Jackboots and Sporran: the strange world of Robert Gayre
Kevin Koogan in ANARCHY No.38 (Box A 84b Whitechapel High St., London E1 7QX)
This is fascinating stuff, the history of some of the more obscure corners in the neo-nazi American/European right-wing since WW2. But it has an odd feel to it, as if it were slightly out of focus. In tracing the connections between Robert Gayre (in current UK Who’s Who), Roger Pearson and the upsurge of Euro-fascism since the 1950s, Koogan takes in WACL, Permindex, Freemasonry, Kenneth de Courcy, the World Wildlife Fund, the House of Savoy and Mitch Werbell – and that’s just the text. The footnotes, as long as the text, are, if anything, even more interesting and more complex.
On first reading this is almost impenetrable; on second it becomes clearer, and on third doubts begin to set in. Inarguably, Koogan has done some wonderful digging – he just hasn’t quite got the synthesis right. Very interesting stuff, though.
Stable force in a storm; Harry J. Anslinger and United States’s narcotic foreign policy 1930-62
Douglas Clark Kinder and William D. Walter in Journal of American History, March 1986
This makes an interesting companion piece to pp2/3 of the P.D. Scott essay in Lobster 12. Anslinger was the primary originator of the basic US foreign policy move of accusing your enemies of running drugs into the otherwise innocent bodies of the US citizenry (China, Cuba, Nicaragua), while allowing your political allies (KMT, anti-Castro Cubans, Contras) to fund-raise by dope-dealing.
This essay focuses on Anslinger as manipulator of Congress, media and the American public, rather than the content of his anti-communist bullshit or his acquiescence in drug-running into the US by the KMT.
US cover-up of Nazi scientists
Linda Hunt in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists April 1985
Very important, immaculately researched piece documenting the way US government official policy of not employing ex-Nazis/war criminals was subverted by the US War Department.
“The solution was very simple. If State would not approve immigration due to derogatory OMGUS (Office of Military Government US) reports, the JOIA (Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency) would change the reports.”
Date-line Washington: anti-Semitism and the airwaves
Lars-Erik Nelson in Foreign Policy No.65, Winter 1986
Since Reagan took office Radio Liberty, the US-funded anti-Soviet radio station based in Munich, has become increasingly anti-Semitic. Emigre groups, especially Ukrainians, are being allowed to broadcast their rewrite of WW2 in which they didn’t collaborate with the Nazis, didn’t participate in the mass murder of Jews in the Ukraine, and didn’t form a Ukrainian division in the SS, etc.. Anti-Semitism seems to be built into Ukrainian nationalism. This should be read alongside the Anderson and Anderson’s account of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists in their Inside the League (reviewed in this issue).
Israel’s state terrorism and counter-insurgency in the Third World
Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Occasional Paper No 7, 1986, from NECEF Publications, PO Box 1708, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. No price stated.
Pieterse is the author of the Round Table piece in this issue. The first thing that should be said is that for someone for whom English is a second language, Pieterse writes really well. This is excellent, the perfect concise, detailed, documented exposition of the Israeli state’s profitable games of footsie with some of the most obnoxious regimes in the world. In South America, for example, that list includes Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, El Salvador and Guatemala.
The most plausible rationale for this apparently odd behaviour (odd in the sense that these states are famously sympathetic to neo-fascists, harboured Nazis after WW2 etc) is that the Israeli state has hitched its wagon to US foreign policy interests and is thus paying the price, acting as a US surrogate in areas where overt US intervention is difficult.
Pieterse is highly critical of contemporary Israeli foreign policy and will no doubt be called an anti-Semite. He isn’t.
RR