Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 18, 2018

Launch of DECLASSIFIED

Filed under: Government,Intelligence,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 11:48 am

Launch of DECLASSIFIED by Mark Curtis.

From the post:

I am about to publish on this site hundreds of UK declassified documents and articles on British foreign policy towards various countries. This will be the first time such a collection has been brought together online.

The declassified documents, mainly from the UK’s National Archives, reveal British policy-makers actual concerns and priorities from the 1940s until the present day, from the ‘horse’s mouth’, as it were: these files are often revelatory and provide an antidote to the often misleading and false mainstream media (and academic) coverage of Britain’s past and present foreign policies.

The documents include my collections of files, accumulated over many years and used as a basis for several books, on episodes such as the UK’s covert war in Yemen in the 1960s, the UK’s support for the Pinochet coup in Chile, the UK’s ‘constitutional coup’ in Guyana, the covert wars in Indonesia in the 1950s, the UK’s backing for wars against the Iraqi Kurds in the 1960s, the coup in Oman in 1970, support for the Idi Amin takeover in Uganda and many others policies since 1945.

But the collection also brings together many other declassified documents by listing dozens of media articles that have been written on the release of declassified files over the years. It also points to some US document releases from the US National Security Archive.

A new resource for those of you tracking the antics of the small and the silly through the 20th and into the 21st century.

I say the “small and the silly” because there’s no doubt that similar machinations have been part and parcel of government toady lives so long as there have been governments. Despite the exaggerated sense of their own importance and the history making importance of their efforts, almost none of their names survive in the ancient historical record.

With the progress of time, the same fate awaits the most recent and current crop of government familiars. While we wait for them to pass into obscurity, you can amuse yourself by outing them and tracking their activities.

This new archive may assist you in your efforts.

Be sure to keep topic maps in mind for mapping between disjoint vocabularies and collections of documents as well as accounts of events.

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