[…] no-one who had read, say, Alfred McKoy’s The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia, exactly the same thing happened, for exactly the same reasons, when the Reagan administration set about destroying the Sandinista regime. It was simplicity itself: planes flew from America carrying supplies for the CIA’s contra army camped along the Nicaraguan […]
[…] explore and support his thesis about LIC clutters up with a lot of repetitive discussion of LIC and its predecessors an interesting and detailed account of the Reagan administrations’ attempts to ‘roll back revolution’. Molloy would justify by this by claiming that LIC really was something substantially new, not just ‘counter-insurgency under a new […]
[…] far from being ‘Finlandized’ or GDR-ized, far from drifting slowly into the Soviet orbit, saw the beginning of the right-wing moves which now see Thatcher, Kohl and Reagan in power. To this mere book-reading outsider one of the odder features of the great ‘mole hunt’ has been the contrast between the wilder stories told […]
[…] off for a holiday with Albert Camus’ L’Étranger on his reading list?(9) There is a group of new books out in the US trying to represent Ronald Reagan as a wise and intelligent leader and not the dummy he appeared to be.(10) There is section of the American political intelligentsia which is acutely discomfited […]
[…] into power in much of Europe, America and Australasia. It is arguable that without the oil price hike in 1974 we would not have had Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their subsequent effects on the world. An e-mail to the Observer journalist who conducted the interview with Yamani went unanswered but I had an idea: […]
[…] such as it is – is not so very far away from Webster’s contemporary followers in the John Birch Society. Those with long memories will recall that Reagan was a Goldwater supporter in 1964, the year the Birchers had captured much of the grass roots of the Republican Party. Through the Birchers and related […]
[…] to know. Running Soviet themes? I have been accused of running Soviet disinformation by Herb Rommerstein, a big cheese in the United States Information Service during the Reagan years. In fact in all the years I have been doing this I have never seen a piece of Soviet disinformation. I have seen lots of […]
[…] Myth of the Lone Wolf Robin Ramsay, Undercurrents No 62. Jan./Feb. 1984 Written nearly three years ago, and essentially an immediate response to the Hinkley attempt on Reagan, pointing out the obvious inconsistencies in the press reports. Much has happened since. Hinkley has spoken of the group he was part of (reported on NBC’s […]
[…] clear that MI5 thought they could fight the war/conflict with the PIRA to a finish, and that the Americans, excepting bits of Cold War rhetoric from the Reagan era, have always supported at least the possibility of a negotiated settlement, one which would necessarily involve compromise. Without buying into Enoch Powell’s notion that the […]
[…] of the US Information Agency, and James A. Baker, White House Chief of Staff. (International Herald Tribune 5th January 1984). Wicks asked Baker to arrange for President Reagan to meet a group of businessmen he had put together under the banner ‘Project Democracy’, a propaganda effort to ‘support democratic institutions abroad’. They were to […]
