On the jacket of his new book, reviewed in this issue, Steve Dorril writes there that he ‘is founder-editor of the widely respected journal’ Lobster. I invite you to look on the rear cover of this magazine and see who the editor is. That’s right: it’s not Steve Dorril. I have resisted going into detail … Read more
From April to late June 1992, I spent some three months in a Dutch refugee camp, OC Zeewolde. I had applied for political asylum. The Dutch authorities had agreed immediately, to fully process the application. I gave them no reason for my application. The Bosnian war was beginning and the Dutch reception centres for refugees … Read more
It now looks pretty certain to me that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a local Texas conspiracy on behalf of, and with the knowledge of, the then Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Most of the extant evidence for this can be seen on the web site ‘The Men on the Sixth Floor'(1) which advertises the … Read more
Dan Hind London: Verso, 2007, h/b, £24.99 Hind’s ‘concern is to examine how ideas from the historical Enlightenment function in contemporary society.’(p. 6) His starting point is the aftermath of 9/11 and the outbreak of loose talk of there being a conflict between radical Islam and ‘the enlightenment’. (12) Some of this came from … Read more
Introduction The British press is pretty feeble, and much of the problem begins with its cosy relationship with the British state. At the heart of that relationship is the ‘lobby system’, that peculiar British institution formed to allow the state and its political mouthpieces to lie to the media off the record. The document reproduced … 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
Pieces without an author are by the editor Parish Notices Thanks to Phil Chamberlain, Alex Cox, Richard Alexander, Robin Whittaker, Rom, Jane Affleck, Peter Watson, Chris Tame, Terry Hanstock and Phil Edwards for information, cuttings or sources. Somebody commented recently that Lobster had changed from its early days. Yes it has. This is inevitable. The … Read more
Editorially In this issue we are running the first half of something not originally written for the Lobster. It’s not that we’re short of copy, just that there is a lot of US material which we would like to recycle in this country, and this Marshall piece seemed like as good a piece as any … Read more
9:11 Revealed. Challenging the facts behind the War on Terror Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan London: Robinson, 2005; £8.99, p/b A declaration of a kind of interest: one of the authors of this book, Ian Henshall, is the Chair of INK, the Independent News Collective, to which Lobster belongs and whose leaflets Lobster has … Read more
Daniel Estulin Waterville (Oregon): TrineDay, 2007, $24.95, p/b To use an old word which has recently reentered my vocabulary, this is complete tosh. When it arrived I opened it at random and my eye fell on this, from a list of Bilderberg’s aims on p. 43: ‘One Socialist Welfare State. The Bilderbergers envision a … Read more
