The history of the police, fascism and anti-fascism in Britain, is dominated by three very different interpretations. First, there is the argument that the police acted as a constraint against fascism: intervening against fascist groups as the need arose. Second, there is the opposite view: that the police were a hindrance to anti-fascists, acting always … Read more
Weird Web Professor Peter Dale Scott reported the following in March. ‘Four times today I have tried to go to www.counterpunch.org. And four times Netscape was unable to find it. This happens frequently on my computer to websites which share my opinions, or to which I am hotlinked. And when I searched for ‘Alex Cockburn’ … Read more
‘They’re blanks!’ Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin? Barry Chamish Brookline Books, PO Box 1046, Cambridge, MA 02238, USA, $15.95 This is an interesting and important book. To its content I will return. But who is the author? Chamish is one of those names you cannot avoid if you potter around in the American conspiracy sections … Read more
Bernard Donoughue London: Jonathan Cape, £25, h/b Political diaries are among my favourite reading. In that genre this is an absolute belter; but not for the minutiae of policy formation, with which Donoughue was primarily preoccupied, or the account of the government’s handling of various incidents, interesting though they are; but for the picture … Read more
Harold Weisberg Harold Weisberg died at his home in Frederick, Maryland, on 21 February from a kidney ailment at the age of 88. He was one of the first generation of Warren Report critics along with Vincent Salandria, Ray Marcus, Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and others. He was a tireless critic of the Report and … Read more
Dangerous Liaison Between EU Institutions and Industry This is the first publication of Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), an Amsterdam-based foundation which will ‘monitor and report on the activities of European corporations and their lobby groups’. Very nicely produced and illustrated, this is 72 A-4 pages and costs £5.00 in the U.K. and US $10.00 in … Read more
See also: Part 1: British Fascism 1974-92 (Lobster 23) Part 3: British fascism 1983-6 (Lobster 25) Part 4: British Fascism 1983-6 (II) (Lobster 26) The 1986 National Front Split (Lobster 29) Introduction In the first part of this essay, in Lobster 23, after reviewing the strategies adopted by significant British fascist parties in the period, … Read more
Harold Pinter defined American foreign policy thus: ‘Kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in.’ William Blum counts the heads that have been kicked. United States foreign policy In 1975, there was a committee of the US congress called the Pike Committee, named after its chairman Otis Pike. This committee investigated the covert … Read more
Orwellian control, public denial, and the murder of President Kennedy E. Martin Schotz Kurtz, Ulmer and DeLucia, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1996 Distributed in the UK by Plough Publishing House (at 01580 883344), £15.50 This is a very odd book. It is beautifully printed, bound and laid-out – a pleasure to handle. Unfortunately the content doesn’t match … Read more
This is a slightly abridged version of part of chapter four of Mark Curtis’s book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed Press, 1995) reviewed below. In August 1953 a coup overthrew Iran’s nationalist government of Mohammed Musaddiq and installed the Shah in power. The Shah subsequently used widespread repression and torture … Read more
