Historical Notes: Blair and Gladstone

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

[…] which safeguarded the route to India. It was at this point that Britain’s Liberal government decided on intervention. It hoped for French support, which would, in Gladstone’s mind at least have helped to preserve some element of international respectability about the enterprise – but none was forthcoming. So a unilateral British invasion occurred. Arabi’s […]

Thinking about the Falklands

Lobster Issue £££

[…] even more in her determination to demonstrate the “persistence of illusions about Britain’s place in the world.” (1) This version of events is attractive to the liberal mind because it looks like an exemplary demonstration of the cockup theory of history, and it is that which passes for political sophistication in most of respectable […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

[…] Still very much in the land of the living is an old political associate of both departed peers, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee. A teasing thought crossed my mind during the phoney leadership war in the days before the Labour Party conference when Toynbee switched her allegiance to David Miliband from Gordon Brown. (We are […]

The Case Against Israel, and, The Power of Israel

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

The Case Against Israel Michael Neumann Oakland (US): CounterPunch, $15 Edinburgh (UK): AK Press, £10, 2005 The Power of Israel in the United States James Petras Atlanta and Black Point: Clarity Press and Fernwood Books, 2006, $16.95   In a year in which Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza were accompanied by more stories of … Read more

Policing Politics: Security Intelligence and the Liberal Democratic State

Lobster Issue 27 (1994) £££

[…] out no operation, investigation, surveillance or action against any individual otherwise than for the purposes laid down in its directive.’ The words ‘lying’ and ‘bastard’ come to mind, as they say. Gill takes a deep breath and contents himself with observing that ‘such an inquiry, to be carried out properly, would have taken many […]

Conservative Radicalism: a Sociology of Conservative Party Youth Structures and Libertarianism 1970-1992

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

[…] was perceived as anti-socialist/communist, the FCS became cheerleaders for whichever bunch of murderous thugs happened to be getting support from Washington: Renamo and the Contras come to mind. About Mozambique or Nicaragua, they knew the best part of fuck-all; but they didn’t need to: if X was fighting a socialist government, X deserved their […]

Watergate revisited: Hougan’s ‘Secret Agenda’

Lobster Issue 9 (1985) £££

[…] as the Nixon people knew that the CIA knew, they (the White House) must have known that it was all going to come out. With this in mind we should perhaps not so readily accept Hougan’s assertion that the Agency couldn’t have foreseen the outcome. Indeed, we need not assume – as Hougan does […]

Psi Spies

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Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

[…] which I’ve read a couple, but also in Jim Schnabel’s 1997 Remote Viewers, which covers very similar ground to Marrs, and in a chapter in Armen Victorian’s Mind Controllers. Of the two book-length accounts I prefer Schnabel; but if that is no longer available, Marrs’ version of the material would do. For the basic […]

UDA: Inside the heart of Loyalist terror

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££

Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack London: Penguin, 2004, £12.99, p/b   Henry McDonald’s highly readable recent book with Jim Cusack on the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) is everything that other recent offerings on the subject were not. On the one hand, it avoids the kind of borderline homo-erotic sensationalism, in which the atrocities of self-serving … Read more

Web update

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998) £££

[…] Expose Government Corruption and Corporate Crime http://www.well.com/user/pfrankli/ Provides info on high level corruption and crime; eg Danny Casolaro case (INSLAW, PROMIS etc); Iran-Contra affair; BCCI; Panam flight 103; Savings and Loan Industry failure; CIA; NSA; FBI: government corruption during cold war, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s etc. Extensive links, including material on conspiracies, mind control, media censorship.

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