[PDF file]: […] equivalents are working for their country. The murder of a British businessman who worked in China and was associated with the now disgraced Bo Xilai, the former Communist Party chief of Chongqing who was once tipped for high office, was characterised by systematic British media undermining of the dead man’s character (presumably because it […]
A Work of Camouflage Intelligent Warfare: The Memoirs of General Sir Frank Kitson GBE, KCB, MC and Bar, DL Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2024, £25 h/b John Newsinger What is most interesting about this posthumous memoir by General Frank Kitson is what it does not say, exactly how little it contributes to our knowledge and […]
[PDF file]: […] case that JFK wanted to withdraw all U.S. military personnel as soon as was feasible, but that JFK had no intention of abandoning South Vietnam to a Communist takeover on his watch. And, yes, JFK was prepared to continue economic and military aid for many years. This will not be the last word on […]
[PDF file]: The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay Harold Smith RIP Harold Smith has died. In Lobster 24 I summarised Smith’s account of witnessing the outgoing British state rigging the pre-independence elections in Nigeria which, he argued, lead to the Biafran war and millions of dead. Smith’s story can be found by Googling ‘Harold Smith + […]
[PDF file]: […] ‘gentlemen’ professional soldiers, who came to be exemplified by Mike Hoare. Demobbed at the end of WWII with the rank of Major, and an admittedly virulent anti- Communist, he led the mercenary force which fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from July ‘64 to December ‘65. In those intense 18 months he […]
[…] over the requirements of material sustenance and the drudgery of mindless wage work’.10 It was a vision which bore some striking similarities to Marx’s vision of a Communist society, where ‘society regulates the general production’ and scarcity would cease to exist, ending all need for the division of labour: ‘nobody has one exclusive sphere […]
[PDF file]: […] Marx’s second blind spot was failure to appreciate the power and significance of nationalism. His and Engels’ call for workers of the world to unite in The Communist Manifesto was based on the conviction that, even by the late 1840s, the international expansion of capitalism including the working class without which it could not […]
[PDF file]: […] also significant. There was the planning for a Baltic expedition, without air cover, in the autumn of 1939; the attempt at turning the war into an anti- communist campaign in Finland a few months later; the disastrous failure in Norway that this produced (which, ironically, propelled Churchill to power); the diversion of forces from […]
[PDF file]: […] this is undoubtedly true. Orwell, however, was not ‘appropriated’ by British intelligence services. He willingly cooperated with them, particularly in passing on the names of suspected 1 Communist fellow-travellers. Referring to the abolition of the Central Office of Information in 2011, Anthony also states (p. 20), ‘The constraints on centralised state power that existed […]
[…] Oswald owned a Mannlicher-Carcano; and as recent analysis seems to have confirmed, the photographs of him posing with the rifle and American left newspapers, both Trotskyist and Communist, were authentic (despite his claim that they had been faked).13 In his memoir Chauncey Holt tells us that, in the months before the assassination, the weapons […]
