Clippings Digest: August – November 1984

Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££

[…] Times for Nixon’s ‘plumbers unit’: ‘Nixonian plumbing was a defensive response to aggression’. Ignorance masquerading as sophistication. Interesting piece about Soldier of Fortune magazine, the World Anti Communist League and General John K.Singlaub in New Statesman 2 November 1984. (The War Against ‘Communism’) The author is Chris Horrie who is, if memory serves me, […]

‘Conspiracy Theories’ and Clandestine Politics

Lobster Issue 29 (1995) £££

[…] revolutionary organizations, economic pressure groups, secret societies with hidden political agendas, and the like? No monolithic conspiracy There has never been, to be sure, a single, monolithic Communist Conspiracy of the sort postulated by the American John Birch Society in the 1950s and 1960s. Nor has there ever been an all-encompassing International Capitalist Conspiracy, […]

Blinded by the light: Puppet Masters: the Political Use of Terrorism in Italy

Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££

[…] easy target, and that the attribution needs to be specifically proved in each case. For such claims of a general nature have often been advanced by official Communist parties as an alibi for their own political failings. There is little attempt at sociological explanation of terrorism, although Willan might reply that such speculation has […]

Pipe Dreams: the CIA, Drugs, and the Media

Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997) £££

[…] to deny the 1948 elections to the Communists. By 1950 the Mafia again controlled Sicily. The CIA was also paying the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles to undermine Communist influence with striking workers. These Mafia syndicates were sufficiently well-protected that in 1951 they opened their first heroin lab. By 1965 there were two dozen labs […]

Ratlines: how the Vatican’s Nazi networks betrayed Western intelligence to the Soviets

Lobster Issue 22 (1991) £££

[…] the United States recruited many of them as “freedom fighters’, spies and saboteurs. They also describe how the Soviets were able to infiltrate many of the anti- communist organisations who were ostensibly working for Western intelligence. At the end of World War II, the American, British and French zones of Austria and Germany, as […]

Cloak and Dollar, and, Know Your Enemy

Book cover
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] Indonesia. ‘The bodies of the murdered generals were found in a well near the air force base of Halim (the air force had been a centre of communist influence among the military). A gruesome pogrom followed through the country as opponents of the PKI took their revenge.’ The crude attempt to imply that the […]

Decoding Edward Jay Epstein’s ‘LEGEND’

Lobster Issue 2 (1983) £££

[…] for example, to see that: “In exposing Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent, Congressman (sic) Richard Nixon made a major contribution to the bringing home of the Communist menace and therefore to the mobilisation of popular support for an interventionist foreign policy.” (15) For a member of the Israeli lobby in 1976 when that […]

The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain […]

Cold War Stories

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

[…] details the U.S. role in Indonesia’s deadly purge of ‘ communists’ in the 1960s. The volume concerned also points out that the US embassy supplied lists of communist leaders to the Indonesians who were trying to destroy the PKI. The embassy said the lists were ‘……apparently being used by Indonesian security authorities who seem […]

The Rhodes-Milner Group

Lobster Issue 13 (1987) £££

[…] the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR): “Critics of a power elite theory often call it “conspiratorial”, which is the academic equivalent of ending a discussion by yelling Communist. It is difficult to lay this charge to rest once and for all because these critics really mean something much broader than the dictionary definition of […]

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