Patriots not sneaks After a year of New Labour I feel beholden to write something on this subject, but what is there worth saying that isn’t blindingly and depressingly obvious and predictable? Jack Straw, who took over as Home Secretary, and thus formally as the boss of MI5, is determined to sedate any sleeping dogs … Read more
[…] International Workers Association. Who they? you ask. That I don’t know. Details at http://www.directa.force9.co.uk Heavy weather An impressive reworking of the evidence that the Libyans did not kill WPC Yvonne Fletcher was published in Squall and is – or was – on their Website at www.squall.co.uk/yes/ind2.html Drug wars and Another view of the Afghani […]
[…] become, sometimes in partnership with Noam Chomsky, the scourge of its conventional wisdom. In the early Reagan years we had an expose of the ‘Bulgarian plot to kill Pope John Paul II’ — a critical event in the winding up of the Second Cold War — and more recently The Terrorism Industry: the experts […]
John Newsinger London: Bookmarks, 2006, £11.99, p/b Fifty years after Suez is a good time for Britons to reflect on empire. Our military is again deployed in regions of the world more associated in the national mind with the 19th century than the 21st, while the children of the poorer regions of Britain are … Read more
Elite Jottings Fascinating letter in the Daily Telegraph (see 4 January and 9 January 1985) on the career of Dom Mintoff, recently retired as Prime Minister of Malta. Mintoff was a Rhodes Scholar (1939-41) and the 4 January letter informs us that “in the flush of the George Cross award (to Malta) he wanted integration … Read more
John Newsinger Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave; 2002 hb £47.50 To my knowledge this is the first account of Britain’s post-1945 colonial wars written from a radical left stand-point. By which I don’t mean that it is a load of left rhetoric – that is entirely absent; but the assumptions about legitimacy and right are on … Read more
Non-lethal weapons This is a scam, essentially. A smoke-screen of wacky bits and pieces – sticky stuff and gooey stuff and slippery stuff – conceals the real agenda, the development of various form of energy weapons. There was a big conference – billed ‘secret US only’ – in June this year, a ‘Detailed review of … Read more
Wick the forgotten One of the most prestigious, yet least challenging, posts in British journalism is that of Washington correspondent. Prestigious because of the importance of the United States; but least challenging because the natives speak English, more or less; and there are so many ready-made stories ripe for recycling to Britain, as the Internet … Read more
Hess: A Tale of Two Murders Hugh Thomas Hodder and Stoughton, London 1988 This is an update of Thomas’ 1979, The Murder of Rudolf Hess. Thomas argues (a) that the ‘Hess’ in Spandau prison wasn’t Hess at all but a double; and (b) that both the real and false Hess were murdered. The first proposition … Read more
A stranger harvest The best single volume on the alien abduction connundrum I have come across is C.D. B. Bryan’s Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1995). In it Linda Moulton Howe, the American film-maker who made A Strange Harvest about the ‘cattle mutilation’ phenomenon in the United States, describes to … Read more
