Just ten years ago the issues were so simple, the arguments so clean. The concept of hackers was cute and quaint, best understood through Hollywood thrillers like ‘War Games.’ The major media had yet to use the word ‘cyberspace,’ a term just then created by William Gibson in Neuromancer, his first masterpiece in a strange … Read more
Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain … Read more
Introduction On May 20th this year the San Francisco Examiner ran a story by Kathy Kadane which began, ‘The U.S. government played a significant role in one of the worst massacres of the century by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and killed … Read more
Introduction: While my piece on CIA and DoD psychic research was awaiting publication in Lobster 30, the CIA went public on its interest in so-called Remote Viewing (RV).(1) As a result much new information has been obtained. This piece should be read in conjunction with the piece in Lobster 30. At the time of the … Read more
Peter Gill Frank Cass, London, 1993 Academia’s a swine. Writing an essay on International Relations (the ideological version of Foreign Office ‘realism’) for my Politics MA, I managed to smuggle in a few references to actual politics — European Nuclear Nuclear Disarmament, the SNP, and ‘independence within Europe’, that kind of thing. Flushed with success, … Read more
At the end of World War II, hundreds of thousands of non-German workers, mostly from the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries, were stranded in Germany, while many thousands more were fleeing from areas overrun by Soviet forces. Most of these workers were anti-communist, anti-Soviet and anti-Russian; some had voluntarily collaborated with the Nazis, … Read more
The Paris Review (PR hereafter except in quotations) has a new editor. Philip Gourevitch, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for his book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda and a writer for The New Yorker, has taken the position that was held … Read more
Mandy’s place in things On 12 June 1999 The News, Portugal’s weekly English-language paper, ran this comment on the Bilderberg meeting which had then just taken place in Portugal. The 47th Bilderberg Conference has come to an end. Members and one-off participants have departed as discreetly as they arrived. Lines of black limousines, unmarked except … Read more
Gecas and Special Branch A wonderful example of the reach and power of intelligence connections was provided in January. Why did the British state refuse to extradite Anton Gecas, the WW2 Lithuanian war criminal, to the Soviet Union in 1976? Turns out not only had Gecas worked for SIS at the end of WW2, he’d … Read more
Fleshing Out Skull and Bones: Investigations into America’s Most Powerful Secret Society Ed. Kris Millegan Waterville (Oregon): TrineDay, 2003, (UK) £28.50, h/back Distributed in the UK by Gazelle Books, www.gazellebooks.co.uk As an illustration of how much the American media’s view of secret societies has changed in the last 20 years, have a look at … Read more
