The BBC: Its real origins and purposes

[Paul Rigby]

Not quite your conventional take on the origins of the BBC:

“…the BBC was started in the early 1920s as a means of quietly raising revenue for British radio manufacturers, in order to develop radio signalling equipment for the British secret service…”

Tom McArthur & Peter Waddell. Vision Warrior: The Hidden Achievement of John Logie Baird (Orkney Press Ltd, 1990), p.277

The big prize was, initially at least, radar: TV was the cover-story. The implications, however, go much further:

"...Appeasement was a fake. Appeasement implied not knowing Hitler's next move. In fact, it now appears that the future Allies were aware of most of these plans, allowing him to make increasingly reckless moves"

(Ibid., p.309)

Guido Giacomo Preparata, take a bow.

[Peter Presland]

Thanks Paul.

A previous post rung a bell and I searched 'Guido Giacomo Preparata' on Amazon.

The reviews of 'Conjuring Hitler' are informative and very much accord with my own developing knowledge and intuition on the whole 20th century historical record, as 'imprimatured' and carefully nurtured by the Anglo American Establishment.

I've ordered it.

[Paul Rigby]

Thanks Paul.

A previous post rung a bell and I searched 'Guido Giacomo Preparata' on Amazon.

The reviews of 'Conjuring Hitler' are informative and very much accord with my own developing knowledge and intuition on the whole 20th century historical record, as 'imprimatured' and carefully nurtured by the Anglo American Establishment.

I've ordered it.

Peter,

Buy both – or order Vision Warrior from the library (paperback ISBN 0907618049) – and read them as, well, companion volumes. For, as unlikely as it may seem on cursory inspection, the degree of correspondence is staggering. What do I mean by this?

The authors of Vision Warrior prove that conventional accounts of Logie Baird's career, not least those offered publicly by the man himself (“…it is difficult to date many incidents because Baird post-dated them to fit the official version…,” p.142), are essentially deep state fictions – pre-eminently, though by no means exclusively, SIS fabrications - designed to hide Baird’s real activities; and that those activities, essentially radar and secret signalling, were geared, from the early 1920s at the latest, to war.

McArthur & Waddell even touch upon a central theme of Preparata’ thesis, to wit, the degree to which the British establishment undertook a sophisticated, and utterly bogus, “bifurcation” designed to create the illusion of division, and weakness.

“The possibility remains that some of these members may have been placed in ‘The Link’ as double agents, to encourage Hitler to believe that the wealthy in Britain were pro-Nazi and anti-communist.”

Preparata or McArthur & Waddell? The latter (p.277). Here’s Preparata on the same subject (pbk, p.xviii):

“England put on a mesmerizing show by feigning before the world that her ruling class was divided between pro-Nazis and anti-Nazis, and that such a scission accounted for the apparent lack of commitment to fight Hitler on the Western Front…”

The resonances are not merely historical:

“…in the 1926 Christmas edition of the Illustrated London News he [Baird] presented a breathtakingly early vision of what was in store. An artist’s impression had hostile tribesmen on the North-West frontier of India observed and tracked in the dark by solar-topeed troops who watched their movements on a screen,” (p.224).

CIA drones, anyone?

Paul

[Paul Rigby]

Not quite your conventional take on the origins of the BBC:

“…the BBC was started in the early 1920s as a means of quietly raising revenue for British radio manufacturers, in order to develop radio signalling equipment for the British secret service…”

Tom McArthur & Peter Waddell. Vision Warrior: The Hidden Achievement of John Logie Baird (Orkney Press Ltd, 1990), p.277.

Back to the original theme of the thread for a moment.

In seeking to understand why a wealthy & sophisticated news-gathering entity like the BBC parrots obsessively the American establishment line on the latter’s successive world-historical covert ops, we might usefully start at the beginning. And in the beginning was, as we have seen, deception in the service of the Russophobic geopolitical lunatics running Britain’s avowardly imperial military industrial complex. But there was another factor at work, too:

“A look at the early structuring of the BBC provides some fascinating facts. Originally the British Broadcasting Company, created in late 1922, consisted of six of the biggest radio-producing companies in the country. Their make-up reveals intriguing links…about the strength of American representation.

The companies were Metropolitan Vickers, originally British Westinghouse, a branch of the American Westinghouse Company, and subsequently owned by General Electric USA; British Thompson Houston, also bought by GE of America; British GEC, 60 per cent of whose shares…were owned by GE USA; The Radio Communications Company, specialising in naval radio, which had information and patent swaps with Metropolitan Vickers; Marconi Britain whose American firm was forced in 1919 by US Government order to join with GE to form RCA; and Western Electric, also American-owned, part of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company who were linked by patent swaps and trade agreements with GE USA in the 1930s…

With the BBC linked to such associates, it is hardly surprising that…*”

…it regurgitates any old nonsense the US MIC cares to foist on it and us: The BBC was its mouthpiece from the off.

PS Didn't General Electric fund Hitler? Or have I misremembered my Anthony Sutton?

* Tom McArthur & Peter Waddell. Vision Warrior: The Hidden Achievement of John Logie Baird (Orkney Press Ltd, 1990), pp. 301-302.

[David Guyatt]

PS Didn't General Electric fund Hitler? Or have I misremembered my Anthony Sutton?

Rest assured that your memory is intact:

Chapter Three of Sutton "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler"

[Paul Rigby]

PS Didn't General Electric fund Hitler? Or have I misremembered my Anthony Sutton?

Rest assured that your memory is intact:

Chapter Three of Sutton "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler"

Sutton's fascinating.

Question: Who, at the deep political level, initiated the attack on The Order? Was it revenge for the grand Yale U-turn on the Vietnam War? Reading between the lines of Andrei Navrozov's book, The Gingerbread Race, it was elements of CIA.

[Paul Rigby]

The Guardian, Saturday Review, 17 October 2009, p.15

Letter: “Inside MI5”

David Leigh omits one of his own most brilliant achievements in his review of Christopher Andrew’s The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (“Whispers and lies,” 10 October). This was his exposure (in the Observer) of the secret presence of an MI5 officer permanently based in Broadcasting House, whose task was to approve or veto all applications for BBC staff jobs after running the names through security service files. Rejected applications were stamped with a “Christmas tree” mark by this officer, who in the 1980s was reported to be a certain Brigadier Ronnie Stonham.

In one notorious case, Isabel Hilton was blacklisted on the idiotic grounds that she had been secretary of the Scotland-China association – most of whose members were retired Presbyterian missionaries. This monstrous and well-documented case of intelligence control of the media is not even mentioned in Andrew’s book. That reveals what the adjective “authorised” can mean. Perhaps the BBC scandal was omitted because something of the sort is still going on.

Neal Ascherson, London

[Paul Rigby]

Hallam Tennyson. The Haunted Mind: An Autobiography (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), p.150:

“Christmas Trees were the symbols put on the personal files of those who were considered to be a security risk. There was a Christmas Tree on the file of someone who had been friendly with a nationalist leader in Malaya, and another on the file of someone who had a close relative living in East Germany. These people could not be promoted beyond a certain grade…Christmas Trees were a lethal infection and their possessors were addressed by their bosses as if through a gauze mask.”

[Paul Rigby]

Emma Hartley, “The firing line,” The Guardian, Media, 12 June 2000, p.6:

“…it is well known that the BBC is riddled with spooks”

[The World Service as propaganda arm of MI6/FO]

Peter Godwin, “The story that was too explosive to tell,” The Guardian, 20 August 1994, p.21:

“Government intervention …ensured that the BBC minimised the bomb’s dangers”

[The great Joseph Rotblat excluded from Panorama programme broadcast in August 1955]

[Paul Rigby]

How the BBC conspired with the spooks to suppress independence in the colonies, and, in Britain, non-establishment perspectives on that imperative…

From Andrew Roth’s obituary for Lord (Hugh) Jenkins of Putney, The Guardian, 28 January 2004, p.29:

“Still in uniform, he was then seconded to the government of Burma and put in charge of English language programmes on Rangoon Radio. He gave airtime to Aung San, the leader of Burma’s nationalists, which put him in the black book of British intelligence and may well have undermined his attempts to join the BBC when he returned to England in 1947…In the late 1980s, he called for a body to monitor the security services…In 1993, he backed the intelligence services bill to provided such a supervisory body, recounting his own clashed with MI5 and MI6, which had blocked his passport at one stage and, presumably, been responsible for bugging his telephone and burgling his flat.”

Bruce Kent added the following snippet on Jenkins’ time on Burmese radio:

“On Christmas Day 1945, he left the studio in charge of a Burmese independence activist, who played Colonel Bogey before the King’s speech, and Mad Dogs and Englishman immediately afterwards.”