[…] 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 NATO, the […]
[…] intelligence operations which developed in Europe under the wing of the United States and that are now coalescing into the pan-European security agency of a new state-in-the-making. Conspiracy theorists who have managed to get past the idiocies of The Da Vinci Code will always point to Catholic involvement in the spiriting away of such […]
Philip Hoare, Duckworth Press, London, 1997, £16.99 The opening of MI5’s archives up to and including 1919 gives historians and researchers the chance to exhume the genesis of the right in British domestic politics as well as the early activities of the secret state. Despite its title (Oscar died in 1900) Hoare dips quite a … Read more
[…] to Chomsky, Cockburn and Hitchens – very much the critical insider. In keeping with this stance, however, Hersh has an almost visceral aversion to anything suggesting ‘ conspiracy’ – as evinced in his take on KAL 007 – and it is this bias which leads to an ultimately flawed, if highly readable work. Like […]
[…] of the coup which appeared in the June issue of a privately circulated newsletter from New Zealand, “Wellington Confidential”. Both stories were filled with unsupported allegations, innuendo, conspiracy and inaccuracy. “Wellington Confidential” attempts to model itself on a U.S. publication “Covert Action Information Bulletin” which claims to reveal U.S. intelligence activity, but often replays […]
[…] Opportunity. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1995. 342 pps. Illustrated, index. After all these years Moldea now says Sirhan Sirhan acted alone and there was no conspiracy, and those bullet holes in the doorway weren’t bullet holes after all. I wish I could believe him. PEPPER, William F. Orders to Kill: The Truth […]
[…] essays you can follow Vidal on the final stage of his journey from being a kind of patrician, cynical, left-liberal out into parapolitics and even into American conspiracy theory culture. ‘Revisionist historian’ has come to mean people who want to deny the reality of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews in Europe. Before this […]
[…] Jersey; New Page Books (newpagebooks.com), 2007, $15.99, p/b I’m not a fan of Marrs. I didn’t think much of his JFK book, Crossfire; and his The Terror Conspiracy (which isn’t included in his CV on the rear cover, for some reason) about 9-11 and its aftermath was a sorry collection of conspiracy theories and […]
Noam Friedlander London: Conspiracy Books/Collins and Brown, 2005, p/bk, £8.99 Apart from being an anagram of Oedipus, Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic organisation, which has grown from beginnings in Spain in the 1920s, led by José Maria Escriva, to being an evangelising force within the Catholic Church, aimed as much at the […]
[…] the attack on USS Liberty. ‘As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy four years earlier, the official version is even more unlikely than some of the conspiracy theories.’ John Simpson, forward to Peter Hounam’s Operation Cyanide (London: Vision, 2003) The well-documented rise of the neo-cons has highlighted again a seemingly enduring feature of […]
