Clippings Digest to May 31st. 1984 Policing The Miners Up to May 30th. These are only brief references to the major elements. Magistrates setting restrictive bail conditions. Guardian 5th April Police trying to buy NUM badges Guardian 19th May Police changing their ID numbers for picket duty Tribune 25th May Pickets charged with conspiracy for … Read more
The Kent and Sussex Courier is the archetypal regional conservative daily. It reflects an area that returns Conservative candidates for Parliament and Council like Alabamans would return ‘yellow dog’ Democrats. One recent police raid in ‘the war on terror’ was on an Islamic school, Jameah Islamiya, in Crowborough, East Sussex.([1])It is possible that the authorities’ … Read more
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 lay … Read more
Mel Gibson’s movie Throughout the ages, the Vatican’s iconic depiction of the Crucifixion has been an example of one of PR’s most effective ‘tactics’: the freeze-framing and subsequent promotion of a single event, to dictate perception, itself a marketing tactic. (The same ‘mind control’ is apparent in marketing today, when, say, a ‘life-style’ freeze-frame is … Read more
Hitler’s spy chief: the Wilhelm Canaris mystery Richard Bassett London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005, £20 This is a full and very well researched biography of one of the great enigmatic figures of the spy world in the 30s and 40s. The author, former foreign correspondent of The Times in Berlin and Prague, provides … Read more
The demise of Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London on 1 May was preceded by the publication of the latest account of his political career, Andrew Hosken’s Ken – The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone.(1) Although it contains some new and interesting material (but has no index), it is similar in many ways to … Read more
Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 Cees Wiebes Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, Studies in Intelligence History, 2003 ISBN 3-8258-6347-6 p/b, 34.9 euros, $39.95 from Amazon. The publisher declined to send me a review copy but I read one chapter sent by e-mail from the author. This isn’t my field but it seems to me … 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
Open Eye, the major media, and the New Age anti-semites Earlier this year, as editors/producers of the radical-green magazine Open Eye, we found ourselves investigating and trying to expose in the major media far right involvement in the Green and New Age movements. This included links to anti-semitic conspiracy theorists, Holocaust revisionists, the British Israelite … 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
