[…] themselves as evangelical Christians, and a quarter believed they were living in the ‘end times’. That is a huge number: the equivalent of half of those who vote in Presidential elections. Premillennialism has also, Northcott thinks, influenced American religion more generally, making it much more Manichaean (the ‘good/evil’ thing), antisocial, crusading and war-like than […]
‘You don’t investigate people for why they think but for what they do.’ – former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti (1) Introduction If nothing else, the Iran-Contra scandal temporarily illuminated the extent to which ostensibly private organizations have been helping secretive elements within the American government — in this case the core of the executive branch’s … Read more
[…] Barney Greenwald reducing Commander Queeg to a gibbering mess in The Caine Mutiny and the gentle liberal Henry Fonda destroying Lee J Cobb to get his “not-guilty” vote in 12 Angry Men.’ I doubt if the publicity machine behind Frost/Nixon could have put it better. Here we have the interviews elevated to these ‘forensic […]
[…] a bomb into the U.K. and cause an apparent nuclear accident close to a U.S. air force base in East Anglia. This would ‘panic the 10% floating vote into unilateralism, and support at the polls the only party pledged to unilateralism, the Labour Party.’ (p.179) An analogous theme, of radioactive waste and the KGB, […]
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie Giles Scott-Smith,(1) who wrote about the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Lobster 36 and 38, has written a very interesting study of Margaret Thatcher’s first visit to America in 1967.(2) Scott-Smith shows that Thatcher, then a junior shadow spokesperson in the Tory Party, was talent-spotted by the State Department’s man in the … Read more
[…] Board, Schumacher was a socialist who, according to his close friend and colleague George McRobie, believed that his hand would drop off if ever he cast a vote for the Conservatives. He distrusted another major figure who emerged in the organic and environmental movement at this time, Edward Goldsmith, partly on account of his […]
Rodney Stich Diablo Western Press, PO Box 5, Alamo, CA 94507, USA $28 plus $4 shipping in the US. Outside the US inquire first at 1-800-247-7389 (phone) 925- 295-1203 (fax) This is the successor to Stich’s Defrauding America, reviewed in Lobster 34. As with the earlier work, it is impossible to verify and difficult … Read more
STANLEY MAYNE A Socialist Caucus pamphlet put out in June 1984, Cold War and Class Collaboration: Red Baiting and Witch-Hunts in the Civil Service Unions suggested that ‘A rather mysterious affair occurred in the IPCS (Institute of Professional Civil Servants). Its General Secretary, Richard Nunn, who had in April 1962 correctly realised that the Radcliffe … Read more
Philip Hoare, Duckworth Press, London, 1997, £16.99 The opening of MI5’s archives up to and including 1919 gives historians and researchers the chance to exhume the genesis of the right in British domestic politics as well as the early activities of the secret state. Despite its title (Oscar died in 1900) Hoare dips quite a … Read more
[…] elections. (For all their chatter about ‘mould breaking’ and the centre ground, the effect of the SDP was utterly divisive and destructive.) The splitting of the anti-Tory vote on these two occasions was so significant that no political party, under even brilliant leadership, could have gone from where Labour was in 1983 to forming […]
