Declassified UK is an online media publisher consisting of a group of journalists and editors under a board of directors funded by big capital (“trusts and foundations”), according to its website, which paradoxically also claims that its journalists are “independent”.
What can seem paradoxical about this well-funded investigative reporting outlet is the extent to which its authors are able to examine the details of British imperialism’s historical crimes. This seems strange until one understands it as a last-ditch attempt to keep on side the growing number of people who have begun to glimpse behind the curtain of pro-imperialist narratives, learning to suspect the motives not only of past politicians but of present ones too.
The growing movement away from mainstream media, and the increasing difficulty they have in holding together imperialism’s collapsing narratives, has led the capitalists to seek out new ways of reaching the public via ‘alternative’ avenues.
One of the tactics imperialist media have always used is that of producing what appear to be a wide range of narratives and analyses encompassing the full spectrum of political thought, but which all turn out to share a common goal of protecting and prettifying imperialism. This is why we can today find spokespeople for a wide variety of ideological trends, from anarchists to liberals to fascists and even to so-called ‘communists’, all of whom will agree on the necessity of supporting Ukraine against the evil Russians.
One of the more subtle approaches to this goal, used to great effect by Declassified’s Mark Curtis, reminds us of the story of the boy who cried wolf.
In its role as a last line of ideological defence for imperialism (a role that was formerly performed by mainstream papers such as the Guardian), Declassified sets itself the task of ‘exposing’ the wrongdoing of British imperialism in the past. As it does so, it encourages its readers to believe the events under consideration were avoidable mistakes made by misguided governments; that the mistakes were a question of bad policy and not a problem with the system of global monopoly capitalism as a whole; and that we should still assume the best when our rulers ask for our support to wage their present-day wars.
By ‘exposing’ past offences, details of which have long since become common knowledge amongst the interested, Declassified hopes to gain credibility as an ‘unbiased’ and ‘trustworthy’ source regarding its analysis of present-day British foreign policy. As in the apocryphal folk tale, the boy must admit that he lied on the previous occasions if he is going to persuade the villagers to come to his rescue again in the future.
Coming clean is easy when people have already seen behind the curtain
In January 2023, Declassified published two articles by Mark Curtis, titled The UK’s 83 military interventions around the world since 1945 and Britain’s 42 coups since 1945.
In the first piece, an extensive list of British imperialist crimes is documented, including the use of concentration camps, widespread torture and massacres of civilians. No moral judgement is passed and the article remains very impartial, doing an excellent job of collating a wide array of evidence whose cumulative effect is to illustrate that Britain has historically been no different from Nazi Germany in its brutal methods, incessant lying and ultimate aims.
At the same time, the language Curtis uses when referring to the Soviet Union or to communism implies that the behaviour of the socialist governments was no better than that of Britain, Nato or the USA. An implicit equation between nazism and communism, between Hitlerite Germany and the Soviet Union, runs like a thread through his journalism like the proverbial rotten apple in the barrel.
This leads him to repeat the lie that the imperialist funding of the Afghan mujahideen was necessary to “counter the Soviet occupation”. Curtis either does not know or does not want his audience to know that the Soviets, much like the Russian Federation in Syria today, were supporting Afghanistan’s democratic revolutionary government at its own request against a bloody insurgency led by the most reactionary extremist elements in the country and the region – a ‘movement’ that had been entirely manufactured from without via imperialist funding, arming, training and propaganda.
Describing nefarious British interference in eastern Europe after WW2, Curtis says: “UK forces sought to stir up opposition to emerging communist rule in Albania, Ukraine and the Baltic states in the late 1940s operations, which all failed to prevent these countries coming under communist control.”
He fails to mention that the ‘opposition’ that British forces ‘sought to stir up’ was made up of the most committed and ardent of eastern Europe’s surviving Nazi collaborators, including those of Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose red and black flag is now proudly and openly displayed by the west-backed fascist junta in Kiev.
Curtis’s use of phrases like ‘emerging communist rule’ and ‘coming under communist control’ aims to dismiss the process whereby the will of the people was finally able to express itself through democratic socialist revolutions. The Anglo-American imperialists were as keen to disrupt this process as Nazi Germany had been. The Soviets, on the other hand, allowed these revolutions to develop after 1944 and made every effort to provide an atmosphere of stability and security in which the new socialist states could develop.
Towards the end of the article, Curtis makes a comment that is particularly telling about his own loyalties and assumptions. Like a serial killer admitting to scores of murders as he tries to convince the jury that some of his victims ‘deserved it’, he says:
“Only a handful of these interventions might be regarded as truly benign. The UK’s deployment of forces to Sierra Leone in 2000 prevented the vicious Revolutionary United Front taking control of the capital, Freetown.
“Britain’s involvement in the Korean war in the early 1950s – one of the most destructive conflicts of the past century – upheld the non-communist south of the country, and allowed a future south Korea to prosper.” (Our emphasis)
Even while admitting that Britain’s role in helping to crush Korean independence and socialism in the south of the country and in bombing the north to smithereens – an intervention that ultimately cost nearly five million Korean lives on both sides of the imperialist-drawn border – was ‘one of the most destructive conflicts of the past century’, Curtis has the gall to justify this horrific anticommunist genocide using the usual imperialist tropes.
It seems that, like the British and US imperialists, Mark Curtis would prefer the wiping out of an entire people over letting them get on with improving their existence through the adoption of a planned socialist economy.
The imperialist tenet of ‘benign’ interference
In his second article, Curtis goes on to describe in greater depth the relentless crimes of British imperialism in its quest to maintain world dominance. He cannot resist ameliorating these with his customary caveat:
“Some of the British interventions have been against repressive, malign forces. In the early postwar years, the covert operations in Ukraine and the Baltic states were intended to promote uprisings against Stalin’s brutal emerging rule.”
What this statement glosses over is the simple fact that any force that is opposed to British imperialist domination is ‘benign’ in that it represents the interests of the vast masses of humanity. Seen through the (historically accurate) lens of anti-imperialist class consciousness, every single ‘intervention’ by British imperialist forces has consisted of ‘malign’ invaders confronting ‘benign’ defence formations.
Unfortunately for Mark Curtis, in the particular case he chose to use as an example, we now have the declassified CIA memoranda on Project Aerodynamic, which prove that the CIA (and therefore also MI6) was not merely conducting ‘interventions’ that were ‘intended to promote uprisings’ against ‘repressive, malign forces’. Project Aerodynamic’s stated purpose was:
“To provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance movement for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UBVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in western Europe and the United States, and other organisations such as OUN/B will be utilised.”
The project’s operators aimed to:
“A. Train agents to strengthen the existing W/T links to further the FT mission in the Ukrainian SSR and to solidify the assets in the underground.
“B. Obtain operational and positive intelligence on targets in the target area.
“C. Establish a sound working with the intelligence service (SB) of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the principle underground party subordinate to the HUVR within the Ukraine, and to provide access to the positive Intelligence and CE information produced by the organization.”
The project archive reveals:
“Project Aerodynamic is the principal vehicle through which SB division conducts its operations against the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The main purpose of the project is to exploit contacts with Soviet Ukrainian citizens in order to encourage national and intellectual unrest in the Ukrainian SSR, thus encouraging cultural and intellectual freedom for Soviet citizens.
“CIA has been in contact with the ZP/USTR (Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council) since 1950. Anti-Soviet propaganda activities were begun from New York by a panel of the ZP/UNTR in 1953.
“As of 1958, all activities and all publications, with the exception of the Information Bulletin, originated in Europe. The Prolog Research Corporation of New York conducts the research, writing and contact operations of the project.”
Project Aerodynamic was itself a rebranding of the CIA’s anti-Soviet activities in eastern Europe that began even as the war was still underway during Operation Cartel.
Curtis entirely ignores the fact that the operation he upholds up as defensible (‘benign’) was aimed at rallying and strengthening Nazi collaborators who had been defeated during the second world war – the very people our ruling class always tells us they were committed to wiping out in what they present as a titanic battle between fascism and ‘democracy’. Yet thanks to generous western support, fascist insurgents fought on until 1953 in Ukraine and Poland, causing considerable loss of life and ongoing insecurity problems in both countries.
The CIA and MI6 had no qualms about funding and coordinating with open fascists who had been directly responsible for horrific crimes during WW2, including the mass murder of Russians, Poles and jews (including babies and the elderly) and the torture of civilians. Indeed, the Banderites were notorious for enthusiastically carrying out massacres that even the officers of the Nazi SS found distasteful.
Mass graves are still being uncovered which are adding to the known death toll of these genocidal activities. The sadistic brutality of Stepan Bandera’s OUN towards communists, Russians, jews, gypsies, Poles and others was legendary. When their last remnants were finally defeated in 1953, those who remained of Bandera’s army were given safe haven in Britain, Canada and the USA. Their west-protected descendants have been encouraged to maintain their ethnonationalist and supremacist ‘traditions’ to this day.
For such ‘critics’ of the system as Curtis, it seems that alignment with fascism is acceptable in the interests of stopping communism. No wonder such ‘anti-imperialists’ can be relied upon to line up with Nato and its fascist proxies in its war against Russia in Ukraine. Scratch a western liberal and you will too often find a fascist.
