Olivier Schmidt Atlanta (USA): Clarity Press, 2005, $14.95, p/b www.bookmasters.com/clarity/currenttitles.htm Here’s a new name to me, the publisher Clarity; and a familiar one, Olivier Schmidt. In the 1980s Schmidt was producing a very good newsletter in Paris, Intelligence and Parapolitics. This got expensive, professionalised and eventually went on-line for subscribers as Intelligence.(1) This is … Read more
PART 1 See also Part 2 in Lobster 6 Most Western political scientists, following in the traditions of Marx or Weber, scorn the study of secret and occult societies as irrelevant to understanding the politics of the age. In their view, politics can best be understood as the working out, in public arenas, of bureaucratic, … Read more
In footnote 6 in his essay on the Bilderberg group in Lobster 32, Mike Peters noted that the US Left had lost interest in the study of the power elite because the subject had become ‘contaminated’ by the interest in it taken by the US Right.(1) I had never thought of it as that, but … Read more
Malcolm Kennedy believes his telephones, email and post are being interfered with. His attempts to obtain answers have met with brick walls, and his situation has been described as Kafkaesque. Soon his complaint will be one of the first to be heard by the recently established Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Background Last Summer, Lobster drew attention … Read more
I invited David Turner to begin writing a regular column for Lobster. He agreed then rang to tell me his computer had been attacked by a virus and could not meet my deadline. (He is the second contributor to this issue to have been virused recently.) But I had on file this splendid polemic written … Read more
Researching the European State: a critical guide Edited by Tony Bunyan Statewatch PO Box 1516, London N16 0EW £7.00 With sixty A4 pages plus a six page index, this is, as the title suggests, an annotated bibliography. The flyer which came with it accurately described it thus: ‘This is the first bibliography on the European … Read more
Joel Kotek Translated by Ralph Blumenau Macmillan 1996 £40 An edited version of a PhD thesis, this is an extremely interesting and massively detailed account of the politics of the student movement before and during the early years of the Cold War. Centrally it shows how Communist Party members from various countries, under presumed if … Read more
Those who remember my case will be aware that in 1992/93 I was portrayed as a major KGB spy, featuring on the front pages of several national newspapers. My name later appeared in The Mitrokhin Archive, as did Melita Norwood – the ‘Granny Spy’ – but unlike her I have been largely ignored by those … Read more
Kenneth De Courcy Kenneth de Courcy buffs will be pleased to know that they can now visit a website with some interesting further information about this maverick figure. The site can be found at < http:// www.pharo.com/intelligence >, and is run by the team which produced Double Standards, last year’s interesting study of the Hess … Read more
Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism Edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003, £14.95 The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair Oakland (US) and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003, £9.00/$12.95 The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century Scott … Read more
