From Dan J. Bye
Following up a note in the latest Lobster re: ‘Bilderberg’ appearing in the index but not in the text of Clinton’s autobiography, I thought I’d try out Amazon.com’s ‘search inside’ facility. ([1]) Still no ‘Bilderberg’.
I also noticed the review of part 3 of Stuart Christie’s illustrated biography. I’ve got the single volume paperback published by Scribner last year , 0-7432-5918-1. I enjoyed the read, except for one bit. On pages 255-256 is a potted biography of the late Albert Meltzer, with whom Christie was closely associated until Meltzer’s death in 1996. Leaving aside the misspelling of Kate Sharpley Library as Kate Shipley Library over the page, the following sentence struck me:
‘A lifelong trade unionist, he fought Moseleys Blackshirts in the Battle of Cable Street and was involved in the Cairo Muutiny in the British Army in 1946.’
The ‘Muutiny’ (sic) bit makes you wonder, as does spelling ‘Mosley’ as ‘Moseley’. Two mistakes already, but the big one is that Meltzer did not fight Mosley’s Blackshirts in the Battle of Cable Street. Meltzer’s account of Cable Street occupies pages 37-38 of his own book, I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels, published in 1996 with a preface by Christie. It punctures some of the myths about the legend, pointing out that fascists marched through the East End plenty of times before and after Cable Street [1936]. Here are the important bits of what Meltzer remembers of the day:
‘I was a few streets away at an open-air meeting, the first one I ever spoke at, and my first time in the East End proper. I hadn’t known about the march. I carried on until all the crowd vanished, whether attracted by the noise or bored by me. Abandoning the attempt at enlightenment, I walked up to Gardiners Corner where I saw Fenner Brockway looking very excited. Later I learned he telephoned the Home Secretary to warn him of possible bloodshed, and the Home Secretary contacted the police and they called the Mosley march off and they went back. No way would the Mosleyites have proceeded without their police guard. The CP version has passed into myth, but that was how Fenner Brockway stopped the police marching through the East End.’
So, Meltzer did not fight fascists at Cable Street. Nor did anyone else, of course, so he wasn’t alone in that (the only battles were against the police, who were trying to clear a path through the barricade at Cable Street), but he wasn’t even at Cable Street, but speaking nearby!
From Noel Currid
Just e-mailing you as I know there have been a few bits and pieces in Lobster and elsewhere in the past few years trying to work out where the whole RCP/Living Marxism/LM etc got the money to keep going during its transformation from ultra-Leninist sect to Marxism Today Mark II.
I used to be a Living Marxism subscriber from 1990 to 1995. I remember first buying it as it was different from the rest of the Marxist left; then it became controversial just for the sake of it. In fact I stopped subscribing late 1994, but they kept sending me it for another year.
My copies of the mag are long recycled so I am going from memory here. One thing I do remember is that LM was extremely pro-Japanese in its world view. Back in around ’91 it advertised an LM readers group in Japan. Then around ’94 I remember LM published an article about whale hunting, saying that if you opposed whaling you were racist, since the Japanese whaled. (Where this leaves the blue eyed blond whalers of Iceland and Norway, LM didn’t say, but by that point LM was basically hype over experience.) Then the August ’95 issue, on the 50th anniversary of the atom bombings of Japan, featured an article which whitewashed Japanese war crimes in China and the rest of the Far East in the 1930s and 40s, claiming that the Imperial Japanese armies were welcomed as liberators by the natives (so were the Waffen SS and Wehrmacht in the western USSR in 1941, but that didn’t last long either…).
I have absolutely no evidence that LM was funded from Japan, but if Mick Hume was to ‘fess up big time in his Times column I wouldn’t be surprised.
From Val Stephenson
Alex Cox wondered (in Lobster 48) who among the Bush/Saud bunch might sue: Khalid binMahfouz, bagman for the Saudis. He threatened to eviscerate me, bless him, via his equally scumbag legal counsel, for a story that was kosher in every way…. I took the article down pretty smartly. ([2])
He also threatened Scotland on Sunday and the Washington Post, apparently, for almost the same article. He sued Pluto Press over Michael Griffin’s book which suggested that he’d been financing Al Qa’ida (true, as far as the CIA is concerned), was involved in the BCCI fiasco (which John Kerry wrote the report on – I want to get an interview with him on that subject some time) and was involved in dodgy business deals with GWB (the only bit he didn’t regard as libellous – most people are involved in dodgy deals with Shrub!). KbM didn’t notice that another of Pluto’s books was much franker on the subject of Al Q and BCCI!
The line that he was OBL’s brother-in-law appeared in various CIA reports but was later said to be untrue. The reason for the sensitivity is that KbM was mentioned in the 9/11 Families class action, which is for an astonishingly large amount, and he’s threatened the families’ legal guys and lead researcher. Random House were scared off by the Pluto case, but Rachel Ehrenfeld has filed an interesting suit in the States to protect her new book, Funding Evil. ([3]) She’s asked a Manhattan court to block any claim by KbM on the grounds that UK libel laws are not enforceable in the US. Good luck to the woman! Weirdly, Amazon.co.uk still refuses to list House of Bush, but lists the forthcoming p/b version of Funding Evil.
Notes
[1] <www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0375414576/ref=sib_dp_pt/104-2031990-8029511#reader-link>
[2] From Stephenson’s Website <www.nthposition.com/index.html> ed.
[3] <www.frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asrlD=11760>