[Image description: The text “Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable. - Rosa Luxemburg” over a black and white photo of Rosa Luxemburg, which is overlaid over a red-tinted black and white image of the Russian Revolution. -end ID]
[Image description: Two tweets. The first is from the US radio station KCUR (@kcur) and reads “BREAKING: Missouri’s @GovParsonMO has once again declined to pardon Kevin Strickland, a Kansas City man who has spend 43 years behind bars for a crime prosecutors say he did not commit.” The tweet is accompanied by a link to the article on KCUR’s website and a picture showing a black and white photo of Kevin Strickland, a Black man, alongside a scanned image of the list of individuals pardoned by Missouri governor Mike Parson on May 31st, 2021.
The second is a tweet from The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) and reads “Missouri governor pardons McCloskey couple, who waved guns at Black Lives Matter protestors in 2020”. The tweet is accompanied by a link to the article on the Washington Post website and a photo of the McCloskey couple, a white man and woman, brandishing guns and pointing them at Black Lives Matter protestors. -end ID]
In case only children are trying to write realistic sibling interactions : remember this card and the fact that this person’s sibling saw their illiterate child buy this, in fact probably paid for it, and said nothing
British officials secretly deployed black propaganda in the 1960s to urge prominent Indonesians to “cut out” the “communist cancer”.
Recently declassified Foreign Office documents show that British propagandists secretly incited anti-communists, including army generals, to eliminate the PKI. The campaign of apparently spontaneous mass murder, now known to have been orchestrated by the Indonesian army, was later described by the CIA as one of the worst mass murders of the century.
As the massacres started in October 1965 British officials called for “the PKI and all communist organisations” to “be eliminated”. The nation, they warned, would be in danger “as long as the communist leaders are at large and their rank and file are allowed to go unpunished”.
Britain launched its propaganda offensive against Indonesia in response to President Sukarno’s hostility to the formation of its former colonies into the Malayan federation which from 1963 resulted in a low-level conflict and armed incursions by the Indonesian army across the border. In 1965 specialist propagandists from the Foreign Office’s information research department (IRD) were sent to Singapore to produce black propaganda to undermine Sukarno’s regime. The PKI was a strong supporter of both the president and the Confrontation movement.
[…] Not only could GCHQ intercept and read Indonesian government communications, but its Chai Keng monitoring station in Singapore enabled the British to trace the progress of army units involved in suppressing the PKI.
According to Dr Duncan Campbell, an investigative journalist and expert on GCHQ, they had technology enabling listeners to “locate the positions of Indonesian military commanders and units who were sending, relaying and receiving orders for the roundup and murder of those supposedly linked to the PKI”.
A letter to the British ambassador in Djakarta from the “coordinator of political warfare”, a Foreign Office propaganda specialist called Norman Reddaway, who arrived in Singapore in the aftermath of the attempted coup, reveals the policy was “to conceal the fact that the butcheries have taken place with the encouragement of the generals”, in the hope that the generals “will do us better than the old gang”.
[…] Reddaway considered the downfall of Sukarno to be one of Britain’s greatest propaganda victories. In a letter written years later he said “the discrediting of Sukarno was quickly successful. His Confrontasi was costing us about £250,000,000 a year. It was countered and abolished at minimal cost by IRD research and techniques in six months.”
