Wellington Pacific Review Owen Wilkes has ceased production of Wellington Pacific Review (ISSN 0135-5619), the New Zealand newsletter on events in that part of the Pacific, but it continues under the control of Iain MacDougall. At £10/ US 14 for 10 issues, WPR should be on the list of anyone with even a passing interest … Read more
Colin Challen MP First, buy your senator It wasn’t long after their election in 2000 that the business backgrounds of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney became mired in controversy. Cheney’s business career was not as long as Bush’s, but it personifies the role of crony capitalism endemic to U.S. politics. Cheney’s role as Halliburton’s … Read more
Rodney Stich Diablo Western Press, PO Box 5, Alamo, CA 94507, USA $28 plus $4 shipping in the US. Outside the US inquire first at 1-800-247-7389 (phone) 925- 295-1203 (fax) This is the successor to Stich’s Defrauding America, reviewed in Lobster 34. As with the earlier work, it is impossible to verify and difficult … Read more
From David Hambling On the topic of the People Zapper (Lobster 41 p. 9), the new ‘Active Denial System’ is probably not the first microwave weapon to be deployed. There have been repeated rumours of cruise missiles with HPM (high-powered microwave) warheads being used in former Yugoslavia to knock out communications centres, though apparently the … Read more
Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the quest for legitimacy Nigel Copsey Palgrave/Macmillan 2004, £47.50, h/b The Radical Right in Britain Alan Sykes Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005, £16.99, p/b Modern British fascism has been poorly served by academic research, especially when it comes to coverage of the last two decades. These books attempt to … Read more
The American boomerang In America, Mayor Bloomberg has banned smoking in public places, especially in restaurants, inadvertently turning New York into an unlikely but almost spook-free zone. (1) American intelligence officers may not smoke, but some of their overseas contacts will. If meeting in the West, they will prefer to do so in London; or, … Read more
Rogue State: A guide to the world’s only superpower William Blum Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $16.95 Globalize This! The battle against the World Trade Organization and corporate rule eds. Kevin Danaher and Roger Burbach Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $15.95 I have lumped these together partly because they are both published … 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
Editorially Writing in mid-January… good news is the arrival of The Digger, apparently set fair to replace Private Eye as the major outlet – major above ground outlet – for British parapolitics. (Lobster, as one British academic said to me, is ‘underground’…). The new Kincora-Blunt trail, opened up by Ken Livingstone in the House of … Read more
The Trial of Saddam Hussein Abdul Haq Al-Ani, Clarity Press, Atlanta, GA., 2008 Abdul-Haq Al-Ani’s troubling manifesto on behalf of the murdered Iraqi leader exposes bloody doings of empire from a lucid political-juridical perspective. ‘Imperialism is a universal historical phenomenon, but it remains, nevertheless, evil’, he writes (p. 23). ‘I use the term European [imperialism] … Read more
