[…] of Gemstone is demonstrably false, much else uncheckable, almost all of it profoundly implausible, the damned thing’s continued circulation these past 25 years is a depressing testament to the intellectual sloppiness of conspiracy buffs. (Which is pretty much what Jim Hougan says about Gemstone in a letter of his about it included in this collection.)
Operation Julie, a nation-wide police investigation of LSD production, was launched in 1976. Two years later, although some 60 members of the British ‘microdot conspiracy’ had been convicted, Detective Inspector Dick ‘Leapy’ Lee was dissatisfied. The operational commander of ‘Julie’, Lee was interested in the international connections of the network, but was blocked from […]
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 […]
[…] intelligence operations which developed in Europe under the wing of the United States and that are now coalescing into the pan-European security agency of a new state-in-the-making. Conspiracy theorists who have managed to get past the idiocies of The Da Vinci Code will always point to Catholic involvement in the spiriting away of such […]
[…] to Chomsky, Cockburn and Hitchens – very much the critical insider. In keeping with this stance, however, Hersh has an almost visceral aversion to anything suggesting ‘ conspiracy’ – as evinced in his take on KAL 007 – and it is this bias which leads to an ultimately flawed, if highly readable work. Like […]
[…] essays you can follow Vidal on the final stage of his journey from being a kind of patrician, cynical, left-liberal out into parapolitics and even into American conspiracy theory culture. ‘Revisionist historian’ has come to mean people who want to deny the reality of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews in Europe. Before this […]
[…] Phillips provides the first detailed examination of which I am aware of the various dock strikes during the period. Phillips concludes that the various charges of ‘communist conspiracy’ made by members of the government and senior trade union officials were spurious, and probably known to be spurious at the time.(1) The one oddity about […]
[…] of books about Italian politics recently, and almost none of them willing to answer the question “Why Italy?” Why is Italy’s political culture so firmly based on conspiracy and secrecy? A part of that answer must be Italy’s role as the premier European site of the conflict between indigenous left-wing forces and NATO, the […]
Noam Friedlander London: Conspiracy Books/Collins and Brown, 2005, p/bk, £8.99 Apart from being an anagram of Oedipus, Opus Dei is a Roman Catholic organisation, which has grown from beginnings in Spain in the 1920s, led by José Maria Escriva, to being an evangelising force within the Catholic Church, aimed as much at the […]
[…] the attack on USS Liberty. ‘As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy four years earlier, the official version is even more unlikely than some of the conspiracy theories.’ John Simpson, forward to Peter Hounam’s Operation Cyanide (London: Vision, 2003) The well-documented rise of the neo-cons has highlighted again a seemingly enduring feature of […]
