When standard military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency of Kenya in the 50s, the British created gangs of friendly tribesmen, who were pretending to be terrorists. These "pseudo gangs," quickly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive by befriending, then ambushing, genuine freedom fighters or guiding the British to freedom fighter camps. What worked half-century ago is still undermining trust among today's resistance to British Occupation in Ireland. Forming fake republican groups, is a British speciality in Ireland today, practiced since 1971, when Kitson recruited 'turned' IRA members, nicknamed the 'Freds' operating undercover in Brigadier Kitson's area of responsibility.
Kitsonian pseudo-gangs are a key part of the "low-intensity operations" deployed by British Imperialists in the waning days of colonial rule and their legacy has been bequeathed to the Americans. In the early 1950s, Kitson worked with counter revolutionary groups and individuals in Malaysia, Kenya, Cyprus, Oman and then British Occupied Ireland, perfecting strategy and adapting his theory to local circumstance. His counterinsurgency techniques are used in every part of the world today, with imperial interests.The British using Kitsonian techniques while disengaging overtly from occupation, covertly deal deviously with local revisionist revolutionaries, while managing at the same time, to leave enduring institutions behind, to ensure neo-British futures and markets, particularly for their industrial war complex.
Of course Kitson's pseudo-gang strategy cannot work in isolation, without severe control by the British in the form of a police-state. activity, In addition to targeting and "sanitizing" opposition directly, the British still target any part of the civilian population, which supports resistance or has critical intelligence. British measures include collective curfew punishment, as a result of fake gang activity, such as bomb warnings, internment without trial, censorship, and restrictions of free movement. British forces still try to intimidate civilians and separate them from resistance, while trying to collect intelligence to infiltrate genuine resistance of local networks.
The British still enlist surrendered or defected rebels in Ireland, under the guise of a peace process and give them carte blanche, in efforts to penetrate genuine community networks to undermine campaigns such as that against political internment and secret courts currently. British Occupation in Ireland is dependent on local intelligence networks, while it has limited success from former members of Irish resistance intelligence, providing crucial information. However like the loyalists in British Occupied Ireland, some new allies are using their positions to settle private grievances and line their own pockets. .
Throughout Britain's former empire of colonial rule and repression, some British mentored puppets now called nationalists, subscribe to a legacy of violence in Britain's wake. As a leading human-rights group has put it, "Internal-security laws and anti-terrorist laws, are a draconian remnant of the laws used during Britain's colonial era." Britain's Colonial Office crafted the police states throughout its former empire and then drafted the new constitutions and legal systems of institutional coercion and political repression in Britain's former colonial states. Like Ireland, Britain's first colony, repressive laws, undemocratic institutions, not peace or progress, are the primary heritage of the British presence in both parts of the island.
British strategy worldwide as in Cyprus, culminated in the suspension of due process and censorship of the press, with the island taking British direction and repression resulting in division of the island like Ireland. Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Hastings Banda, of Malawi, both used the inherited British methods to suppress opposition and divide, rather than unite their nations. Kenya's Security Act, a replica of British legislation, enabled harassment, internment, torture and the murder of hundreds of opposition. In Malawi laws of the British colonial precedent, gave powers to murder dissent. Like the British, these powers included internment without trial, torture and extrajudicial murder.
Britain's legacy in Occupied Ireland and elsewhere is not just limited to institutions and laws but also includes individuals of local populations, who were formerly used by the British in counterinsurgency operations, helping to carry out repressive measures both while the British were at war in Ireland and now in their low intensity operation dubbed a peace process.These former loyalists and secret collaborators. currently help ensure failure rather than providing anything worthwhile to a civil society. Objective history not written by the imperialists or their minions in places like Ireland, offer the lesson, that the real "outposts of tyranny" are the institutions left behind by the colonial British and their military strategists of British twentieth-century empire such as the current Kitsonian model in British Occupied Ireland.
