A great flood of books about Italian politics recently, and almost none of them willing to answer the question “Why Italy?” Why is Italy’s political culture so firmly based on conspiracy and secrecy? A part of that answer must be Italy’s role as the premier European site of the conflict between indigenous left-wing forces and … Read more
A spook, moi? One of the formative experiences of my youth – and we’re talking early 1960s here, beatnik days, when wearing a narrow leather tie was pretty hip – was going to the Mound in Edinburgh on Sunday nights. The Mound is like Hyde Park Corner in London, a place where local by-laws allow … Read more
US involvement in the Fiji coup d’etat This article presents an analysis of United States involvement in the coup in Fiji. The authors support the demands made in Washington by deposed Fijian Prime Minister, Dr Bavadra, for a Congressional investigation of American involvement. Published by Wellington Confidential, PO. Box 9034, Wellington, New Zealand The one-month-old … Read more
Barry and the boys The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History Daniel Hopsicker Venice (Florida): The Madcow Press, 2006, $19.95, p/b Barry is Barry Seal and ‘the boys’ are the CIA. There is a decent Wiki entry for Seal which conveys the outlines of his extraordinary life as a pilot, large-scale drug smuggler and, … Read more
Introduction In early January the American writer Martin Cannon, whose ‘Mind Control and the American Government’, was published in Lobster 23, and who has a very interesting letter in this issue, offered me a big piece of his on the so-called Gemstone File. Cannon had got access to some of the original documents on which … Read more
John Smith: Old Labour’s lost leader? In non-New Labour Labour Party circles the late John Smith is remembered with great reverence.(1) Quite what this is based on escapes me. All I can identify is his dislike of Peter Mandelson: Smith kept him at bay therefore Smith was a good man seems to be the argument. … Read more
William F. Pepper Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995, but distributed in the UK by WWM at £21.00 Tony Frewin mentioned this book in his survey of the JFK and related literature in Lobster 31. It deserves more than that. William Pepper is an American lawyer with an office in London as well as the … Read more
Ah, the wonderful private sector In ‘Blair anti-corruption plan weakened by British firms’ in The Independent 2 September 2002, Geoffrey Lean reported: ‘Britain has the world’s most corrupt companies, and some of the weakest legislation among industrialised countries for dealing with them….Half of the 70 companies identified by the World Bank as so corrupt that … Read more
Introduction The mid 1970s was not a good time to be a social democratic ally of the United States. In Britain we had “the Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “security scandal’; in New Zealand … Read more
Richard M Bennett London: Virgin Books, 2003 £20 hardback This is 350 pages of summaries of political and historical conspiracies. It starts in 2330 BC but the first 2007 years take up only 84 pages. The content is mostly Anglo-American, especially after WW2. It is done chronologically, so you get odd sequences of subjects: … Read more
