[PDF file]: Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare Thomas Rid London: Profile Books, 2020, 513 pp, £10.99 Colin Challen The dissemination of disinformation is as old as the hills, and now, thanks to the Internet, its transformation from the analogue age to the digital has given it what Rid explains as a post-modernist […]
[PDF file]: […] this in essay in Lobster 72 at . 14 History occurs in a context not of minutes but years, decades, even centuries. When the US embassy in Iran was seized after the overthrow of the Shah, none of the respectable media explained that the Shah had been installed by the CIA after having overthrown […]
[PDF file]: […] This is all being organised by al-Qaeda, and, moreover, ‘it has recently been reported’, that this invasion ‘may be’ being carried out in alliance with Venezuela and Iran. Rubin puts forward a plan for how to defeat this attempted Muslim takeover. Among his recommendations are an immediate ban on all Muslim immigration into the […]
[PDF file]: Sex scandals and sexual blackmail in America’s deep politics Jonathan Marshall Note: In my ‘Blackmail and the Deep State’, also in this issue of Lobster, I discussed the importance of political blackmail as a force in America’s deep politics from the late 1950s to Watergate. This article, which also addresses Watergate, focuses on the politics […]
[PDF file]: The Devil’s Chessboard Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government David Talbot William Collins, London, 2015 HB, 686pp., illus., index, bib., refs., £25.00 This truly excellent biography is at least partly a biography of two men, Allen Dulles and his older brother John Foster. I write ‘at least partly’ because the […]
[PDF file]: Conspiracy theories and conspiracy facts THEY KNEW How a Culture of Conspiracy keeps America Complacent Sarah Kendzior New York: Flatiron Books 2022 John Newsinger Sarah Kendzior is one of the most interesting commentators writing about contemporary America. Her two previous books, The View from Flyover Country (2018) and Hiding in Plain Sight (2020), are essential […]
[PDF file]: […] and ensuing civil war. Finally Cockburn gets to the rise of ISIS, which he spotted very early on, and the present chaotic situation with Saudi Arabia and Iran funding proxy armies and NATO member Turkey assisting ISIS and attacking the Kurds (who are fighting ISIS). The major theme here is this: as happened in […]
[PDF file]: […] was elected by 62 million people and ‘no one could say he wasn’t doing what he promised. Renegotiating trade deals, tougher immigration laws, cutting taxes, exiting the Iran nuclear deal and winding back regulations. These are precisely the policies he promised during the campaign’. (p. 32) This, despite everything, seems to be the position […]
[PDF file]: […] the Saudis. AlQaeda’s atrocities were deliberately intended to provoke sectarian civil war, a methodology that is continued by Islamic State today. This inaugurated the proxy war with Iran that the Saudis have been waging in Iraq and later in Syria ever since. The extent to which the United States has found itself caught in […]
[PDF file]: […] tax farming which is now beginning as what’s left of the state is divvied-up among James Kirkup, ‘Britain had to plead with US to take part in Iran flotilla’, Daily Telegraph 06 Feb 2012. 22 Alan Travis, ‘Thatcher went behind cabinet’s back with Trident purchase’ The Guardian, 30 December 2011. 23 See Martin Beckford, […]
