distributes CPS material. And Churchill does not hesitate to justify their ultra-right arguments.
CPS has been most conspicuous for trailing aerial banners, with slogans like “Kremlin sends congratulations”, across peace movement demonstrations. Accompanying the pilot on some of these flights has been Julian Lewis, one of CPS’s main organisers. Lewis is better known to Labour Party members for his disruptive use of writs and legal action to try to prevent Newham NE Labour Party from democratically de-selecting Reg Prentice, who subsequently went over to the Tories.
In this general election, Lewis is standing as Tory candidate in Swansea West.
In its campaign to discredit and smear CND, CPS has used some scurrilous methods.
CPS has churned out leaflets claiming that CND are “Communists, Neutralists, Defeatists,” using the CND logo with the peace symbol altered to represent a hammer and sickle. Crude stuff.
Crude forgery
Even cruder was the smear campaign in the West Region. CND activists received copies of what purported to be a letter on Soviet Embassy notepaper from the assistant naval attaché, Captain Georgi Machkovsky, to Dan Plesch, the CND West Region organiser. It congratulated CND and expressed “a special admiration for the skilful way in which you gloss over topics which reflect badly on the USSR…”
The letter was a crude forgery, CPS leader, Holihan, denied any Coalition involvement in the hoax, but defended it as a legitimate form of political comment, “good tongue-in-cheek British humour.”
The “Coalition” has undoubtedly been involved in a campaign against Mgr Bruce Kent, CND’s general secretary. In March, Kent was warned by Cardinal Hume that he might have to step down if CND became too “political”. This warning, however, was followed by a vicious attack on Kent by Mgr Bruno Heim, the Pope’s ambassadorial representative in Britain.
In March 1982 the CPS invited British industrialists, military figures and right-wing Conservatives to a conference on “American campaigning techniques … fundraising and opinion-forming”. In a letter to company directors appealing for support, David Tripper MP, who chaired the Tory backbench Defence Committee, said:
“The Coalition for Peace Through Security is bringing to this country some of the key figures whose mastery of these new methods helped ensure victory for the Republican Party in the contest for the control of the White House and Senate…”
Following Reagan’s lead
Speakers included a serving US State Department official and six other US speakers who had worked in right-wing lobbying campaigns.
The conference was funded by a Foundation which is never short of a few hundred thousand dollars to finance right-wing political campaigns.
The Tories are determined to continue Britain’s so-called “independent nuclear deterrent”. In reality, it is entirely dependent on US weaponry and US policy. The Tories’ defence policies are subordinated to world-wide strategic interests of American capitalism, to which British big business is increasingly subservient.
Unable to admit the real interests they seek to defend, the Tories are concentrating on trying to smear the opponents of their nuclear policies. As their military policies have fallen in line with the Reaganite policies of American capitalism, the Tories have opened the door to ruthless, Reaganite policies of propaganda borrowed from the extreme right-wing representatives of American big business.
And there can be no doubt that the importation of these methods has been helped by substantial funds from the mysteriously financed Foundations which never spare any expense in promoting the interests of the American ruling class throughout the world.
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