[…] his subject and the economic sections of the book are inadequate. After 200 interviews Bower cannot decide if Brown is a labourist disguised as a neo- liberal or a politician who, like Harold Wilson in the famous Private Eye cartoon, faces both ways at once: to his party and the unions he comes […]
The Trial of Saddam Hussein Abdul Haq Al-Ani, Clarity Press, Atlanta, GA., 2008 Abdul-Haq Al-Ani’s troubling manifesto on behalf of the murdered Iraqi leader exposes bloody doings of empire from a lucid political-juridical perspective. ‘Imperialism is a universal historical phenomenon, but it remains, nevertheless, evil’, he writes (p. 23). ‘I use the term European [imperialism] … Read more
For some time, the world’s secret services have been making use of loose structures parallel to the official clandestine hierarchies for their more controversial activities. Fred Holroyd’s revelations have shown how the British state employed Loyalist paramilitaries for kidnap and assassination operations in Eire, whilst the Irangate hearings have exposed what is, so far, the … Read more
[…] with Kenn Thomas for Steamshovel. I deeply resent Chip Berlet, Z Magazine, various books, that run stories that I am a Nazi. The problem is that the liberal press will not runs stories about what I do…. I’m an orthodox Jew. My mother and her whole family died in the Warsaw ghetto….To say I’m […]
[…] they included Alan Sked, who later split from it to launch the UK Independence Party. Sked, who began his political career as a parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party in 1970, eventually left the UK Independence Party in 1998. He is an historian and published Britain’s Decline (1987) an extremely gloomy look at the […]
[…] two world wars, etc? I believe he worshipped power and for him the global power of European culture meant that it must be right. He was a liberal and believed that liberalism belief in freedom, rights, democracy, equality of women was essentially a European idea, linked to a ‘European structure of mind’ […]
[…] the International Monetary Fund or encouraging the spread of Keynesian economics, was done in pursuit of causes which were inspired by what were in the 1940s mainstream liberal and socialist rather than Communist ideas. We cannot say that they were Stalinists at heart simply because they met Communist agents, since (a) what evidence we […]
Ed. Jon Melissen London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, h/b, £50.00 Just after World War 1, a group of the liberal-left in Britain began campaigning against orthodox i.e. secret diplomacy. It had caused the mind-bogglingly stupid carnage of World War 1, they argued, and had to go. This was the Union for Democratic Control […]
[…] I knew just enough about the role of the state in domestic politics to see the importance of their experiences. In what passes for the theory of liberal democratic states like ours, there is no such political role – the state is neutral. There are interests in society aligned to parties, which fight elections […]
[…] Market Campaign, with Roy Jenkins as deputy, which aimed to recruit Labour intellectuals and trade unionists to its cause. Other campaigns were launched by the Conservative and Liberal parties, Federal Union (assisted by a number of former civil servants), the United Europe Association (with support from several religious leaders), businesses (British and European bankers, […]
