BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour … Read more
Mel Gibson’s movie Throughout the ages, the Vatican’s iconic depiction of the Crucifixion has been an example of one of PR’s most effective ‘tactics’: the freeze-framing and subsequent promotion of a single event, to dictate perception, itself a marketing tactic. (The same ‘mind control’ is apparent in marketing today, when, say, a ‘life-style’ freeze-frame is … Read more
Roundtable I get regular e-mail bulletins from an organisation called the roundtable – not the Round Table but somebody? some people? – trying to document the US ruling elite by the study of its organisations. Really they should be called Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – because it is the CFR they mostly write about; … Read more
It is impossible to make an omlette without breaking eggs. — James Anderton on anti-terrorism My anger in this case stemmed from the denial that things had gone wrong, that no eggs were broken even though the omlette was there to see. — John Stalker David Murphy, The Stalker Affair and the Press, Unwin Hyman, … Read more
Here is a selection of sites on the Internet that may interest Lobsterreaders. The usenet newsgroups are for discussion of issues and anyone can contribute; some of the contributions are pretty far-out, or just plain abusive, and much of the material is US-oriented. The content of newsgroups is continually changing, and the examples I have … Read more
Electromagnetics & VDU News Subtitled ‘a News Report on Non-ionising Radiation’, this is now up to volume 6, and is now extremely impressive – and pretty alarming. Vol. 6 nos 1-2, for example, includes: Dramatic cuts in EMF exposure demanded by US draft report; biggest EMF lawsuit launched by top attorney – then dropped; breast … Read more
Korean war biological warfare? Issue 11 of the Bulletin of Cold War International History Project contained what appears to be evidence that the allegations by North Korea and the Chinese that the US were using biological warfare during the Korean War were false – were in fact disinformation. Documents apparently from former Soviet archives seem … Read more
Empires Apart: America And Russia From The Vikings To Iraq Brian Landers Hove: Picnic Publishing, 2009, £15, p/b Is America an empire? Tsarist Russia and its Soviet successor were certainly seen as such through western eyes. That America is not showing the heavily ideologised world through which we frame history. In a bold sweep … Read more
Thinking about the Falklands Paul Johnson recently sneered in The Times at the ‘conspiracy theories’ about the Falklands War held by the likes of Tam Dalyell MP. Reading this, what struck me was just how few conspiracy theories about that war have emerged in the past 3 years. So, here are a couple. Mine is … Read more
David Stafford, John Murray, London, 1997, £25 Any book dealing with Winston Churchill must situate itself within one of two rival camps. On the one hand, there are the Churchillians, who regard him as one of the great men of the twentieth century, who dominates modern times and deserves personal credit for having saved Britain … Read more
