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
From David Guyatt: David Hambling’s comments in Lobster 39 (Feedback) underscore the extreme difficulties involved in firstly accessing, then corroborating and, finally, reporting stories that are as obviously sensitive as Operation Black Cat and Operation Black Dog. It is easy to raise what appear to be realistic technical objections, but the Black Dog story consumed … 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
At 00:20 on Sunday 31 August 1997 a black Mercedes S280 carrying four people left the Ritz Hotel in central Paris. Shortly afterwards at 00:25 it crashed into the thirteenth pillar of the Concorde-Boulogne lane of the Pont d’Alma Tunnel in central Paris. The driver – Henri Paul – was killed instantly. The front passenger … 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
Inside the League Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson (Dodd, Mead and Co., New York 1986) This is the only book I know on the World Anti-Communist League. Most of it is new to me but the few bits I am familiar with look accurate, and it is reasonably well documented. It is really in … Read more
‘I know nothing about it. I don’t want to say I didn’t at the time, but today I have no knowledge of it.’ Former US Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara on the attack on USS Liberty. ‘As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy four years earlier, the official version [of the attack on … Read more
In this essay I offer some informed speculation on the assassination of John Kennedy. I have called this a new hypothesis, but in fact it is the elaboration of a hunch about the case – but an interesting hunch, I think. I take as proven that there was a conspiracy to murder Kennedy and a … Read more
The Imperial War Museum book of Modern Warfare: British and Commonwealth Forces at War 1945-2000 Edited by Major General Julian Thompson London: Pan Books, 2003, £8.99 This is the paperback edition of the book published by Sidgwick and Jackson a year ago. It contains 15 essays on conflicts that have involved British armed forces … Read more
The funding of Blair Sometimes chronology implies causality and sometimes not. Consider the following sequence of events: in January 1994 Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary and career-long member of the Labour Friends of Israel, took a four day freebie trip to Israel, with his wife, at the expense of the Israeli government. Two months … Read more
