Citizen Reporter - Samizdat Newscasting How it All Began for Me

I currently use Twitter to comment on the world as I see it from where I stand (and sit) as the most recent vehicle in a long line of communications I have used for most of my life. From my days at school in the early 1960s I became fascinated by the use of covert communications, indoctrination and brainwashing. 

I can trace this interest back at least as far as when age 10 or 11 I saw the Gregory Peck film 'Pork Chop Hill' on television.  The 1959 film highlights the absurdities of war and the stoical resentment of the lower ranks of US military near the end of Korean War hostilities (the war itself never having actually ended).  For me the really impressive part of the film was the psychological warfare deployed by the Chinese against the forgotten cannon fodder of the abandoned heroes led by Peck.

From my earliest memories of cinema, which I regularly attended throughout my childhood from pre-school age to teens, I maintained a relatively open mind about who constituted baddies or goodies, for example I always sided with the indians not the cowboys and was perpetually disappointed by the outcome of the uneven contest on the silver screen.

In Pork Chop Hill it was the Chinese propaganda unit that impressed me most and their psychological attempts to undermine morale of the obviously impervious GIs. I became interested in the use of radio as a propaganda tool and developed those interests through my early teens and friendship with Jonathan, who owned a shortwave radio and who was a keen radio amateur. We used his receiver to listen to news broadcasts in English from all around the world. The movie Pork Chop Hill involved two lines of enquiry for me 1. the use of non-lethal warfare and 2. the failure of propaganda on some individuals and not others.

When we were still both in our 15th year of life Jonathan's dad got him a submarine transmitter and strung an arial wire from the attic of a large victorian house in north Birmingham to the end of its rather long back garden.  

Now we were in business so the next thing was to create a pirate radio station in his attic that managed several broadcasts from the in 1966. Radio Eagle (later changed to the more alliterative Radio Raptor) thus named for its swooping modus operandi, we would crash onto the airwaves at random times - one time we played the Mothers of Invention Absolutely Free album (I still maintain we're the only radio station in England to do that) - and I gave a news broadcast based upon two contrasting reports of the same event. This was of course at the height of the Cold War and the event in question was a US bombing raid on Hanoi during the Vietnam War reported on both American Forces Network radio (AFN) and Radio Prague English language station whilst Czechoslovakia was still part of the Warsaw Pact military alliance with the Soviet Union. AFN reported a successful raid on military targets in which no aircraft had been lost while Radio Prague denounced the raid on civilian areas missing all strategic targets, in which several aircraft were reported downed by the North Vietnamese.

We then invited the listener(s) to consider the description from both sides and decide for themselves whether either account is trustworthy and if so why one rather than the other? Our impromptu broadcasts were difficult for the regulator (then the General Post Office - G.P.O.) to locate as they needed a 3 directional fix and since we were only on the air for 30-40 minutes we came and went out of the blue so to speak.

My dad at home about a mile or so away was an avid listener having been tipped off when we were going on air. He seemed to think it was hilarious. We had feedback that our broadcasts had been monitored by an amateur radio club receiving us more than 20 miles away which we viewed with considerable glee. We put out news from Radio Moscow and other English language world services including the BBC periodically and in short bursts.

Our time checks were accurate to within about 3 minutes, because we used an old double bell type alarm clock with dubious timekeeping capabilities. I played a few hit singles on air at that time too, Crispian St Peters You Were On My Mind is one I recall playing - this was a year before the BBC had launched Radio 1 music station in 1967. 

The Raptor crash landed when the GPO trigonometry finally triangulated us, pinpointed our pirate transmissions and came and confiscated the equipment. No legal action was taken against us on account of our ages being both still under 16 at the time, but we were left without the means to continue, so that was to be the end of that.  

The principle of information sharing and scepticism of official accounts preceded my blogging by about 30 years, but I have been a regular blogger on mostly now defunct accounts since the about 1998.

In between the radio and social media I've been a contributor to editors letters in several local and national newspapers. on a variety of topics fro water privatisation to electoral reform, antiwar and anti apatheid. I did a bit of odd jobbing at the Birmingham Broadside magazine in 1976 and distributed various seditious  materials including Freedom newspaper founded by Peter Kropotkin's Freedom Press. I was out of the country working in the Middle East and Norwegian Sector of the North Sea between 1977-1980 so not a lot of communicating except with friends and family during that period. 

Since those times I have spent getting on for 40 years as a student of information and behaviour. This has included a career of more than 30 years in mental health services including  20 years in crisis work with quite a bit of it on a 24/7 rota. I have also been a researcher, tutor and visiting tutor at several places of higher education in England and Wales.

The juxtaposition of ideological accounts of events in the real world has been my lifelong hobby. I am privileged to have worked in frontline mental health services where authentic communication is not only desirable but sometimes a matter of life or death. I think this has reinforced my natural inclination toward Perspectivism as the way I view the world. This is a free floating philosophical concept associated with both Plato and Nietzsche, but to me it just does what it says on the tin e.g.-

"Perspectivism rejects objective metaphysics, claiming that no evaluation of objectivity can transcend cultural formations or subjective designations" Wikipedia.

So, I have used various media to communicate a message that what we are served up as 'truth' is from a certain perspective and does not necessarily accord with our own various truths. 

Now Brexit is the local ground in the battle for the truth but  there is no truth in Tory Brexit we must inscribe our own sustainable agenda on Brexit - it is a breakaway, it is anarchy that hugely favours the ruling class. It has been my lifelong commitment to alter that situation and in some small ways along the way I think I have at an individual level and sometimes on a community level too, but now all of nature demand change or extinction. 

I consider participating in the history of our epoch in any  way is the closest human beings come to immortality - my language is borrowed maybe but my perspective is the result of endless research, experience and ongoing re-evalutaion.

Karl Marx 

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history  in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”