Ivan Molloy London: Pluto Press, 2001, £18.99/£55 In the 1980s the resurgent US military and neo-conservatives were in a bind: faced with a variety of challenges to the American economic empire, the enormous military power they possessed was constrained by PR considerations; American parents who didn’t want their children dying abroad (the so-called ‘Vietnam … Read more
[…] Dulles, was working with McDonald, then Chief of Security for Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Kimsey allegedly told McDonald at that time details of the plot to kill Kennedy. The actual assassin, Kimsey maintained, was a contract killer sometimes employed by Kimsey on behalf of the CIA. In his book Appointment in Dallas (1975), […]
George McT. Kahin London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, £17.95, p/b The late George Kahin was a pioneering US scholar of Southeast Asia in the post WW2 era. This memoir describes some of his travels in the 1945-70 period, when he behaved rather like a CIA officer (for which he was occasionally mistaken), talking to the rising … Read more
Thanks again to Terry Hanstock and David Turner for contributions. Although all URLs are checked shortly before publication, occasionally websites unaccountably disappear. Contributions, comments and info welcome – my email address is Secrecy, censorship FOI and released records Freedom of Information Draft Bill http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/foi/dfoibill.htm Link to the draft FOI Bill (May 1999) and FOI … Read more
The other Bilderberg Between 1964 and 1966 there was a little-known attempt to establish a new Commonwealth conference modelled on the Bilderberg Group, with Prince Philip lined up to take a leading role. Nothing ever came of it, mainly because of the impact that Rhodesia’s UDI had on Commonwealth affairs. Newly released documents from The … Read more
[…] number of ‘conspiracy theorists’ have assumed that this man was signalling to the assassins, thus tying a seemingly trivial and inconsequential act into the alleged plot to kill Kennedy. It is precisely this totalistic, all-encompassing quality that distinguishes ‘conspiracy theories’ from the secret but often mundane political planning that is carried out on a […]
I invited David Turner to begin writing a regular column for Lobster. He agreed then rang to tell me his computer had been attacked by a virus and could not meet my deadline. (He is the second contributor to this issue to have been virused recently.) But I had on file this splendid polemic written … Read more
Part 1, 1974-83 See also: Part 2: British Fascism 1974-92 (II) (Lobster 24) 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 This essay does not set out to be a comprehensive history of fascism in this period but rather to … Read more
PART 1 See also Part 2 in Lobster 6 Most Western political scientists, following in the traditions of Marx or Weber, scorn the study of secret and occult societies as irrelevant to understanding the politics of the age. In their view, politics can best be understood as the working out, in public arenas, of bureaucratic, … Read more
[…] is about the worth of the state as planner since it is quite clear now that all large organisations have a tendency to sclerosis and entropy. They kill the human spirit by their very nature. To me, the Left ends up as an ethic of opposition to any attempts to assert essentialism over the […]
