It has been a while since the first ‘If the Truth be Told’ article. This one comes after two of the most significant events of our time, the death of the second longest reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, and the crowning of her eldest son King Charles III. More about that in the next ‘If the Truth Be Told’ article. Let’s first focus on our continued tracking of the enemy. If there was a pound for every ‘So who is the enemy?’ challenge we could retire to Antigua, a very expensive island to live on by all accounts.
Our more recent work discovered how the Soviet communist movement strongly influenced trade unions and other worker-led pressure groups across the world since it’s inception in 1917. This was done by local communist party members joining worker organisations. When communist parties seemed to disappear, or were dissolved along with the Berlin wall, members joined other parties who aligned somewhat with their ideologies – socialist, labour and sometimes liberal, continuing with their membership of these other groups. Through both political parties and pressure groups they forwarded the aims and objectives of the communist ideal, purposefully and quietly.
We must note that any political movement can be founded upon a set of ideals, which appear on the surface to have the greater good as primary goal. The catch comes when the leadership actively use an ideology as a tool with which to subvert and conquer other countries and even their own people, perhaps with the end goal of having a global empire, or One World Order. The British proletariat, in the form of Unions and workers, were publicly very accepting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s financial support and advise in worker/owner/government disputes over pay, better working conditions and more equality.
On a western national level, the communist and softer socialist ideology comes under the auspices of bureaucracy, the body designed to administer the state welfare given to those who feel, possibly quite rightly, taken advantage of by money hungry capitalists. In being so led they are easily turned against those associated with capitalism, and driven towards an increasingly socialist ideology, which at times verges on the more extreme left version, embodied in Communism. Each time the left gain power they introduce more layers of bureaucracy, make more ‘public services’ jobs, and increase monetary reliance on the state. This, in contrast to the free market ideals of capitalism, leads to loss of a truly free market, and limits what individual workers can do and how much they can earn. In some cases, as we will see shortly, socialist welfare mechanisms can backfire against those who welcome it. Socialist bureaucracy can give with one hand and take away with the other. The introduction of the welfare state has also led to its abuse by greedy capitalists, who underpay because they know the state will pay. In the west we now have a toxic mix of both ideologies.
Of course, where the perceived imbalance of living standards is strongest, and most vilified by the proletariat group, is in the so called ‘elite’ or Bourgeoisie, a group of course led by nobles, princes, princesses, kings and queens. This group with hereditary titles and inherited wealth are vilified even more as they are seen to acquire wealth without lifting much of a finger.
It is rare however, for workers to target the private or listed companies and business owners they work for. To hold them to account for the poor working conditions and pay offered, because after all they wish to retain their jobs. This feeds the reliance on the welfare state even more. If only business owners were more equitable we might say. This is perhaps a rather simplistic analysis, but certainly one that we might all be able to get to grips with. Essentially the normal worker is fearful that they will not keep their job if they ask for a share of the copious profits many of these companies make.
If government attempts to tax or legislate against corporations and other private businesses, immediately the lobbying machine kicks in to action and a stream of ‘threats’ to leave the UK are issued, forcing government to retreat. We are in almost perpetual stalemate.
National Council for Civil Liberties
Recently we have been identifying organisations founded through or alongside communist ideology, that are highly politically influential in the UK today, particularly when it comes to navigating the ‘injustices’ of the hybrid capitalist/socialist system we have inherited. Seb discovered that the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL or laterly rebranded Liberty) campaigned in 1941 against the ban by the BBC of artists who had attended the Communist ‘People’s Convention’. This organisation was set up by Ronald Kidd in 1934 in response to police action against Hunger Marches. The first of these, the Jarrow March, took place in the Rhondda Valley, Wales. These marches were largely set up by the National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM). The Paper ‘The National Unemployed Worker’s Movement and the Communist Party of Great Britain Revisited’ details in greater depth the extent to which this movement was led by the Communist Party. As we know from the previous article on the General Strike, the British Communist Party was tied to and instructed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Wal Hannington, a leading activist of the NUWM, was also a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). In ‘The National Council for Civil Liberties: the First Fifty Years’ by Mark Lilly (1984), the author covers the arrest of Wal Hannington in 1932, as he was attempting to disaffect the police from their sworn duty. The march was a protest against a 10% cut in unemployment benefit, which of course affected all members of the movement. Observing from a distance Ronald Kidd, then running the politically radical book shop Punch and Judy (including books on the USSR and communism), noticed there were two men wearing mufflers as a form of disguise. According to Kidd they attempted to incite the crowd to move towards the police cordon in Whitehall, then pulled out truncheons and made two arrests. In response to what he felt was entrapment, he decided to set up the NCCL in 1921, just four years before the Russian Empire was overthrown in favour of the formation of the USSR, and five years before the General Strike of 1926. It is well known amongst historians to have had a significant communist party membership and was viewed in political circles as a communist organisation.
Founding members of the organisation included authors EM Forster, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley and JB Priestley. They were joined by Clement Attlee who was to become Leader of the Labour Party (1935-1955) and Prime Minister in post World War II Britain from 1945 to 1951 and Aneurin Bevan, Welsh Labour politician who was Minister for Health under Attlee. Bevan read Marxism at college and, having come from a mining background, began to lean more towards communist ideology during his years in politics. ‘Bevan perceived the weight of the argument between capitalism and communism beginning to go towards communism. After the Russians successfully orbited a rocket around the sun [Moon], Bevan thought people would begin to see the merits of the communist system more clearly than capitalism.’
Attlee, despite having been a member of this organisation with clear links and sympathy with the Communist led NUWM, was apparently strongly anti-communist. He was briefed regularly on Labour Party MPs who were suspected to be communist spies including John Platt-Mills and Geoffrey Bing. Bing was also a member of the NCCL. The Labour Party, concerned that there were even more communist infiltrators amongs their MPs, asked MI5 to vet each one. MI5, possibly wanting to avoid looking like the Stasi, declined. As MI5 would be investigating MPs serving under the Labour Prime Minister, the refusal may have been more related to managing Attlee’s public image, or indeed to avoid giving the impression that he did not have proper control over his party.
Another well known Communist member of NCCL was Kenelm Hubert Digby, who proposed the motion at the Oxford Union in 1933, just 10 days after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, ‘That this House would in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. The motion famously known now as the King and Country Debate and the resulting Oxford Oath was passed with a vote of 275 for and 153 against. It came at a time when Communism was viewed as much more of a threat than Hitler. Digby left the UK for New Zealand in 1955 to work in the legal profession, some viewing the move as a result of his role in the outcome of the debate. The framed record of the King and Country Debate was stolen from the Oxford Union in 2004.
The IRA
Less than one year before the May 1926 General Strike, according to History Ireland, P.A. Murray, together with other members of the Irish Republican Army, secretly visited Moscow to ask for financial aid and arms. They came away with the agreement that the IRA would spy for Moscow in the US and UK in exchange for £500 a month, which was handed over by Soviet assets in London. Their work primarily involved the gathering of information on military capabilities including designs for weaponry, artillery, naval vessels and aircraft, chemical weapons and gas masks.
The IRA also liaised with the Chinese in support of the Soviet Union. In addition to the monthly payment the Soviet Union made noises about providing weaponry to the IRA and also gave information about mustard gas. Just one and a half years after this agreement was made, in November 1926 the Soviets reduced the payment to £100 citing the financial crisis and poor quality of information. The IRA withheld critical intelligence, and forced a £1000 payment in May 1927, and in November the IRA pledged to support the USSR in the event of a war with Great Britain.
Incitement to Disaffection
We noted, when looking at the General Strike of 1926, the use of Soviet communist propaganda to undermine the military resolve of target nations. This also happened to Prussian troops under Kaiser Wilhelm as they fought against the Russian s in World War I. The resolve of troops waned as they were encouraged by infiltrators not to fight, whilst the soon-to-be Soviet Union took advantage of their disarray. Similar movements were made to rile up the populace and disaffect the Tsarist White Helmet troops in Revolutionary Russia.
In a similar vein, Ronald Kidd and the NCCL opposed the ‘Incitement to Disaffection Act 1934’, which made it an offence to attempt to undermine military loyalty to the Crown through direct or written incitement. The debate at Oxford, primed by a British communist party member, together with other workforce-based communist party activities, could quite possibly undermine the strength of British military resolve as trouble on the continent loomed yet again. NCCL called it the ‘Sedition Bill’. Sound familiar?
It is not such a leap therefore to imagine that the newly forming Nazi Germany, might also become a target of Soviet infiltration. But perhaps instead of undermining the resolve of their administration and troops, the aim would be to reinforce and direct Nazi efforts. Indeed Haaretz talk of a new study published in October 2020 by Danny Orbach, detailing how spies infiltrated the West German Intelligence Agency during the war and were apparently controlled by the USSR afterwards if not during. The US Department of Energy documents the infiltration of the Manhattan Project and other initiatives by Soviet spies. During WWII and post war, hundreds of Americans were feeding back information to the Soviet Union from various offices and industries. The account of infiltration of the Department of Energy also notes that the Communist Party of America, similarly tied to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had thousands of members, many of whom were highly educated. A number were physicists, some of whom did provide information to the USSR. News of the Manhattan Project was already with the Soviet administration before it was even actioned.
Klaus Fuchs, a British physicist at the Los Alamos Nuclear facility, leaked information to the Soviet Union for over four decades. He was a paid up member of the German Communist Party when he fled to Britain in 1933 as Hitler came to power. He went to Edinburgh University, then to Birmingham to research the atom bomb, and in 1943 was sent to Los Alamos. All the while, it seems he continued allegiance to the Communist Party.
Foreign Interference
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union attempted to directly influence the outcome of the British Miner’s strikes. The first in 1926, was primarily a Miner’s strike but broadened in to a strike involving transport and power, triggered by mine owners forcing reduced wages and increasing hours. After the return of mine management from Government to owners after World War I, the unfavourable sterling exchange rates made UK coal on the international market incredibly uncompetitive. The second strike from March 1984 to 1985 saw the British Union of Mining asking for money in support of their strike from the USSR and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi.
It could be said that Gorbachev, Soviet Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, broke Margaret Thatcher’s agreement with him that the USSR would not interfere with the strike in any way. He signed papers to allow funds to be sent from Russian miners to British striking miners. Feeding funds in support of the strikes could have led to major power outages across Britain, affecting not only the population but manufacturing as well. Thatcher’s administration was luckily well prepared.
But why were the mines being shut? As we have all struggled to pay for soaring electricity costs due to over reliance on gas-based electricity production, it seems quite inexplicable that thousands of miles of mines were gradually shut over the years following the strike, purely because Margaret Thatcher thought it was a good idea for international business. Clearly it made thousands of miners redundant and depleted the key source of work in many already deprived areas in the UK.
Strange Earthquake Patterns
The British Geological Earthquake’s Archive reveals a treasure trove of information on a bizarre trend of underground activity. You can search for any area in the UK at any given date using the link above.
The earthquake pattern starts in the 1970’s under the Edinburgh area and the Firth of Forth, deep under Ben Nevis and on the western edge of Scotland flanking the Hebrides. These then spread across the plain and the foothills between the southern uplands and the Grampians, all the way to Argyle and Bute and the western port town of Ardrossan. In the analysis done on the Glasgow area of Scotland in the 1990’s, earthquakes occur a variety of depths, some startlingly regular in geographical distribution, others less so. The Strathcylde and Firth of Clyde area alone has experienced roughly 340 earthquakes since 1982 with clusters in Oban in 1986, Renfrew in 1987, Cumbernauld and Loch Fyne in 1988, Strathblane 1989, and so on.
Are we truly to believe, where the British Geological Survey was capable of tracking earthquakes in the UK all the way back to 1900 and further, that well over 11,000 of them took place in the last 53 years, with only 156 recorded between 1900 and 1969? It is as if UK earthquake activity has become akin to the San Andreas Fault. Even during the two World Wars there was scant activity, with the most noteable clusters to the west of Snowdonia Base camp, another of Great Britain’s highest peaks. When we arrive in the 1970’s, however, things really start to take off.
The IRA became very active in 1971, bombing multiple sites in Belfast, injuring and killing civilians of both Catholic and Protestant denominations. The following year they attacked other Northern Irish targets and also bombed Aldershot Barracks in England, apparently in retaliation for Bloody Sunday. In 1973 they bombed the Old Bailey, Kings Cross and Euston Stations and Westminster with attacks getting more frequent on British soil from 1974 through 1976. Oddly the British-based bombings ended on 27th March 1976 with the Olympia bombing, which killed 85 people. This was the same year of the heatwave, bookended by storms and of course various illnesses. It also had the highest number of earthquakes of the decade – 195 in total.
The earthquake buffs amongst us might attribute the significant spike in earthquake activity in 1976 to the rise in heat, yet on reviewing the distribution it seems most of the 195 happened in one area, Coalfield, now East Lothian, Scotland. This was one of the few areas in which the first significant earthquake clusters were recorded by BGS in the early 1970’s.
If the earthquakes were down to the rise in temperature across the United Kingdom, why were nearly 77% of them exclusively underneath East Lothian and the remaining 33% radiating their way in land from the Firth of Forth, the Firth of Clyde and the Hebrides?
The Unions and Callaghan, then leader of the opposition, had agreed prior to his election in 1975, that a voluntary pay restraint of 10% should be leveraged on the workers due to economic depression. Another demonstration of how under socialism, the administration can give, but they can also take away to suit the economic climate.
Just 11 days after the Olympia bombing, James Callaghan, new labour leader, was voted in to power, after Harold Wilson suddenly announced his resignation as Prime Minister less than two years in to his next term. He struggled through the Winter of Discontent of 1978/1979, where inflation was very high at over 25%, and the economy was at a standstill. Workers marching under guidance of the Unions, demanded higher wages to compensate.
Whilst the IRA started their attacks across Northern Ireland, Ireland and Great Britain in 1969, the Red Army Faction (RAF – not the Royal Air Force!) also started their campaign of bombings and arson in 1970 against West German corporations and West German and US military installations. The group claimed that the current West German administration was led by Nazis. One of the founders, Ulrike Meinhof, had an established history of supporting communism. She started work for the radical left konkret publication, which was partly funded by the East German Communist Party.
In 1979 more earthquakes occur in the Bristol area, including in the Bristol channel part of the River Severn, also to the north of the estuary, and then some time later even further inland in to Pontypridd area in Wales. Around the same time small earthquakes were occurring in Hartlepool, Consett and the Mansfield areas - ports and mining locations. The earthquakes spread to Whitby, Northumbrian Coast, Stoke, Scarborough, Barnard Castle, then Ambleside, Nottinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Worcestershire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and other areas both on the coastline and further inland, again primarily in to mining areas. Constantine in Cornwall has experienced a total of 486 earthquakes since 1981, with the most recent cluster in February 2023, when 12 struck in close succession at the exact depth of 7.6 kilometres, one measuring 3 on the Richter scale.
So what exactly was going on in Scotland in the 1970’s? It has had by far the most earthquakes. Was an underground invasion taking place instead of by sea? You can make up your own minds by perusing the thousands of earthquakes under the British Isles during this 53 year period.
Fascism/Nazism
As we noted in the last few days, what better way to promote the polar opposite cause to Nazism, by blaming everything on that political ideology, whether legitimately or not? The more the theory is repeated, the less we all think to look at why it is being repeated.
After the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, the Scottish Daily Express put out a headline saying that she and her husband were ‘running the SNP like Putin’s Russia’. Is there anything else we should be reading in to this headline other than their tight control on the election process in Scotland? Indeed we might start to wonder exactly where the £600,000 seized from their home actually came from. Is this model of control over election procedures a fascist or communist method, or could it be both?
Sturgeon called out Putin strongly early on in the invasion of Ukraine, but called for personal sanctions to be brought against him, which is rather odd. Usually punishing a country with sanctions causes suitable leverage. The Express, looking at the recently published anthology ‘Scottish National Party Leaders’ (2020) by James Mitchell and Gerry Hassan, speaks of the dangers of Nationalism, and past links to Nazism, in relation to the Scottish National Party’s ultimate aims of independence from the United Kingdom, coupled to membership of the EU as an ‘independent’ nation.
Seb picked up a similar trend this week in the reports of 33 year old Mauricio Garcia, identified as the shooter who took the lives of 9 people in an outlet mall in Allen, Texas on Saturday 6th May. Garcia was flagged by police as showing ‘Neo-Nazi ideation’ on his social media accounts. More details on the timeline and a number of GoFundMe initiatives for the victims are given in this article from the Independent. Garcia allegedly had an account set up on the Russian platform OK.ru, which Elon Musk questioned on Twitter. It was odd given the shooter appeared to be of hispanic descent and very unlikely able to speak Russian. This has echos of the coverage by Russian media and pro Russian social media accounts on the Nazi Azov battalion who are supposedly working with Ukrainian forces against Russian Troops. There are many more examples.
Whether the shooter was 33 or not remains to be seen, but often we see this figure used when there is a direct link to enemy (to the west) factions. The number is also used in relation to war, as seen in the Burkina Faso conflict recently, energy giants like Eni loosing 33% share value, corporations, individuals, ‘virus’ deaths, illness and other odd articles with minute detail that puzzle the reader as to their relevance to the story. 33 undoubtedly is used as a signifier, and usually in connection to enemy activity, or the results of enemy activity.
So we are left with the question. Why did the Texas shooter have an account on a Russian Social Media platform? It is unknown if the account was identified specifically as being owned by Mauricio Garcia, or if it had been found using something like facial recognition software. What was the motivation for setting it up, and did he actually set it up himself? There is of course the possibility it was either set up for him, or without his knowledge. It is also possible that he was primed by people unknown to make the attack. People who wanted to drive home the message that ‘Nazi’ ideology was responsible for the shooting perhaps.
Garcia being associated with Nazi ideology and violence drives home a clear message – right wing is very bad, move towards the left. Could this have been a far left operation?
‘Going Underground’
Going back to the late 70’s, the USSR continued to push buttons in the west by invading Afghanistan in 1979. This despite efforts to come to some sort of level playing field through the Helsinki accords, the Helsinki Final Act being signed at the end of July/Beginning of August 1975. Read more about the Helsinki accords here in the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Gerald R Ford 1975.
The invasion in to Afghanistan came in December 1979, some months in to Margaret Thatcher’s first Prime Ministerial term, after James Callaghan received a vote of no confidence. As with all visible newsworthy events we must wonder if it was something of a distraction. The following year saw a sudden jump from 46-195 earthquakes a year in the 1970’s, to a staggering 453 in 1980 and another very precise 453 in 1981.
The 1980’s were very busy by all accounts. The IRA bombed two military bases, Kensington Barracks in London, and an army camp on Salisbury Plain in 1980. Meanwhile the earthquakes continued creeping inland in Scotland, in to the Stoke area, and in to estuaries and ports including Longtown on the Solway Estuary and Newport in Wales. The Stoke area had a total of 221 earthquakes that year.
The following year at least four IRA attacks took place on British soil. These included the Chelsea Barracks, RAF Uxbridge, a senior member of the military at his home in Dulwich and the Wimpy bar on Oxford Street. The IRA were clearly aiming for military disruption, but also possibly using these attacks as divisionary and distraction tactics.
The Falklands War broke out in early 1982, in response to incursions to the islands by the Argentinian Military Junta, led by the right wing Lieutenant General Leopoldo Galtieri, who was actually of Italian origin and tarnished with human rights abuses. The war was brief but with losses on both sides during the 10 weeks. The UK lost 255 troops and Argentina 650. The War interrupted proceedings somewhat and as the IRA attacks reduced to four bombings in 1982, 1983 and three in 1984, likewise the earthquakes also eased off a little. They dropped from 458 in 1981 to 129, 130 and 159 for each consecutive year afterwards.
The Miner’s Strike followed from 1984 to 1985, the mechanics of which we have gone in to briefly in this article. Earthquakes in 1984 reduced considerably, but started to rise again in 1985. From 455 earthquakes in 1986, underground activity remains relatively high, largely with over 300 earthquakes a year until numbers started to drop after 1994, by which time the large proportion of coal mines were shut.
Vladimir Putin
It is reported that Vladimir Putin, when he was KGB for East Germany from 1985, met with the Red Army Faction. In this article we read that a ‘former Red Army Faction member and his colleagues would travel into East Germany by train and would be met by Stasi agents waiting in a large Soviet-made Zil car, then driven to Dresden, where they were joined in a safe house by Putin and another of his KGB colleagues. “They would never give us instructions directly. They would just say, ‘We heard you were planning this, how do you want to do it?’ and make suggestions. They would suggest other targets and ask us what we needed. We always needed weapons and cash.”’
Similarly, in a report by The Irish News in December 2022, Vladimir Putin held meetings with the Official IRA in Belfast, in conjunction with two Soviet delegations to Ireland in 1986. This was around the same time that he and other KGB colleagues were instructing the RAF in Dresden. In October 1988 a team of six Official IRA members, interviewed by John Sweeney, British investigative journalist, travelled to North Korea to undergo training on how to make bombs, how to kill someone without a gun and kidnapping techniques.
We have strayed somewhat from the original aim of the second ‘Truth be told...’ article, but this serves to give us even more background on the very global ideological, political and militaristic struggle that seems to have continued from the Cold War in to the 21st Century.
In the next part we will be looking at how negotiations between Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher and the USA influence the USSR making their transition from the Soviet Union to today’s Federal Russia, the progression from a Conservative administration to Labour in the 1990’s, undoubtedly more earthquakes, and the implications of the call for a Republic versus a Monarchy.
Credits: Jo and Jax for the brilliant song titles, Bullshit Battlefield for some thought provoking work on the post war political landscape and Seb for the most illuminating exchanges in the process of putting together this and other articles in the series.
Faslane: all those personnel. How do they get supplies in and out? You'll never see an appropriate number of trucks (lorries) on the road bringing in food or taking out personnel. Hmmm?
The military transport isn't above ground.
Since I became aware of the concept of D.U.M.B.s it had occurred to me that it was odd that the UK's Coal Industry & its mines was shutdown so quickly over a relatively short space of time and whether the reasons for doing so were because The Government wanted to construct its own Bases underground or because other entities were already present. The subsequent economic decline of many of those towns associated with the Coal Industry also correlates to areas suffering most with the presence of 'grooming gangs' in more recent decades and I have wondered if influences other than poverty played a part in this.
As a random thought can I throw in the comment that Jimmy Savile worked down the mines himself as a 'Bevin Boy'.
Also as someone who remembers how tiny Westminster Tube station used to be before the Jubilee Line Extension was built and how much money went into the Jubilee Line Extension project, I have subsequently wondered if parts of that money went into building the massive PINDAR base underneath Whitehall, so I'd be interested to look up underground explosions in that area of London. Have other large underground projects, eg Eurotunnel covered for other military projects?