In Lobster 14 we printed a piece on the USA’s alleged role in the first Fiji coup, originally published in Wellington Confidential. Since then, due to the ill-health of Wellington Confidential’s editor/publisher, it has been cut back and is now being sent to a very restricted list of people. Fortunately, Lobster is still on its … Read more
Francis Beckett and David Hencke London: Constable, 2009, h/b, £18.99 This is quite interesting and impressive; but with a strange spin. There is a lot of (to me) new detail on the impact of the event on the Labour Party and trade unions, on money given to the NUM from other unions and on attempts … Read more
In its own communications, evangelical Christianity exists in a delirious present but it has a rich and recoverable history. Evangelical religion can and should be explained in part in terms of the response of the millions of the faithful to the experience of modernity. But while secular intellectuals sometimes see it simply as a mechanism … Read more
Bilderberg Originally given as a paper at the British Association for American Studies 2002 Annual Postgraduate Conference, this draws on newly available archival evidence to document the origins of the Bilderberg Group. It also considers the various conspiracy theories which have attached themselves to the Group. Is it a CIA plot to undermine socialism or … Read more
Introduction What follows is an interim report about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. In so far as it has a central thesis, it is that Jones initiated the Jonestown massacre because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation would disgrace him. Specifically, Jones feared that Ryan and the press would uncover evidence that the … Read more
Colin Wallace and ‘Clockwork Orange 2’ In 1974, while working for the British Army’s Northern Ireland psy-ops unit, Information Policy, Wallace was asked (told) by an MI5 officer to work on a psy-ops project, ‘Clockwork Orange 2’. Wallace’s job spec. for CO2 was to produce a document, a first-hand narrative, apparently written by a supporter … Read more
Jim Phillips Pluto Press, London, 1995, £12.99 To study the relationship between the Labour government and the trade unions in the ’45-’51 government, Phillips provides the first detailed examination of which I am aware of the various dock strikes during the period. Phillips concludes that the various charges of ‘communist conspiracy’ made by members of … Read more
Two pieces here by Tim Pendry. The major piece is followed by an addendum, which began as the text of a letter from Pendry to Dr Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance in response to an article of Gabb’s. Pendry copied me his letter and I saw that it would go nicely with the longer … Read more
The Information Research Department Andrew Defty Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2004, £23.99, p/b Thinking about this book, I wondered why people like me have been so interested in IRD for the last 30 years. There are two reasons, I think. The first is that way back in the 1970s, when information about the British … Read more
US deception operation blowback The e-newsletter stuff (1) ran this fascinating piece around 15 March. ‘At the Princeton conference last Saturday, Raymond Garthoff, a distinguished historian now with the Brookings Institute and a former CIA analyst, mentioned that we had recently learned of an FBI-Army double agent operation that may have spurred the Soviets to … Read more
