[…] The Hidden Face of the Labour Party, a large tabloid-style pamphlet warning of the penetration of the Labour Party by ‘communists’ and, in the 1979 version, by ‘communist’ and Trotskyist groups. Contemporary reports suggested these pamphlets had been distributed by the million. I met him in 1987. He was a very charming toff. I […]
[…] revolutionary organizations, economic pressure groups, secret societies with hidden political agendas, and the like? No monolithic conspiracy There has never been, to be sure, a single, monolithic Communist Conspiracy of the sort postulated by the American John Birch Society in the 1950s and 1960s. Nor has there ever been an all-encompassing International Capitalist Conspiracy, […]
[…] easy target, and that the attribution needs to be specifically proved in each case. For such claims of a general nature have often been advanced by official Communist parties as an alibi for their own political failings. There is little attempt at sociological explanation of terrorism, although Willan might reply that such speculation has […]
Greg Grandin New York: Metropolitan books, 2006, $25.00 Reviewing a biography of Harold Laski in 1953,() the historian A. J. P. Taylor remarked on ‘the dilemma of our times’: that ‘no-one who believes in liberty can ever work sincerely with communists, or trust them, yet no-one who has socialism in his bones can ever […]
[…] to deny the 1948 elections to the Communists. By 1950 the Mafia again controlled Sicily. The CIA was also paying the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles to undermine Communist influence with striking workers. These Mafia syndicates were sufficiently well-protected that in 1951 they opened their first heroin lab. By 1965 there were two dozen labs […]
[…] the United States recruited many of them as “freedom fighters’, spies and saboteurs. They also describe how the Soviets were able to infiltrate many of the anti- communist organisations who were ostensibly working for Western intelligence. At the end of World War II, the American, British and French zones of Austria and Germany, as […]
[…] Cynthia Street. 6 Cynthia Street was the headquarters of Democratic Left, which had been the beneficiary of the final struggle between the hardline ‘tankies’ and the euro- communist revisionists of the old Communist Party as the latter’s limited national influence collapsed under the enormous strain of dealing with the unravelling of the Soviet Empire. […]
[…] to be retired to prevent further damage to the Agency. But interesting current research shows that Angleton’s politics were by no means those of the conventional anti- Communist: he appears to have been a man of convictions but these were not necessarily those of modern capitalism. These reflections derive from the work of an […]
[…] for example, to see that: “In exposing Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent, Congressman (sic) Richard Nixon made a major contribution to the bringing home of the Communist menace and therefore to the mobilisation of popular support for an interventionist foreign policy.” (15) For a member of the Israeli lobby in 1976 when that […]
Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain […]
