The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] down mentioned it at every opportunity as proof of the Sandinistas’ immorality. “High level officials” of both Nicaragua and Cuba “have been personally implicated” in drug smuggling, Reagan said during the 1985 debates over contra aid (Reagan 1987:673–76). The State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, which managed the administration’s public-relations campaign against the Sandinistas, […]

The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret relationship with apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret relationship with apartheid South Africa Sasha Polakow-Suransky London: Vintage Books, 2011, £16.00 O ne of the striking features of the apartheid years was the courageous determination of many South African Jews to bring down a regime significantly sustained through close alliance with Israel. In part this was a relationship of […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013)

[PDF file]: Robin Ramsay Big stuff or disinformation? The most interesting and important collection of new information that I have seen this year is at . The jancom bit of the URL refers to the Justice for Asil Nadir Committee and there is pretty convincing evidence there that he got screwed. But I was most struck by […]

Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] and the likelihood was that high levels of violence would continue unless she sought a political solution to the Troubles. Four months before her narrow escape, President Reagan had visited the Irish Republic. Mindful of the significant scale and bi-partisan nature of the US ‘Irish lobby’, he told Thatcher on her reciprocal December 1984 […]

Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world by Nicholas Shaxson

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] held tax free, offshore, greatly advantaging those corporations. The author describes how attempts to control US money supply in 1979-81 were thwarted; and six months after Ronald Reagan took office the International Banking Facility was introduced in America, allowing US banks to pretend to be overseas banks. Thus the US moved to the UK […]

The End of the Republican Party: Three ‘Never Trump’ Conservatives on the Trump Presidency

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019)

[PDF file]: […] He praises Barry Goldwater (although he admits that, only recently having read what he actually had to say, ‘he really was an extremist’ (p. 168)), and Ronald Reagan (‘How I loved that man’ (p. 19).) And the late John McCain is fulsomely praised. Inevitably he regards Trump’s attacks on McCain as absolutely contemptible: ‘I […]

Donald Trump and the Christian Right

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018)

[PDF file]: […] United States is not new. It has been a growing influence within the Republican Party since the 1970s, and played an important role in both the Ronald Reagan and George W Bush Administrations. In order to ensure their support in the 2008 Presidential election, John McCain had to install the appalling Sarah Palin as […]

My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: […] told his audience, looked on by the whole world as ‘a shining city on a hill’. He praised Kennedy for putting a man on the moon and Reagan for winning the Cold War. America was truly ‘the indispensable nation’. After 9/11 the British people had ‘wept for our friends in the land of the […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] the Internet an essay entitled “What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want”1 3 concerning the expected war. Included in this were the words of Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, then at the 11 12 To add yourself to his mailing list, simply send an email to with “add” in the subject line. Blum is […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney worked to kibosh detente with the Soviets in the 1970s, preparing the way for the neocon revival of the Soviet ‘menace’ under Ronald Reagan and his successors.52 The actions listed by Sachs have their immediate roots in the mid 1970s and ultimately – diEugenio would argue, I think – on […]

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