BELOW IS THE TEXT OF A LETTER OF MINE PUBLISHED IN THE IRISH POST IN
EARLY 1983:
” A recent television programme on war propaganda revealed that Goebbels modelled his approach on British World War I propaganda. Certainly my late
father disbelieved the first revelations of the barbarity of Auschwitz and Belsen
because he remembered British government lying regarding fictitious German
‘corpse-factories during World War I and the consistent lying of British ministers
during the Tan War.
Not even Goebbels dared to pretend that his people or their allies died during
World War II.
British government sources and the British media – THE TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS
and the DAILY STAR and THE DAILY MAIL – out-Goebbelsed Goebbels when they
claimed, in effect, that the IRA perpetrated all the killings in the conflict in Northern
Ireland and that Ulster Protestants were the only victims. Ian Paisley and his friends also spread this lie in America – a strange perversion of the ‘Protestant Ethic’.
D.F.Conlon is to be congratulated on his successful and dogged extraction of the
the truth from the Press Council. That body could, of course, have delivered its
condemnation of THE DAILY EXPRESS and THE DAILY STAR in less than nine
months. Their condemnation of THE SUN and THE DAILY STAR over publication
of photographs of a pregnant Princess Diana in a bikini was instantaneous.
It may be asked why, when Ireland has a Government in Dublin and an Embassy,
it should be necessary for private citizens here to combat British government-inspired lying propaganda in the media.
It was not always so.Much of the meagre revenue of the First and Second
Dail-Eireann was devoted to naling British government and press lies. Take,
for instance, the report of the Minister for Publicity on April 26, 1922, regarding
Belfast.
‘The situation there has been that a systematic pogrom has been directed against
the Nationalist inhabitants, many of whom were murdered and their houses burnt
and looted. The Belfast press represented these occurrences as Sinn Fein outrages. These misrepresentations ere also cabled abroad. To meet this situation
we issued daily reports from Belfast. Particular care has been taken that these
reports should be reliable ……….Nevertheless, we have been largely successful in
bringing much of the truth of Belfast to the world.’
Ireland’s Minister of Publicity in April 1922 was Desmond FitzGerald, father of today’s Taoiseach.
No Irish minister can today claim that his government has been largely successful
in bringing the truth of Belfast to the world and exposing the distortion of anti-Irish
agencies.
Donal Kennedy
LONDON”
TYPOS:
Para 2 should read “ONLY his people”
Para 6 should read “a Government in Dublin and an Embassy IN LONDON”
Para 7 “naling” should read “NAILING”
A year before THE PRESS COUNCIL had upheld my complaint against THE TIMES for
the exact same lie published in May 1981 following the funeral of Bobby Sands. Nine months
after I had raised the matter. Most British papers ignored that ruling and hours after its release for
publication I turned on the TV to see TIMES Editor Harold Evans hailed as EDITOR OF THE YEAR
by fellow Editors – including Editor in Chief of THE OBSERVER Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Promoting the term “liberation” to denote the entry of the Red Army into several European countries – in 1939, 1944–45 and later on – was a fundamental element and starting point for image-building activities intended to disguise Soviet imperialism and Joseph Stalin’s policy towards these countries
https://ipn.gov.pl/en/news/9575,The-meaning-of-the-term-liberation-in-Soviet-and-Russian-narratives-on-the-Secon.html?search=5015381852
Nobody does Propaganda quite like the British, had I been around during the dark days of World War II, I have to confess I would probably have doubted everything they said. They do have form.