The Case Against Israel Michael Neumann Oakland (US): CounterPunch, $15 Edinburgh (UK): AK Press, £10, 2005 The Power of Israel in the United States James Petras Atlanta and Black Point: Clarity Press and Fernwood Books, 2006, $16.95 In a year in which Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza were accompanied by more stories of … Read more
Michael Phayer Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, p/b, £15.99 In 1997, urged on by the US government, fourteen European countries together with Canada and Argentina, established commissions to investigate the involvement of their banks in the holding of assets looted by the Nazis and their allies during the Holocaust. One particular sovereign state refused … Read more
Preface This paper was written for the History Workshop 20 in Leeds, during November 1986. In the workshop which I gave, I introduced the paper by pointing out that the arguments within it were very general and the paper itself entirely polemical. I explained that each of my last three books contain detailed case histories … Read more
Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997) Seymour Hersh is one of those figures with no real equivalent in British journalism. For one thing, the budgets, the armies of fact-checkers and, indeed, the market for this sort of extended politico-analytical foray just does not exist over here. Writing from a … 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
The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina Uki Goni London: Granta Books, 2002, £20 If there was a category of work called Detective History, Uki Goni really ought to be awarded Book of the Year. Undeterred by the shredding and incineration of key documents, rebuffs from the supporters of Peron … Read more
Greg Grandin New York: Metropolitan books, 2006, $25.00 Reviewing a biography of Harold Laski in 1953,([1]) the historian A. J. P. Taylor remarked on ‘the dilemma of our times’: that ‘no-one who believes in liberty can ever work sincerely with communists, or trust them, yet no-one who has socialism in his bones can ever … Read more
The story of the Ulster Citizens’ Army (UCA for the rest of this essay) is a tiny fragment in the intricate history of Protestant politics in Northern Ireland in the mid 1970s – so tiny that none of the general accounts I have looked at even mention it. But the UCA lingers on: it is … Read more
In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more
Official openings We don’t have a Freedom of Information Act, and are not likely to get one from any of the British political parties. Imagine a conversation in the office of the new Labour Prime Minister in a year or three: ‘FOI? Too much trouble, too much aggro with Whitehall. As if we need any … Read more
