Since the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London on 5 May 1980, the Special Air Service (SAS) has become a cultural phenomenon as much as a military one; has become, in the words of its former Director, Peter de la Billiere, ‘a living embodiment of the individualism of the British’. Their heroic exploits have … Read more
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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
[…] of the Labour Party, a core position: can socialists be pro-nuclear? The cold-war warriors of Labour never attempted to develop a left foreign or defence policy, never mind a socialist one. Stewart remained firmly on the extreme right of the party on what were, for the Americans, key policy issues. He even went as […]
[…] that an effective analysis of the use of power “should refrain from posing the labyrinthine and unanswerable question who then has power and what has he in mind?” Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely investigated in its real and effective […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Brian Crozier HarperCollins, London, 1993 This is a very interesting book which greatly adds to our knowledge of the clandestine shaping of British politics in the 1970s and 80s. It is also a book which, like Chapman Pincher’s Inside Story, will repay repeated re-reading. But amidst all the new material a surprising amount of these … Read more
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
