Feedback From Ernest Wistrich Dear Sir, I have read the article ‘Spinning the European Union: pro-European propaganda campaigns in the British media’ by Andy Mullen in your Winter 2002 issue. Whilst it contains a number of minor inaccuracies it includes one major misrepresentation, namely that the European Movement, of which I was director between 1969 … Read more
Introduction by Kenn Thomas Foreword by David Hatcher Childress Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois, USA, 1996, $16.00 Also known as ‘Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal’, the so-called Torbitt Memorandum (‘Document’ here for some reason) has been floating around the JFK research world since the early 1970s. Torbitt looked quite promising initially: lots of interesting … 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
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire Anne Norton New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004 $25/£16 What’s the Matter with America? Thomas Frank The Resistable Rise of the American Right London: Secker & Warburg, 2004, £12 Most of us in Europe find it difficult to understand what happened in America on … Read more
James McConnachie and Robin Tudge, London, New York: Rough Guide Ltd (Penguin Books), 2005, p/b £9.99 / $14.99 (US) / $22.99 (Can) This chunky paperback is intended to give readers an introduction to the world of conspiracies and the theories around them, as opposed to works which discuss conspiracy theories as a topic in … Read more
NFTB There is a new issue, no 6, of Larry O’Hara’s Notes from the Borderland. It is 68 pages, glossy paper, with essays on ‘journo-cops’, Paul Foot, Shayler and Machon and the Copeland bombing. In the UK this is £3.50 from BM 4769, London WC1N 3XX; a two issue sub is £7.50. Outside the UK: … 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
Mark Urban Faber and Faber London 1996 £16.99 The first sentence of Urban’s conclusion to this very interesting and rather important book is: ‘More than anything else, British intelligence is a system for repackaging information gathered by the USA.’ He might have added, ‘information gathered in large part at US bases in Britain’. Urban has … Read more
Dr Mary’s Monkey Edward T. Haslam Waterville (Oregon): Trineday, 2007 (www.Trineday.com) $19.95 (US), p/b The Kennedy assassination literature has produced some oddities over the years but this takes the biscuit. A sense of this is conveyed by what must be one of the longest subtitles in publishing history: ‘How the unsolved murder of a doctor, … Read more
The discussion of conspiracy in the mainstream media tends towards a very specific formula. The writer first notes with shock and disappointment the growing popularity of conspiracy theories and then goes on to provide explanations for this new popularity. This explanation almost always assumes that these theories about the ‘true’ nature of social reality exist … Read more
