View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] of law, and strong defence 2. To encourage strong transatlantic links between Britain, Europe, and North America 3. To assist and encourage the peoples of the former communist countries and other oppressive regimes across the world as they adopt democracy 4. To foster greater contact between Western nations and those of the Middle East […]

In Spies We Trust: the story of western intelligence by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba in the Congo by poisoning his toothpaste, many attempts on Castro, kidnapping (and more recently ‘extraordinary rendition’), the illegal financing of anti- Communist journals abroad, including Britain’s moderate-left Encounter – the list goes on. The CIA has been widely suspected of further plots, against Australia’s Gough Whitlam and Britain’s […]

Historical Notes on Tom Nairn and the British State

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[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 […]

Who let the dogs out?

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] Talbott, The Russia Hand (New York: Random House, 2002) 31 Y. Brudny, ‘In Pursuit of the Russian Presidency: Why and How Yeltsin Won the 1996 Presidential Election’, Communist and PostCommunist Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 255-275, 1997. 32 Aleksei Sanaev, ‘Vybory V Rossii: Kak eto Delaetsia’, Os’-89, 2005, p. 8, quoted in ‘Russia: […]

Still thinking about Dallas

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

Armed and Dangerous: The US Far Right in the Trump era

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: Armed and Dangerous: The US Far Right in the Trump era John Newsinger In the aftermath of the 6 January 2021 capitol insurrection in Washington DC, a large number of books have been published examining the background to the event and warning of the dangers that still lie ahead. This review looks at only a […]

Churchill’s War Against D-Day by Graeme Bowman

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[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 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] who, as vice president had been excluded from the major war decisionmaking, and was a believer in the threat posed by international communism. The crusade against the communist threat was irresistible and those who opposed it were ignored or crushed as com-symps, fellow-travellers, naifs. George Kennan, deputy head of the U.S. mission in Moscow […]

The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers by Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] Furnival Jones, MI5’s Director, no previous Prime Minister had ever shown ‘such enthusiasm for regular up-to-the-minute reports during an industrial dispute’. Wilson was particularly pleased that the Communist Party headquarters was ‘comprehensively bugged’. And he actively encouraged rightwing union leaders to collaborate with MI5. One of the leading figures in the GMWU, Sir Harry […]

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