Down Under
David Lange may have come and gone and the New Zealand Labour Party may have blazed a rightwards trail for Tony Blair et al to follow, but the New Zealand anti-military, anti-spook campaigns continue. The latest journal to document the activities of the spooks and military in that part of the Pacific is Peace Researcher; Journal of the Anti-Bases Campaign. I have received issue 5 which includes several interesting, well documented pieces on the activities of ASIO, ASIS, the US Air Force in the region, and on GCHQ’s move from Hong Kong to Australia. Overseas subscriptions are $25 Australian per annum, to Peace Researcher, PO Box
2258, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Gott’s Reply
Richard Gott, the Guardian journalist who let the Soviet Union help him get around the world in the late 1960s and 70s, has written a kind of reply to his critics, unapologetically surveying his time as foreign correspondent. There is nothing very startling here – and no new details about his contacts with Soviet personnel – but it is nonetheless interesting to be reminded how American imperialism appeared to him then. His piece, ‘Pull the curtain from your eyes’, is in The Printer’s Devil, issue F, from: Top Offices, 13a Western Road, Hove BN3 1AE, £4.99. This is a literary journal of new writing, part subsidized by the Arts Council of England.
I presume that the proximate cause of the attack on Gott was his review of the memoirs of the ITN journalist, Sandy Gall, in the Guardian of 12 February 1994, in which he pointed out that Gall had been working with SIS in his reporting of the war in Afghanistan.
Turkish delights (not)
All summer British TV carried ads for holidays in Turkey. It looks wonderful, so more’s the pity Turkey is now a major practitioner of state terrorism against its Kurdish population. This is analysed at length in a densely documented 60 page report, Beyond the Paradise of Infinite Colours; Turkish state terror, tourism and the Kurdish question, by Desmond Fernandez, a draft of which I have seen. Even if, like me, you know nothing about the main subject, there is interesting material on the way academic terrorologists and propagandists, such as Paul Wilkinson, have joined in the business of whitewashing the Turkish regime’s terrorism, and on the role of the British military-industrial complex in arming it. A fuller account will appear in the next Lobster, but for information on this report’s publication, contact Defend the Kurds in Britain and Europe Campaign, 0171 250 1315.
Funny, flexible old thing, the concept of ‘Europe’. In the Eurovision Song Contest, ‘Europe’ includes Israel; and NATO member Turkey is apparently going to join the European Union.
Chipping away
Chip Berlet is a sort of American Gerry Gable: while formally monitoring the far right, he ends up in some funny places with some funny people. Berlet was discussed by Daniel Brandt in Lobster 24 (pp. 7 and 8) and now Ace R. Hayes (a long time friend of this organ) has given Berlet a thorough, chapter and verse rubbishing in his piece ‘Berlet for Beginners’ in Portland Free Press July 1995. This is a very good issue, for in addition to Hayes there is a piece on the CIA’s co-opting of civilian air planes for covert missions, discussion of Oklahoma, an FBI agent provocateur, and an essay by Professor Carrie Foster of the Coalition on Political Assassinations Speakers Bureau, ‘Conspiracy is as American as Apple pie’.
Must be something in the water up there in the North-west. Good stuff, from PO Box 1327 Tualatin, Oregon 97062, USA; $4 per issue; add another dollar outside the U.S.
Eric Miller
In some of London’s radical bookshops there is an anonymous 8-page, stapled pamphlet The Eric Miller Affair. As someone pointed out to me recently, Miller was conspicuous by his absence from Smear!– an oversight, nothing more interesting – though he does get a brief mention in Ben Pimlott’s Harold Wilson. Miller was one of those slightly rogueish, dodgy businessmen for whom Wilson had a penchant, and who ingratiated themselves with him by providing the Labour Party with money, planes, helicopters and so on. Miller died in 1977, just ahead of inquiries into the collapse of his business, a suicide – or ‘suicide’ – the inverted commas here the result of press reports that he shot himself twice in the head. (A highly unusual but not, I suspect, a quite unique occurrence.)
This pamphlet, alas, is an exemplar of how not to do it. First published in 1977 or thereabouts, the author, or authors, to judge from the typeface and line drawing on the cover, are the same person or persons who put out the first UK version of the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File, and this pamphlet is the first example of an attempt to fit UK events into the framework provided by Gemstone. On the first page we get Miller, Judah Binstock, Lansky, Luciano, Nixon, Onassis, Danite Mormons (?), Watergate, Hughes, Kennedy, CIA JFK, the Warren Commission……It’s a farrago in which one or two suggestive facts are buried under a torrent of nonsensical assertions. For Gemstone buffs only.