www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Winter 2014
Mac Wallace and the finger of guilt Lobster by Garrick Alder Apocryphylia by Simon Matthews Is a new ‘cold war’ coming? 68 by Dr T P Wilkinson Secrecy in Britain by Jonathan Bloch The View from the Bridge by Robin Ramsay Kim Besly, 1926-1996 by Nigel Norman The Conspiracy and Democracy Project by Robin Ramsay Chemtrails by T. J. Coles Tittle Tattle by Tom Easton New Labour against manufacturing by Robin Ramsay
Book Reviews The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne reviewed by T. P. Wilkinson Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the end of Empire by Aaron Edwards reviewed by Bernard Porter A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination by Philip Shenon reviewed by Anthony Frewin White House Call Girl by Phil Stanford reviewed by Robin Ramsay The President and the Provocateur by Alex Cox reviewed by Robin Ramsay The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark reviewed by Dr. T P Wilkinson Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War by Douglas Porch reviewed by John Newsinger The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine reviewed by Dr T. P. Wilkinson Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies reviewed by John Newsinger The Hawks of Peace by Dmitry Rogozin reviewed by Robin Ramsay The Establishment by Owen Jones reviewed by Tom Easton Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland by Anne Cadwallader reviewed by Robin Ramsay www.lobster-magazine.co.uk
Mac Wallace and the finger of guilt
Garrick Alder
This essay concerns disputes over the identification by latent fingerprint analysis of Malcolm ‘Mac’ Wallace as a party in the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy. While there is inevitably some technical discussion of the forensic processes involved, it is anticipated that such details will actually prove surprisingly enlightening, and perhaps even pleasantly so, to the general reader. After the breakthrough of the Wallace fingerprint identification was first announced by a Dallas-based group in 1998, 1 there followed a period of silence, then cautious acceptance of the identification among some researchers and shortly thereafter a minor slew of books about the evidence that incriminates Wallace and thereby implicates Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, as the main motivator behind the murder. This has now been superseded by a period in which critics have attempted to dismiss this evidence. There are two prominent and respected critics who object to the Wallace identification, the first an experienced jurist and the second a professional latent print examiner, and this essay will address each of them in turn. To deal with the most easily dismissed first, veteran lawyer Vincent Bugliosi attempted to rubbish the Wallace fingerprint identification in his enormous paean to Lee Oswald’s lone guilt as assassin, Reclaiming History (Norton, 2007). On page 923, he recounts a telephone conversation with Nathan Darby, the fingerprint expert who made the original match between Wallace’s fingerprint and an ‘unidentified’ fingerprint obtained from the ‘sniper’s nest’ from
1 The group consisted of Richard Bartholomew and John Frazer Harrison in Austin and Barr McClellan, then based in Houston. Walt Brown was recruited for the purpose of fronting the press conference at which the information was released. (Information from Richard Bartholomew.)
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which Kennedy was supposedly shot. The key passage from Mr Bugliosi’s tome is reproduced here, as follows: ‘On November 20, 2001, I spoke over the telephone with Darby. Eighty-seven at the time, he told me he had been the head of the Austin, Texas, police department's Identification and Criminal Records Section for several years. He had retired from the force and was still living in Austin. I told him I had trouble with his finding a “match” between prints found at the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor and the fingerprint exemplar card of Malcolm Wallace. “Why?” he asked. “Because,” I pointed out, “the unidentified latent print found on the sixth floor was a palm print, not a fingerprint, and unless you’ve come up with something new, I’ve never heard of anyone matching a palm print with a fingerprint.” Darby, sensing he had been taken, told me that he had been given “two fingerprints, one from a card, the other a latent. It was all blind. I didn’t know and wasn’t told who they belonged to [it was much later, he said, that he heard Malcolm Wallace’s name mentioned], although I recognized the layout of the card [he said all identifying features had been blacked out] as that of the Texas Department of Public Safety. I wasn’t given any palm print. They were both fingerprints. Of course, you can’t compare palm print with a fingerprint.” Any armchair fan of courtroom dramas, let alone anyone with experience of real-life court proceedings, will recognise at once Mr Bugliosi’s tactic here: an interrogating lawyer will attempt to produce verbal confusion in an inconvenient witness under questioning, and thereby introduce doubt in the minds of jury members as to that witness’s reliability. While this ‘trick of the trade’ might have produced favourable results in a courtroom, set down on paper in black and white it reflects far worse upon Mr Bugliosi than it does upon Mr Darby. Note, for example, how Mr Bugliosi attempts to influence his readers by characterising Mr Darby’s vocal reactions in a manner not available to him unless via telepathy (i.e. ‘sensing he had been taken’). If Mr Darby’s voice betrayed
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any uncertainty, I would suggest that it was probably a degree of disbelief over the sheer outrageousness of what Mr Bugliosi was proposing, i.e. that Mr Darby – a respected fingerprint examiner of several decades of experience – could easily confuse a fingerprint with a palm print. In any event, Mr Bugliosi’s cocksure complacency merely reflects the superficiality of his own understanding of the evidence. He apparently believed that the sniper’s nest fingerprints originally labelled as the FBI as ‘unidentified’ were indeed (as per the FBI’s report on the matter, recorded in the Warren Report 2) eventually identified as those of Richard Studebaker, a scene of crime officer from Dallas Police Department, or Forest Lucy, an FBI clerk. The only remaining unidentified print, according to the Warren Report, is the lone palm print referred to by Mr Bugliosi. Sadly for Mr Bugliosi, whose sincerity is not in question, he has been comprehensively taken for a ride along a false trail laid half a century ago. As definitively established by the formidable and meticulous JFK researcher Richard Bartholomew in his privately circulated 1998 monograph ‘Conflicts in Official Accounts of the Cardboard Carton Prints’3), the FBI did indeed match some of the unidentified prints to Officer Studebaker – but then performed a feat of legalistic legerdemain by recategorising other such ‘mystery prints’ as being incomplete or indistinct and then muddling up the exhibit numbers, apparently to disguise what they had done. This forensic furtiveness was then compounded by the Warren Commission’s staff, who introduced a completely new fingerprint exhibit numbering sequence from the FBI’s, making it nearly impossible for later re-investigators to follow the evidence from its origin to its final publication. The Wallace print was one of these falsely shuffled, discarded and then concealed prints, not one of those later matched to DPD Detective Studebaker or Mr Lucy. So much, then, for Vincent Bugliosi. The second critic of the Wallace match is a somewhat 2
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tougher nut to crack and doing so takes us into some detailed consideration of print examination. Kasey Wertheim is the son of famed US fingerprint expert Patrick Wertheim and a respected latent print examiner in his own right. On his website, he has a page4 which briefly dismisses Darby’s 1998 match as ‘erroneous’ by reference to two observable dissimilarities between the pair of prints presented to Darby. I contacted Mr Wertheim in early April 2014 and he agreed to be questioned on the matter. A somewhat fitful back-and-forth e-mail exchange then took place, and the most relevant sections of our conversation are outlined below. At this point, you may find it helpful to have the relevant page of Mr Wertheim’s website open in another browser, for reference. I asked Mr Wertheim about the number of discrepancies he had found between the two prints, since his webpage quite clearly implies he had found more than the two examples illustrated. He replied: ‘Quite frankly, when I got to one discrepancy I could have ended my analysis, but I went on to add another one just to put the issue to rest – to provide overwhelming evidence for my conclusion. If I remember correctly (and I haven’t re-analyzed the prints for this discussion, so it’s been a few years), there were other discrepancies on the edges of the impression but they weren’t as obvious as the two I pointed out. I wanted to portray straightforward discrepancies that anyone could see, right there in black and white, so I limited the demonstration to those two.’ As a layman, I would normally hesitate to take on a forensic expert in their own field. However, one of forensic science’s dirty little secrets is that there is in fact no formal training or qualification required to be able to present detailed analysis of fingerprint evidence in court cases in America. In theory, any reasonably observant person could therefore make a legitimate argument and a compelling case – although in
4
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practice, juries are probably more likely to be swayed by such a person’s experience and maybe their official status, particularly if they have, e.g., undergone FBI ‘training’ in fingerprint comparison.5 I therefore don’t think it is too presumptuous to criticise Mr Wertheim’s analysis in some detail. The ‘one discrepancy’ rule to which Mr Wertheim is alluding is that followed by the FBI in fingerprint analysis, which one might reasonably expect to represent a ‘gold standard’ for such procedures: basically, one non-matching point in an examined pair of prints disqualifies all the matching ones and means a positive identification between the two prints is ruled out. However, the question of discrepancies between otherwise compatible prints is very much a live issue among print examiners, with some experts tolerating several such discrepancies in making a positive identification. Indeed, Mr Wertheim’s own website has hosted a number of discussions between experts with differing opinions on the matter of discrepancies, and a reasonable reader’s impression of those debates might be that the analysis of such evidence can be a genuine case of ‘You pays your money and picks your expert’. The ‘one discrepancy’ rule has even been scornfully thrown out altogether by some authorities. In 1977, for example, a dissenting fingerprint expert wrote contemptuously: ‘Let us acknowledge that the one- dissimilarity doctrine has never been demonstrated to have originated from a firm scientific basis. Once we recognise this, we will not be forced to guess the manner of occurrence of unexplained differences. In view of a preponderance of matching characteristics, one dissimilarity isn’t important.’6
5 The FBI’s record of reliability in fingerprint analysis resisted criticism for decades due to the ‘clannishness’ of fingerprint experts, until the recent Brandon Mayfield fiasco, a truly frightening near miscarriage of justice that interested readers can study online. See, for example,
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The fact that discrepancies are sometimes observable between prints that are definitely known to come from the same finger was even noted by Sir Francis Galton, the father of the modern method, in his seminal work Finger Prints (1892). In this he discusses various reasons why discrepancies might arise, such as through the differences in pressure applied when depositing separate prints (with less pressure favouring the deposit of pronounced ridges and not shallower ones), or simple skin deterioration during the ageing process. In particular, he recorded an instance of a non- matching point that had apparently arisen naturally between taking a fingerprint from a child of two-and-a-half and then taking a second print when the child had matured into an adolescent of fifteen.7 Wallace’s police ‘ten-print’ from his 1951 arrest, used in Mr Darby’s comparison, was taken 12 years before the murder of JFK and even Mr Darby himself observed differences in the two prints that had arisen during the intervening time (e.g., he recorded what appeared to be an injury to the skin that was not present in the 1951 print but disrupted the 1963 print). He still felt confident enough to swear an affidavit stating that he had found 14 matching points, the threshold for admissibility in Texan courts. By all accounts, he later revisited the prints out of personal interest and found a 32-point match, which has to be considered as being beyond the possibility of coincidence by anyone’s standard (although why Mr Darby did not then also swear an affidavit to this more impressive match remains unknown, and since he is now dead we may never know). The general reader may at this point have gained the unexpected impression that fingerprint analysis is more akin to an art than a science. I would encourage this impression, because while it is perhaps somewhat cynical it is basically correct. Fingerprinting is not (at present) any form of science
7 Galton’s book is available online in a PDF facsimile edition at < http://www.biometricbits.com/Galton-Fingerprints-1892.pdf>. The chapter addressing dissimilarities in print pairs is number VI, entitled ‘Persistence’, and the discussion of the specific case of the maturing child commences on page 92.
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at all, not least because it has no known error rate.8 Fingerprinting is perhaps rather closer in nature to the skills employed by police ‘identikit’ artists, who produce a suspect’s likeness based on eyewitness statements, which may then be useful in identifying the malefactor and can often be produced in evidence. Such a reader’s rapidly unravelling faith in the supposed infallibility of fingerprint identification will only be accelerated when they consider the FBI’s ‘position statement’ on fingerprinting (boldly titled: ‘Fingerprints do not lie’) issued in 1969 after its own analysis was called into question during a court case hinging on conflicting interpretations of fingerprint evidence. In this document9 the following passage occurs, which is worth quoting in full: ‘[The opposition expert] testified that regardless of the number of matching characteristics present, one point of dissimilarity would result in the conclusion that the two fingerprints are not identical: that is, that they were not made by the same finger. FBI fingerprint experts state unequivocally that any two fingerprints possessing as many as 14 identical ridge characteristics, the number which the defense witness acknowledged when he testified concerning the fingerprint in question, would certainly contain no dissimilarities in the ridge formation.’ Any sense of unease or confusion felt by the reader at this point is 100 per cent justified: the Bureau is indeed, as it appears, quite explicitly contradicting its own ‘one discrepancy’ rule by stating that a 14-point match (such as Mr Darby's) will by definition contain no discrepancies, and thus presenting an astonishing case of ‘Having your forensic cake and eating it’. I put it to Mr Wertheim that inexactitudes, uncertainties and ambiguities inherent in fingerprint analysis such as those discussed above might qualify to some degree his apparent conviction that Mr Darby’s match was ‘erroneous’. He 8 For more on this see the appendix. This obviously absurd situation would present particular problems for Australian law enforcement officials. For a brief and amusing treatment, see < http://io9.com/ 5798400/koalas-have-exactly-the-same-fingerprints-as-humans>. 9 Reproduced at
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responded: ‘No, there is no uncertainty in the role of these two dissimilarities. I have seen many examples in my career where there is uncertainty. I have seen strange scars that seem to move details around; strange artefacts from live-scan devices that seem to do the same, etc. But there is no evidence of that in these impressions. And there certainly isn’t the level of similarity present to throw that analysis into question.’ Attentive readers may now think that his reply rings somewhat hollow. To sum up, I would categorise Mr Bugliosi’s dismissal of the Wallace print match as simply bluster and bluff at best, and (with all due respect) Mr Wertheim’s apparent confidence in his own deductions as being patently unsustainable to a crucial degree. It is my conclusion that the overall upshot of scrutinising the arguments of the two critics is that Mr Darby’s 1998 identification of Mac Wallace’s fingerprint has survived the onslaught of the most serious sceptics. Further developments are sure to follow.
Appendix Such an error rate would be impossible to determine with any degree of precision without repeatedly fingerprinting every person on the planet on an ongoing basis and comparing each and every print obtained with all the billions of others, and so on never-endingly. Fingerprints (as deposited marks) change due to pressure, age, injury and sometimes for no reason at all (as per the examples from the Galton work discussed) so the testing would need to be permanently ongoing to establish continuity of identity for each fingerprint bearer. And as fast as one print-bearer died, another one or two would be born. So not only continuity but cross-referencing would be needed to establish that a duplicate print-bearer had not been born at any given moment. And so on ad (very nearly) infinitum. I think the most accessible summary for a lay reader is
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Jennifer L Mnookin’s ‘Fingerprints: Not a Gold Standard’. 10 The key extract is this: ‘[The landmark case of Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals] invites judges to examine whether the proffered expert evidence has been adequately tested, whether it has a known error rate, whether it has standards and techniques that control its operation, whether it has been subject to meaningful peer review, and whether it is generally accepted by the relevant community of experts. Pollak found that fingerprinting flunked the Daubert test, meeting only one of the criteria, that of general acceptance. Surprising though it may sound, Pollak’s judgment was correct. Although fingerprinting retains considerable cultural authority, there has been woefully little careful empirical examination of the key claims made by fingerprint examiners. Despite nearly 100 years of routine use by police and prosecutors, central assertions of fingerprint examiners have simply not yet been either verified or tested in a number of important ways.’ Rather less accessible, but rather more magisterial is Robert Epstein’s ‘Fingerprints meet Daubert: the myth of fingerprint “science” is revealed’11 which includes this: ‘The DOJ [US Department of Justice] recognizes that the fingerprint field “needs” to develop “standardized” procedures for comparing fingerprints and that these “[p]rocedures must [then] be tested statistically in order to demonstrate that following the stated procedures allows analysts to produce correct results with acceptable error rates.”As the DOJ candidly concedes, such testing “has not yet been done.”’
*
10 At
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Addendum After initial publication Richard Bartholomew sent the following comment. ‘Wallace’s police “ten-print” from his 1951 arrest, used in Mr Darby’s comparison...’ (p. 6) When J. Harrison first started seeking Mac Wallace’s inked prints, he obtained a certified copy of the Austin Police Department’s card through his sources there. The prints on that card were so poorly inked they are useless. J. then sought a print card he suspected must exist at the Texas Department of Public Safety. The DPD located one but refused to release it, using various legal excuses. After a year or so of correspondence, J. convinced them they were wrong and obtained a certified copy. The DPD card is excellent quality.
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Apocryphylia
Simon Matthews
Letter of the week! Watching Newsnight or any of the other flagship current affairs programmes, it is striking how little attention is being paid to the possibility of Scottish independence. Coverage of day-to-day politics remains focussed on speculation about the outcome of the 2015 General Election, with a basic assumption that the UK as we know it will remain intact. This may be an accurate reading of the situation, and it may transpire that Alex Salmond has overplayed his hand. The debate, though, about the referendum and the arguments now being marshalled by the ‘No’ campaign are fascinating. In February, Sir Nicholas MacPherson, the Permanent Secretary to HM Treasury, gave formal written advice to ministers about whether – in the aftermath of an independence vote – Scotland should be allowed to retain the pound as its currency. He argued against, claiming: * Scotland might move to another currency in the longer term (true – presumably the Euro). * The banking sector in Scotland is too big in relation to its national income (true – but isn’t that the case for the UK generally?). * The rest of UK might have to support Scotland if ‘things went wrong’ (perhaps – shades here of the Irish crisis, where Ireland was underpinned by the EU. But if this happened, and Scotland turned to the EU why would that affect the rest of the UK? And wouldn’t we want Scotland to pull through, rather than write them off?) * The Scottish government will not follow a rigorous fiscal policy (Ah....!) His advice, on two sides of A4, avoids wider
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considerations and is based on extremely debatable assumptions. It contains nothing about industrial policy, full employment, future investment requirements in the domestic economies of either nation, the current level of the UK national debt compared to other advanced industrial nations and whether government revenue from personal taxation in the UK is now unsustainably low. Presumably he was restricting his reply to a very limited request from Cameron and Osborne for arguments to use against Scotland keeping the pound. None are convincing. Had the wider questions been put and had MacPherson chosen to address them, he could have started by spending about ten seconds doing some high-powered research on Wikipaedia about the impact made by North Sea Oil on the UK (and Scottish) economy in the early 70s. In 1973 the Heath government – rattled by the rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP) even then and casting around for arguments to use against them – commissioned a report from Gavin McCrone on how an independent Scotland might cope in the world economy.1 McCrone concluded that Scotland – on the basis of access to a reasonable percentage of the revenues from North Sea Oil – would have ‘the strongest national currency in Europe’. His report was promptly classified as Top Secret and was only released, under the 30 year rule, in 2005. Although HM Treasury and the media have failed to broaden understanding of why people support the SNP and the ‘Yes’ campaign, a number of historians have ventured into the field with some interesting commentaries. In his 2011 book Vanished Kingdoms Norman Davies spends pages 679-
1 The original draft of the McCrone Report is at
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685 addressing the possible independence of Scotland. He concludes ‘….that the United Kingdom will collapse is a foregone conclusion…’ and points out that Burgundy, Aragon and Prussia, all seemingly permanent fixtures of the European scene (in some cases for up to a thousand years) are all gone. Nor is complete disappearance the only option. His book contains many examples of shifting borders, dynasties that have vanished, states that have been subsumed, renamed or merged. The collapse of Yugoslavia into six (seven with Kosovo) different countries in recent times is an obvious case in point. The present difficulties in Ukraine are not dissimilar.2 More recently Linda Colley in Acts of Union and Disunion: What has held the UK together – and what is dividing it? (2013) points out that the UK is a recent and synthetic entity having only existed for a mere 400 years.3 Echoing McCrone she asks why a dependent Scotland is worse off than Denmark although it has same population and better resources than that country. Colley concludes that a major part of the problem is that the UK is actually a backward country constitutionally. Despite federalism being very common and generally working well everywhere (including the US – usually copied in all other matters) the UK is definitely not a federal nation and nor is there any local equivalent of the well resourced regional government that prevails elsewhere. Instead, the UK is governed directly from London by an unelected civil service and 656 MPs. The only exception ever allowed to this was Northern Ireland between 1921 and 1972 – which, co- incidentally, provided a reliable batch of Unionist MP’s, faithful
2 Davies is an expert on eastern Europe and his book reflects this with lengthy accounts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Galicia, Rusyn (a.k.a. Ruthenia – now in western Ukraine) and the Soviet Union, his account of which is headed ‘CCCP:The Ultimate Vanishing Act (1924- 1991)’. He includes an interesting chapter on the Duchy of Saxe- Coburg-Gotha (pp. 539-574) pointing out the success of the UK branch of this dynasty in cultivating and managing their image so that a pretence of a UK connection can be kept at all times. 3 For reviews of Colley see The Guardian 9 January 2014 at
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to the Crown, throughout this period. Colley duly points out that despite these numerous anomalies the English remain fond of advising others about good governance, particularly in the third world. In this context the comments of Sir Nicholas MacPherson appear to have more in common with religion and the role of a High Priest: the quiet and firm issuing of a metaphysical pronouncement from which logic, evidence or proof are eradicated, that will banish doubters and rally all to the cause of the Sacred Text. Perhaps this isn’t as crazy as it appears. After all, Merril Lynch (‘one of the world’s leading financial management and advisory companies, providing financial advice and investment banking services’) have a belief in the free market that is so absolute that anything that might seemingly provide an ‘edge’ over competitors, or an insight into a forthcoming trend is eagerly sought, including the use of astrologers to predict the market.4 From here it is only a step to the grim world of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) with its theories about ‘Prosperity Theology’, and routine defrauding of its adherents via continual cold-calling telesales. (Happily, though, the UCKG is strongly anti- communist.)5 It would be interesting (or not) to see written advice about how a heavily deregulated economy, driven by the private sector, can be relied upon to ensure ‘a rigorous financial policy’.
Small business goes bust The comments from McPherson and others about the economic difficulties that might befall the Scots after independence were undermined somewhat in The Times on 31 March 2014, where, buried on page 26 (thus ensuring no headline) were the worst
4 For more on stock markets and astrology see The Sunday Telegraph, 6 December 2013, ‘Financial astrology: can the stars affect stocks?’ at
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ever UK balance of payments figures. These amounted to the equivalent of 4.4% of GDP, giving the UK the worst trade to current account balance in the developed world. Germany – where they make things – has the best. In the olden times, and certainly pre-1979, the monthly trade figures were a piece of ritualised political theatre that required urgent announcements, elaborate explanations, and, sometimes, finished political careers (usually Labour). This is no longer the case. Even The Times opined that Britain imports too much and its only hope if it wishes to reverse this is to devalue urgently so that its manufacturing industries can recapture overseas markets. The main stumbling block to this is considered to be the continued maintenance of the pound at too high a level by the Bank of England and the City. Some months earlier, and again in The Times, another article pointed out the low level of investment in the UK as a % of current GDP. The world average for this statistic is 23%. Leaving aside emerging economies (China, India, Brazil etc) the EU average is 18%. The UK registers a mere 14% and compares badly with Spain 19%, Australia 29%, Portugal 16%, Germany 18%, Japan 21% and Russia 22%. A study of major and/or western nations shows that only Montenegro, Pakistan, Eire, Swaziland, Cuba, Turkmenistan, Angola, Malawi, Libya and Iraq invest less in their own economies than the UK. The announcements now being made about a UK economic recovery (the definition of which is rather curious) would not seem to accommodate any evidence of either of these measurements…..which is not surprising as manufacturing exports and investment in the UK itself are not the basis by which the Treasury defines the general performance of the economy. The narrow parameters now followed relate exclusively to inflation, interest rates and – possibly as a sop to those with a conscience – unemployment. The first two are entirely relative concepts (for instance: you can have inflation running at 20% but if the economy is growing at 30% people might still be better off), the last is important but is now calculated purely on counting only those on job seekers allowance…..if a person works 5 hours a week
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in a tanning salon or dog grooming parlour then, sorry, they’re not unemployed. Ditto if they are self-employed and only getting a handful of pieces of work per year, or if they’re on a zero hours contract: officially they are not unemployed, even if they earn nothing.6 The carefully constructed artifice overseen by HM Treasury about what constitutes normal economic behaviour, and how an advanced economy ought to be run, looks set to continue even if Scotland quits the UK; and few of the actors on the English political stage seem able to contemplate changes to this. Certainly the efforts of Labour pre-2010 do not inspire confidence. Great store was set by Gordon Brown in 2009 in the establishment of the International Centre for Financial Regulation was announced. Designed to map out the future of responsible capitalism, it came with a US Chief Executive, Barbara Ridpath, and a UK Chair, Lord Currie, previously an advisor to John Major and currently on the Board of Lord Sainsbury’s Institute of Government. Merrill Lynch were a major stakeholder, as were many other US firms. Absent were any representatives from UK industry (although UK banks and the City of London Corporation were members), a telling detail that confirms again how low down the list of priorities secure investment and long term employment for the masses in the are for our political classes. The ICFR was wound up in 2012 after a member of its staff (Charles Taylor) was accused of stealing £600,000 from its accounts.7 The lack of any original (and appealing) Labour policies on the economy is seen as a problem for Mr Miliband. In this context the media picking up on the activities of Andrew Balls, brother of Ed, can hardly be helpful. It turns out that the Shadow Chancellor’s brother is City bond fund manager at US giant Pimco, formerly the Pacific Investment Management Company. In this position he runs a vast financial operation used by governments around the world as an alternative to
6 See ‘The world will buy British when the pound is cheaper’, The Times 31 March 2014. 7 See ‘Boss “stole £600,000” from City think-tank’, The Times 11 January 2014.
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direct taxation when money is needed for major investment projects. Issuing bonds to raise money, rather than just collecting it from the wealthy by higher domestic taxes, comes at a price – paying arrangement fees and commission to those who arrange the bonds (as well as the interest). Andrew Balls, who like his brother was privately educated before proceeding to Oxford and Harvard, was paid a £4.5m bonus last year and is regarded by his colleagues and contemporaries as brilliant. Will his brother’s occupation have any impact on Ed Ball’s policy preferences should Labour take office after 2015? Or, in an echo of JM Keynes (who made serious money playing the markets), will the incoming Chancellor – knowing from his family ties how the markets really work – return to the traditional methods of managing the UK economy pre-1979 and still followed in Europe (and Obama’s US)?8
The Special Relationship in practice: defence procurement It would be beneficial if the fiscal rectitude that takes centre stage on most UK budgetary matters extended to defence. Which is not to say that defence spending must be cut, but, rather, that decisions are made which appear to fly in the face of common sense. In their 2010 Defence Review (i.e. cuts programme) the present coalition cancelled the delivery of 21 Nimrod MRA4 reconnaissance aircraft. Descended from the 1949 De Havilland Comet airliner, and rebuilds of existing fuselages that were already 42 years old, the project was 7 years late and heavily over budget. Liam Fox MP took the decision and announced that as a replacement the UK would buy 3 redundant US RC-135 aircraft, at a cost of £634m. These, too, were all 40+ years old, had been stored in the open at a base in the Nevada desert. The RC-135 is based on the 1957 Boeing 707 design. They will remain in service until 2045 by 8 On Andrew Balls see The Times p. 33 on 22 January 2014, ‘Balls brother in the money as Pimco chief executive quits’, which goes on to say: ‘In 2012 Mr Balls, then aged 38, and six other European directors had a pay pot of £57 million.’
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which time they will be over 80 years old...... yes, the RAF will be flying aircraft that are 80 years old: if this were the case today they would be equipped exclusively with pre-WW2 biplanes.9 It’s all very different from 1965 when the Wilson government ordered 46 Nimrod aircraft so that the Comet production lines could be kept open, UK jobs protected and technological expertise maintained. Such considerations – though obvious elsewhere – are no longer paramount in English political circles. Another interesting story – barely recorded outside the small number of persons interested in the arcane world of jet fighter procurement – has arisen in the saga of the two new ‘super-carriers’ under construction for the Royal Navy. It will be remembered that in 2010 there was talk of cancelling one of these, or at any rate completing it and never commissioning it, or even selling it straight away to another country – because the UK, unlike ten other countries, ‘can’t afford’ such a luxury. What will eventually transpire remains unclear.....carrier number one is inching toward completion, but what type of aircraft will it fly? Both Mr Cameron and Mr Hague have spoken earnestly about improving defence co-operation with France (possibly as a slightly embarrassed retreat from Blair’s fanatical pro-US enthusiasm). Given that the UK hasn’t designed or built a specifically naval strike aircraft of its own since 1959 and hasn’t operated a conventional aircraft carrier since 1978, this was always going to be a difficult decision. Could the French help? Their nuclear powered aircraft carrier ‘Charles de Gaulle’, in service 2001 after a 15 year building programme, operates the Rafale M. This has a speed of 1156 mph, a range of 2000 miles, weighs 13.8 tons and costs $102m each.
9 See The Sunday Times 13 April 2014, ‘Keep it quiet: RAF spy planes fail safety rules’ at
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HMG has resisted the French option and have ordered instead the US F35b which offers a broadly similar speed, but a reduced range of 1200 miles, weighs 22 tons (and therefore requires stronger and more expensive lifts, catapults and decking) and costs $197m each. The explanation based for going US and not French appears to be that the US manufactured aircraft delivered to the UK will be fitted with Rolls Royce engines, thus keeping UK production lines open, protecting UK jobs and maintaining UK technological expertise: something for which it is deemed worth buying a clearly inferior aircraft at an extra cost of $95m each. It is odd that this logic, and the related vast subsidy, wasn’t extended to the Nimrod programme. The absence of an urgent letter from Sir Nicholas MacPherson advising ministers is also noteworthy.
‘Official’ conspiracy theory The death of Major General John Strawson was noted by a couple of broadsheet obituaries recently. Strawson collaborated with Sir John Hackett as the (uncredited) co- author, in 1978, of the popular best seller The Third World War – 1985. In this the USSR deliberately starts a massive conventional war by invading western Europe. It meets resistance, so then deliberately resorts to the use of nuclear weapons with a catastrophic attack on Birmingham. NATO then retaliates with a counter strike on Minsk, carefully selected because being in a satellite state (Belarus SSR) its targeting would accelerate the collapse of Soviet control – in the book this duly occurs when an uprising by ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ leads to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Strawson and Hackett’s book may have chimed with the paranoia felt by many in the Cold War then being revived in America, but, speaking as someone who was around then, and politically aware, it never appeared to be the case to me that the Brezhnev era USSR would deliberately start a nuclear war. There was nothing to suggest it at the time, and, post 1990 and the release of much material in the archives, nothing to back up this view has emerged since.
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It is interesting to note the calculation made by Strawson, Hackett and others that a ready supply of Ukrainian ‘nationalists’ would rally to the cause of the free west if a nuclear weapon were dropped on Minsk. (Would they? We bomb your city – you join our side?) Presumably these would have been the exiles and supporters of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (not a few of whom had fought in the SS during WW2) on whose support and nurturing a considerable amount of dollars and pounds were spent after 1945.
Paranoid Harold The latest volume of Dominic Sandbrook’s compendium history of the recent past in Britain has arrived, Seasons in the Sun, which covers the period 1974-79. Written in his accessible and entertaining style and culled from a wide range of sources it reinforces the conventional narrative of the period...... severe industrial relations problems + national bankruptcy requiring an IMF loan + Harold Wilson being detached from reality and letting the country drift + the inevitability of Thatcher’s win in ’79. In many respects it could have been written in the early 80s and makes for an interesting comparison with Andy Beckett’s When the Lights went out, which strikes a different tone with the same material. Sandbrook, in particular, struggles with giving his account and retaining his professional credibility. For example, on the issue of massive industrial problems he devotes a great many pages to recounting these (and the episodes, Grunwick etc, are undoubtedly memorable) before finally mentioning, in a couple of sentences, near the end of this section, that the UK lost fewer working days through industrial action in the ‘70s than either the US or several European nations. Similarly, on the election that never was (September 1978) he concludes that is wasn’t such a major event after all. He opines that Callaghan wouldn’t have won a majority and that a general election in late ’78, therefore, may have led to Thatcher being asked to form a government anyway, as Callaghan would have gone to the country and failed. This
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seems plain wrong. If the election had gone ahead in the autumn of 1978, then Callaghan may not have won a large majority, but, as Labour had a consistent 5% lead in the polls throughout this period, the outcome would clearly have been either a small overall majority for Labour or another hung Parliament with Callaghan remaining at Downing Street as the leader of the biggest single party. Thatcher would clearly not have won – and the Conservative Party would then have dumped her, as they planned to do. To imply that this wouldn’t have occurred, or simply didn’t matter, is to underplay, massively, all the changes wrought in the UK since 1979. In addition, throughout his account of the pros and cons of ‘78 vs ‘79 as an election date, Sandbrook fails to mention that even then it was known that governments that go full term (or very nearly full term) have almost always lost – Baldwin (1929) and Macmillan/Douglas-Home (1964) being examples in point.10 Callaghan duly lost in 1979, as did Major in 1997 and Brown in 2010. The fact that Callaghan ignored this in 1978 only underscores what a decisive moment his pulling back from an election was. Of particular interest is Sandbrook’s account of Wilson’s admittedly tired and difficult last couple of years as Prime Minister. We learn that Harold often pointed to mirrors and light bulbs in Downing Street and took baffled colleagues who wanted a private discussion with him about government matters, into the lavatory where he would turn on the taps in the washbasin prior to having the dialogue in whispers. Callaghan jocularly referred to him as ‘a bit of a Walter Mitty’. A great many pages are spent sketching the picture of Wilson as deluded, with a highly unusual (almost subservient) relationship with his own PA, Lady Falkender, and erratic judgement in general. However: on pp. 74-75 we learn that, yes, there were hidden microphones in 10 Downing Street. Apparently Harold Macmillan asked MI5 to install them ‘during the Profumo scandal’. They remained in situ until 1977 when they were quietly removed. One reading of this would be as follows:
10 Attlee, too, went full term in 1950, and almost lost.
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In 1963 the US (specifically the CIA) lost patience with the British old boy network running MI6, following the imprisonment of John Vassall, Philby’s defection and the news that John Profumo MP had, possibly, shared a girl friend with the Soviet naval attaché Yevgeny Ivanov. The US were also greatly alarmed by the sudden demise of Hugh Gaitskell and the election of Harold Wilson as Leader of the Labour Party. Gaitskell had been very pro-US. Wilson was much less so, and had travelled extensively to and from the Soviet Union, on private business, since 1951. Conspiracy theories abounded on this point – was Wilson a Soviet agent? Macmillan was simultaneously trying to persuade an irritated, reluctant and puzzled US that the UK should borrow/share the Polaris nuclear missile system (why didn’t the British just build their own?). Wilson and Labour looked absolutely certain to win an election held at any time in 1963-1964. Advised strongly by elements in the CIA – of whom James Jesus Angleton was prominent and paranoid – and egged on by a significant minority in MI5 and MI6 who were rabidly anti-Labour, and specifically anti-Wilson, the US insisted that MacMillan install recording devices in Downing Street in advance of Wilson becoming Prime Minister. This was duly done. They remained in place until Wilson retired, after which they were removed. However.....some elements within either MI5 or MI6 were unhappy with spying on their own government at the request of the US and privately told Wilson – hence his actions and concern at the possibility of the intelligence services machinating to remove him from office. Basically, Harold was right, and (presumably with Heath) he remains the only UK prime minister spied on by his own security services. Sandbrook, though, can’t produce a narrative on these lines. But to ensure he meets professional standards, he has to mention, in passing, the crux of the issue. It strikes me that like many of the English intelligentsia he has difficulty justifying or explaining the miserable state of Britain today and shies away from appropriate criticism of the
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recent past. But: read his book – it is a good, well written narrative with all the required detail in it; but read Beckett, too, to get a better balance of the period.
You’re fired With fixed term Parliaments and the date of the next election set, speculation turns to the next government. On the basis of the opinion polls or the outcome of the recent European elections, few would conclude that purely Conservative or Labour administrations are likely. The Liberal Democrats face a hard time – but will probably just about keep enough seats to remain a factor. UKIP may take enough votes away from Cameron to install Miliband in Downing Street, or vice versa. Who knows? If trying to guess two or three way splits in electoral preferences is hard enough, trying to judge a four way split is impossible. Many people think that a likely outcome would be another coalition, or a minority government. But could the UK – under the O’Donnell-Sainsbury rules11 agreed in 2009 – possibly default, if agreement between the various parties were too difficult or too protracted, to an interim ‘technical’ administration of the type seen in Italy or Greece? And, if so, who might it contain? Or, more specifically, who might be invited by the Crown to participate in such a venture?12
11 Discussed in Lobster 64 at
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Early this year You Gov published a poll identifying the ‘most admired’ people in the UK. Leaving aside the Queen, the Pope, celebrities, footballers and people on TV generally, the highest regarded Brits were...... Richard Branson, Nigel Farage, Tony Benn (now deceased), Boris Johnson, Alan Sugar and Alex Salmond. An interesting selection. Perhaps, in a time of national crisis with reassuring faces and good communicators at a premium they may be approached. (Assuming Salmond hasn’t by then floated away as head of an independent Scotland).
Mandela The world said goodbye to Nelson Mandela on 5 December. The eulogies were long, the grief genuine and the (largely unspoken) worries for the future of South Africa profound. But is it possible that he was over praised? The hyperbole was considerable with the departed former President of South Africa being compared by many to a saint. Yes – Mandela was a good man, but...... did he really, as some have said, save the world? Has he enacted miracles since his death?13 Missing from any of the coverage of his last illness, death and elaborate funeral arrangements was any analysis of the geo-politics at play in the late 80s and early 90s, and the context in which his release and rise to political power should be seen. Quite simply: after the demise of the Soviet Union the need for the US to have a reliable ally in the vicinity of South Africa vanished. At this point – and only at this point – did serious talk about releasing Mandela, and starting a transition to democracy, begin. The need to have an orderly
Note 12 continued: mechanism by which governments would be formed in the event of a hung Parliament.....thus allowing the Queen (then 83, now 88) to avoid the process. If there is a hung Parliament in 2015 will Prince Charles adjudicate? In an ideal world the UK would have a written constitution where all this would be set out, agreed and voted on. 13 For a view of Mandela that avoids hagiography see Matthew Parris in The Times 7 December 2013. Parris lived in South Africa, Rhodesia and Swaziland as a child and teenager. On the South African nuclear deterrent see
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civil government in the Cape, particularly given its mineral resources, remained essential and Mandela in guaranteeing this, unlike many others in post colonial Africa, rose to the challenge of providing the credible leadership needed. In fact, it was Mandela’s insistence on plurality, disinterest in self- aggrandizement, upholding of the rule of law and general statesmanship that was being celebrated after his death.....for many this was unusual in Africa, and far exceeded the very low expectations that many in the (white) West had for newly emerging African leaders. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, would Mandela have been released and allowed to run for election as President of South Africa? No mention was made either, of the 1991 decision whereby South Africa voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons. A variety of motives may have led to this.....at the most lofty, deeply statesman-like behaviour by the apartheid regime (with attending saintly collaboration by Mandela – if he even knew about it) through to a final grim determination by the exiting white politicians to ensure that no succeeding black leader could threaten the West, with normal deal making somewhere in between. It is hard not to conclude that during the Cold War it was considered necessary for South Africa to maintain a small nuclear strike force at the Cape to safeguard the area from aggression by Soviet-backed regimes further north. Because of the attitude toward apartheid by the UN, it couldn’t be openly armed by the US, the UK or France, the most likely providers of this hardware. The considered view is that South African acquired its nuclear weapons by collaborating with Israel, culminating in a nuclear test near Prince Edward Island, in the southern Indian Ocean, in September 1979.14 President Carter noted in his diary in February 1980: ‘We
14 On the Vela Incident (the September 1979 test) see
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have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of Africa’ – a fascinating way of putting things. If it were suggested to him that only the Israelis were involved then criticism of them – given the close US-Israeli relationship – would be certain to be private. Surely the US intelligence services (as opposed to ‘our scientists’) knew about the involvement of South Africa?15 Is it possible that they didn’t tell Carter? Or, given Carter’s hostility at that time to the proposed settlement in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, which was quickly jettisoned in favour of his insistence on fresh elections that then allowed Mugabe to take over the country, did they take the view that pragmatic US support for a stable military ally in South Africa was so absolute that the less said the better? Like Callaghan on the bugging of Downing Street (and much else) Carter appeared to believe what he was told in this case. An impartial account of how apartheid-era South Africa changed, within five years, into Mandela-era South Africa, and the many behind the scenes, negotiations, decisions and deals that enabled this, was absent from the coverage accorded to the death and funeral of Mandela and by its omission made a proper judgement of his role and views difficult.
15 As Leonard Weiss stated in 2011: ‘One of the likely reasons that the U.S. government is withholding the declassification of relevant documents is to assist Israel to maintain its policy of opacity in nuclear affairs, a policy which had its origin during the Johnson presidency and was reinforced in a bargain made with the U.S. during the Nixon presidency. Its abandonment accompanied by the admission that Israel violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty would create some serious political fallout for both countries. But it is hard to argue that helping Israel in this way contributes to U.S. national security at a time when the U.S. demands openness in the nuclear activities of Iran, North Korea, Syria, and all other countries who may be engaged in clandestine weapon related nuclear activities.’
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Is a new ‘cold war’ coming?
Dr T P Wilkinson
This question is asked repeatedly in the English-language media – probably the most heavily censored data streams in the world (a point to which I will return). Why should anyone worry about a new ‘cold war’? Perhaps it would be more relevant to worry about the extent of current and future ‘hot’ ones? The ‘old Cold War’ was an invention of the US regime. Bernard Baruch, one of two prominent South Carolina banksters (the other being James Byrnes) introduced the term into American political discourse with, inter alia, the aid of the dean of political propaganda, Walter Lippmann, as the US Empire was mobilising to absorb the remains of European empires after the defeat of Japan.1 The subsequent 50 years of US aggrandizement were orchestrated by an unending march against any attempt to actually apply the preamble to the United Nations Charter.2 Domestically this ‘Cold War’ comprised both covert and overt action against any form of 1 James Byrnes (1882–1982) congressman US senator and governor of South Carolina, US Secretary of State under F D Roosevelt and H S Truman, ardent segregationist and anti-communist. Bernard Baruch (1870–1965) stockbroker, banker, chair of the War Industries Board under Woodrow Wilson and a principal political-economic advisor to Roosevelt and Truman. Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) US journalist and Wilson propagandist, author of Public Opinion, argued that the masses were not competent to direct public affairs and therefore needed to be guided by a governing class, as opposed to popular democracy. 2 ‘We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom. And to these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace Continues at the foot of the next page.
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political dissent, coordinated by the FBI (e.g. COINTELPRO) and CIA but ultimately initiated and maintained by the major corporate conglomerates whose central goal was to perpetuate the military-industrial gravy train that World War II brought them.3 In short the ‘Cold War’ meant for anyone except the white middle-class and the ruling elite, the suppression of demands for peacetime economic justice. As Tony Benn, the recently deceased UK Labour politician, once said: after the war people asked, if we could organise full- employment for war, why couldn’t we organise full- employment for peace?4 This question was answered with the domestic side of the ‘Cold War’ – namely employment for war is the only employment profitable enough to justify the engagement of private enterprise. After the surrender of Italy, Germany and Japan in 1945, the world was exhausted – except for the USA, which ended the war unscathed and with minimal losses of men in combat. Already after the end of the World War 1, the US elite had made great inroads toward usurping its European rivals. France and Britain owed enormous sums to the US banks that
Note 2 continued: and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples…’ In his speech, delivered to the UN General Assembly in 2009, the Libyan leader M Gaddafi, assassinated in 2011 by soldiers overthrowing his government under US/NATO direction, criticised the fact that the only part of the UN Charter that expressed what all nations desire is the preamble, while the rest was drafted by experts to privilege the permanent members of the Security Council. 3 See, inter alia, Frank Donner, The Age of Surveillance (1980), Ward Churchill & Jim Vanderwall, The Cointelpro Papers (1990). 4 Tony Benn (1925-2014) ‘After the war people said, “If you can plan for war, why can’t you plan for peace?” When I was 17, I had a letter from the government saying, “Dear Mr Benn, will you turn up when you‘re 17 and 1/2? We‘ll give you free food, free clothes, free training, free accommodation, and two shillings, ten pence a day to just kill Germans.” People said, well, if you can have full employment to kill people, why in God’s name couldn‘t you have full employment and good schools, good hospitals, good houses?’ Quoted in the New Statesman (14 March 2014) but also heard by the author at a talk given in London in 2009.
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financed its war efforts from 1914–1918. However, the US was not quite equipped to dominate Europe directly so France and Britain maintained their empires, while helping the US regime in its attempts to suppress the Russian Revolution.5 This part of US history, kept in obscurity, was a hot war in which US troops were deployed in the Soviet Union to support an aspirant fascist dictatorship and destroy the government under Lenin. Military action ended around 1922 when the last of US, British, Czech Legion and Japanese troops withdrew from the territory of the USSR. In contrast, World War II ended with the USA as the sole undisputed imperial power on the globe. It had essentially made the formal continuation of the British and French empires dependent on these governments granting open and unrestricted access to the colonial markets – and, with the Marshall Plan, virtually unrestricted access to Western European markets. All this had been more or less agreed at Bretton Woods in 1944 and in the preliminaries to the United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945. The US dollar would become the world currency and international ‘trade’ would be regulated by dollar convertibility.6 However neither the US regime nor its European vassals anticipated that the end of
5 In 1918 the US sent troops under MG William Graves in support of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, ostensibly deployed to aid in the evacuation of the Czech Legion that had been caught in Russia when the revolution began. During this period ADM Alexander Kolchak had established a White government in Omsk and was waging war against Lenin’s revolutionary government with Allied support. Allied troops only left Russian territory in 1922. The so-called Far Eastern Republic was created to serve as a buffer between Japanese and US troops in Asia and the new Soviet Union. It was abolished in 1922 when the Soviet government finally succeeded in securing its Asian borders. 6 The so-called Bretton Woods System, including the IBRD (World Bank) and International Monetary Fund, was organised on the principle that currency convertibility was essential for free trade (the primary US interest) and that this could be accomplished by linking currencies to the fixed gold value of the US dollar. Imbalances in exchange rates or trade were to be compensated by extending credit to countries, called special drawing rights (SDR), ultimately intended to adjust the borrower’s currency value against the US dollar. The Bretton Woods System was constituted like a joint stock company in which control was vested in the majority stockholder – in this case the US.
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World War II would give such enormous impetus to anti- colonial struggle in all the colonial empires. As Michael Manley, former Jamaican prime minister, pointed out, the Bretton Woods agreements were made by the major colonial powers for their interests, assuming that all the countries, like his Jamaica, would simply function as part of their respective empires.7 No provisions were made for a post-war economic dispensation that included newly independent countries – they were not even contemplated. Nevertheless, after 1945 the colonies of France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and even the US itself, demanded independence and equality after what had sometimes been centuries and sometimes only decades of exploitation and oppression for the enrichment of Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic. The reluctance and refusal to entertain such demands provoked political and military responses as the inhabitants met these denials with varying degrees of resistance. As a result the world war continued, not against Europeans, but against the three quarters of the world’s population struggling to escape Euro-American domination. The combined resistance of colonised peoples to the restoration of Euro-American domination once the war had ended summoned the Euro-American elite to focus enormous efforts to economically suffocate newly independent countries and strangle those who were struggling to establish independence. This was the ‘hot war’ waged unabated from 1945–1989. This was the war that both Baruch and Byrnes – leading insiders in the US national government and paragons of the white settler regime (whose spiritual home still lies in the Deep South) that created the USA – knew had to be fought to maintain US claims on most of the world’s natural resources. Both Baruch and Byrnes were aware that it would
7 Michael Manley (1924-1997) recorded in an interview used in the film ‘Life and Debt’ (2001) by Stephanie Black. Manley’s social democratic government was usurped in no small part by US covert action. This was aggravated by IMF/World Bank refusal to assist Jamaica during the 1970s oil crisis without demands for so-called ‘structural adjustment’. Manley was also opposed by the US regime because of his support for Cuba and membership in the Non-aligned Movement.
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be very complicated to sell multiple attacks on resource-rich countries without the capacity to prevail at home. On the other hand, the Soviet Union – held in good esteem by much of the working population even in the US – could pose a major obstacle to US expansion. Although the end of World War II left the USSR with nearly 30 million dead and much of the infrastructure it had built since the Revolution destroyed, both Southern banksters knew – along with their North-eastern counterparts in the white oligarchy – that the Soviet Union was incredibly resilient, having defeated the German Wehrmacht.8 They also knew that even a mildly successful ‘socialist’ regime of that magnitude would present both ideological and economic challenges to the rapacious plutocracy that dominated the West. The Soviet Union offered the US oligarchy the perfect alibi for its wars of colonial conquest after 1945. Baruch and Byrnes inter alia helped establish in the minds of Americans and those under US ideological sway that the US was not conquering to promote an ever-expanding empire but ‘protecting’ the world from an ever-expanding Soviet Union.
Pleasure and pain: consumerism over communism As Edward Bernays and then Walter Lippmann fondly proclaimed, consent is manufactured and it is essential for the political class in the US to master the manufacture of public opinion as a substitute for democratic political processes.9
8 For an extensive analysis of the role of the US regime in World War II and its legacy of profiteering and bad faith, especially toward the Soviet Union, see also Jacques R Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War (2002). For a thorough discussion of the roots of US imperialism, especially in Asia and the Pacific, see Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea (2010). 9 Edward Bernays (1891–1995) nephew of Sigmund Freud, author of Propaganda (1928), public relations advisor to Woodrow Wilson. He coined the term ‘public relations’ to avoid the negative connotations of the wartime use of the word propaganda. See, inter alia, Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (1996) and Adam Curtis’ 2002 documentary The Century of the Self (at
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Manufacturing opinion is related to censorship but is not censorship as popularly defined – a prohibition against writing or saying something. Yet Bernays meant propaganda – or as he would later call it ‘public relations’ – censorship combined with manipulation. Censorship in the English-language media rarely involves ‘official’ intervention. Although such official intervention does occasionally occur, most if not all media control is exercised by virtue of absolute property rights and not by state licence or interdict. Classical censorship is confined almost entirely to the military, where it is generally accepted as legitimate – like war, too. Journalists – professional corporate propagandists – have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that public information, the direct and unfiltered access to what are now largely data streams, is threatened by state censorship.10 Such fear-mongering in the US or UK has the effect of discrediting public (to an extent subject to residual democratic accountability) control in preference to ‘private control’. The recent trumpet fanfare for Glen Greenwald is a perfect example of this sentimental distraction. Mr Greenwald left the Guardian (once more fittingly named the Manchester Guardian – as in guardian of Manchester capitalism) to publish selectively his brand of private journalism with the financial backing of the
10 The Missouri School of Journalism, the first of its kind in the US, was founded with money from Joseph Pulitzer in 1908 to train professional journalists. Professionalism in journalism was seen as antidote to the tradition of partisan newspapers that had prevailed until the so-called Progressive Era. Mainstream interpretation of the Progressive Era has been that it ushered in democratic reforms. However one effect of this professionalisation was to isolate journalists from popular movements, making their job ethic conform to the business interests of newspaper cartels, e.g. Pulitzer and Hearst. Thus ‘objectivity’ meant reporting according to the standards of major newspapers owned by media magnates. Since unlike in Europe ‘Business’ has always claimed to be a citizen rather than part of the state, the newspaper owner was deemed to be an ordinary person in the republic – his definition of truth or objectivity was supposedly subject to the same values as the rest of the citizenry and in opposition to the state. This misconception persists today leading many people to complain that mainstream media fails as a citizen so to speak. This mistake is reinforced by the centrality of business to the US regime’s definition of ‘freedom’, corporate freedom that is.
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ebay fortune (News for auction? one might ask).11 During the Vietnam War there was an intensive quid pro quo between corporate journalists and military commanders and imperial officials operating under other cover that persists today.12 The principal form of censorship in the English-language mass media is merely the exercise of ownership, of sanctified property rights. Probably in no other culture in the world is the idea of speech as private property so radically defended as among the English-speaking peoples – who since 1945 have dominated the mass media more than anyone else besides perhaps the medieval Catholic Church. This has had the effect of making the protection of private property – capital – the most powerful interest controlling the mass media today in all its forms. This control over the mass media has been used to create consensus and failing that the appearance of consensus for whatever might serve the interests of media owners – as owners, as members of the class whose defining attribute is that they own everything. Since there was no anti-Soviet consensus in 1945 – except among the white ruling elite – it was necessary to create one. And this consensus was created with great élan. The ‘Moses’ of post-war anti-communism, George Kennan, brought his tablets from Moscow to the Council on Foreign Relations where it was minted as holy coinage.13 Just as
11 Glen Greenwald resigned from the Guardian in 2013, announcing that he would start a new media organisation funded by ebay mogul Pierre Omidyar. 12 The US war against Vietnam is considered to be one of the most heavily televised. Media management by the military in Vietnam included access – e.g. military transport to combat zones or access to interviews in return for favourable or selective coverage. During the so- called Church and Pike Committee hearings (1975–76) even then CIA director William Colby – who had been responsible for Agency operations in Vietnam – admitted the extensive ‘cooperation’ between the media and the Agency. There is of course both witting and unwitting collaboration with the regime’s propaganda goals. ‘Sources’ are a journalist’s capital and the demand for sources can and does lead to media manipulation by other government agencies. 13 George F. Kennan (1904–2005) US diplomat, ambassador to the Soviet Union and author of the infamous ‘long telegram’ later published in the elite journal Foreign Relations as ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ by ‘X’ in 1947.
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Freud cast doubt on the veracity of Mosaic tradition, one ought to wonder how a post-adolescent Ivy League graduate, traveling by train to Moscow, with no idea about the country except from scripture, and with utter disregard for the recent vicious war of annihilation against the country, could presume to explain ‘Soviet conduct’ . Consistent with the mendacious and hypocritical tradition upon which the USA werasoriginally founded, all domestic demands, e.g. for real racial equality and an end to apartheid, especially in its most obvious and violent Southern form, were converted into communist/Soviet subversion. The fundamental hatred the white settler-capitalist class harbours for the descendants of its slave population was now reshaped as a version of anti-communism, which of course had to be rooted in an alleged foreign conspiracy – conceived in the Soviet Union of course. In the ante-bellum era as well as the period before the UDI of 1776, slaveholders regularly asserted that it was outside or foreign influences which were whipping their otherwise ‘happy’ slaves into discontent and revolt. It was inconceivable that slaves would revolt on their own to obtain their freedom. Within the USA itself, all demands for justice from the white elite were classified as Soviet-inspired and hence potentially traitorous. Abroad, independence movements were immediately classified as communist/Soviet- managed if they did not acknowledge US world hegemony. ‘X’ (George Kennan) did not have to consider facts, his job was to deliver a justification by faith alone – one adopted by the entire US political class and deeply held to this day. In the English-speaking world, mainstream journalism is the principal agent of what Orwell called ‘the thought police’ .
CIA: the ministry of love and peace Instrumental in the creation of a permanent war system – true to Orwell’s predictions, always called ‘peace’ – was the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although officially the purpose of the CIA was to coordinate all the national intelligence activities for the executive branch of the US regime, this begs the question: what are those activities?
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14 The official history claims the CIA was established as a revived OSS. The Office of Strategic Services was a wartime intelligence/ counter-intelligence organisation. Conventional wisdom or myth has it that intelligence in wartime is the process of learning what the enemy plans or is capable of doing – so as to prepare adequate offensive or defensive operations. However, this academic description obscures the actual roots of the OSS and its CIA successor. Prior to WWII, US corporations established and maintained control of their overseas fiefs by employing mercenaries and buying political leaders. This activity was sometimes managed directly, but in order to protect these corporations from direct attacks on their assets and to simplify the competitive environment (another term for undercutting the competition), a class of law firms arose specialised in managing corporate warfare, if necessary at arm’s length. The paragon of these law firms was Sullivan & Cromwell, the alma mater of the notorious Dulles brothers.15 The chief of the OSS was William Donovan, a lawyer- adventurer who had established his own mercenary law firm, Donovan, Leisure. WWII catalysed the process by which much of heavy industry became directly regulated by government agencies dominated by the regulated industries. The state became a central instrument for the exercise of power over the economy and society by corporate cartels and their 14 In NSC 68 the authors explain the challenge of the Soviet Union: ‘By the same token the “peace policy” of the Soviet Union, described at a Party Congress as “a more advantageous form of fighting capitalism”, is a device to divide and immobilise the non-Communist world and the peace of the Soviet Union seeks is the peace of total conformity to Soviet policy. The antipathy of slavery to freedom explains the iron curtain, the isolation, the autarchy of the society whose end is absolute power.’ And ‘We must with our allies and the former subject peoples seek to create a world society based on the principle of consent… It will consist of many national communities of great and varying abilities and resources and hence of our war potential.’ 15 Nancy Lisagor, Frank Lipsius, A Law Unto Itself: The Untold Story of the Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell (1989). Sullivan & Cromwell is just one of a number of so-called ‘white shoe’ law firms in the New York City. Covington & Burling is an example of the same type of elite law firm in Washington. These firms are not only noted for their powerful clients but for the frequency with which their partners enter high government office or are recruited from there – a kind of revolving door.
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owners. The mercenary law firm sector, including the investment banks, also seized the opportunity to organise a state agency to regulate the international corporate policing activities. OSS was essentially the kernel of what the CIA would become – what Philip Agee called ‘capitalism’s invisible army’ (one ought to add its ‘secret police’, too).16 The creation of the CIA and the origins of the ‘Cold War’ are inseparable. The CIA was founded in 1947, the same year that Bernard Baruch gave his notorious ‘cold war’ speech in South Carolina.17 In the process of retooling the post-war US for massive rearmament, permanent wartime footing, and the conquest of soon to be abandoned European dependencies, the lessons of the Creel Commission – charged by Woodrow Wilson (another South Carolinian) with selling US intervention in World War 1 – were applied.18 The ‘American dream’ was revived despite the fact that black Americans were almost entirely excluded from it. The Marshall Plan was launched to 16 The contribution of Philip Agee (1935–2008) to understanding the CIA and how it works simply cannot be overestimated. Unfortunately he seems to have been virtually forgotten by those writing on the subject today. See, inter alia, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975), Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe (1978), Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa (1979), On the Run (1987). This work was given considerable attention since much of it was published around the time of the Select Committee reports. See also John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (1984). Interest persisted in exposing CIA operations until about 1989 when one could argue it either waned or was suppressed. Probably the second most significant work on the CIA published is Douglas Valentine’s The Phoenix Program (2002). Valentine succeeds in explaining the creation of an enormously complex counter-terror/terror system by the Agency, copiously documented through interviews with those who actually created, introduced and managed it. He also shows how the system works within the US itself and provides a template for understanding Agency operations throughout the world. 17 ‘Let us not be deceived – we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success. The peace of the world is the hope and the goal of our political system; it is the despair and defeat of those who stand against us.’ Speech to the South Carolina Legislature, Columbia, SC (April 16, 1947); reported in Journal of the House of Representatives of the First Session of the 87th General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, p. 1085. Baruch was a good friend of Lippmann, who then proceeded to popularise the term. 18 Committee on Public Information, a.k.a. Creel Commission. George Creel, How we advertised America (1920)
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sell the myth to destitute Europeans, while US corporations invaded their economies. NATO was created to subordinate the various Western European militaries to US command and to restore the threat against the Soviet Union that had disappeared when Hitler’s Wehrmacht was defeated. NATO also created vehicles for the of the customer base for US armaments manufacturers while stimulating demand. By 1949, the US regime had succeeded in manipulating the elections in most European countries to its advantage, establishing right wing or ‘centre-right’ governments, despite large majorities favouring socialist or social democratic parties.19 It had stabilised the position of its two dictatorial allies, Franco and Salazar, within NATO and, together with Britain, had subdued anti-fascism in Greece. With Europe pacified, it could turn its attention to absorbing or seizing the rest of the world not protected by the Soviet Union.
The original ‘Asian Pivot’ Everything seemed brilliant until 1 October 1949 when the US regime had to accept the defeat of its client army under the warlord Chiang-Kai-Shek. All of a sudden, the US had ‘lost China’. The so-called China Lobby – a coalition of banking, contraband (e.g. drugs) and feudal military interests, exemplified by former colonial governor of the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur – began a far-reaching campaign to mobilise the US as a whole to forcibly restore Euro-American control over China’s economy.20 Whether relative sanity in the US or the extremism of the Lobby itself (in its day almost as powerful as the Israel lobby today) prevented outright war is a matter of dispute. The psychological impact of ‘losing China’ certainly enhanced the status of the emergent national security state which then turned the ‘loss’ into an argument
19 See, inter alia, William Blum, Killing Hope (1995), updated in 2004. 20 The China lobby originated from the commercial banditry of American (and European) enterprises based in Shanghai and HongKong since the Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60). When the Chinese civil war started, these banks, drug dealers and other colonial enterprises sided with Chiang Kai-Shek. The Japanese occupation Continues at the foot of the next page.
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for even more rigorous control of domestic and foreign political activity. However it did not take long for the US regime to mobilise militarily in Asia again. Defeat of the Japanese empire had been an essential element of US imperial expansion in the Pacific. Prior to World War II, in fact with the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, the US regime aimed to dominate Asia through Japan. Thus it was US President Theodore Roosevelt who licensed the Japanese occupation of Korea in 1905 and its annexation in 1910. With Japanese surrender in 1945, the US replaced the Japanese army as the occupying force in Korea, retaining Japanese police units in the country to control the population. US Asia policy was essentially to rebuild Japan as a base from which to control the mainland. To do this it was necessary to continue the supply of cheap food to Japan’s population. That meant domination of Korea and Indochina, the ‘rice bowls’ for Japan. The US attempt to colonise Korea from Japan encountered heavy resistance since the Military Government in Korea (MGIK) was determined to defend exports of rice to Japan even if it meant the bulk of Korea’s peasantry would starve.21 Any Korean attempts to resist US–Japanese exploitation were labelled ‘communism’ and viciously suppressed using methods that would later be
Note 20 continued: forced Chiang and the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tse-Tung into an alliance that continued until Japan’s defeat. Despite extensive support by these interests, Mao was able to defeat Chiang, forcing his evacuation to Taiwan. The Shanghai colonialists were ejected from the Chinese mainland with Chiang. Douglas McArthur, once the quasi- hereditary (his father had also been governor of the Philippines) colonial governor of the US Philippines and subsequently governor of occupied Japan, was effectively a major player in both US Pacific imperialism and de facto supporter of the China lobby until his dismissal in 1951. 21 Cumings points out that much of the riots and resistance in the countryside was due to Southern landlords continuing to take virtually all the grain (rice and wheat) from the peasantry because it was being exported to Japan. The US Military Government in Korea defended the landlords and their property rights against the peasantry.
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institutionalised as the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.22 The northern half of Korea had regained its independence when the Red Army withdrew in 1947. Meanwhile the US regime continued to occupy the southern half of the peninsula with the aid of a US-educated Christian fascist Rhee whose own nationalism called for reunification of Korea under a fascist regime aligned with the US (not unlike those supported by the US elsewhere).23 In 1950, hostilities on the demarcation line separating independent Korea from US-occupied Korea resulted in a massive assault by armies of the PDRK (North Korea). This event was presented by the US to a rump UN Security Council as a quasi-international attack on sovereign Korea.24 Punditry and official history present this conflict as part of the ‘Cold War’ or as a catalyst for those elements of US policy deceptively described as pertaining to the ‘Cold War’. US President Harry Truman had already proclaimed a major policy deception when authorising the deployment of US forces to defend fascism in Greece, what became known as the
22 Douglas Valentine (see note 16). The similarities become apparent when the counter-insurgency in Korea is examined. Moreover, there was considerable knowledge-transfer among officers in Asia and especially in the counter-terror unit(s) of the Agency. 23 Another important aspect of US interest in Korea was the industrial base the Japanese had built in the North as well as the country’s tungsten reserves – tungsten being a strategic metal for the steel and munitions sectors. Korea is estimated to have the world’s sixth largest tungsten deposits. Rhee’s principal US advisor was OSS/CIA officer M. Preston Goodfellow. In a letter from Goodfellow to Rhee dated 10 September 1954, Goodfellow wrote, ‘I hear that a German group has made a proposal to buy the entire Korean tungsten output at a price above world markets. Of course such an offer would be a snare and a delusion. If the Germans had the entire Korean output sewed up they would fix the world price and of course, if necessary, that could be pushed below Korean mining costs…’ At
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Truman Doctrine. Now he was expanding the application of that doctrine to the suppression of independence struggles in Asia. The US invasion and devastation of Korea, including the slaughter of at least three million Koreans and the levelling of nearly every city in the country by means of aerial bombardment, would become a model for the ‘invisible’ corporate warfare waged against the world but denied at home. Of course the invasions and wholesale destruction of Korea, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, were not invisible – except to the white population of the US which profited from this carnage just as it had been profiting, since its founding, from the conquest of North America and subjugation of Central America. Although the US slaughtered over six million people in its invasions of Korea and Vietnam together, these campaigns are called part of the ‘Cold War’. The US was almost forced to abandon the Korean peninsula where it remains today in a state of ceasefire with the Korea it tried to destroy. After being forced to compromise in Korea – a considerable psychological blow for white supremacy – the US began a successful season of imperial expansion: inter alia returning Iran to the control of the oil cartel and Guatemala to United Fruit. Nationalist movements in Ghana and Congo were subdued.25 With the exception of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, retained as colonial offshore enterprises, the US regime successfully replaced its colonial administration either with statehood status or installation of a nominally independent client regime. Thus, despite setbacks on the Asian mainland, the US continued to expand its archipelago of military-industrial outposts throughout the Western hemisphere and the Pacific. To maintain the pressure on the Soviet Union, a constant series of atomic weapons tests was conducted. At the same time these weapons were deemed well suited for obliterating any darker skinned armies that might challenge US hegemony. Korea had shown that not only
25 There was one major blemish in an otherwise successful record of what is now innocuously called ‘regime change’ – Cuba. In 1959, Fidel Castro defeated the US-backed Battista dictatorship. However, the scope of Cuba’s revolution would not become apparent to the US until the end of 1960.
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could Asians defeat racist ‘white’ armies in the field, it also revealed that the US simply did not have the reliable manpower to dominate Asia’s large populations. ‘Better dead than red’ actually meant that US policy was to massacre Asian ‘hordes’ rather than risk that they become communist or socialist. The drivers behind the US atomic weapons programme, psychopaths like Edward Teller, were steeped in the tradition of the worthlessness of non-whites. And yet the US population could not be mobilised simply on the vague need to oppose communism – there had to be a powerful fantasy of fear. Fear is induced by anticipation of pain or loss. The ‘Cold War’ myth therefore needed both an image of something perceived as valuable enough to oppose its loss and painful enough to prevent its occurrence. A division of labour emerged in the two wings of the US ruling party. The liberal wing devoted its energy to creating and maintaining the myth of what could be lost while the traditional wing (erroneously called ‘conservative’) became devoted to creating and maintaining the expectation of pain. Liberal ‘Cold War’ practice therefore emphasised all the ‘blessings’ of America: consumerism, entrepreneurialism, hedonistic political institutions, mass entertainment and the ‘civil rights’ that supposedly guaranteed them. The traditional wing – not surprisingly strongest in the former slave states of the South – focussed on the violent threat. Just as South Carolina’s slaveholders contrived the most draconian measures to control their slaves – out of sheer terror that the black majority, if given the chance, would repay whites with the viciousness inherent in chattel slavery – the ‘traditional’ Cold Warriors demanded judicial, extra-judicial and terroristic means be applied to prevent latent revolutionaries from overthrowing the US regime. Classical interpretation of the ‘Cold War’ also includes this fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ means. Although the term ‘Cold War consensus’ has been used often, the term has rarely been substantively explained – except in deceptive ways. The ‘Cold War’
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consensus did not emerge because of a threat by the Soviet Union or even the declared risks of the nuclear arms race. The ‘Cold War’ consensus was the tacit but often explicit agreement that US corporate expansion and the extension of the archipelago of empire required discipline of the domestic population and marketing of the USA abroad so as to distract from the real wars being waged worldwide – and the fact that all these wars were being waged by the US regime or its vassals. When criticised for all the injustices and crimes committed by the clergy, Pope Pius XII insisted that the Church be judged by its high principles and not by its actions. This is the underlying precept of the whole concept of the ‘Cold War’ – to create an edifice of abstract principles that appear so unassailable, that no action however vile can be deemed to impugn it.
A ‘new cold war’ ? This question is actually ludicrous. First of all, the ‘old Cold War’ – properly understood – never ended. The ‘Cold War’has been a war waged by the US regime since 1945 to enforce the imperial scheme contrived between 1917 and 1944 but which could not be implemented as long as Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands still had any substantial control over their empires. 1945 gave the US ruling elite what they thought was the ultimate weapon to impose their will on the rest of the world – with the concessions made by the European competition which was now hopelessly indebted to the US banks and seriously weakened militarily so as to be unable to defend their colonial control against the indigenous populations. The ‘Cold War’ was also modelled in NSC 68 that mandated a massive armaments industry to heavily arm the US to assert and defend its corporations’ claims to a
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disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth.26 As the report indicates: ‘Even if there were no Soviet Union we would face the great problem of the free society, accentuated many fold in this industrial age, of reconciling order, security, the need for participation, with the requirements of freedom. We would face the fact that in a shrinking world the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable.’ 27 It has been the logical extension of Manifest Destiny, the particularly US term for imperialism. It has been assumed – at least by those who ask the foregoing ludicrous question – that the ‘Cold War’ ended, the date usually being set around 1989 with the opening of borders between the US-occupied Federal Republic of
26 NSC 68 – National Security Council Report 68, (1950, Top Secret) was declassified in February 1975. However as noted on page 10 et seq., the objectives represent a consistent development of those formulated in 1948 (NSC 20/4). ‘These objectives contemplate Soviet acceptance of the specific and limited conditions requisite to an international environment in which free institutions can flourish, and in which the Russian peoples will have a new chance to work out their destiny.’ Soviet capabilities are assessed in contrast to the vaster potential of the US, ‘in contrast to us, the Soviet world can do more with less. It has a lower standard of living, its economy requires less to keep it functioning and its military machine operates effectively with less elaborate equipment and organisation.’ The report anticipates an economic downturn as well as insufficient military expenditure, recommending measures to increase the latter throughout the ‘West’. ‘Such increased power could be provided in a shorter period (to less than two to three years) in a declared period of emergency or in wartime through a full-out national effort….A large measure of sacrifice and discipline will be demanded of the American people. They will be asked to give up some of the benefits which they have come to associate with their freedoms. Nothing could be more important than that they fully understand the reasons for this.’ The report lists among recommended measures: ‘substantial increase in military expenditures and military assistance programmes.....intensification of affirmative and timely measures and operations by covert means in the fields of economic warfare, and political and psychological warfare with a view to fomenting and supporting unrest and revolt in selected strategic satellite countries, development of internal security and civilian defence programs, improvement and intensification of intelligence activities, reduction of federal expenditures for purposes other than defence and foreign assistance, if necessary by the deferment of certain desirable programs, increased taxes…’ 27 NSC 68, p. 34
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Germany and the German Democratic Republic, established in the Soviet zone of occupation. Of course more dogmatic types date the end of the ‘Cold War’ with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Then the official enemy ceased to exist as a state. However, as argued above, the ‘Cold War’ did not originate because of the Soviet Union and any presumed competition between the US and USSR. The ‘Cold War’ was in and of itself a war waged unilaterally by the US regime. It was conceived and has been perpetuated as the political strategy of US corporations in their quest for world domination – what they call euphemistically ever-expanding markets. On the contrary, the official policy and praxis of the Soviet Union since Stalin had been literally anti-imperialist to the point of refusing by and large to support foreign revolutionary movements. Instead Stalin advocated ‘socialism in one country’ – the Soviet Union. The US from its very inception has claimed to expand its system: slavery and theft of indigenous land, plus unrestricted exploitation of labour and natural resources for private profit. It was augmented by the long-standing (if only recently declassified) policy of the US regime to initiate attack against the Soviet Union, massively with nuclear weapons. Only the visible and convincing success of the Soviet Union in establishing near parity in nuclear capability forced the US to refrain from pursuing its traditional mass annihilation strategy.28 It is not necessary to ask if there will be a new cold war, since the ‘Cold War’ is still being waged and the deception
28 With a little bit of training in deciphering the language of national security, especially the atomic bomb dialect, the official documentary history of US strategic nuclear policy produced by Sandia National Laboratories at
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inherent in the regular reiteration of this question in the media is proof that it is still being won among the whites of this world.
Dr T P Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket in Heinrich Heine’s birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003).
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The text below was the keynote speech at a conference at The Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICWS) School of Advanced Study of the University of London on 29 May 2014. The conference was titled ‘The Secret Archive. What is the significance of the FCO’s “Migrated Archives” and “Special Collections” ’?
Secrecy in Britain
Jonathan Bloch
Distinguished guests it is a great honour to give this keynote speech. I will use the 600,000 Foreign Office hidden files as a launching pad to examine the history of secrecy in Britain, why it is so persistent and pervasive, attempts to change it and what we could and should do about it. After all it is not only the 600,000 Foreign Office files, there are also between 66,000 and 600,000 Ministry of Defence files, depending on the source, and that is only two government departments. Interestingly enough the Daily Telegraph did a study in 2004 based on government information and believed that there were only 101,283 retained or extended closure files in existence across all government departments. These 101,283 files had been retained after a review under the Public Records Act; while, by contrast, the FCO Special Collections and MOD files had never been reviewed under the Act. In an account of the history of secrecy in Britain by David Vincent titled the The Culture of Secrecy in Britain 1832-1998, Vincent suggests that Britain is a particularly secretive society for two main reasons: the social and political depth of the country’s secrecy and the cultural rather than the institutional nature of it. He argues that this of course has a class base. ‘Official secrecy was exercised mainly by the upper middle classes. That was supposed to make it all right. In their hands it was called discretion, reserve or reticence, gentlemanly qualities much admired at the time.’
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Secrecy is a weapon – it is a means of control. Secrecy can be looked at from different directions: it can be seen as essential to ‘protect’ ‘national security/interests’; or it can be seen as the means by which bad deeds are covered up and hidden. Britain has always been ruled by a very small ruling class but it is not a dictatorship and force domestically is very seldom used. Ideology is the method of control. Secrecy is a very important component of this. If you can control what people know, what they believe is their history, you can determine their beliefs. Determining the national discourse is essential. This is buttressed in Britain by an unseemly deference to authority. As Glen Greenwald of Edward Snowden fame commented: ‘The political elite of (that country) Britain cling desperately to 17th century feudal traditions. Grown adults who have been elected or appointed to nothing run around with a straight face insisting that they be called “Lord” and “Baroness” and other grandiose hereditary titles of the landed gentry. They bow and curtsey to a “Queen”, who lives in a “palace”, and they call her sons “Prince”. They embrace a wide range of conceits and rituals of a long-ago collapsed empire.’ Access to historical files might mean a radical reinterpretation of historical events – the reasons for wars to be fought, countries to be invaded etc. It might also dispel myths spread by present day politicians – witness Cameron’s remarks ‘I think there is an enormous amount to be proud of in what the British Empire did and was responsible for – but, of course, there were bad events as well as good.’ People are still dying because of the legacy of empire be they in Israel/Palestine, Kashmir or other far flung places. There has never been a full reckoning of the deleterious impact of empire on the countries that were coloured red on the map. The fight to open up the state and its secrets has been a long one. It has been a constant theme of civil society that government should be opened up. There have been some notable victories or perceived victories as well as defeats. It is true to say that the periphery of power has been opened up –
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you can find out how much money MPs have falsely claimed but the leading lights of the Royal family and their covert political involvement remain protected. The tone for government secrecy was set by section 2 of the Official Secrets Act of 1911 which was signed up to on the first day of service by all civil servants. This made the unauthorised disclosure by a public servant a criminal offence. This provision was amended in 1989 with the catchall provisions of the 1911 Act been replaced by specific offences in most cases focussed on tests of harm likely to be caused by disclosure. In the 1990s there was a sense that excessive secrecy could no longer be defended but there was a hope by the establishment that the process of document release could be governed by a non-statutory code of practice other than where personal data was involved where there would be statutory provisions extending the scope of the Data Protection Act 1984 to manual files. The white paper ‘Open Government’ published in 1993 acknowledged that ‘the need for confidentiality diminishes with time as sensitivity reduces’; and while it did not recommend a change to the 30 year rule it set out proposals for reducing the amount of material subject to retention beyond 30 years. Under the Public Records Act 1958 public records were normally made available for inspection in the PRO, now called the National Archives, after 50 years. This was reduced in 1967 to 30 years by the Labour government after a successful campaign by historians and others. Subsequently the Dacre Review recommended that the 30 year rule should be replaced by 15 years. The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 reduced the 30 year rule to 20 years for some records with this target been reached over an extended period of time. The Public Records Act made provision for the Lord Chancellor to give approval for public inspection of documents in existence for periods shorter or longer than 30 years. There were two provisions under the 1958 Act for documents to be withheld for longer periods than 30 years: namely Section 5 (1) allows for records to be closed in the PRO for a
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prescribed period in accordance with agreed criteria – these mainly relate to census and tax information. Section 3 (4) is of more relevance as it allows records to be retained where the Lord Chancellor has given special reasons and I will come to this later. In 1981 a Government Committee ‘Modern Public Records’ argued that department records could be closed for a longer period than 30 years if they were exceptionally sensitive and their disclosure would be contrary to the public interest, contain information supplied in confidence and contain information about individuals, the disclosure of which would cause distress to or endanger living persons or their immediate descendants. In 1992 there was a further review of these criteria and the scope for retention was narrowed to those ‘where it is possible to establish the actual damage that would be caused by release and that the damage falls within the criteria’ mentioned. This is the rub of the matter. They defined and the Government accepted a definition of ‘public interest’. ‘Exceptionally sensitive records containing information, the disclosure of which would not be in the public interest in that it would harm defence, international relations, national security (including the maintenance of law and order) or the economic interests of the UK and its dependent territories.’ Examples given of records to be closed for longer than 30 years were references to possible plans for intervention in a foreign state and documents concerning the security or defence of a UK dependent territory where release would jeopardise the security of the territory concerned. There were another two criteria but they involved mainly individuals and personal information rather than matters of state. Those records retained under the first criteria were subject to periodic 10 year reviews. On ‘Defence and National Security’ the White Paper was firm. I will quote at length the white paper because it summarises the then government’s attitude and one that has continued to this day. ‘Legislation can exempt all information relating to defence, security and terrorism or can exempt such
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information only if its disclosure would be actually or potentially harmful. It may set out as in Canada a specific list of information which will not be disclosed concerning for example military operations or cyphers. Government agencies whose information is largely of a necessarily secret kind such as security and intelligence services, are in some countries excluded from the access requirements altogether or in others included but subject to exemptions which in practice need to cover a large part of their information. Whether particular information needs to be protected is in some countries established by conclusive Ministerial certificates; in others it is judged by whichever body hears appeals against refusals to supply information.’ And here comes the crux: ‘The Government believes that decisions affecting national security and defence should be taken by Ministers accountable to parliament for those matters. In the final analysis Ministers are best placed to judge what is likely to cause damage.’ It then goes on to say that they see no purpose in giving access rights to information in this area because in any event they would exempt the data to be released. Given that most commentators regard parliament’s role in keeping the security services accountable as totally lacking in substance, Ministers and the Government have total unaccountable power in this area. This has meant that the security services MI5, MI6 and GCHQ have effectively been exempt from the provisions of the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts which were brought in the 1980s and 2005 respectively. But this exemption goes beyond these three organisations to cover any mention of the intelligence agencies or information obtained from them in files of other organisations: e.g. FCO, MOD etc. Special Branch which is not specifically mentioned as an organisation enjoying absolute exemption is nevertheless caught by Section 24(1) of the Freedom of Information Act which covers national security. In the later instance a public interest test is applied. These exemptions from these two
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pieces of legislation were also reflected in the provisions of the Public Records Act allowing for the retention of documents ‘whose sensitivity is such that no date can be put on their potential release’. With respect to these the Lord Chancellor has given ‘blanket’ approval to retain, the most crucial of which is Security and intelligence material. Under Section 3(4) of the Public Records Act the Lord Chancellor has made an instrument, the most recent dated 19 December 2011 expiring 31 December 2021, which allows documents to be retained in the department concerned because the transfer of the records to the Public Record Office ‘will create a real risk of prejudice to national security’. Schedule 2 of this instrument lists 10 types of documents relating to MI6, MI5 and GCHQ which are excluded from deposit and they effectively cover most areas of activity of the agencies. No time limit is set for the retention. The reason given for this was that ‘the agencies depend for their effectiveness on maintaining the confidentiality both of their methods of operations which, despite the passage of time are still extant, and most of all, of the identities of people who put themselves at risk in the service of the state.’ Based on this we will never know the full extent of British intelligence involvement in the War on Terror and all that it entailed – torture, rendition etc. In 2012 there was an Early Day Motion as well as a full debate in the House of Commons calling on the papers relating to the Shrewsbury 24, a group of convicted building workers who were prosecuted in 1973 following a strike in 1972, to be released to the Public Record Office. On the 40th anniversary of the strike the papers were still been withheld from deposit in the National Archives on grounds of national security. There was, however, a minor concession to the rule that the intelligence services were exempt: namely that papers originating in the agencies which have been held in other departments over the years would be reviewed as part of the normal process and would be released if no longer sensitive. Also, unlike the exemption in Section 23 of the Freedom of Information Act which is absolute in relation to departmental
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files, where historical intelligence records are held in the National Archives the exemption will not be absolute and a public interest test will be applied before they are released. However most of these records are unlikely to land up in the National Archives for the reasons stated earlier. Off course, some historical intelligence records are released in a controlled way usually showing the skilfulness and intrepidness of the security agencies. For example GCHQ has completed the process of releasing all its Second World War and earlier material. In addition post-War material relating to Venona has been released complementing that released by the USA. However there are still some World War II Records withheld ‘withheld on grounds of continuing sensitivity’ – one can only guess widely what they must cover. GCHQ has agreed with the Advisory Committee criteria for the retention of documents and these are comprehensive and read well. But again without independent checks there are no guarantees that they are been adhered to. As regards MI5, otherwise known as the Security Service, similar criteria have been published. According to a document prepared by the National Archives in 2001 and revised in 2005: ‘The selection criteria will be applied without regards to whether the records may appear to reflect well or badly on the Service.’ Records which have been transferred to the National Archives may be returned to the department from which they have been transferred. The fact of the records being ‘on loan to the department’ does not affect their status as open records and if a member of the public wishes to see them they should be returned to the National Archives. This leads to some peculiar situations. A contact of mine was researching a book on a particular Soviet spy. He found an interesting document written by said spy in a file at the National Archives. It was 12 pages – he copied 6 pages and left it for another time to do the rest. On his return the file was ‘on loan to a government department’ and he did not obtain access. Why was it returned to the government department after the researcher had viewed it? What prompted them to do so? Is a record kept of the files accessed by researchers at the
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National Archives? What is more bizarre is that there is no limit to the length of time that the Department can hold the file. The National Archives responding to an FOI request admitted that there is no deadline to return loaned documents although it went onto add, ‘Government Departments can’t withhold documents indefinitely from the Archives.’ Without a deadline what compulsion exists to compel the return of documents? Why can documents not be scanned or photocopied rather than loaned? In effect a record that was in the public domain has been effectively withdrawn, and this has happened, in the same case, to several associated files. Ironically, the contents of the file were a copy of one discovered in a KGB archive, which is freely available. It seems clear that what is being protected is less to do with security, but more to do with the official narrative of events which occurred almost seventy years ago, an attempt to what I referred to at the beginning of my speech, to control history. The availability or withdrawal of files is one thing. There has been over the years concern by historians that the security services had systematically destroyed some of their records which would not be retained to be examined by future historians in the long distance future. The Wilson committee in 1981 came across two egregious examples of this namely in relation to SOE and PWE records which in one case had been accidentally and in the other deliberately destroyed. On this point the Wilson committee got a ‘categoric assurance that the records of the security and intelligence agencies ‘were being carefully selected for preservation’ in accordance with the Public Records Act of 1958. It also secured a concession from the Government that the words ‘never released’ would never be used again. Subsequently some intelligence records have been released to the National Archives, albeit heavily redacted. However, questions were again raised in 1998 over the destruction of MI5 files. Alan Clark, the MP and historian, commented on the Home Secretary’s assertion in a parliamentary debate that MI5 only retained files which were
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essential for their fulfilment of their statutory functions or which’ were of historical importance. ‘The problem is that almost invariably that judgement is made by civil servants – although laughably Ministers may occasionally try to get something taken out to protect their political reputation. For the historian the really obstructive thing is when civil servants, to defend their reputation as administrators or having made colossal errors of judgement, weed out or repress things that will reflect badly on them.’ In a seminal article, ‘In Never Never Land? The British Archives on Intelligence’, Wesley Wark, a Canadian academic, in 1992 commented after mentioning various strategies for dealing with the then virtual absence of intelligence records at the National Archives: ‘In the best of all possible worlds, all intelligence research would offer historical lessons: about the perennial difficulties of knowing one’s enemies or knowing one’s allies. The closure of parts of the intelligence archive make this difficult. Dedicated users of the British intelligence archive can escape the closure of records by a variety of stratagems from widening the circle of research to widening the basis of the definition of intelligence itself. The only losers are those who insist on making a never-never land out of security service records. There are no lessons to be learned from such a far-off place.’ In 1993 the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster invited historians to suggest what historical records should be released and as a result several files were released, including those relating to Rudolf Hess and the Derek Bentley case. Openness or secrecy relating to secret service issues, according to Richard Aldrich, were at the centre of the debate over the Waldegrave Initiative. This was partly because most of the files withheld for more than 30 years contained secret service material and also because Waldegrave deliberately chose to make ‘revelations’ in the area of secret service
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history as well as current secret service practice a flagship in the presentation of Open Government to the media. To that end amongst other items in 1993 Waldegrave also announced that the Joint Intelligence Committee files were to be reviewed and released on the same basis as other public records. Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary also made known that the Special Operations Executive (SOE) archive would also be reviewed for release. However Aldrich in 1998 sounded a warning note on the Waldegrave initiative and these words are even more true today after the discovery of the Foreign Office and MOD files. He argued and I quote: ‘The Waldegrave Initiative has introduced a more complex and seemingly discriminating range of criteria for restricting documents, with the intention of weeding more selectively and releasing portions of files that would previously suffered blanket closure. Inescapably, this more complex process requires more time, care and expert knowledge. These extra resources have not been made available. We know that the review staffs in many departments are still being cut rather than expanded and results are there for all to see.’ He drew attention to two key areas where files had been virtually totally culled doing irreparable damage to historians digging in those areas – one was the area of Axis prisoners in the UK and the other was the records of the Intelligence Division of the British occupation of Germany where only 10 files out of a reputed 1 million survived. The end of the Cold War also marked the beginning of the end of ‘never never’ and in 1997 MI5 began releasing files to the PRO. The availability of raw material has allowed for previous historical events to be re-examined. The official histories which have been written have tended to be bland and written within tight parameters. Bernard Porter in his review of Christopher Andrew’s Defence of the Realm, the authorised history of MI5, in the London Review of Books summed it up. After praising the book as terrific in many ways – rich, immensely readable and fascinating – he put the knife
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in and I quote: ‘Even if we trust Andrew to be telling the truth as he understands it, it would be naïve to assume that MI5 has been as open and honest with him, or that its archive whose use is what distinguishes this account from all others can tell us everything, indeed, even more if they are authorised, but restricted as much as Andrew has been: not allowed to see certain stuff or to reveal other stuff or even – the fundamental requirement, this, for an academic historian in all other circumstances – to permit verification by others.’ Unfortunately in Britain there is no independent scrutiny of what is to be released by the security services. The Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Public Records, comprising ‘the good and great’, is not robust enough in dealing with those hell bent in maintaining secrets. As Andrew Horrall, a Canadian archivist, in a London Review of Books article commented: ‘Uncovering secrets lies at the centre of intelligence history. Official disclosure has.....not prevented the most capable of researchers to wonder what remains safely stored away and whether the hidden hand is not still at work.’ There is a danger that government embarrassment could lead to more documents been retained. An uproar ensued when documents released showed that Lord Howe, the then foreign secretary, had sent an SAS officer to advice Gandhi on the Golden Temple siege in Amritsar. Subsequently the raid on the temple led to the killing of hundreds of Sikhs. Cameron immediately appointed Sir Jeremy Heywood to investigate what role the UK played in the attack and why the documents were released despite their obvious sensitivity. This can only have had a chilling effect on the reviewers. Embarrassment is part of the political process and should not be used to prevent the full story been told. One issue which is going to loom large in several decades time is whether documents withheld under the
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Freedom of Information Act as a result of the exercise of a Ministerial veto will be released after a passage of time. During the first 4 years of the FOI Act there were no ministerial vetoes – the first one was in 2009 and related to the contents of the legal advice on military action against Iraq. Subsequently there have been another 5, including one prohibiting the disclosure of correspondence between Mr Charles Windsor and government ministers. One can only guess why these vetoes were exercised: perhaps the war against Saddam Hussein was illegal; perhaps Mr Charles Windsor should not have been lobbying Ministers and Government Departments? Embarrassment should not be a reason to withhold documents. The Information Commissioner has commented on this interaction in a special report to Parliament in September 2012: ‘If the veto continues to be exercised in response to the majority of orders for the disclosure of Cabinet or Cabinet committee minutes, it is hard to imagine how the most significant proceedings of the Cabinet with ever be made known before the elapse of 30 years (to be reduced over time to 20 years under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010.)’ This Act also created a new absolute exemption for correspondence with the Sovereign, the heir and second in line to the Throne members, so the question of the Ministerial veto in this regard will no longer arise. What can be done to change the situation? • All security organisations should be brought within the ambit of the Freedom of Information Act and the release should be subject to the normal exemptions. This is the case in the USA, Canada and New Zealand. A precedent exists in Britain itself as the intelligence agencies are covered by the Environmental Information Regulations. • The instrument issued under Section 3(4) which allows the intelligence agencies to retain documents should be revoked and they should be subject to the normal exemptions.
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• There should be a presumption in favour of release unless strong reasons in the public interest indicate otherwise. These reasons need to be given and be subject to review. • The Cold War is now over. All the files gathered on the ‘state’s enemies during this period should be opened for scrutiny. If Romania and some of the other Eastern European countries can do this there can be no conceivable reason for not doing so other than it would shock the public as to the extent of surveillance, spying and the use of informants. MI5 is on record as destroying a vast number of these files – what has not been destroyed should be preserved for history. • More resources need to be allocated to employ more reviewers. • There should be a time limit placed on the borrowing of files from the National Archives – currently there is no deadline to return loaned documents. • The Ministerial veto should be removed from the FOI Act • The absolute exemption for members of the Royal Family should be repealed If we had full access to all government files what would our views be, for example, of the Pinochet affair, attempted deals over the Falklands Islands, the miners’ strike etc.? The most notable case of history having to be rewritten because of documents becoming available is the Hillsborough disaster. Our view of policing and the integrity of British police forces might never be the same after the revelations of the cover-up of this tragic incident. Historians have an important role to play in uncovering the truth and working for a better, more equal and fairer society. Historians should go where others have not dared to go. It is not going to make them popular but the struggle for human betterment has always been a hard one with opposition along the way. A prerequisite to this is having access to the raw and original information and data. And that is what we should seek.
Jonathan Bloch was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He
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studied law at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. He was politically active in South Africa and remains involved in Southern African causes. He is now a London-based businessman and is a former Liberal Democrat councillor in the London Borough of Haringey. He co-authored British Intelligence and Covert Action and KGB/CIA, Global Intelligence: The World's Secret Services Today and was also a co-author of three chapters in the collection Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa.
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The view from the bridge
Robin Ramsay
Meeja news Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of the German conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, did an interview with Russia Today1in which, among other things, he said this. ‘Germany is still a kind of a colony of the United States, you’ll see that in many points; like for example, the majority of Germany do not want to have nukes in our country, but we still have American nukes; so, we are still a kind of an American colony, and, being a colony, it is very easy to approach young journalists through (and what is very important here is) transatlantic organizations. All journalists from respected and big German newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, they are all members or guests of those big transatlantic organizations, and in these transatlantic organizations you are approached to be pro-American, and.....they invite you for seeing the United States, they pay for that, they pay all your expenses and everything. So, you are bribed, you get more and more corrupt, because they make you good contacts...... So, you make friends, you think they are your friends and cooperate with them. They ask you, “will you do me this favor,” “will you do me that favor,” so your brain is more and more brainwashed, through these guys...... ’ 2 Which – apart from the desire to remove American nukes – would apply to this American colony, would it not? Britain being essentially a colony of the US is why the
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British mainstream media fails to report so much of what is going on within the American sphere of influence. At the upper levels of editors and managers of newspapers there are lines from the owners which cannot be crossed. All – including the trust which owns the Guardian – are pro-American, reluctant to acknowledge the reality of American politics and policies.3 (British TV news organisations share the same biases though they are not so obviously paraded.) But lower down the ladder the three ‘C’s, careerism, cowardice and conformism, are more significant. In my (limited) experience, most mainstream media journalists are just doing a job (pursuing a career); and their job is not perceived to be to report what is going on, or ‘tell the truth’, let alone higher aspirations such as holding the powerful to account or informing the public. Rather, it is more prosaic things such as getting a story; producing enough to keep their jobs or advance their careers; and competing with their rivals on other similar papers or TV programmes – none of which are enhanced by straying off the reservation. Gary Webb and his stories about the CIA, the Contras and cocaine – the dark alliance as he called it – in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, illustrated what can happen when you leave the reservation. Despite the fact that Webb’s stories about the CIA allowing cocaine trafficking into the US in exchange for funding for the Contras were true, Webb and the paper were attacked by many other media organisations, the paper relegated Webb to a minor role in a distant office, he couldn’t get another reporting job and eventually committed suicide.4 Robert Parry, of Consortiumnews.com, who has
3 There is a very long list of such subjects – I could fill every issue of Lobster with them – but two that have struck me recently are the effects in Iraq of the use of depleted uranium ammunition by the US (and UK?) forces and the health effects of Monsanto’s popular weedkiller Roundup. For Depleted uranium see, for example,
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followed these events more carefully and more closely than anyone else, commented recently on a declassified CIA report on how the Agency handled the PR fallout from the Webb articles. ‘The initial attacks on Webb’s series came from the right- wing media, such as the Washington Times and the Weekly Standard, but the CIA’s report identified the key turning point as coming when the Washington Post pummelled Webb in two influential articles. The CIA’s PR experts quickly exploited that opening. The CIA’s internal report said: “Public Affairs made sure that reporters and news directors calling for information – as well as former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media – received copies of these more balanced stories. Because of the Post’s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a ‘firestorm of reaction’ against the San Jose Mercury- News.”’ Rather than the CIA authorising cocaine trafficking being the story, ‘Webb got it wrong’ became the story. Parry comments: ‘The overall tone of the CIA’s internal assessment is one of almost amazement at how its PR team could, with a deft touch, help convince mainstream U.S. journalists to trash a fellow reporter on a story that put the CIA in a negative light.’ 5
UKraine and the major media Recent events in Ukraine illustrate the gap between the mainstream media’s version of events and what we can find out for ourselves. The American-EU attempt to detach the Ukraine from the Russia orbit is stupid and dangerous. A 5
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comparison might be the Russians seeking to sign Mexico or Canada into an economic and military alliance. But the standard moves were made: the IMF offered a big loan to Ukraine with the usual conditions, ‘restructuring’ – i.e. unemployment and economic devastation. Unless the IMF analysts are incredibly stupid and completely misread the economic data on Ukraine, the real plan was that Ukraine would be unable to repay the loan and thus would have to repay in kind. This would entail giving large chunks of Ukraine to the American agri-chemical giant Monsanto,6 to seed the Ukrainian plains with its GM wheat; and so, when Ukraine eventually joined the EU, an end run would have been made around the widespread objection to GM crops within the union: GM wheat would already be growing there. That was the plan but the Russians initially topped it with a better offer than the IMF/EU deal. So the Americans overthrew the Ukrainian government and installed one of their people. That’s about it, isn’t it? And how much of this has made it into the British mainstream media? The IMF loan has since been made but Ukrainian politics is so corrupt7 the loan is probably long gone into off-shore accounts,8 it won’t be repaid and Monsanto will duly get their hands on what used to known as ‘the breadbasket of Europe’. Despite the presence in Russia of a kleptocracy not dissimilar to that running the US, the American weapons lobby wants Russia as an enemy and Obama’s people cannot think of a way to resist this.
More bollocks from Balls 6 On Monsanto’s role in all this see
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As winter approachs some people suffer from seasonally affective disorder (SAD). I get CAD, conference affective disorder, a creeping gloom produced by reports from the Labour Party conference. It’s not just that they’re so obviously more concerned with careers than the national interest – that’s a given these days – they’re so incompetent. Take shadow chancellor Ed Balls’ speech to conference on 22 September. The penny has dropped that some sort of apology needs to be made for the mess he and Gordon Brown created when they were last in office. This would play well with the electorate: a politician’s admission of error is so rare that it would be headline news. Here’s what we got. ‘But where we made mistakes – like all governments do – we should be grown up about it. We should put our hands up, learn from the past and explain how we will do things differently in the future. So Conference, we should have had tougher rules on immigration from Eastern Europe – it was a mistake not to have transitional controls in 2004...... And Conference, while it was the banks which caused the global recession, and it was the global recession which caused deficits to rise here in Britain and around the world, the truth is we should have regulated those banks in a tougher way. It was a mistake. We should apologise for it. And I do. And so as we get the deficit down, we must reform our banks for the future so that can never happen again.’ But this is evasion and deception. The mass immigration of the past decade wasn’t caused just by the absence of transitional controls on new EU member states. It was the result of a policy of encouraging immigration to generate economic growth – a policy NuLab copied from Bill Clinton’s America. In a speech about the policy, then Home Office minister Barbara Roche said: ‘The evidence shows that economically driven migration
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can bring substantial overall benefits both for growth and the economy. In the United States, as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has commented, the huge recent inflow of migrants – 11 million in the 1990s – has been key to sustaining America’s longest-ever economic boom.’9 As for his promise to regulate the banks to prevent another crash, this won’t happen – even presuming Labour get back into office. At the first suggestion of any legislation likely to actually do this, the City would threaten to pack their tents and leave and the Labour government would take fright and abandon it. This being the case, such legislation simply will never be proposed. And everyone knows it. Nor is it the case that it was the financial melt-down of 2008 which caused the deficit problem. The deficit – and he means the gap between government spending and government income, not the trade deficit or the total national debt – was rising before 2008 and is caused by UK taxes being too low. But no mainstream British politician will argue for raising taxes. While in office Blair, Brown and Balls encouraged the delusion that the UK could have American levels of taxation and EU levels of public services. Apologising for that and the NuLab abandonment of manufacturing in favour of ‘the knowledge economy’ would be the beginning of adult politics. This stuff Balls is giving us is just baby talk. Addendum: open mouth, stick foot in A classic case of the curse of the commentators has struck me. A week or so after I wrote in the paragraph above, ‘But no mainstream British politician will argue for raising taxes’, Nick Clegg and Vince Cable of Liberal Democrats did just that. Cable went so far as to actually spell out the truth: ‘The truth is more taxes will be needed – to contribute to deficit reduction and also to address unacceptable inequalities. Any politician who tells you that the next government can balance the budget and avoid tax
9 Text at
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increases is lying to you.’10 A couple of days later Nick Clegg proposed raising capital gains tax on the wealthy11 and said: ‘The difference between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives is that we want to cut taxes for working people, paid for by the wealthiest; they want to cut taxes for the wealthiest, paid for by the working poor.’ Both statements were greeted with silence from the leadership of the Labour Party, I presume because a Labour- Liberal coalition of some kind is the most likely outcome of the next general election and the Labour leadership wouldn’t want to be linked to anything as ‘radical’ as raising taxes. Between these two statements I watched an episode of the American political series Boss12 in which a character called Zajac, running in the primary election to be Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois, has his campaign derailed by a sex scandal. With nowhere else to go Zajac stumbles into a real issue – housing foreclosures – and accidentally finds a way to revive his dying campaign. The Liberal Democrats, facing big losses at the next general election because of their association with the Conservative Party, are having a Zajac moment.
Spooks, now and then Cryptome is the Website of John Young, who has been publishing information about states and especially their
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intelligence services for about 15 years.13 He recently published a list of putative MI6 officers14 and I was struck by how little it interested me. In 1989 I published A Who’s Who of the British Secret State, over a thousand names and brief cvs of publicly identified or identifiable secret state employees.15 In 1989, publishing such a list seemed worth the (theoretical) risk of prosecution. Today it wouldn’t. What has changed? Then it seemed worthwhile to stick two fingers up to the British state, headed by Margaret Thatcher, by revealing (minor) state secrets. Today we have Cameron and Clegg, imitations of Tony Blair, Thatcher’s successor, who hardly matter. Then, influenced by research on the ‘Wilson plots’, the secret state seemed important and powerful. These days it doesn’t seem so significant. Would the average MP today be more afraid of the Daily Mail or MI5? How powerful can MI6 be if it is unable to withstand being co-opted by the prime minister’s chief press officer (Alastair Campbell) during the assault on Iraq? Of course a lot has not changed since 1989. The intelligence and security services remain entirely unaccountable. Then there seemed some slight chance that, via the Labour Party, something might be done about that. I even got a resolution through the Labour Party conference on the issue (1989? 90? I don’t remember), though I suspect it was forgotten about before that day’s conference session ended. For as we know now the Kinnock team had already decided to capitulate and ‘Thatcherise’ the Labour Party in the
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pursuit of office16 – a process completed by Brown and Blair. These days no-one within hailing distance of the Labour leader’s team is interested in challenging the power of the spooks – or any other substantial entity, for that matter.
The unspoken On the interesting American economics/financial site Zero Hedge this appeared recently: ‘Time and again, we’ve been told that the Great Crisis of 2008 has ended and that we’re in a recovery. Indeed, earlier this year, we were even told by Fed [Federal Reserve] Chair Janet Yellen that the Fed may in fact raise interest rates as early as next year. If this is in fact true, how does one explain the following statement made by the Fed’s favorite Wall Street Journal reporter, Jon Hilsenrath? “One worry: As they move toward a new system, trading in the fed funds market could dry up and make the fed funds rate unstable. That could unsettle $12 trillion worth of derivatives contracts called interest rate swaps that are linked to the fed funds rate, posing problems for people and institutions using these instruments to hedge or trade.” (emphasis in the original) So.....the Fed may not be able to raise interest rates because Wall Street has $12 trillion in derivatives that could be affected? Weren’t derivatives the very items that caused the 2008 Crisis? And wasn’t the problem with derivatives that they were totally unregulated and out of control? And yet, here we find, that in point of fact, all of us must continue to earn next to nothing on our savings because if the Fed were to raise rates, it might blow up
16 Discussed in detail in my ‘The two Goulds’ in Lobster 63 at
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Wall Street again…..’17
Sid’s tell Sidney Blumenthal is an interesting figure. One time lefty journalist and author,18 he became one of President Bill Clinton’s advisers in the White House. He was there during the years when the Republicans – who controlled Congress – and other groups on the right were trying to force Clinton out of office with a torrent of allegations, most of them simply invented.19 He describes this at enormous and occasionally tedious length in his 800 page The Clinton Wars (2003). In an autobiographical chapter, ‘A political education’, he tells us, inter alia, that he had been a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) while at university. What he does not mention in that chapter is that between SDS and becoming a professional journalist he had been interested in the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. On p. 207 he writes of ‘my first book, The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980’ – omitting his 1976 book on those assassinations, Government by Gunplay, co-edited with Harvey Yazijian, to which he contributed a chapter.20 Other people remember his interest in the assassinations. A review of another of his books in Commentary mentioned the book;21 and his one-time friend, the late Christopher Hitchens (they fell out over the Monica
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Lewinsky affair), in his review of The Clinton Wars, noted that Blumenthal had ‘spent some time with Carl Oglesby and the Assassination Information Bureau.’ 22 Why would Blumenthal want to conceal his interest in those assassinations? The answer, I think, is that the assassinations are part of a narrative about American politics which is simply forbidden to mainstream politicians. Its elements include: the post-Vietnam revisionist historians’ version of the Cold War; the rise of the military-industrial (more accurately, perhaps, the military-industrial-intelligence) complex and outgoing President Eisenhower’s warning about it in his farewell speech; the Kennedy/Krushchev attempts to wind down the Cold War; and the assassinations in the sixties. As one of what we might call the paranoid or spook- wise left, Blumenthal understood that narrative in the 1970s. But after the brief Congressional flurry of activity in the middle of that decade – the Pike and Church committees (which led to the appearance of accountability for the CIA) and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (which pretended to investigate the assassinations) – no-one with any weight in American politics has challenged the military-industrial- intelligence complex and its enormous slice of the American tax take. The subject has disappeared from the mainstream political agenda; it is almost literally unspeakable. And as journalism and political careers in America are rarely to be had articulating that narrative, Blumenthal ditched it.
MH17 Amidst the usual flurry of junk conspiracy theories on the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 17, NATO released satellite images showing the scorch marks on fields left by rockets fired – NATO alleges – from inside Russia into Eastern Ukraine.23 Yet neither NATO nor US intelligence has released any images of the anti-aircraft missile system – what, a hundred? two 22
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hundred? times as big as one of those scorch marks – which it is claimed was used to shoot down Flight 17. The American journalist Robert Parry has been very carefully picking his way through all this with tips from ex American intelligence officers who know serving officers and concludes that such images are not being withheld: they do not exist. The Americans have no photographic evidence that the pro-Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine have or ever had the Russian BuK anti-aircraft system alleged to have downed flight 17. In three days recently we had three conflicting explanations of MH17’s downing. On 7 August it was reported that on Ukrainian TV: ‘Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), today stated that the 17 July shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 near Donetsk by Russian- backed separatists represented a terrible case of a Kremlin provocation gone horribly wrong. According to Nalyvaychenko, the SBU has evidence that what happened was the outcome of a diabolical Moscow plot to create a pretext for war, meaning Russian invasion, by shooting down an Aeroflot airline and killing its (mostly Russian) passengers, then placing blame on Ukrainian forces.’ 24 On the same day, 7 August, the New Straits Times in Malaysia reported: ‘Intelligence analysts in the United States have already concluded that Malaysia flight MH17 was shot down by an air-to-air missile, and that the Ukrainian government had something to do with it. This corroborates an emerging theory postulated by local investigators that the Boeing 777-200 was crippled by an air-to-air missile and finished off with cannon fire from a jet that had been shadowing it as it plummeted to earth.’ It cited ‘experts who had said that the photographs of the blast
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fragmentation patterns on the fuselage of the airliner showed two distinct shapes – the shredding pattern associated with a warhead packed with “flechettes”, and the more uniform, round-type penetration holes consistent with that of cannon rounds.’ 25 The next day, 8 August, Robert Parry of the Consortium reported: ‘U.S. intelligence analysts are weighing the possibility that the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a botched attempt by extremists in the Ukrainian government to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin whose aircraft was returning from South America the same day, according to a source briefed on the U.S. investigation.’ 26 We shall see; but, given his track record of careful investigation and his Washington sources, my money would be on Parry getting to the bottom of this. Meanwhile the Obama administration and the nodding dogs in the NATO countries and the major media who echoed the administration’s verdict that the Russian-backed Ukrainians did it, despite an almost complete lack of evidence, are stuck with their initial decision. And great powers do not admit their errors: think of Lockerbie, or the downing of the Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes in 1988.27 Which means that if the US intelligence community does finally conclude that the Russian-backed Ukrainians didn’t do it, on past performance it will leak that fact to the media (which may be happening already with the fragments Robert Parry is picking up).28
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Can he really believe this? 1. ‘One of the many merits of a free Press — which is what they have in the U.S. — is that it makes it almost impossible for the government to pull the wool over its own public’s eyes, or at least not for long.’ Thus Dominic Lawson (son of Nigel) in the Mail on Sunday on 12 July. Lawson was editor of the Spectator, where he let MI6 use it as journalistic cover,29 and the Sunday Telegraph, where he regularly ran pieces by Con Coughlin, an MI6 asset.30 Can he really believe that the US government cannot deceive its citizens? When I first began reading Coughlin’s writing in the Telegraph his MI6 affiliation was concealed – at any rate not admitted. These days it’s almost trumpeted. A puff piece by him on the 27 June was headed ‘MI6 experts can stop politicians dragging us into war: Sage advice from the likes of Sir John Sawers at MI6 may prevent foreign policy disaster’. It included this striking paragraph: ‘Sir John is the first “outsider” to head the intelligence service since John Rennie, who was appointed in 1968 to overhaul the service in the wake of the chaos caused by George Blake’s defection to Moscow. Sir John has taken a similarly robust approach to “cleaning out the stables”, as one former senior officer put it – 40 per cent of MI6’s senior officers have taken early retirement during the past four years. After the ignominy the service suffered from its association with Alastair Campbell’s over-hyped treatment of the Iraq dossier, Sir John has worked hard to rehabilitate MI6 and put it at the heart of Whitehall’s decision-making process’ (emphasis added).
2. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, was questioned by the House of Commons Treasury Committee about the foreign exchange market in March and he said this: 29
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‘What we saw in LIBOR, and what the FCA and other authorities around the world are investigating in the FX markets around fixes, are symptomatic of a group of individuals in markets who clearly — in the case of LIBOR, because there have been prosecutions, and it would appear to be the case in FX — have lost sight of what a real market is.’ 31 Can he really believe that the world’s foreign exchange dealers and the banks for whom they work give a dull fuck about what a ‘real market’ is? Inside Carney’s head there appears to be an idealised world in which there will be ‘real markets’ in this field. We’re long past that.
Kincora And so, on the back of the Jimmy Savile affair, calls are now being made for the the Kincora Boys’ Home affair in Northern Ireland to be included in forthcoming inquiry into historical child sex abuse and how state institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from paedophiles.32 We may presume that this is one area in which the state does not want such an inquiry to go as it will show that MI5 tolerated the sexual abuse of teenage boys at the home. It will be interesting to see how they prevent this: claim that an inquiry into Kincora has already been held? 33 Cite national security? The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has been quoted as saying she would ‘have to consider the restrictions of the Official Secrets Act in some cases’.34
31
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Colin Wallace – who would be subject to the strictures of the Official Secrets Act – has once again expressed his willingness to testify about his knowledge of those events in the mid 1970s. It is not beyond the British secret state, its deep state, to be planning on keeping the lid on until he dies. Wallace is now in his early seventies. Last time we spoke on the phone he sounded pretty chipper. This game might go on for quite a while yet.
Boris and the City If you wondered what the subtext was to Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s announcement in early August that he would be trying to return to the House of Commons, the answer lay in a story in the Daily Telegraph on 8 August headed ‘Brussels plots fresh City of London power grab: European Commission calls for greater powers for Brussels regulators in move likely to inflame tensions between City and Europe’. Reading (just) between the lines of his speech it is obvious that Boris is offering himself as the leader of the Conservative Party who will take the UK out of the EU to preserve the City of London as the financial crime centre of the world economy.35
Huh? Elsewhere in this issue I have written about the Conspiracy and Democracy project. One of the posts on the project’s website is ‘Coincidences and Conspiracy Theories’, by Dr Rachel Hoffman (Brown University, Cambridge, Yale).36 Hoffman notes that some conspiracy theories are triggered by events, ‘...... frequently physically violent in nature – such as assassination attempts, terrorist attacks, armed
35 Or England and Wales, if the Scots vote for independence in the September referendum. 36
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uprisings.’ She offers as an example the two attempts on the life of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm the First in 1878, which ‘....provided the political pretext for the dissolution of Parliament and the eventual passing of the anti-socialist laws supported by the Iron Chancellor [Bismarck].’ After which ‘...... the suspicion spread that perhaps the assassins had been instigated by Bismarck.’ I don’t know if there is anything to that ‘suspicion’ but given what we know now of false flag operations in history, this is an interesting hypothesis, worth a bit of research. She continues: ‘Similarly (sic), in the 1960s and 1970s conspiracy theories that surfaced in the immediate aftermath of US President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination appeared increasingly plausible in the light of the subsequent murder of Malcolm X, and later the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and then Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Against the conflict-ridden backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and the Cold War, paranoia about a government plot grew culminating in 1975 with the US Senate Select Committee’s uncovering of evidence of CIA involvement in state-sponsored assassination plots abroad.’ (emphasis added) What she intends to say here is unclear but I think she means ‘paranoia about a government plot’ to kill JFK. But this is not only a strange way to express it – nobody, in fact, was blaming ‘the government’ but some were blaming a state agency, the CIA – it is simply wrong to say that it was theories about ‘a government plot’ to kill JFK which led to the 1975 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (better known as the Church Committee). It was revelations about the CIA’s activities which had been reported in the media. For the first
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time, between 1964 and 1975 the nature and to some extent the scope of the American national security state was revealed, along with details of some of the operations, e.g. Cointelpro by the FBI and the CIA’s Operation Chaos.37 These details are of no interest to her and she continues with other conspiracy theories which are the result of acts which ‘....violate existing knowledge and trust – such as the public revelation of information that was formerly concealed, and which by its uncovering threatens to harm the relationship between groups, notably state and society. An example of the latter can be found in the public disclosures of WikiLeaks and, most recently, Edward Snowden’s divulgences about the US National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programmes. Coincidences such as these are regularly seen by conspiracy theorists as irrefutable evidence of a malign plot.’ (emphasis added) This is even less clear than her first conclusion. Coincidences? What is she talking about? Which coincidences are involved in the revelations of Wikileaks and Snowden? And is she trying to deny that Wikileaks and Snowden have provided evidence of real, actual ‘malign plots’? As far as I can see the Conspiracy and Democracy project will not be looking at the political uses of the terms conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist. James F. Tracey looks at one such use in his ‘Media Disinformation and the Conspiracy Panic Phenomenon’.38 ‘In the American mass mind, government intelligence and military operations are largely seen as being directed almost solely toward manipulation or coercion of unfortunate souls in foreign lands. To suggest otherwise, as independent researchers and commentators have done with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA-Contra-crack cocaine
37
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connection, and 9/11, has been cause for sustained conspiracy panics that act to suppress inquiry into such events by professional and credentialed opinion leaders, particularly journalists and academics.’ True enough. But...... ‘credentialed opinion leaders’?
Bull’s-eye Rowan Bosworth-Davies, former member of the Metropolitan Police Fraud Squad: ‘In August 2012, I wrote a response to a British Parliamentary Commission public request for evidence concerning the state of the British Banking Industry. In that document I made the following assertions: “The British banking sector has become an organised criminal enterprise which has been allowed to develop because of the criminogenic environment in which it functions, which has resulted from the absence of any meaningful regulation which those who control and manage the banks would fear.”’ 39
Oh, really? On 19 June the Atlantic Council sent out an e-mail headed ‘New Report: US Risks Losing Iraq and Syria to ISIS’. The US owns Iraq and Syria?
Beam me up It’s almost 25 years since I met the first person to tell me that he was a mind-control victim, getting microwave assaults from the CIA. Given what we knew then about what the CIA had done in the 1950s and 60s with projects like MK-Ultra, this could not dismissed as nonsense and I have been keeping half an eye open on the subject ever since. I have been getting e-mails from a Todd Giffin who is apparently embarking on a lawsuit in America about mind-
39
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control devices (though who is going to be the target of said lawsuit is not clear to me).40 I was quite interested until I got an e-mail in which he stated: ‘Built into a massive array of global satellites and phased array antenna systems (basically just high tech radar), they possess a system to beam complex waveforms and high frequency directed energy at any object. Humans can be targets as can electronics and aircraft, buildings and even the atmosphere. There are many purposes of these weapons ranging from heating, chilling, disruption of circuits, and even manipulation of brainwaves and dustification (sic) and destroying targets as massive as the World Trade Center (http://www.drjudywood.com/).’ Well I don’t see any evidence for this yet (and he offered none); and the link is to Dr Judy Wood, a professor of engineering, who believes that the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11 by beam weapons. The author then referred me to a site
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voice of someone who is going to successfully sue some branch of the American state, is it?
The annals of stupidity I am just old enough to remember the world of economics before the arrival of what used to be called monetarism. Economics was a subsidiary part of the course I did at university in the early 1970s and I remember our lecturer – who would now be called a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian – giving us the quantity theory of money42(as monetarism was then known) to kick around. The point being that the quantity theory of money was so easily refutable that even undergraduates who were not specialising in economics could be expected to demolish it. Less than a decade (and with inflation peaking at 25%) later Milton Friedman, one of that theory’s leading advocates, was on BBC television promoting his book and TV series Free to Choose.43 The quantity theory of money was becoming the new orthodoxy, capturing the Conservative Party en route. Not that its appeal to the Tory right was terribly surprising; for what the theory said was that to reduce inflation politicians should cause a big recession and make lots of the working class unemployed. Which Thatcher and the Treasury team of Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson duly did. Around then I met a young Oxford graduate with a first in PPE, who was doing accountancy training on his way into what was then still called merchant banking, in the pre ‘Big Bang’ City of London. In the course of our conversation I discovered that what he had been taught at Oxford as economics was the free market–rational consumer–perfect competition paradigm which has dominated the Western world for the last 30 plus years. When I offered the standard rebuttals of this I discovered that he had never met the arguments before. And this matters, for Oxford produces a
42
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considerable proportion of those in the knowledge industries (media, universities) who determine what counts as ‘sensible’ – and common sensible – in this society; and generations of them have been fed this nonsense. I was reminded of all this by a very interesting essay on the rise of Friedman and his ilk, Michael Collins, ‘Mr Anonymous and the Not-So-Spontaneous Birth of the Libertarian Movement’ 44 which shows in some detail the role played by American foundations – in this instance notably the Volker Fund – financed by rich American businessmen, which paid salaries, published books and magazines, supported students, created and financed university chairs, and supported dozens of other so-called ‘think tanks’ – in the UK notably the Institute for Economic Affairs – which advocated a particular anti- collective, anti-state, individualistic vision of capitalist society. Collins’ essay includes this devastating paragraph: ‘Tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of books, hundreds of journals, dozens of universities, tens of thousands of people and thousands of professorships, and so on in a network touching virtually everyone in the “Western Democracies” – all of it centrally planned, all of it subsidized, none of it capable of existing by itself in the commercial marketplace or in the “marketplace of ideas” and all of it failing dozens of times until hooked into the river of cash produced by the simple subsidies of the rich designed to derail the “free” evolution of ideas as they were actually proceeding.....is there any such example in all of human history of a “movement” so far at odds with its own self- proclaimed “principles”?’ The Collins essay should be read with Mark Ames, ‘The True History of Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate Agenda’45 which discusses in detail the early career of Milton Friedman and shows: ‘Milton Friedman and his U[niversity of] Chicago cohort
44
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George Stigler arranged an under-the-table deal with a Washington lobbying executive to pump out covert propaganda for the national real estate lobby in exchange for a hefty payout, the terms of which were never meant to be released to the public.’ So why has this rubbish been so dominant for so long? Why are we seeing ‘the strange non-death of neoliberalism?’46 In an essay for Open Democracy, Japhy Wilson argues that: ‘neoliberalism should be interpreted as an anxiety- ridden form of crisis management that is constantly attempting to cover over the gaps and ruptures in its own ideological fabric caused by the contradictions that it is structured to conceal.’47 Wilson makes quite a pretty convincing argument for this in the case of Jeffrey Sachs, the subject of the book on which the article is based; but do we need to bring Lacanian psychoanalytical concepts into it as he does? I would rather ask: why would those who have embraced it change their minds? Those who are using the paradigm to enrich themselves have no reason to. But why do intellectuals continue to believe something which is not only nonsense but has had disastrous consequences? In general people find it hard to change their minds about their core beliefs; and intellectuals, like everyone else, know that you get along by going along. The three Cs, cowardice, conformism and careerism, are a formidable obstacle to intellectual change. There is also simple denial; only looking at evidence which supports the belief (confirmation bias); and the ‘Well, it’s never been done properly yet’ move. These strategies are used by all political positions. Neo-liberal economics – like socialism and anarchism – depicts an ideal state towards which its advocates think we should travel.48 Some people are attracted to this kind of 46 Colin Crouch, The strange non-death of neoliberalism (London: Polity, 2011) 47
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thinking. Others are not. It may come down to brain development in the end. The psychologists busy MRI-scanning the brain may one day be able to point to some little feature on the scan as the place which determines why some of us do and some of us don’t respond to ideal types.
‘Quite accessible to the embassy’ More quotes from the interviews with staff at the US embassy in London.49
ROBERT HOPPER, Political Officer, London (1982-1986) George Robertson was one of my closest contacts and he was just a junior MP from a pretty safe district who was not taken seriously by many people in his party because he was sort of a defense intellectual. I had him meet with many people and I sent him to the U.S. and I worked with him and talked with him a lot, and considered him a good friend. Tony Blair I picked for an international visitor’s program, and sent him to the U.S. I worked with Gordon Brown, who is the chancellor of the exchequer, was from Scotland. It was clear that he had a seat he could keep for a long time, but he was also a pretty undisciplined young fellow. I had him go to the democratic convention in San Francisco, kept using him a lot. I was very close to a wonderful, wonderful fellow in Scotland who for a while was the deputy leader of the Labour Party, then was the head after Neil Kinnock for a little bit, and then had a heart attack and died. It’s so awful I can’t remember his name right now [John Smith]. But he was wonderful and I worked with his staff and I stayed very close to him.
LYNNE LAMBERT, Trade Policy Officer, London (1987-1990) Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament when I lived in London. Both were fairly young, and they were considered Labour’s comers. They were not in the 49
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leadership of the Labour Party, but they were in Parliament. Mrs. Thatcher was so dominant that people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were quite accessible to the embassy.
After Nigel Farage ‘If globalisation has failed, then we return to the nation state. Do you see anyone on the left thinking about this? I don’t. And no wonder: nation segues into nationalism, and this is the territory of the right and far right. So there’s the big necessary project: how to detoxify the notion of the nation state and make it acceptable to the left.’ That was me in March 2012 in an e-mail Q and A with Occupied Times.50 I came across it recently and thought: quoting yourself is naff but this is still apposite. So little thought about this is there on the left, the BBC turns to Billy Bragg51 for leftish views on nationalism.
Still a non-no I don’t read enough books any more: the Net takes up so much of my time. But, on holiday, without computer, I finally got round to Keith Jeffrey’s MI6: the history of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909 to 1949, an official history of MI6. I began determined not to cherry-pick my way through the index and to read the whole thing; but after forty pages on the organisation’s foundation and earliest days I got bored and turned to the index: let’s see what it says about British Security Co-ordination (BSC). BSC was the most extraordinary operation in British intelligence history: an MI6 operation, in America, with the approval of the White House (which could thus keep its hands
50
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clean), the key part of which entailed the discrediting of the opponents of American entry into WW2. British psy-ops and ‘dirty tricks’ against American politicians, in America, with presidential approval. This is still sensitive and thus far it has produced only what is presented as BSC’s in-house history, British Security Co-ordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas 1940-1945 52 (though we cannot be quite sure of that book’s status because BSC’s files were destroyed after it was written) and one study of consequence, Thomas Mahl’s Desperate Deception (based on his PhD thesis).53 On the key ops to discredit the so-called ‘isolationists’ and change American public opinion Jeffreys says almost nothing. The closest we get is this: ‘....American journalists, newspapers and news agencies were targeted with pro-British material; an ostensibly independent radio station (WURL), “with an unsullied reputation for impartiality” as virtually taken over’....(p. 441) Though Jeffreys cites many books, as well as the official MI6 files to which he was given access, Mahl’s thesis and book is not mentioned. From which you can draw your own conclusion.
Same old same old I had another rummage through the collection of interviews with American diplomats based in London and found this in the recollections of Thomas Hughes, Deputy Chief of Mission London (1969-1970). ‘The Wilson Government’s policy toward Iain Smith and his unilateral declaration of independence was bitterly contested by the Tory opposition. The result was that we witnessed a replay of Anna Chennault’s Vietnam caper in Washington a year earlier. Once again an
52 Discussed at
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opposition party undercut an elected government’s diplomatic position by intriguing directly with a foreign leader. In this case it was Edward Heath, leader of the opposition in the UK, using a back channel to Kissinger and Nixon to undermine official British policy. This gambit of Heath’s complicated our chain of command in the embassy. While the ambassador formally, and I more practically, were working with the Labor Government, Bill Galloway, a foreign service officer who headed the political section, was assigned to work with the Conservatives. He got to know them very well, perhaps too well. Through Galloway’s good offices as intermediary, Heath set up a back channel communication to Nixon. Galloway facilitated the delivery of secret messages from Her Majesties “Loyal Opposition,” urging the President of the United States to ignore the British Prime Minister of the day on Rhodesia. The Tory leader in effect told the US president that the conservatives were going to be in office the following year, and that they had their own plans for Rhodesia. They didn’t want the U.S. to help Wilson muck it up in the meantime. Q: Was there any disquiet on the part of the Labor government over this Tory relationship with the Nixon administration? Hughes: There certainly would have been if they had known about it.’ 54 US embassy and opposition leader conspiring against the prime minister? Some disquiet, I think.
Biter bit An e-mail on 4 April from the Atlantic Council, one of the lobbying groups for the US munitions industry, announced a ‘A Live Conversation with Deputy Secretary of Ukraine’s National
54 Page 421 at
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Security Council Viktoria Siumar’ on the subject of ‘Combating Russian Propaganda and Disinformation on Ukraine’. The spiel went thus: ‘Since the Maidan protests began in November of last year, Russia has released a barrage of disinformation against Ukraine. The Kremlin's most important instruments in the battle for Ukraine are the Internet, newspapers and television, including an arsenal of pundits and journalists around the world intent on creating an alternative discourse to the truth. Can Ukraine tell its story in the face of such an overwhelming assault?’ Oh, really? ‘An arsenal of pundits and journalists around the world’? And where is this army? I am aware of the Russian digital TV channel, Russia Today (and it’s not bad, either) but where is the rest of this arsenal? What I hear in this message is: this time the world isn’t buying the Washington line on this event; Uncle Sam’s ‘arsenal of pundits and journalists’ is no longer having its own way.55 And if this is the case, the American military-intelligence establishment’s desire to nobble the Internet – which is what the complaint is really about – will intensify.
The sewer not the sewage Chapman Pincher is probably now best remembered for his versions of Peter Wright’s theory about MI5 director, Roger Hollis, being a Soviet agent, notably Their Trade is Treachery. He has an autobiography out. Ian Jack’s review of it in the London Review of Books (5 June 2014) contains two interesting anecdotes from it. Pincher made his early name by receiving leaks – secrets – from within Whitehall. This involved much lunching at L’Ecu de France restaurant. Later in life Pincher learned that MI5 had bugged the restaurant, including the table he used. MI5 had thus heard the details and learned the
55 Most strikingly demonstrated by Chrisopher Booker’s
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perpetrators of many major breaches of the Official Secrets Act, few if any of which were apparently acted on. The second recounts Pincher asking retired PM Harold Macmillan if his government had realised that seeking labour in the Caribbean in the 1950s would lead to mass immigration. Macmillan is reported to have said, ‘We just never imagined that they would want to come here in such numbers.’ Asked why his government didn’t raise the wages on London Transport, whose labour shortage had been one of the reasons for the imported workers, Macmillan said, ‘ah but that would have meant putting up bus fares “which would have made us very unpopular and cost us votes that could have been crucial in marginal seats.”’
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From the archives: Kim Besly, 1926-1996
Nigel Norman
Kim Besly was a peace campaigner and a regular visitor to the women’s camp at Greenham Common in the 1980’s.1 She did not match the stereotype of the ‘Greenham woman’. She was in her late fifties when she went to Greenham and had little involvement in politics up until then. She had five children and was married to Charles, who went to public school and later taught at Fettes College (‘the Eton of Scotland’). He had also fought in Burma, been wounded and awarded the Military Cross. She had joined up with the WRNS (‘they had the nicest uniform’) and had served as a radar technician during the war, working on radios, transmitters and homing beacons in planes, small ships and ground stations. It was because of her technical background that the Greenham women turned to her for help after experiencing harrowing symptoms at some of the camps from September 1984 onwards. People had noticed big changes around the base, after the first Cruise missiles began to arrive in November 1983. The heavy police and military presence went away. They learnt of BISS (Base Installation Security System)2 and the general feeling was ‘they must be using something else’. Besly wrote: ‘A number of women are suffering a range of symptoms which are giving cause for concern.....(they) did not at first communicate their anxieties....after some time this came to be discussed and the women found that others were experiencing some odd sensations, too.....nose
1 A note on Besly’s death appeared in Lobster 32. Thanks to Sarah Hipperson for her memories of Besly. 2 BISS was a microwave-based intruder-detection system. This was discussed in the Guardian in 1986, that article being reproduced at
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bleed, pressure in the forehead, temples and ears; earache; pain in the glands in the parotid region; swelling of tongue resulting in slurred speech; dizziness; bleeding gums; “sunburned” face in mid- winter; pressure in chest, palpitations, nausea; vaginal discharge; change in menstrual pattern.....impaired coordination, impaired memory, disorientation, profound depression unreasonable panic.’ Against a background of arrest, continuing harassment from bailiffs and unknown assailants, she continued driving up from Hampshire to support Cruisewatch and doing relief shifts for the peace campaigners. She also led an investigation into the ‘odd sensations’ and illnesses at Greenham Common and eventually went on to to speak about her findings to people in the UK and a five- week tour of Canada and the United States, which included public meetings and radio and TV interviews. Readers of this journal may be interested in the archives which Besly and her husband have left at the London School of Economics and the Imperial War Museum.
The archives at the London School of Economics There are five files at the LSE.3 These range from correspondence from ‘Pensioners for Peace’ (she went with them three times to the Soviet Union to meet the Peace Committees), Ex-Services CND (including obituaries for KB), and the WILPF low level radiation seminar of April 1989. It includes an autobiographical statement and information about her later work for nuclear test victims, power line hazards and food irradiation. There is a lot of correspondence from Jack Sheppard, Fenner Brockway, Bruce Kent and a short file from the journalist, James Cameron (1911-1985). The core of the collection (and KB’s work) is the 1986 3 File Numbers: BRODIE/1/3;CND/2008/8/3/;CND/2008/8/3/14; CND/2008/15/43/2;WILPF/2009/16/21. These are in the newly opened archive reading room on the 4th Floor of the Library. LSE Library, 10 Portugal St,WC2A2HD; e-mail
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‘Preliminary Report’ entitled ‘Electromagnetic Pollution: a little known health hazard, or a new means of control?’ An opening covering letter is attached, asking for comments etc. And the title/contents page gives three sections: 1. Health Effects; 2. Riot Control/Anti-Personnel Equipment; 3. Greenham Common and Conclusion. At first sight, it seems inchoate, with spelling errors and an unconventional referencing. It contains references to books,4 newspaper reports, scientific journals and the well- argued testimony of Dr Rosalie Bertell, who visited the Greenham camp in April 1985. It does contain useful information – the Proceedings of the IEEE (vol. 60, no. 6, 1972 and vol. 68, no. 1, 1980) generated numerous references to peer-reviewed papers in the literature. These deal with the biological effects of microwaves and the microwave ‘voice’ phenomenon.5 It records the efforts of groups like ‘Electronics for Peace’ to measure different levels of non-ionising radiation at different locations, with equipment either loaned from the National Radiological Protection Board or improvised from tools such as microwave-oven safety equipment. It documents KB’s efforts to track down the Greenham ‘sickness’. She asked the women to keep diaries of illnesses and unusual experiences and sent out questionnaires. The results, ‘analysis of women’s symptoms’, were summarised in a histogram towards the end of the report. It was a real achievement, given the daily struggles against evictions and harassment taking place at the time. It does, perhaps, point the way to dealing with the effects of electromagnetic weapons – which cannot be seen and have deniability built in to their conception. It is regrettable that of the 89 women who took part in the study, there has been no published follow-up in the medical literature.6
4 Paul Brodeur, The Zapping of America (NY: Norton, 1977) and Bob DeMatteo, Terminal Shock (New Canada Publications, 1985) 5 James C Lin, ‘The microwave auditory phenomenon’, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 68, no. 1, January 1980, pp. 67-73. 6 There has been a study of childhood leukaemia around Greenham Common airbase, following the release of radiation from a fire on a B45 in 1958: J. Bithell, and G. Draper, Journal of Radiation Protection, vol. 19, no. 3, 1999.
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It has been reported that some of the Greenham women have died of cancer – KB died of cancer at the age of 69. This raises the possibility of an oncogenic dimension to these weapons, with profound psychological effects (fear of cancer). This perhaps explains the denial noted by KB: some of the women refused to believe that they had been harmed in any way and could not write it down. The threat was taken seriously by some women (who never returned to Greenham) and by the camp as a whole: they advised pregnant women and children to stay away (at the start, children had played quite happily among the tents and caravans). There are a few allusions to the MKULTRA project7 and the TV programme Opening Pandora’s Box in KB’s ‘Preliminary Report’, (a final report was never published) which she used to show at her public meetings.
Opening Pandora’s Box Opening Pandora’s Box 8 was the final part of a series of programmes about the effects of electricity, broadcast by Channel 4 in 1984. It starts off with a simple explanation about ionising (nuclear bombs) and non-ionising radiation (RF, microwaves etc.). It moves on to look at the ‘Moscow signals’, which saw the US Embassy in Moscow irradiated with microwave radiation and may have led to the death of two US ambassadors and illnesses amongst Embassy staff. The staff were fed a cover story about a viral study and were not told
7 My guess about MKULTRA is that after the Senator Church hearings the funding shifted to countries with a more relaxed legal framework. The tricks, concern with drugs and hypnosis, continued, but there may have been a shift towards advanced electronics. For a classic statement of these types of projects see: Albert Biderman and Herbert Zimmer, The Manipulation of Human Behavior (NY: Wiley, 1961). 8 Opening Pandora’s Box (original), BFI National Archive: 184904 Central Independent Television 1984-09-08 (BFI: 21 Stephen Street, W1; 0207 928 3232 for research viewings).
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about Project Pandora9 which set out to explain what was going on.10 It seems that the true purpose of the ‘Moscow Signals’ was never tracked down. Similarly the Soviet ‘Woodpecker’ signal (coded messages to agents? anti-missile radar? weapon to shift mood and cognition of target populations?) and the US response – a 16 cycle-per-second pulse aimed at the ionosphere11 – were not understood. It concludes with interviews with scientists (Robert Becker, Karel Marha, Ross Adey and Robert C Beck) who showed the effects of (disturbing) research into EMF and stress manipulation on animal (monkeys) and human behaviour. One scientist (Robert C Beck) pulled out of this research – he found it too frightening and in violation of ethical standards. He seemed to suggest that the work was continuing (1984) but it was locked in total secrecy. An updated Opening Pandora’s Box would be useful.
Sound Archives: Imperial War Museum In 1992 KB and her husband were interviewed (and recorded) by Lyn Smith of the Imperial War Museum.12 There are accounts of KB’s early life and how she got involved in the WRNS. They explain why she got involved in peace campaigning: she became aware of the horrors of nuclear war and feared for her children and grandchildren. She did not like ‘the Yanks’ dumping their nuclear missiles on Britain. There are some details of life at Greenham e.g. when the women, 9 I often wonder if this account is true, or if it was a cover story for tests on their own population. It seems more likely that the lax standards set for e.g. radar (and other military applications) in the Second World War gave rise to concerns about health effects. They carried out all sorts of tests on children, people with learning difficulties, psychiatric and cancer patients, prisoners and junior service personnel. See J. D. Moreno, Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans (NY: Freeman, 2000). It is possible that in the interests of ‘national security’ similar (irradiation) tests were carried out on vulnerable targets. The UK has yet to see published work along the lines of Moreno. 10 This seems to have led to a report, Ly H Petersen, Joseph E , Joseph K Kuos et al, ‘Flash Report of Pandora/Bizarre Briefing’. Project Bizarre is discussed at
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holding onto the the wire got their fingers brutally hit by military personnel on the other side of the fence. It also describes how she got involved in the ‘zapping’ investigation and how it came to take over her life. Her husband (Charles’) testimony is also interesting. He was in the Second World War in India and Burma. He describes at one point how he slapped an Indian beggar – his deep remorse – and how he began to see the world in a different way after the event. Lyn Smith also asked him at one point: ‘Do you really believe all this about zapping at Greenham – it is hard to prove and there is little in the press.’ He replied, quite simply, ‘Yes, I do.’ He also said that often KB came back from Greenham ‘shattered’ and ‘with blinding headaches’. What comes across from the oral archives is the humanity and sincerity of KB .
Nigel Norman was the subject librarian for Politics and History at London Guildhall/London Metropolitan University. He is currently Secretary of Redbridge CND.
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The Conspiracy and Democracy Project
Robin Ramsay
With a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, the Conspiracy and Democracy Project began in January 2013 at Cambridge University, with some academics at the helm.1 The title of the project, Conspiracy and Democracy, might suggest that it is going to deal with the issue of how conspiracy as a practice undermines or impacts upon democracy. It might, for example, examine all the state conspiracies which now exist within this society; and since the armed forces, police, security and intelligence services (and the big corporations) are almost entirely unaccountable, such research would be entirely apt. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the British state – almost any modern state – is a set of interlinked conspiracies, competing for money (taxes) and power. One of the project’s three directors, Guardian-Observer journalist, now Professor John Naughton, sort of gets this. He is quoted as saying: ‘The reason we have conspiracy theories is that sometimes governments and organisations do conspire.’ 2 Indeed: but how often is ‘sometimes’? Unless you have read parapolitics – and I think it a fair assumption that the project’s academic members will have read little or none – your perception of the extent of conspiracies by governments and organisations will be a gross underestimate. There is a piece on Watergate on the site,3 for example, which makes the banal point that conspiracy and cock-up often go together but discusses only the more obvious conspiracies within the Nixon White House. The authors appear to know little about Watergate’s place in and links to the American national security state revelations in the 1960s and 70s. However this 1
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is academic: examining conspiracies in the UK is not the direction the project is going to take. Formally, this is what the project looks like: A History research track asks whether the expanding public sphere and the rise of mass democracy since the 18th century has encouraged a shift from government suspicion of popular conspiracies to popular suspicion of government conspiracies, and, if so, why. A Political Theory research track looks at the contribution philosophers have made to the analysis of conspiracy theories and their relationship to democracy. The Internet Theory research track asks whether the internet is, in fact, uncontrollable and is exponentially expanding/removing all checks on the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Fourthly, we ask what can we learn from a detailed ethnography of specific conspiracy theories operating in the contemporary period. The Social Anthropology research track aims to broaden the geographical scope of C&D as well as add to its repertoire of methodological approaches.4 It really should be called the Conspiracy Theories and Democracy Project, because it is conspiracy theories and their apparent impact on democracy which they are concerned about. The BBC report on the launch of the project was titled ‘Are conspiracy theories destroying democracy?’;5 and one of the project’s three directors, Sir Richard Evans, began a piece about it with this: ‘There is a crisis of trust in modern societies. Public confidence in the central institutions of representative democracy has been declining since the 1980s. Conspiracy theories play a key part in this process.’ 6 For the moment let us accept that Evans is correct and 4 From ‘A Year in the Life of Conspiracy & Democracy’ at
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the decline in trust began in the 1980s. If so, where is the evidence that ‘Conspiracy theories play a key part in this process’? In the 1980s there was little interest in conspiracy theories in the English-speaking world, with only a couple of tiny American magazines devoted to them. The explosion of interest in conspiracy theories in the English-speaking world was triggered – perhaps created – by the TV series The X Files in the mid 1990s. I spoke at the Fortean Times annual conference in 1996 on conspiracy theories and was told to expect an audience of about forty. In the event, much to the surprise of the FT and me, it was several hundred – The X Files effect. But Evans is wrong: in this country social surveys show trust in politicians declining from the early 1970s;7 and in the United States the decline began in the mid 1960s, caused by – yes, of course – the state’s cover-up of the Kennedy assassination.8 John Naughton’s comment that ‘sometimes governments and organisations do conspire’ is the place to start. If ‘sometimes’ is in fact frequently, perhaps routinely – and in my view it is – then ‘conspiracy theorising’ is not per se the irrational activity the project assumes it to be. Many conspiracy theoriests are incompetent and many of the theories proposed are false but Sturgeon’s law applies here: if 90% of conspiracy theories are crap, so is 90% of everything.9 It is easy to sneer at stupid conspiracy theories and mock the thinking processes of those who advocate them. But in doing so academics and journalists are contaminating the good theories with the bad, lumping together secret state research
7 See
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and David Icke’s reptilian delusions as ‘conspiracy theories’. Which is, of course, what the state wants us to do. There are other issues: for example there is Anthony Summers’ distinction between a conspiracy theory and a theory about a conspiracy. Take the discussion on the project’s website about Watergate. Its opening lines are these: ‘In David’s talk at the recent Festival of Ideas he criticised the false dichotomy between a “conspiracy theory” of government and a “cock-up” theory of government. Conspiracies in democratic governments, he suggested, seem most often to be cover-ups of cock- ups.’ The authors – following David Runciman, the ‘David’ in the quote, one of the project’s three directors – treat ‘conspiracy theory of government’ in the first sentence and ‘conspiracies’ in the second as if they are synonymous. But they are not. And there is, in fact, no ‘conspiracy theory of government’. If you google that phrase you get lots of hits about governments, about conspiracies by governments and within governments, but none for ‘conspiracy theory of government’. Second, there is the issue of the status of a conspiracy theory. No matter how apparently absurd, a conspiracy theory is a proposition or propositions about the world. Propositions may be true, false, worth investigating, implausible, ridiculous etc. But some of the C and D project’s members aren’t treating conspiracy theories as theories; some of the time they treat them being as analogous to religious beliefs, with the content of the beliefs being irrelevant. But this is an error because religious beliefs are not, for the most part, propositions about the world, open to falsification. But conspiracy theories are. Again, 90% (at least) of conspiracy theories may well be bad/false theories but they are theories nonetheless. Adam Curtis commented on this issue of loss of trust. ‘Nobody trusts anyone in authority today. It is one of the main features of our age. Wherever you look there are
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lying politicians, crooked bankers, corrupt police officers, cheating journalists and double-dealing media barons, sinister children’s entertainers, rotten and greedy energy companies and out-of-control security services. And what makes the suspicion worse is that practically no-one ever gets prosecuted for the scandals. Certainly nobody at the top.’ 10 Why point the finger at conspiracy theories when there are other, more obvious culprits for this loss of trust, starting with the behaviour of those who think we should trust them?
10 Adam Curtis in his essay ‘Suspicious Minds’ at
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Chemtrails
T. J. COLES
CHEMTRAILS, HAARP, and the “Full Spectrum Dominance” of Planet Earth Elana Freeland Feral House: Port Townsend, WA, 2014, $21.95 ISBN: 978-1-936239-93-1
There’s not enough information about weather warfare. Most books on the subject are either obscure academic histories or off-the-wall conspiracy theories. For example: the late Jerry E. Smith’s Weather Warfare (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2006) begins as a sober, scholarly history of weaponized weather systems but — just as it gets to chemtrails and HAARP — deteriorates into outlandish nonsense: that aliens and demons may be to blame. Likewise, internet sites are full of dis- and misinformation, ranging from the subtle to the ridiculous.1 Books and articles that address chemtrails and HAARP with integrity are a precious commodity. So, what are chemtrails and what is HAARP? In the mid-to-late 1990s, a growing number of people
1 Examples of misinformation: wingtip vortices being generated as commercial jets land are posted online as ‘BUSTED Pilot Forgets to Turn Off CHEMTRAILS While Landing’,
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across Europe and North America began witnessing something they had never seen before: long white trails coming out of jet aircraft, ‘stretching from horizon to horizon’ (former Rep. Sen. Karen Johnson), expanding into cirrus clouds.2 These trails are distinctly different form the short, dissipating trails and occasional longer persisting ones that characterised aviation flight-paths from the mid 1940s to the late 1990s. There should be no doubt that most of the uncharacteristically long and persisting trails are ‘chemical clouds’ (Air Force Phillips Lab and Materiel Command) being sprayed from specially designed, non-commercial aircraft in order to mitigate the effects of ionising radiation on electromagnetic systems (e.g. satellites) – experiments acknowledged by the military.3 Another, broader objective is ‘owning the weather’ (US Air Force 2025),4 a project which received Congressional funding in 1998, disproving detractors’ comments that ‘owning the weather’ is merely a military idea.5 In 2009, the UK Parliament’s Regulation of Geoengineering report acknowledged that the government had been financing ‘low level cloud development’ (Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change, Joan Ruddock,) and that ‘those carrying out tests do so in secrecy’.6 The UK Ministry of Defence said that out to 2040, ‘Weather modification will continue to be
2 Johnson interviewed in Michael J. Murphy, What in the world are they spraying?, Truth Media Productions,
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explored’.7 Witnesses often report that the offending jets are silvery- white, unmarked, and fly at altitudes lower than normal condensation trails can form, let alone persist.8 NASA- sponsored studies dating back to the 1970s show that contrails can only persist for two hours maximum, even in the most ideal circumstances: i.e., at high altitudes, in exceptionally cold regions, like the Alps, the Rocky Mountains, or Chicago in late-Autumn-Winter.9 A 1980 press report on the radiative effects of contrails and how they might affect the climate barely mentioned persistent contrails, noting fewer than 3,000 sightings across the entire United States in one year.10 Take a look at the skies now, in any region, in any climate, at any time of year, and the sky is frequently hazed over by persistent trails. If this is the result of an increase in commercial aviation, why are there a disproportionate number of persistent – rather than dissipating – trails being generated? Since jet aviation began, air forces have had a special interest in contrails because enemies can detect them (and thus aeroplane movements) on radar. In 1953, the Appleman Standard of contrail prediction was established, and fighter pilots were advised to fly lower than approximately 25,000 ft.11
7 Ministry of Defence (UK), Strategic Trends Programme: Out to 2040, 12 January, 2010 (4th ed.), Swindon: MoD, p. 156,
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A 1992 US Air Force report into contrail formation took into account advances in jet fuels and turbofan engines and concluded that these were mostly insignificant for contrail formation. The report mentioned contrail persistence once.12 This indicates that until 1996 – the year in which the US announced it would ‘own the weather’ and test ‘chemical clouds’ out to FY99 – persistent contrails were a rare and thus insignificant phenomenon, minus potential effects on climate change. Around the same time, the US Air Force, Navy, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and (what became) BAE- Systems began developing a giant ioniser in Alaska to ‘mimic what the Sun’s energy does to the atmosphere’ (Office of Naval Research).13 The ioniser is officially called the High- frequency Active Auroral Research Program, HAARP. The sun provides the electromagnetic energies necessary for vapour to adhere to submicron particles and thus form clouds.14 The Air Force Materiel Command document quoted above mentions HAARP and ‘chemical clouds’ in the same document. It has been speculated by chemtrail researchers that jets are spraying chemicals in order to make cirrus clouds15 – or chemtrails, as they are referred to in one US government draft
12 Captain Jeffrey L. Peters, ‘New Techniques for Contrail Forecasting’, August, 1993, AD-A269 686 AWS/TR--93/001, Illinois: Scott Air Force Base,
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bill.16 Ionisers meanwhile, mainly HAARP, are exciting those particles to jam enemy communications and enhance cloud formation.17 Elana Freeland’s book, Chemtrails, HAARP, and the Full Spectrum Dominance of Planet Earth, cites none of the above sources, yet quotes equally compelling ones. Her argument is identical to the one put forth by this author18 and by Professor Bob Fitrakis, author of Star Wars, Weather Mods & Full Spectrum Dominance:19 that the US military is committed to a doctrine of global militarism, which it calls Full Spectrum Dominance, and that chemtrails and HAARP play a huge part.20 By creating an artificial haze over the planet, the electromagnetic frequencies upon which telecoms, internet, banking, RFID, etc. depend can be enhanced or degraded, depending on the given objective. Even more disturbing is a suggestion made public in 2002 by the Defense University (US), that nanosensors (too small to see or feel) could be sprayed in an aerosolised form and ingested by humans to provide real-time data on location, bodily functions, etc.21 Freeland, again citing different but no-less-compelling sources, reaches the same conclusion. Freeland is a great investigator, documenting not only the Welsbach patent owned by Hughes Aircraft, which
16 Dennis Kucinich, ‘The Space Preservation Act (2001)’, United States Library of Congress, HR 2977 IH, 1st Session, 2 October, 2001,
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discusses spraying aluminium to mitigate climate change, but the merger/buy-out of Hughes by Raytheon, which, as others have noted, appears to be running software at HAARP through its E-Systems connection. Like Michael J. Murphy in his superlative documentary Why in the world are they spraying?, Freeland theorises, realistically, that GM companies have a big interest in geoengineering because the nanoparticles (many say aluminium, barium, and others22) present in chemtrails will increasingly poison soils, as floods and droughts resulting from the ‘owning the weather’ programme make genetically- modified food sources a necessity. Freeland writes that Harvard geoengineer Professor David Keith is president of a company called Carbon Engineering and has received money from Bill Gates, who has invested in genetic modification research. Her sources check out. Some of her research is questionable, however, such as the reference to purported holographic cities appearing in China. It is true that for decades the US military has planned to use holograms for psychological warfare purposes23 but whether these ‘ghost cities’ are true or not is difficult to substantiate. The book dismisses the UN’s ENMOD Treaty, which prohibits weather warfare, as ‘having no teeth’. However, the treaty is sound, particularly the annex, which makes just about every weather modification activity unlawful. As she points out, however, it has no enforcement mechanism; but the same is true of all UN treaties (think of Israel’s decades-long violation of the Geneva Conventions in occupied Palestine, or Britain and America’s illegal invasion of Iraq in violation of the UN Charter, or the social security cuts across Europe in flagrant violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ad infinitum). Sadly, Freeland repeats the unsubstantiated claim that passengers on commercial planes are asked to ‘lower the
22 See, for example,
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blinds’ by staff as not to witness spray operations. This does not pass the common sense test. Chemically-modified contrails can only be sprayed from specially-designed jets. Papers dating back to the 1970s discuss using afterburners to vaporize carbon,24 as does a NASA patent for barium vapour releases,25 and a more recent proposal by a scientist to the UK government.26 Also, when you see the amount of chemicals sprayed in the skies, it would be difficult to imagine how such quantities could be fitted to commercial craft. Added to which, the spray operations are conducted in ways impossible for commercial jets, such as planes ascending almost totally vertically, as this author has videotaped and discusses in the Appendix below.27 Freeland also lists a number of US bases from which chemtrail planes are supposedly taking off. This is substantiated to some extent by former, late FBI agent Ted Gunderson, who ‘personally ha[s] observed’ unmarked spray jets taking off from air force bases in the US.28 Which raises the question: why aren’t US chemtrail activists going en masse to these bases in protest?
24 Gray, W. M., W. M. Frank, M. L. Corrin, and C. A. Stokes, 1974, Weather modification by carbon dust absorption of solar energy, Deptartment of Atmospheric Science Paper 225, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO,
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Apart from a few trifles like the ones above, the book is a well-researched and frightening read. Myself and others are of the opinion that along with the ever-present threat of nuclear accident/war, geoengineering is the most serious threat we face and it is shameful that well-known critics of modern power systems are reluctant to discuss chemtrails for fear of looking like fools, even though the evidence is there. Geoengineers themselves say that their plans (read: actions) will deplete ozone, exacerbate drought, and cause flash-flooding. This will mean the destruction of food supplies, the growth of disease as temperatures rise, the militarisation of increasingly scarce water supplies, the dominance of GM companies over agriculture, and, to ‘protect’ against such chaos, the realisation of the Pentagon’s quest: Full Spectrum Dominance.
Appendix The image below is from a video I took of four, possibly five
jets, whose manoeuvres I recorded on 11 August 2012 between 6am and 7am in Plymouth, UK, near the abandoned airport. I filed a FOIA request with the MoD in order to identify them. This still shows a plane with the transponder signal 3770 ascending from 17,000 to 21,000 ft in less than 30
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seconds making a long, persistent trail, even though the CAA’s own documents say vapour cannot form, let alone persist, at those altitudes.29 Below is a section of the radar reply analysis of the National Air Traffic Service, Britain’s privatised air traffic control company. Part of the organisation is under Ministry of Defence control; that part is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. To protect MoD employees, the contact details were redacted when the report was sent to me. The report acknowledges that ‘the gentleman [i.e., me,] specifies he saw jets’, yet the Primary Tracks on the radar were not registered as jets until one — with the transponder signal 3770 — contacted air traffic control to register a manoeuvre, i.e. climbing from FL170 (or flight level 17,000ft.) to FL210 (or flight level 21,000ft.) which I videoed. Squawk 3770 appears to be a non-commercial jet, as I can never find it via commercial plane-spotting software.30 The radar analysis concludes that nothing but ‘normal airways traffic’ had occurred. But this cannot be the case as the jets are not registered on the radar cell — though the report acknowledges that I saw jets — until one, i.e., squawk 3770, performs an unusual manoeuvre, and that squawk 3770 is making a ‘contrail’ at an altitude impossible for contrail formation, let alone persistence, as I videoed. The consensus is that contrails cannot form below 24,000ft. (The UK Civil Aviation Authority puts it higher at 50,000ft.) In an e-mail, the UK Civil Aviation Authority told me that the trail is black because it is a ‘shadow’ of a contrail. A more likely explanation is that it is a climate-modification operation involving carbon black dust.31
29 Civil Aviation Authority (UK), ‘Contrails, Wingtip Trails and Fuel Dumping’,
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T.J. Coles is a PhD student at the University of Plymouth, UK.
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Tittle-tattle
Tom Easton
Friends of ‘the Friends’ in the North Watching the coverage of the Scottish referendum campaign from south of the Border made me wonder if this is what it must have felt like during the EEC vote in 1975 – the privately- owned media majority marching in one direction alongside the BBC and the big noises of politics, capital and the state. In this case it wasn’t fearful warnings about ‘missing the European boat’, but other terrors – including more real terrorism to come, according to Lord Robertson of Port Ellen – if the Scots voted to let go of nanny London and inch towards the removal of Trident from Holy Loch.1 The ex-NATO Secretary General, UK Defence Secretary and founding figure of the British American Project (Lobsters passim) chose to issue his warning to referendum voters not from his home country, but just down the road from the offices of the William Cohen Group in Washington DC where he works as ‘senior counsellor’ to the weapons and security consultants. Cohen was Robertson’s opposite number at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration.2 Reporting on the referendum for the BBC from Glasgow was Sarah Smith, the former Channel 4 News Washington correspondent, who is the sister-in-law of Robertson’s son Malcolm. Sarah is the oldest daughter of former Labour leader John Smith. The Robertson family were out in force with leading Labour lights in Scotland for Sarah’s own wedding in 2007 to US-born former soldier and novelist Simon Conway.3 The ceremony was conducted by the father of Labour Shadow 1
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Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander and attended by, among others, Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, the former senior MI6 figure who advised John Smith. Smith’s widow was for a time on the board of Hakluyt, run by several ex-MI6 people (Lobsters passim).4 When I read about this tight political network I begin to understand why so many Scots seemed keen to shake off the influence of Whitehall and the British state.5
Friends in the North There seems to have been another influential network running Rotherham where revelations of widespread child abuse eventually led to the resignation of a number of senior public employees, including the elected South Yorkshire Crime and Police Commissioner Shaun Wright.6 Silence seems to have been the main response from the Labour Party, still seeking to recover from UKIP May local election successes following the jailing of the town’s former MP Denis MacShane. Ahead of his sentence for fraud at the Old Bailey, Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman was one of a cavalcade of friends attesting to MacShane’s good character. Another old pal of the fraudster, former Observer man Martin Bright, wrote a panegyric in the Jewish Chronicle under the headline, ‘Why we should mourn Denis MacShane’s fall from grace’. After the ex-Rotherham MP was jailed, former New Labour minister Chris Mullin rushed to his former colleague’s defence in language and sentiment far from the man many remember for his work on behalf of the Birmingham Six. His days of devotion to Tony Benn are long gone, but both are still in demand at the BBC, where, in the offices of the World 4
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Service, Mullin first encountered MacShane many moons ago.7
Friends of America Back in the old world of the MSM, the announcement that Evan Davis is to take over from Jeremy Paxman as Newsnight presenter was probably rather welcome in the US London embassy. For the 52-year-old who is stepping into the shoes of the now-retired BBC TV veteran also followed him into membership of the British American Project (BAP), the informal network of aspiring Brits and Americans set up during the Reagan-Thatcher years to revive what the White House and No. 10 feared was a weakening ‘special relationship’ between the two countries. Paxman was recruited into the BAP in 1990. Davis will be leaving behind at the BBC Radio 4 Today programme one of the BAP’s UK advisory committee for many years, James Naughtie. BBC TV reporter and newsreader Jane Hill, who, with Naughtie, was based in Scotland for part of the referendum campaign, is a long-standing BAP member. The current BAP treasurer is senior BBC producer Murphy Cobbing. The acting chair of the BBC Trust this year was Diane Coyle, an early recruit to the BAP at the same time as Naughtie and Peter (now Lord) Mandelson.8 The new BBC trust chair, Rona Fairhead, is a close Tory friend of Chancellor George Osborne. Lord Stevenson, a key figure in the BAP network and in the 2008 banking collapse, appointed Fairhead to her first senior position at Pearson Publishing.9
More American friends Fresh from controversy in the United States arrives David 7 Previously ignored by the mainstream press, regular news of dirty doings in Rotherham – a community largely stripped of its mining, steel and engineering economy since Margaret Thatcher – has come from websites, particularly Rotherham Politics at
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Frum, a former speechwriter for George W Bush, as chairman of what is said to be the Prime Minister’s favourite think-tank, Policy Exchange.10 Senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, credited with inventing the phrase ‘axis of evil’ during his time in the White House, Frum had to apologise in July after claiming that press photographs of blood-soaked men in a Gaza hospital were fakes.11 The images, used by AP, Reuters and The New York Times, were genuine and Frum later said: ‘These images do appear authentic, and I should not have cast doubt on them. I apologize especially to Sergey Ponomarev of The New York Times, whose work I impugned.’ 12 In London, Frum will be meeting up with his old friend and director of Policy Exchange, Dean Godson.13 Godson was a member of the Reagan Administration for which Frum campaigned as a volunteer in 1980. Godson, the son of former US labour attaché in London Joe Godson,14 was himself memorably caught in controversy on BBC Newsnight in 2007. He was fiercely questioned by Jeremy Paxman when Policy Exchange was found to have used receipts of doubtful authenticity to ‘prove’ the purchase of radical Muslim literature at mosques.15
More friends of America When Sir Harold Evans was honoured by the Media Society (MS) at its last annual dinner, The Guardian praised the
10
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veteran journalist ‘for taking on “big targets”’. At the Mayfair event hosted by the Today programme’s James Naughtie, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and former Times editor and now BBC ‘director of news and current affairs’ James Harding were among those to laud the former editor of The Sunday Times and The Times. This was all under the watchful eye of the American president of ‘the insiders’ forum for debate and networking’, Geraldine Sharpe-Newton (ex-CBS, ITN, CNN and WWF), and MS council member Margaret Hill, an early member of the BAP Project (Lobsters passim) and now ‘chief adviser, editorial policy’ at the BBC. With the publication of the Richard Crossman diaries, the exposure of Kim Philby and the campaign for thalidomide victims to his name, the plaudits for Evans were undoubtedly earned, even if he was a founding member of the Media Society himself. But one ‘big target’ the 86-year-old was conspicuously reluctant to go for during his editorship of The Sunday Times was the Cold War influence of the United States on the Labour Party, the European Movement and British trade unions. In 1972 Richard Fletcher was commissioned by The Sunday Times Magazine to investigate US intelligence activities at the time of Hugh Gaitskell, and when many questioned the funding source, among other things, of Encounter magazine which much favoured the Labour leader’s Cold War stance. The article was meant to complete the then impressive and innovative Sunday magazine’s unofficial history of the 20th century series. The 5,000-word piece which named prominent Labour figures was set to go to print – edited, legalled, graphics and text produced on proofs – when Evans spiked it, reportedly with the words: ‘These are the people we support.’ Fletcher gamely reproduced the piece in a mock ‘Not The Sunday Times’ format under the title ‘The Labour Party and the CIA: Who are They Travelling With?’, and sold it to political activists around the country.16 The piece was republished in
16 The text can be read at
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1977 by Spokesman Books along with another essay by Fred Hirsch under the title CIA and the Labour Movement. It is still available. Mayfair dinner host Naughtie, like Evans, was the beneficiary of a US scholarship early in his journalistic career. Naughtie’s took him to Syracuse, followed by a fellowship to the Washington Post. Evans’s took him to Stanford, Chicago and visits to US newspapers between 1956 and 1957. Naughtie maintains his transatlantic interest through active membership of the BAP (see above and Lobsters passim), Evans, who for many years has lived in New York, continues to be protective of US security interests. In a Guardian article in 2012, he described NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as ‘narcissistic’.
Friends of Israel Media Society joint host James Harding was soon joined in the upper reaches of the BBC as ‘director of strategy and digital’ by former Labour Cabinet minister James Purnell. Purnell made his first career move in politics by becoming an Islington councillor, alongside fellow Blairite praetorian guards Stephen Twigg and Tal Michael. On one occasion in the 1990s the trio attempted an inept NUS-type putsch to remove the long-standing MP Jeremy Corbyn. They were more successful in smearing fellow councillor Liz Davies, preventing her attempt to become a Labour MP. The New Labour machine quickly found winnable seats for Purnell and Twigg, and both quickly became active in the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). Purnell succeeded Twigg as LFI chair in 2002. The latter, replaced last year as Shadow Education Secretary by Tristram Hunt, is now an MP in Liverpool, along with leading LFI lights Louise Ellman and Luciana Berger. (Lobsters passim) Harding, now alongside Purnell at the Beeb, is also a strong supporter of Israel. A Guardian profile on his BBC
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appointment reported: ‘Harding, who is Jewish, will also have to leave behind the pro-Israeli line of The Times. In a debate at the Jewish Community Centre For London in 2011, he said: “I am pro-Israel” and that in reporting on the Middle East, “I haven’t found it too hard” because “The Times has been pro-Israel for a long time.”’
More friends of Israel Campaigning vigourously against UKIP in the local and European elections was HOPE not hate (HNH), a group backed by the Daily Mirror and the Unison trade union. It was also given positive publicity in The Observer ahead of the May poll by Nick Cohen, a friend of its chief executive Nick Lowles. Formerly editor of Searchlight magazine, Lowles parted company with Searchlight founder Gerry Gable in 2011, taking HNH from under Gable’s wing. HNH deputy director Ruth Smeeth is now Labour parliamentary candidate for Stoke-upon-Trent North. A member of the Lord Sainsbury-funded Progress network, Smeeth is a former director of public affairs of BICOM, the Israel lobby group. Ms Smeeth is one to watch, given her US embassy ‘strictly protect’ status revealed by Wikileaks.17 But with her leader, Ed Miliband ‘warming the hearts of the Labour Friends [of Israel]’, who’s to blame a healthily ambitious young politico for swimming with the tide?18
On the other hand One of the most encouraging developments since the ‘war on terror’ replaced the Cold War as the principal fear factor in
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Western political life has been the distancing of ever more Jews from the policies of Israel. This may partly be generational: younger, internet-savvy Jews not seeing themselves quite so identified with the state created soon after the Second World War. But one reason must be the forceful and courageous actions of thoughtful Jews who risk the ‘self-hating Jew’ smears of Zionists. One Briton who found himself facing that line of attack was the late Tony Judt.19 Another who has experienced that and career damage is Norman Finkelstein, the New Yorker son of Holocaust survivors whose latest book, Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land, was launched in London earlier this year. More than 200 attended a very lively Saturday night question and answer for the event hosted by Jews for Justice for Palestinians.20 Finkelstein’s presence at the Oxford Union shortly before was not welcomed by Baroness Ruth Deech, the former president of St Anne’s College, more widely known for chairing the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority until 2002, and now doing the same job with the Bar Standards Board after a spell as a BBC trustee. Baroness Deech was a member of Jewish Leadership Council until 2010 and a Rhodes Trustee.21 The Jewish Chronicle reported her saying that although ‘the university would say that the Union is independent, this activity is in the heart of the “campus”. It is in my view a breach of the university’s statutory public-sector duty to promote good relations,’ she said. ‘By renting out its hall, the Union is in breach of charity law.’ 22
Greville Janner
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The October Commons vote recognising the state of Palestine may be another small sign that the influence of the Israeli lobby is on the wane. The motion was proposed by Labour MP Grahame Morris, who represents Easington, the Co. Durham seat for one of Labour’s longest serving MPs and most forceful Zionists, Emanuel Shinwell.23 Active in the Commons and then the Lords until his death in 1986, Shinwell’s advocacy of the cause of Israel on the Labour benches then largely fell to Leicester West MP Greville (now Lord) Janner, one of the public figures repeatedly mentioned this year in relation to historic child abuse. Janner’s seat was previously held by his father, Sir Barnett Janner, a former chairman of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain. In September, the Chief Constable of Derbyshire, Mick Creedon, was reported as saying his 1989 inquiries as a detective sergeant into ‘credible evidence’ of child abuse by Janner were blocked by superiors.24 Janner had been named in open court as an abuser during the 1991 trial of Leicester children’s home manager Frank Beck. MPs, including the current chair of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, Keith Vaz, rallied around Janner following trial reports. In December 1991 some called for a review of the law of contempt following what fellow Leicester MP Vaz called a ‘cowardly attack’ on Janner’s character. The Guardian reported on 4 December 1991: ‘The Solicitor-General last night rejected calls from MPs from all sides of the Commons for a review of the law of contempt of court to prevent allegations against innocent third parties such as those made against the MP Greville Janner in the Frank Beck case. Sir Nicholas Lyell angered MPs with his sterling defence of the freedom of the press and the rights of a defendant to a fair trial. “I suggest we interfere with this at our genuine peril,” he said, acknowledging the ordeal
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Mr Janner had been through. The ultimate principle had to be that of open justice. Mr Janner, Labour MP for Leicester West, again rejected allegations made against him during the child abuse, saying they were “disgraceful, contemptible and totally untrue”. His family were in the public gallery to hear MPs denounce the claims made by Mr Beck, the former head of three children’s homes who was sentenced to five life sentences last Friday for sexual assaults on inmates in his care. MPs expressed admiration for Mr Janner’s courage and urged a change in the law. Patrick Cormack, Tory MP for Staffordshire South, said such a change would “prevent this sort of vile calumny being perpetrated again”. Others expressed concern for those who did not have recourse to Parliament to clear their names, and criticised the press for the way the trial was reported.’ Janner was not charged following Beck’s conviction. He received generally positive media coverage when he suggested that he had been framed, including from Ian Katz, then of The Guardian and now editor of BBC Newsnight. The Crown Prosecution Service is now reported to be considering evidence against Janner as part of an inquiry into historical child abuse.25 Janner took ermine when he retired from the Commons in 1979. He was succeeded in his Leicester West seat by Patricia Hewitt, a former aide to Neil Kinnock who became a New Labour Cabinet minister under Tony Blair. Several stories have appeared suggesting that the former president of the Jewish Board of Deputies, vice-president of the Jewish Leadership Council and the World Jewish Congress is now suffering dementia. The Daily Mirror reported, however, that
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this had not prevented Janner claiming House of Lords’ attendance expenses until just before the current police investigations began.26 Whether of not Janner faces trial, and whether Ian Katz will devote any Newsnight resources to telling us more about the former member of the Magic Circle, we can be sure two other prominent public figures of his generation accused of child abuse – Sir Cyril Smith and Sir Jimmy Savile – will not. But for those who forget – or never knew – of their celebrity value to the Liberal Party of yesteryear, their juxtaposition on this February 1974 party election broadcast will fill in a little history.27
Useful to whom? The withdrawal of the LibDem whip from Portsmouth South MP Michael Hancock for an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with a vulnerable female constituent continues the long history of strange behaviour by leading LibDems and members of its pre- 1988 Liberal Party.28 After the bizarre Liberal Party world was revealed by the 1979 Jeremy Thorpe murder trial – the activities of Peter Bessell and the hired gunman among others – the Liberals relied heavily on Cyril Smith as the party’s popular public face.29 When new leader David Steel failed to make much public impact, ex-MI6 man Paddy – ‘Pantsdown’ – Ashdown took the reins of the newly formed LibDems.30 He was succeeded by former SDP MP Charles Kennedy, a man obviously afflicted by serious drink problems long before
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he admitted them, who stood down in 2006. Kennedy had been studying on a Fulbright scholarship in the United States when he received the SDP nomination that allowed him to become became the youngest MP at 23. His close SDP colleague Shirley (now Baroness) Williams had likewise been summoned from a US-funded scholarship when she launched her parliamentary career (Lobsters passim).31 A key former Liberal figure behind the scenes during the SDP/LibDem years was Richard (later Lord) Holme, an early member of the British American Project (Lobsters passim). His chairmanship of the Broadcasting Standards Commission was quickly ended following allegations of multiple adultery.32 A candidate to succeed Kennedy as leader was Mark Oaten, another former SDP member, but the married MP had to withdraw in disgrace when colourful male prostitute stories emerged. One-time deputy LibDem leader and current Justice minister in the Coalition Simon Hughes had won his Bermondsey seat in a 1983 contest marked by its homophobic attacks upon Labour’s Peter Tatchell. The Liberal campaign leaflet described the election as ‘a straight choice’ between Simon Hughes and the Labour candidate. Hughes apologised for the campaign in 2006 when revealing his own homosexual experiences. He told BBC’s Newsnight: ‘I hope that there will never be that sort of campaign again.’ Soon after the formation of the Coalition government in 2010 former banker David Laws was forced to stand down following revelation of expenses fraud. He was not prosecuted and is now Schools minister. Ministerial colleague Chris Huhne and his LibDem ex-wife Vicky Pryce were convicted and jailed for perverting the course of justice in 2013. The man credited with being the brains behind LibDem electoral success in the 21st century Chris (now Lord) Rennard, was accused of sexual harassment by female 31
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LibDems. His suspension from the party was lifted in August after an internal inquiry. Rennard’s legal adviser was Alex (now Lord) Carlile, a former LibDem MP chosen by Prime Minister Tony Blair as independent reviewer of the anti-terrorist laws. Carlile was appointed CBE in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to national security.33 Carlile was reappointed independent reviewer for Northern Ireland security in 2013.34 He is a patron of UK Lawyers for Israel and a vice-president of Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel. In 1991 Carlisle was one of the MPs supporting Greville Janner following the Frank Beck trial. Hansard records him saying of Janner: ‘He is a man of determination and enthusiasm whose integrity and will power have crossed party lines.’ 35 All political parties have their odd characters and scandals. But for a small party – both in its Liberal and successor LibDem forms – this seems a high proportion of both. This has not prevented a hefty number of its members gaining rewards from the state in terms of quango appointments, knighthoods and peerages. And, given how long some of this strange behaviour went unreported, many of these figures seem to have enjoyed a high degree of media and, in some cases, legal immunity. Has anyone done a serious study of the utility to the UK state and, perhaps, those of other powerful interests, of a small but electorally influential third party in post-war UK history?
Philip Willan, Calvi and Ledeen Could he be persuaded to switch his focus from Italy, Philip Willan might do a good job of teasing answers out some of
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these puzzling questions. Rereading his excellent The Vatican at War: From Blackfriars Bridge to Buenos Aires this summer reminded me just how good some persistent and intelligent writers can be.36 He is not alone, of course, and many younger journalists37 are bringing a much wider and often deeper awareness to bear when they find resources and outlets for their work. Willan represents the best of the older generation of specialists who read and research widely in more than one language and, in his case, have the courage to dig in dangerous places. Fewer locations in Western Europe come with more bodies – not all of them buried – than Italy, and in The Vatican at War Willan points to a few casualties in the English- speaking world too. My limited knowledge of Italy and Italian doesn’t permit me to review Willan’s latest work on the world of Roberto Calvi, the Vatican, the strategy of tension, Propaganda Due, Archbishop Marcinkus, Operation Gladio, the funding of the Italian Christian Democrats, Socialists, Polish Solidarity, the Mafia, freemasonry and the rest. But beyond a general endorsement of a fine work of scholarship and investigation into this complexity, there are a few matters that would repay British inquiry into events nearer home. Willan records the total failure of the City of London Police to deal professionally with the death of Banco Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi when his body was found hanging below Blackfriars bridge in June 1982. An assumption that this was the suicide, initially of a tramp, took two inquests and a private inquiry by Calvi’s relatives to expose for the nonsense that it was. Thirty-two years later no one has been convicted of his murder, which an Italian court found to be the cause of his death. (Willan remarks in passing that police officers are often reluctant to pursue inquiries which may have an intelligence services dimension for fear of losing their own security clearance status.) There has been a distinct lack of press and political 36
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curiosity about how a man at the centre of big-time arms dealing – including with Britain’s then Falklands War enemy, Argentina – money laundering, freemasonry and Cold War political intriguing could have met his end in the Square Mile carrying the business card of the senior partner of a City law firm with strong intelligence links. The light-touch curiosity of police, press and politicians in Calvi’s fate mirrors that shown for the fate of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, with which the bank chairman and P2 member was involved. Willan confirms my own impression of the lengthy, expensive and futile High Court case brought against the Bank of England for its failure to regulate a clearly errant and failing bank: everyone seemed to dance around the elephants in the room that were the intelligence operations – US and UK, and probably those of other countries too – which BCCI facilitated. Willan’s references to Calvi associate Francesco Pazienza, the businessman and former SISMI officer, often bring Michael Ledeen (Lobsters passim) back to our attention. His political intriguing and efforts on behalf of Israel to promote terror scares, violence and wars extend from his early efforts to capitalise on the Pope’s shooting in 1981, through Billygate, the Grenada invasion ‘files’, the October Surprise, the yellowcake uranium invention that contributed to the Iraq War right up to his present-day warmongering Foundation for Defense of Democracy outpourings.38 There’s are lots more UK strands to the Calvi story. For those new to it, the link on Willan’s website to the documentary, The Pope and the Mafia Millions, is a good introduction.39 For those who want to seek serious insights into the workings of the Cold War and its use of political terror and media manipulation in Italy and beyond en route to today’s
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‘war on terror’, read Willan’s fine book and reflect on its British implications.
9/11, 7/7 The Best Evidence Panel seems a useful vehicle for keeping updated on substantiated 9/11 material and can be found at
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‘In the years prior to 7/7 the four alleged bombers only did things that made them look like possible bombers with...... [these] likely spies, or in the case of Junaid Babar, through contact with a known American spy. At each point they connected to something that might be called Al Qaeda, they connected through likely spies and at each point that this happened there were significant and inexplicable “intelligence failures”. Information wasn’t shared, or wasn’t explored or exploited with any degree of haste or sense of urgency. Officially these “failures” had the effect of concealing the identity of the alleged bombers from the security services in the years before 7/7. However, they still had half a dozen instances where they had Mohammad Siddique Khan identified with his name, phone numbers, vehicles and addresses. Nonetheless, MI5 maintain that they never had any idea that he was going to become a suicide bomber. This is a fine example of doublethink because in excusing themselves for failing to stop Siddique Khan before 7/7 they are also admitting that they have no evidence that he was actually a suicide bomber. Despite their many hours of surveillance of Khan they never came across anything suggesting he was preparing to kill himself or anyone else. Thus, in slowly revealing tidbit-by-tidbit what information they did have on Khan before 7/7, it is only if you believe that he was a suicide bomber that any of it looks convincing. Khan’s visits to Pakistan, his contact with subsequently convicted “terror suspects”, his involvement at a radical bookshop are all presented by MI5 as reasons why they didn’t find Khan suspicious, all the while telling us that these are reasons why we should find him suspicious.... So were these “failures” really failures, or were they the result of compartmentalizing intelligence to facilitate secret operations? In particular, were they the result of compartmentizing intelligence to facilitate a
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black, false flag operation? The pattern suggests that this is true, but the available information is partial in the extreme.’ Secker seems to me a younger Philip Willan in that he has thoroughly immersed himself in the material and yet not been drowned by it. He retains throughout a calm, balanced approach to an issue about which he clearly feels deeply – that the public, including the families of the victims of 7/7, have not been told the truth about what happened.41
Ways of remembering Writing ahead of the UK Remembrance Day, I was glad to stumble on a lecture on the subject of remembrance by Keith Lowe, the author of Savage Continent, the hugely impressive account of the aftermath of the Second World War. 42 In his talk given in Berlin last year he reflects on the way the people of the countries participating in the Second World War choose to view it. As an invitation to consider many ‘truths’, it may appeal, much like Lowe’s fine book, to Lobster readers.43
Open justice In the week in which arguably the most secret trial in British history opened at the Old Bailey, the words of campaigning solicitor Gareth Peirce at the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival earlier this summer ring heavy bells.44 In talking about the ‘lynch mob’ mentality against Muslims that was being 41 Tom Secker’s work can be seen and the book obtained through
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encouraged in the UK, she warned that the big battle was ‘to defend the rule of law. The rights of minorities are fundamental: we could all become the underdogs, the enemy within.’ When MPs urged a change in the contempt of court laws after Greville Janner was named in the 1991 child abuse trial I mention above, it was the Solicitor-General, Sir Nicholas Lyell, who resisted the call in the name of open justice.45 Peirce told her Cork audience: ‘There are laws that bind us – sound principles that should hold good for all time. These principles are there. There is no need to amend them – just apply them.’
45 One of Janner’s supporters in 1991 was the man who, as Lord Carlile, became the ‘terrorism legislation reviewer’. Here is the former Liberal MP speaking in support of secret courts
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This is the final chapter of my The Rise of New Labour, published in 2002. It didn’t get any attention and didn’t sell but is still available in ebook form. I was prompted to make this available because of the rehabilitation of Gordon Brown recently. Lest we forget, he is one of the chief architects of the economic mess we are in. This chapter shows how.
Robin Ramsay
Chapter 8
Into office
‘It is scarcely credible that Britain should once again be crucified on an excessively high exchange rate.’ – Wynne Godley, The Observer (Business) 23 August 1998.
By the time Labour took office Brown and Blair had promised to toe the conservative line on economic policy: no income tax rises, no increased public spending, no attempts to use government to direct the economy; and no reacquisition of the privatised state assets, the roughly £100 billion of taxation- created assets flogged-off for around £50 billion during the Thatcher years. All talk of justice, fairness and redistribution had been stripped from the vocabulary. They had learned the central mantra of neo-liberalism: private good, public bad. Taking office in 1997, there was only one major tool left in the hands of new Chancellor Gordon Brown, but it was the critical one, the control of interest rates for the economy.1 This last lever was duly surrendered to the Bank of England on Brown’s first day in office: henceforth interest rates were to be set by a committee chaired by the Governor of the Bank of England and with a majority of its members employees of the
1 For any reader still uncertain about how this works: interest rates higher than those of other countries push up the value of the currency; and increases in the value of the currency make imports cheaper and exports more expensive. So the relative level of interest rates is critical.
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Bank, tasked to keep inflation at two and a half per cent using only interest rates.2 For Brown, converted to the neo-liberal view of the economy, setting the interest rate was simply a technical issue. Should interest rates rise or fall? Ask the experts. And who are the experts? The bankers, of course.3 But Gordon, who benefits from interest rate rises? The bankers. Somehow this most banal of observations has escaped ‘the Iron Chancellor’. The consequence of the decision to let the Bank of England control interest rates was that absurdly, and incredibly, like Mrs Thatcher in 1979, Labour set out in 1997 with neither an interest rate policy nor an exchange rate policy. The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee duly agreed that interest rates as low as those in the Euro zone or the United States would not maintain inflation at the target figure and they have remained higher ever since. (That strange noise you can hear is sniggering from the stockbroker belt round London.) Consequently the pound has been too high and a chorus of complaint has issued from British manufacturing as the overvalued pound began putting them out of business. This did not deter Brown. He wanted ‘stability’ and ‘an end to Tory boom and bust’ – phrases you must have heard a hundred times a year. But Brown defined ‘stability’ simply as low inflation – currency instability didn’t matter and didn’t get onto the agenda.4 And we had a re-run of 1980-2. Through 1998 and into 1999, as the pound remained too high under the impact of UK
2 Nigel Lawson was trying to get this done in 1988 but Prime Minister Thatcher blocked it. See Nigel Lawson, The View from No.11 (London: Corgi, 1992) pp. 869/70. The financial press, reflecting the views and interests of the City, could see higher interest rates coming and were thrilled by Brown’s decision. See Paul Routledge, Gordon Brown: the biography, (London: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p. 294. 3 As I keyboarded this sentence I found myself wondering for the umpteenth time: can he really be this naive? The answer still looks like ‘yes’ to me. There is no rabbit waiting to be pulled from the hat. 4 The parallels with the Thatcher-Howe regime arise again. Like them, Brown seems to have believed that if domestic inflation is low everything else slots into place, automatically.
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interest rates almost double those in the Euro zone, the economics journalists who had spent the 1980s warning of the consequences of the high interest rate/high sterling policy, began recycling their old articles, needing to do little more than change the name of the Chancellor from Howe to Brown.5 Finally, on June 10 1999, the Governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George, admitted that the exchange rate had finally made it onto the agenda of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) which he chaired and stated that the interest rate cut of a quarter of a percent that week by the Monetary Policy Committee had been done to try and help manufacturing. But it still left UK interest rates roughly twice those in the Euro zone – and sterling did not fall. Even then Chancellor Brown was not impressed. At the same event at which Eddie George admitted the MPC was now considering
5 See for example: * David Smith et al, ‘Strong pound drives up insolvencies’, The Sunday Times (Business) 22 February 1998; * Charlotte Denning, ‘Trade slumps into the red’, The Guardian 24 June 1998; * Larry Elliot, ‘Circular walk along the Third Way’, The Guardian 6 July 1998; * Peter Kellner,‘How the Bank has been taking us all for a ride’, Evening Standard 4 August 1998; * Mark Atkinson, ‘Brown attacked by Benn’, The Guardian 14 August 1998; * Bill Jamieson,‘EEF slams “arrogant” Treasury’, The Sunday Telegraph 13 September 1998 ; * ‘Larry Elliot, ‘Brown proves a covert radical’, The Guardian 21 December 1998: ‘His reluctance to even attempt to talk down the level of sterling seems bizarre, given what the confederation of British Industry has been saying about exporters’ prospects’; Elliot, ‘Sweet talk won’t stop sterling now,’ The Guardian 10 May 1999: ‘on the one hand a government which has its roots in Britain’s manufacturing heartlands and professes to want to join the single currency; on the other an exchange rate that will close factories and preclude membership of the single currency’; * Charlotte Denny, ‘London visitors fail to impress metal bashers’, The Guardian 20 May 99, which quoted a Midlands ‘metal basher’ that they had had the Governor of the Bank of England in Birmingham the night before ‘who went on record as saying he was not prepared to offer any solace to manufacturing whatsoever’.
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the exchange rate (even though they hadn’t done anything), Brown not only failed to respond to the complaints from the domestic economy, he warned of the dangers of having an exchange rate target. ‘Anyone who thinks that dropping the inflation target to replace it with an exchange rate target, or running inflation and exchange rate targets at the same time is the right way to achieve domestic stability is failing to learn the lessons of the 1980s.’ 6 Notice how Brown rejects a solution to a question the manufacturing sector was not asking. The exporters being crippled by the high value of the pound were not suggesting that ‘running inflation and exchange rate targets at the same time is the right way to achieve domestic stability’. There were simply pointing out that the pound was so high they were going out of business! Nor is it clear which ‘lessons of the 1980s’ he is thinking of. Certainly not the lessons of the early 1980s when Thatcher and Howe followed a policy identical to Brown’s, with the same consequences – destruction of manufacturing jobs. After all the policy making and policy changing of the 1980s and early 1990s, New Labour’s economic policy is essentially Thatcherism mark 1. Superficially it appears different but only because ‘controlling the money supply’ is no longer considered an intermediate target en route to controlling inflation; and as Brown inherited much lower inflation than existed in 1979, the Monetary Policy Committee has not yet had to be as savage as Thatcher and Howe were in the early 1980s.7 But the policy remains the same: we will ‘control’ inflation by putting up interest rates; that is, by making people unemployed; and that is, chiefly, by making people unemployed in manufacturing.
6 The Guardian 11 June 1999 7 The oddity is that Brown appears to be believe that something new is going on. He seems to have forgotten that in the 1950s and 60s the policy of putting up interest rates and clobbering the domestic economy as soon as a little inflation appeared was derided by Labour spokespeople as ‘stop-go’ economics.
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As in the 1980s, the prosperous, City-driven greater London area can experience growth while chunks of the rest of the country are in recession. In May 1999 the TUC reported that in the 106 constituencies where manufacturing employed more than 30% of the work force, half had recorded a rise in unemployment in the previous six months.8 As I was writing this paragraph the BBC news announced at the beginning of August 2001, that the manufacturing sector of the British economy was officially in recession – in large part the victim of interest rates higher than those in the Euro zone and the USA and the concomitant over-valued pound. The same old story: the City does well, manufacturing does badly. All of this is being done in pursuit of policies which now come under the rubric of ‘the Washington consensus’; that is, American-style neo-liberalism. But these policies were adopted by Labour under John Smith as Shadow Chancellor (with Brown as his deputy) when they were quite specifically the policies sought by the City of London. The City’s well-being is top of the economic agenda. At every negotiation with the EU the City’s interests are paramount. The notorious ‘five conditions’ for UK entry into the Single Currency which some bright spark at the Treasury persuaded Gordon Brown to adopt early in his term as Chancellor, refer in general terms to the effect of Single Currency membership on the rest of the economy, but specifically includes Single Currency membership’s effect on the City. The City has had complete control of the UK’s economic policies now since 1979. The last flicker of the thought of resistance by Labour to the City’s agenda occurred about a year before the election of 1997 when, for a few weeks, Will Hutton’s take on the City-versus-industry thesis, his idea of the Stakeholder Economy, was apparently being taken seriously by Tony Blair – until the idea was run past Labour’s contacts in the City. ‘One minute the then editor of The Observer [Will Hutton] was sitting in Blair’s kitchen, watching Tony push
8 Will Hutton, The Observer 2 May 1999.
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down the plunger on the cafetiere, as he said, “Will, stakeholding is going to be our bible”. 9 Just six weeks later Hutton found his idea had been dropped, after Blair’s adoption of it had been greeted with suspicion in the business world....’10 This account was confirmed by the Australian academic Shann Turnbull, who has proposed a slightly different version of the stakeholder concept. Turnbull wrote: ‘When I met Geoff Mulgan [one of New Labour’s policy advisors in No 10 Downing Street] back in Australia on his honeymoon in 1998 he advised me that stakeholder idea had frightened the big end of town and so it had been dropped. Company directors were concerned that they would be made accountable to people other than shareholders and institutional investors were frightened that it would destroy shareholder value.’ (Emphasis added.)11 ‘The big end of town’ for the City of London is an interesting image. But how big is it? How important is the City to the UK economy? What proportion of the Gross Domestic Product is the City? To have this much power it must be big – at least as big, say, as manufacturing, which has been persistently cut- down in the City’s interests for the past 20 years. Wrong. According to figures produced in 1999 by the City of London’s own propaganda outfit, British Invisibles – which may be presumed to exaggerate somewhat in the City’s favour – the
9 The notion had been at the core of The State We’re In, Hutton’s best-seller which persuaded large numbers of people to join Blair’s rebranded New Labour. 10 Paul Vallely ‘Enemies of the people’, The Independent (Review) 4 July 2000. 11 This was in an e-mail posted on the Net as ‘OWNERSHIP: Re: HOMESTEAD: No 3rd Way?’ from Shann Turnbull [email protected] on 25 May 2000. Turnbull’s Website is http://members.optusnet.com.au/~sturnbull/index.html A significant part of New Labour’s relations with the City involves Gavyn Davies, Chief Economist at the American bank Goldman Sachs. His wife has been Gordon Brown’s PA for many years. In a profile of Davies by Brian Milton written for, but not published by, London Financial News of 10 June 1996, Milton quoted a ‘Labour source’ as saying: Continues at the foot of the next page.
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City contributed 6.4% of the UK GDP. That is not a misprint: 6.4%. Manufacturing, by contrast, is still, even after twenty years of assault, somewhere between 20% and 30%, depending on how you define manufacturing.12 And, let it be noted, that 6.4% is now mostly owned by Americans. The reorganisation of the City, the so-called ‘big bang’ in 1986, was the beginning of the end for the British ownership of the City. These days it is essentially a branch office of Wall Street. 13 Pursuing ‘the knowledge economy’ (Blair) and ‘an enterprise culture open to all’ (Brown), Blair and Brown may now believe they are on the wave of the future, driven by technology and changing world markets; but the truth is that at the end of the 1980s they simply swallowed whole the ideology of the City of London – the pioneers of globalisation, after all – and adopted its policies, which reflect its interests. The result has been, just as it was under Mrs Thatcher who was pursuing the same policies, the continued destruction of the manufacturing base of this country.
A disinformation operation ‘I have taken from my party everything they thought they believed in. What keeps it together is success and power’ – attributed to Tony Blair by Andrew Rawnsley in his Servants of the People (p. 195, 2001 paperback edition).
Note 11 continued ‘Gavyn doesn’t write policy, but he is our own City sounding board. We draft the ideas and Gavyn tells what the effect will be on the economy and what the response will be in the markets.’ No wonder Goldman Sachs made him a partner, now worth about £50 – or is it £100? – million! The Milton article got as far as page make-up before being rejected. I was sent a copy of the page. 12 See Oliver Morgan, ‘Official figures hide manufacturing jobs, The Observer (Business) 22 October 2000, which suggests that more careful analysis of the categories gives manufacturing something like 28% of the British GDP. Why manufacturing in this country has so little political influence is one of the central issues of our post-war history. 13 The impact of the ‘big bang’ is clearly described in Philip Augar, The Death of Gentlemanly Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000).
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The capture of the Labour Party by the Blair-Brown faction has been the most successful political disinformation operation I know of in this country’s political history. Those to be disinformed where the unions, who used to fund most of it but whose share of Labour’s funding is now down to around 50%; the party’s members, who funded part of it and did the work; and MPs. The union officials eventually realised what the game was but had nowhere else to go; only one union had withdrawn some of its political funding by the election of 2001. The members of the party were too ill-informed to grasp what was going on, unable to find a means of opposing it, or incapable of believing that the New Labour faction really meant what they said. Many party members trust their leaders and they were placated by periodic statements proclaiming that Labour values were still in place, while Labour policies were removed or undermined; and reassured by the presence of the totemic figure of John Prescott at the elbow of the Brown/Blair group. The MPs were generally bought off with the prospect of election victory or ‘disciplined’ by the fear of another loss – however unlikely that seemed after 1994 – for which they might be blamed. In 1997 I gave to a talk to my own branch of the Labour Party and laid a simplified version of the thesis in this book before them. Nobody took it seriously. I didn’t expect them to. I had already tried – and largely failed – to persuade the members of my branch of the Labour Party that the Militant Tendency really was the conspiracy in the party that the party’s leaders, various Militant defectors and a couple of well- researched books said it was. People who attend meetings of political parties – the dreaded ‘activists’ – may be a tiny self- selecting minority but they seem to be no more able to confront difficult problems than any other group. I was in Hartlepool on the night of the election of 2001 and watched the Hartlepool Labour Party members cheer as Peter Mandelson entered the sports centre in which the vote count was taking place. Labour’s policies? They just looked thrilled to have a celebrity as their MP. It is all deeply depressing at one level – and hilarious at
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another. Based on nothing more than a hunch about the shape of the future, a Labour government is pissing away what was left of the manufacturing base after the Thatcher governments had a go at it. This country’s fishing industry was largely wrecked as part of the price of entering the EEC in 1972. The steel industry was ‘rationalised’, and, like coal, was mostly closed in the 1980s. Agriculture is being reduced under ‘set aside’ schemes and another chunk will vanish as a result of the foot and mouth outbreak; and a further section will go as the result of the collapse of farming incomes in the last three years caused by the low payments made in ‘green pounds’ (i.e. Euros) via UK membership of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. But never mind, eh? Trust your Uncle Tony: he may not know how to use a PC but he knows we have ‘the knowledge economy’ coming over the horizon and everything is going to be OK. And perhaps it will. Perhaps we will all end up in ‘the knowledge economy’ (whatever that is) and we won’t need fishing, farming, steel-making, mining, machine-tools and manufacturing in the future. What am I complaining about? Labour’s policies are working. Unemployment fell in the same month that manufacturing officially went into recession. Perhaps the neo-liberals are right; perhaps the service sector can replace manufacturing. But it can’t: the service sector has not replaced the manufacturing destroyed by its policies in the last 20 years. Britain is running a huge and growing trade deficit: this is not permanently sustainable. Thus far only a bunch of the ‘old lags’, the unreconstructed Keynesians, as Gordon Brown probably thinks of them, are worried by this.14 I’m with them. I cling to the now old-fashioned idea that on a small island with a population of 60 million it is madness to let the island’s productive resources be abandoned. I think Labour’s leaders have got it completely wrong and however they think of themselves, history will judge that the Brown- Blair faction was merely the ultimate triumph of the ideology of the City over the rest of us; and, let us hope, the last dribble 14 See for example Ian Aitken, ‘This country’s living beyond its means’, The Guardian 28 May 2001.
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of Thatcherism down the leg of British politics.
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The ‘moral equivalence of the Founding Fathers’
T. P. Wilkinson
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America Gerald Horne New York: New York University Press, 2014, h/b Since 1976, the bicentennial of the unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) that led to the founding of the United States of America from thirteen originally British colonies, Black History Month has been an officially recognised period – in February – when the descendants of the Founding Fathers acknowledge that the descendants of their slaves also have a history. Also remembered in February is Presidents’ Day – initially George Washington’s birthday but now a combined birthday celebration for Washington and Abraham Lincoln: the Father of the Country and the Great Liberator. The year starts with Martin Luther King Day in January, when some whites and Blacks commemorate the man who was the highlight of the Great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 – assassinated in 1968 for saying in 1967: ‘I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.’ Today the United States is governed with a black president. And yet as can be seen by the representations of the man occupying the White House, the black person born in the United States upon whose ancestors – to paraphrase the assassinated Malcolm X – the ‘rock of Plymouth’ fell, still have no history commensurate with the lives taken from them in the establishment of the American Empire. Maybe this deficit is in some way a blessing. The token historical commemorations dictated by the psychological
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pacification policies of the US regime are based on the attempt – as in the election campaign of that ‘son of Africa’ – to implicate ordinary black Americans in the creation of the present regime. As James Baldwin so forcefully told William Buckley Jr. and the members of the Cambridge Union in 1965: ‘From a very literal point of view, the harbours and the ports and the railroads of the country – the economy, especially in the South – could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been (and this is still so) for cheap labour. I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.’ There is a significant difference between Baldwin’s claim to have built America and the regime’s rulers’ infamy for founding it. Unfortunately this distinction is not very clear in the popular consciousness because the creation of the USA is always presented as the sum of business transactions performed by the white settler elite. The prevailing historical narrative – across the political spectrum – describes the development (conquest) of the North American continent as one endless series of clever, innovative and even enlightened business deals whose frustration by the archaic practices of the British monarchy were challenged by a declaration adopted and promulgated in 1776. Gerald Horne’s latest book is a continuation of his careful scholarly efforts to correct that historical deficit. Two of his previous books recover the record of how the United States of America was made by the slave labour of black Americans and the fanatical determination to preserve this method of enrichment by the white settlers called the Founding Fathers.1 Professor Horne goes beyond those who have finally acknowledged that slavery was fundamental to the economy of the original colonies. He shows that slave resistance forced the settler elite to declare independence from Britain. In doing so he makes black Americans the drivers of the revolution and
1 Negro Comrades of the Crown (2012) and The End of Empires (2009).
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white Americans the motor of counter-revolution. Taking Professor Horne’s thesis seriously not only restores the historical dignity of blacks – more than a month of history – it shows that Africans throughout the Western hemisphere were joined in a liberation struggle whose defeat in mainland North America relied upon the ‘isolationism’ and ‘exceptionalism’ that continue to govern the US regime even today. The myth of the Mayflower and the first Thanksgiving are still the stories that shape the way US history is understood on both sides of the Atlantic.2 They are central events in the pageantry used to prove that the Founding Fathers were the precursors of the anti-monarchical revolutions in France and elsewhere. Slavery in the US is thus considered to be a minor defect in the long march of whites toward what are today called ‘human rights’. This massive distortion has done much to confuse people throughout the world as to what the US regime really represents.3 It has made more than one revolutionary leader shake his or her head at the curious relationships the regime has maintained with the white regimes in Africa nearly two centuries later. It has kept millions wondering why the US regime has been a consistent supporter of dictators throughout the world. It has kept US citizens frustrated by the highest rate of black incarceration in the world, despite the recent election of a black president. These inconsistencies have always been defended or excused by the claim that complexities and contradictions in history itself have merely diverted Americans – white Americans – from perfecting the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Professor Horne’s work provides the data necessary to show that these defences are simply false. His careful
2 Just like its Afrikaner equivalent, Geloftedag (English: the Day of the Vow), Thanksgiving in the US was originally celebrated out of gratitude for a divinely granted military victory over the indigenous. In 1994, the Afrikaner holiday was renamed ‘Day of Reconciliation’. US President Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a holiday of ‘reconciliation’ in 1863, during the US Civil War. 3 For example, English textbooks used in German schools still portray the relationship between the founders of the Bay Colony and the indigenous as one of friendly co-operation, free of animosity or the violence of land expropriation.
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perusal of the contemporary record reveals that the real principles ‘held to be self-evident’ were those that defined Blacks in the original colonies as property and not as people. The Founding Fathers were first and foremost capitalists who, like their descendants, believed that freedom was inherent in the right to own property and dispose of it as one sees fit. To understand this argument it is necessary to go back at least to 1688 and the so-called Glorious Revolution in Britain. This change in the relationship between the British mercantile class and the monarchy catalysed the transformation of British possessions in North America and the Caribbean. It was the first step in the development of what was called ‘free trade’, the central economic doctrine of the US. Free trade in the 17th century meant the ability of merchants, bankers and landowners to engage in unrestricted profit-seeking for private as opposed to state benefit. For the British mercantile class it meant expansion of the slave trade to extract as much wealth as possible from colonies with wage labour. However, the expansion of the slave-based economy caused a serious problem. Slaves soon outnumbered Europeans in all of the colonial possessions. Africans soon took notice of this fact and revolted – causing Europeans to invest ever more resources in suppressing the black labour force. Despite inducements and even impressment, the colonisers failed to lure enough Europeans to the colonies to create a balance of power/terror sufficient to keep slave populations docile. Here official American history focuses on the failure of revolts in the Caribbean and downplays the impact these revolts had on British colonial policy. In fact, well before 1776, Britain was being forced to consider an end to slavery. At the same time competition among the colonising countries intensified. Wars in Europe arose among the colonisers and these wars became world wars in which colonial possessions changed hands between Spain, France, and Britain. These wars further reduced the profitability of colonial enterprises. By the mid-18th century, every European colonial power was trying to find an accommodation with their
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black populations, especially since these wars could not be fought in the colonies without arming them. Black soldiers were not willing to fight for slavery so they had to be freed if they were to bear arms in European wars. As a result Caribbean blacks were being allowed into the colonial regimes – a process which would transform British possessions forever, except in North America. Colonial rivalry created a class of blacks who were not only no longer slaves but who were willing to fight in very disciplined regiments against anything resembling slavery – wherever it still prevailed. As Britain was forced to make concessions in the Caribbean, settlers in North America became increasingly anxious. These concessions induced hard-core slaveholders in colonies like Barbados to abandon their plantations and move to the mainland where British control was beginning to wane.4 At the same time anti-slavery activism was growing in Britain itself. Professor Horne points to Somersett’s case (Somerset v Lewis of 1772, 98 ER 499), a well-reported British King’s Bench decision in which the court held that chattel slavery was inconsistent with English common law. The extension of this precedent to the original colonies would have meant the end of slavery and with it the wealth machine driving Yankee merchants and Southern latifundista. Ironically this had followed Britain’s expensive victory in the French and Indian War (Seven Year’s War of 1754–63), after which the British government decreed a limit to territorial expansion on the North American mainland. Professor Horne treats the British victory as a catalyst in the process of secession. On the one hand, Britain freed its mainland colonists from the threat of European competition thus allowing the colonies to expand economically. On the other, it frustrated the colonists by 4 This occurred again in the wake of the Haitian Revolution (1791- 1804). Spain successfully suppressed the independence movement among the creole elite in Cuba for decades by threatening to abolish slavery. White Cuba – concentrated in the western half of the island – included many who regularly agitated for annexation by the US in the hopes of protecting their plantation economy from abolition. The Spanish crown had threatened Cuban independence advocates with abolition of slavery. See, inter alia, CLR James The Black Jacobins (1963) and Louis A. Perez Jr. Cuba Between Reform and Revolution (New York, 1988), p. 101 et seq.
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limiting their insatiable demand for indigenous lands to work with slave labour. Horne implies that had the settler regime been forced to remain within the confines agreed by treaty, the rate of black population growth would have created ‘Caribbean’ conditions. In other words, slave-driven growth would have been stymied as the resistance by the black population increased. To avert these consequences the North American colonists had to challenge the mother country. They had to circumvent British prohibition of territorial expansion and ultimately end British jurisdiction to prevent impending abolition of slavery by the Crown. There could be no Caribbean solution. This is where the sympathy among settler regimes of the 20th century originates. While Britain was being forced to modernise its capitalist system in favour of ‘free labour’, fanatical Protestant extremists – the core of the Northern settler elite – were opportunistically abandoning their institutionalised discrimination against Catholics and lower order Europeans like the Irish and Scots (later also extended to despised Southern Europeans) to compose a race-based regime that could expand to fill the still to be conquered territories and keep the slave population in check. The Somerset case was the 18th century equivalent of Harold Macmillan’s 1960 ‘Winds of Change’ speech.5 Hendrik Verwoerd’s Afrikaner republic and Ian Smith’s Rhodesian National Front were by no means distortions of the American ideal which both claimed to follow in their attempts to inaugurate explicitly white states based on the exploitation of
5 Harold Macmillan addressed the Union parliament in Cape Town at the conclusion of a one-month tour of British Africa. He told the South African parliament, then led by Hendrik Verwoerd’s National Party, that ‘... the growth of national consciousness in Africa is a political fact, and we must accept it as such. That means, I would judge, that we’ve got to come to terms with it’ and that Britain’s opposition to apartheid (not explicitly named) was based on the necessity of maintaining its co- operation among the (non-white) Commonwealth countries, especially in Africa. Macmillan was emphatic. Mr Verwoerd responded sharply that this was a South African matter concerning the ‘white Africans’. In 1961, South Africa declared itself a republic and withdrew from the Commonwealth (before it could be expelled).
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African labour. Both regimes even made concerted efforts to replicate the US model of privileged immigration for Europeans in the hopes of dominating black majorities – albeit unsuccessfully.6 The obvious objection to Professor Horne’s thesis is that it is anachronistic. By applying current models of historical analysis to 17th and 18th century North America, he could be accused of imputing intentions to the Founding Fathers based on current definitions of human rights. Thomas Jefferson is often held out as a fig leaf. His supposed attitude toward slavery is considered by official American history as an alibi for the ‘defective’ failure to include blacks in the definition of equality. According to this view – still the mainstream interpretation – the demands of the ‘revolution’ required a compromise between Northern colonies that were willing to abolish the slave trade and powerful Southern slaveholders. In other words, the race-based regime founded in 1776 was merely flawed because it would otherwise have been impossible for the colonists to continue the march toward freedom if they could not unite against Britain. This argument is echoed in later events like the Missouri Compromise. Another principled objection from official history – again across the political spectrum – is that the final abolition of slavery in 1865 exonerated the American pageant. The US Civil War is endowed with a teleology that is then applied to vindicate the Founding Fathers motives. They are further excused because after all slavery was prevalent throughout the Western hemisphere at the time. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 successfully rebuts both arguments. First, it documents thoroughly that the key players 6 In 1965, Ian Smith’s Rhodesian National Front proclaimed its Unilateral Declaration of Independence which opened with the words: ‘Whereas in the course of human affairs history has shown that it may become necessary for a people to resolve the political affiliations which have connected them with another people and to assume amongst other nations the separate and equal status to which they are entitled: And Whereas in such event a respect for the opinions of mankind requires them to declare to other nations the causes which impel them to assume full responsibility for their own affairs...’. The allusion to the 1776 UDI was not accidental.
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in the 1776 UDI were almost without exception major slaveholders or slave traders. For instance, John Hancock was Boston’s largest slaveholder – perhaps the real reason for his ostentatiously large signature on the Declaration. James Madison was a staunch defender of slavery – going so far as to introduce the second amendment to the US Constitution in order to secure the autonomy of state slave patrols. Copious correspondence demonstrates that the Yankee and Southern oligarchs knew that Britain was being forced to abolish slavery. That would have been financial ruin for the merchants and plantation owners. Even more serious was their fear that blacks would claim their rights with vengeance as they had been doing in the Caribbean and in the border wars between Florida and South Carolina/Georgia. They made no secret of either. Moreover, the official history relies on an assumption that blacks in North America were essentially docile and unaware of either their humanity or the struggle waged among white elites over their status. If blacks were passive property, then the entire struggle was only between colonists and the mother country. This has never been true. Despite the alienation and deliberate attempts to destroy cultural cohesion among the slave population, there was never a period when blacks did not organise resistance. That resistance was successful to the extent that it persisted in all of Britain’s colonial possessions. When Caribbean plantation owners attempted to pacify their slave holdings – deporting unruly ones to other colonies – this only served to expand the consciousness of blacks as to what was really happening. The recruitment of slaves to fight European wars not only produced cadre of seasoned warriors but discredited efforts by whites to prove their superiority. Jean-Paul Sartre argued at length that the French Revolution as past is inaccessible.7 Thus there is no point in writing history ‘as if’. Gerald Horne does not propose such a history. Instead he is quite consistent with Sartre when he analyses the data available for constructing the past. His is
7 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, (London: NLB, 1976).
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not an appeal for some new found sense of guilt that white America is based on a lie – even if it is. At the same time his analysis is quite consistent with those traditionalists who constantly rave about strict construction and the intentions of the Founders. The Federalists – then as today – assert unabashedly that they were and are guided by the firm principles and intentions of the Olympian slavocracy that founded the US.8 If they are right and the US regime is to be judged by the traditions maintained today as the foundation of the republic, then Gerald Horne has merely provided the full brief. If the Founding Fathers intended to create the republic that is today the paragon of capitalism and the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in the world’ (which in terms of weapons exports and military expenditure it still certainly is), then the Founding Fathers certainly intended a counter-revolution. When the dead US president, now beatified, spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference two hundred and ten years later he said: ‘They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help. I’ve spoken recently of the freedom fighters of Nicaragua. You know the truth about them. You know who they’re fighting and why. They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them, for the struggle here is not right versus left; it is right versus wrong.’ 9 He was criticised severely by liberal and left-liberal opponents of US Latin America policy, supporters of the Sandinista Front government in Managua and aid organisations in the US caring for the refugees who had fled the US-sponsored and managed counter-insurgency and terror wars in the region. (It was estimated that approximately 15-20 per cent of the 8 The authors of the Federalist Papers (1787-88), written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay et al., as well as the followers of the Federalist Society (founded in 1982), an extremely influential association of scholars, jurists, and legal professionals, including members of the US high judiciary, that considers itself to be conservative and libertarian. 9 Ronald Reagan, Remarks at the Annual Dinner of the Conservative Political Action Conference, 1 March 1985.
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Salvadoran population was either killed or forced into exile by ‘freedom fighters’.) Since Ronald Reagan had long been dismissed as senile at best and a lunatic at worst, remarks like these were treated as offensive but more or less right-wing boilerplate. Mr Reagan remained objectionable but the outrage over his statement arose from the belief held from centre to left that he had maligned the Founding Fathers and soiled the original ideals of the USA by associating them with CIA-trained and funded terrorist bands. As Gerald Horne, explains in The Counter–Revolution of 1776, this indignation is seriously misplaced. In fact, Ronald Reagan should have been taken at his word since what he said was historically accurate. Unfortunately most critics of the Reagan regime, its predecessors and successors either do not know or do not understand the actual historical basis for the war of independence from Great Britain started by the British colonial settler elite in 1776. As Gerald Horne notes: ‘Ironically, the US in a sense has emulated today’s Cuba insofar as the operative slogan seems to be “within the Revolution everything, against the Revolution nothing”. In other words, one can quarrel about the destiny of the republic but – generally – not the eternal verity it is said to have created. Of course, left wing republicans tend to emphasize the role of less grand Europeans in 1776 (those not of the left wing tend to stress the role of the Olympian Founding Fathers). Some of these historians tend to see the plight of Africans as the “original sin” of the republic (which begs the question of dispossession of the indigenous). In any case, I suggest in the concluding pages of this book, the left wing’s misestimating of the founding is of a piece with their misestimating of the present: this includes a reluctance to theorize or historicize the hegemony of conservatism among the Euro-American majority – an overestimation of the strength of the left wing among this same majority – which has meant difficulty in construction of the kind of global movement that has been essential in rescuing Africans particularly from the violent depredations that
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have inhered in the republic.’
Dr T P Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket in Heinrich Heine’s birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003).
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The last Praetorian
Bernard Porter
Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law Aden and the end of Empire Aaron Edwards. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2014, h/b, £20 Most older people will vaguely recall the nickname, but little more. ‘Mad Mitch’ comes from a bygone era. Indeed, it was bygone even in his own time. That was around the 1960s, when Britain was relinquishing its hold over most of its empire, to the great chagrin of men like Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Campbell Mitchell of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders: ‘a self-confessed imperialist since boyhood’, whose final military task, to organise an orderly British withdrawal from Aden – ‘we are holding things up whilst we get out from underneath’ – rankled terribly. Upper middle-class, minor public school (Whitgift) and Sandhurst educated, a firm believer in ‘great causes’ and ‘an avid reader of adventure books by famous patriotic pinups like T.E. Lawrence and John Buchan’, he achieved fame briefly in 1967 by taking back the rebellious Crater district of Aden for the British, in just the way his fictional heroes would have done: that is, pretty gung-ho. The press in Britain loved it. (He made sure they came along to observe it.) For a brief while it gave Britons something to cheer about over their Daily Expresses (it was an Express reporter who coined the ‘Mad Mitch’ soubriquet), in the midst of a generally dispiriting period in their international history (for those who bothered about these things); before Crater was finally evacuated, and the Argylls flown back to ‘a grey cold, depressing Britain’ to the strains of ‘Fings ain’t wot they used to be’, played by the band of the Royal Marines of the ship that saw them off. He was, of course, controversial. In real life, boys’ book heroes must expect to be. He had a reputation in the Army
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(though not in his own regiment) for insubordination and attention-seeking: a ‘jumped-up little colonel’ – he was quite short – prone to ‘strutting around like a peacock’, ‘showboating’, and ‘undermining his superior officers.’ He was accused of shooting from the hip (metaphorically) rather too often, though he claimed it was only to deter: ‘they know that if they start trouble we’ll blow their bloody heads off’. After the withdrawal there were charges of torture under him, and of shocking behaviour by his ‘Jocks’ (ordinary troops), some of which were true; but ‘the key point’ here, as Aaron Edwards claims, ‘is that they operated against ruthless assassins who had murdered many of their colleagues’. You couldn’t expect to judge these things through ‘the distorting lens of British fair play’. ‘In any case’, as Mitchell wrote in his autobiography, Having Been a Soldier, published just two years after his return from Aden and resignation from the Army (because he wasn’t promoted high enough), ‘what do politicians at home know of the cruel, hard facts of life when civil disorder has broken out?’ He deliberately courted controversy thereafter, as Conservative MP for Aberdeenshire West, joining the pretty extremist Monday Club and Anglo-Rhodesian Society. He also became an ‘icon’ for the Conservative Right, who of course didn’t mind any of this. There were ‘rumours’ – only – that he ‘was engaged as a trouble-shooter for the Thatcher government’ in the early 1980s. Most damaging to his reputation, however, may be the fact revealed here that when the Argylls marched into Crater – ostensibly the most dangerous place in southern Arabia – it was only after a covert agreement entered into by the (rebel) NLF that its members wouldn’t fire on them, at least at the start. Mitchell probably didn’t know this at the time: in his autobiography he put his success down to his brilliant generalship – mainly the element of surprise – but this suggests that it may not have really been such a big deal. And, after all, Crater was Mad Mitch’s only battle-honour: the
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only one, at any rate, mentioned in this book.1 The lack of background material here on Mitchell’s earlier career in the Army is frustrating for anyone who wants to piece together some kind of explanation for his actions and attitudes. ‘Imperialist from boyhood’ is telling, but rather vague. Edwards tells us he ‘bypassed adolescence for adulthood’, which seems questionable – that he ever bypassed adolescence, that is – and joined the Regular Army at the age of 17 in 1943; but that still leaves 24 years of military duty in Palestine, Korea, Cyprus, Borneo and in the King’s East African Rifles – where he is supposed to have fixed Idi Amin up with his commission – before he was sent out to Aden. At least three of those theatres were sites of counter- insurgency superficially similar to the one in Aden, where he is bound to have picked up some tips, especially in the light of his views about ‘learning from history’: ‘almost everything that ever happened had happened before and a solution to the problem could be found in what went before’. But there’s no clue here as to what he actually did in or learned from those other – difficult and rather dirty – campaigns. His autobiography is scarcely more forthcoming on this. Edwards’ excuse will be that his is more a book about the Aden imbroglio than about Mitchell, despite the emphasis given to him in the title and with his portrait dominating the dust- jacket – ‘Mad Mitch’, indeed, only makes his full appearance two-thirds of the way through; but it really would be helpful to know how his ideas developed through those experiences. One possibility is that they led him to generalise too much. One counter-insurgency situation was much like another. All insurgents everywhere were ‘seedy little terrorists’, ‘gangsters and cold-blooded murderers’, possibly literally diabolical (which no doubt justified padres assuring the troops before battles that they had ‘God on their side’); or – the terms preferred by his Jocks – ‘wogs and gollies’. For his part, Edwards sees the battle as one against a method of warfare:
1 Another honour – though not strictly a ‘battle’ one – was the part he played in the formation of the HALO Trust – ‘Hazardous Areas Life- Support Organization’ – in 1988, turning him, in Edwards’ opinion, into ‘a fully fledged humanitarian’. That was quite a jump.
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‘Britain’s forgotten war on terror’, which is pushing that now familiar term quite a way back. It also rather obscures the faces and the objectives of people who thought they were fighting for other things. Here lies one of the crucial differences between Mitchell and T.E. Lawrence, with whom he was often compared. He didn’t like the comparison because he had rumbled Lawrence as a ‘practising pervert’. And the latter – though Mitchell may not have realised this – wasn’t really a kosher ‘imperialist’. The main difference, however, was that Lawrence had come to serve in Arabia through his empathy with the Arabs, rather than through soldiering. Mitchell, by contrast, saw Arabs simply as a new bunch of ‘subversives’. They were defined, in other words, entirely according to their relationship with Britain. He felt Lawrence’s (and other Englishmen’s) judgment of them had been ‘distorted’, probably by the ‘rough beauty’ of Arabia. If they were loyal, then they might be ‘very good chaps’; and if they fought bravely and in the open – like Lawrence’s desert tribes – they could be admired for that. Otherwise, however, they were ‘disloyal’ (to the British, that was), ‘slippery’, ‘batty’ (the Arabs called it ‘touched by God’), ‘irrational’, ‘cruel’, ‘superstitious’, ‘mystical’, ‘oracular’, ‘hysterical’ (the women), ‘maniacal’, ‘wild’, and unaware of their own best interests. Under fire, they ‘cowered’ – as opposed to sheltering, which was what white men did. They ‘lounged’ a lot. Instead of shouting, they ‘hollered’. While Britain used ‘covert intelligence’, they ‘spied’ treacherously. Their attacks were ‘heartless’ and ‘cowardly’. They were addicted to ‘fighting, killing and treachery’, usually for lucre, or under the influence of ‘gat’ (khat, a chewed stimulant). Under interrogation, they emitted ‘bloodcurdling squeals’ – not ‘cries’. Cairo Radio didn’t just broadcast propaganda, but ‘spouted’ it, ‘gutterally’. Their supporters – at the UN, for example – ‘ranted’. Not all these expressions come from Mitchell’s mouth; many of them are Edwards’. But he is clearly conveying – possibly sharing – the attitudes of the time, as revealed in the words of both of them. A different vocabulary is used for each side. A similar thing happens when men are killed. If it’s a
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British soldier he’s described as a ‘married man with (X) children’. Arab victims, presumably, have no families. Mitchell’s world, unlike Lawrence’s, was centred around the British Empire; that, and Scotland, the other focus of his patriotism – never Britain per se, it seems.2 Mitchell’s attachment to Scotland may have been all the more powerful because he was born and brought up in Surrey, which explained his ‘la-di-dah’ accent – faintly embarrassing when he passed among his Jocks – but it was in the blood. His view of most English politicians was highly negative – ‘squeamish’ and ‘old women’ are two characteristic descriptions – especially Labour ministers of course, who ‘with less of a feeling of the “White Man’s Burden” on their shoulders’ (that’s Edwards) were quite happy to begin the ‘scuttle’, leaving their Tory successors little alternative but to continue down the same road. His rows with them over Aden exposed the existing ‘ruptures in the relationship’ between the military and its supporters on the one hand and ‘Labour Ministers and senior officers in Whitehall on the other’ that were opening up in the 1960s, one other sign of which was the secret and treacherous right-wing plotting that went on against Harold Wilson at this time. (Not that there’s any evidence that he was involved in that.) So far as Aden and the rest of the Empire were concerned, however, theirs was a hopeless cause. Mitchell was under no illusions about this. The best he could do was to contrive a last hurrah before it went under; and – more importantly – help save the British Army from the wreckage, as the only ‘healthy and virile member’ of the ailing national body. At the very least, for Mitchell personally this would soften the decolonisation blow. But then it seems that the Army, and in particular his beloved Argylls, were where his prime loyalties had always lain – ahead of either of his ‘patriotic’ ones. The Argylls had been his dad’s regiment before him. In a period of defence cuts in the 1960s they were one of the regiments under 2 I wonder how many Scots lost interest in the Union when it no longer brought the Empire with it – the latter being the only common thing in which the more conservative of them could take pride?
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threat. Mitchell’s main motive for wanting to serve in Aden, Edwards claims, was to get them out there to prove their mettle, so that no-one could think of disbanding them. Once in Aden he was obsessed with the idea of avenging British soldiers whom the insurgents had killed: ‘It consumed him. The terrorists had to be taught a lesson.’ He revelled in the ceremonial impedimenta of the regiment: bagpipes, naming his Crater HQ ‘Stirling Castle’, and so on, in order to ‘remind all ranks of their fighting tradition’. Then, as an MP after Aden, he devoted most of his energies to the vigorous Scottish campaign to ‘Save the Argylls’. (It worked until 2006, when they amalgamated into the Royal Regiment of Scotland.) This was his particular ‘tribe’. Edwards believes he succeeded in keeping the member virile. ‘The Army generally emerged unscathed’ from the encounter, he writes; ‘the only British institution,’ as Corelli Barnett later put it, with regard to decolonisation more broadly, ‘to leave a permanent mark – the mark of order and organization amid a carnival of collapsing parliamentary government’. (One imagines he is referring here to post-colonial national armies like Idi Amin’s. Whether that is something to be pleased about may be doubted.) So far as the Argylls were concerned, Mitchell seems to have done a good job on them. Their training before they embarked for Aden was imaginative and effective: a mock-up of Crater to practice in, and exercise in a regimental gym heated to tropical levels to get them acclimatised. That was just as well, as conditions out there were terrible: ‘not a bit like Peckham’, as one police sergeant seconded to Aden from there put it, with many Jocks suffering from severe dehydration, for which their ‘staple Army diet’ of ‘tinned baked beans and mutton stew with dumplings’ might not have been the best prophylactic. Mitchell was a courageous and popular commander. He ‘led from the front’. He kept his men entertained by bringing in the likes of Tony Hancock (he turned up drunk), and Harry Secombe, the latter to ‘officially open a new D Company toilet’. According to Edwards’ account the occupation of Crater
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(‘Operation Stirling Castle’) went like clockwork, and its evacuation (‘Operation Highland Clearance’) was likewise ‘incredibly methodical’. That is unusual in warfare, although that NLF ceasefire will have had something to do with it. And this doesn’t take account of all those ‘atrocity’ charges, levelled at the time. Of these Edwards is generally sceptical, based on the available official reports; but declines to get too involved in them, on the grounds that ‘it is not the business of historians to become champions of the litigious culture that has grown up around Britain’s colonial record, especially since these allegations are so obviously one-sided and favour the terrorists and insurgents without ever asking for them to atone for their own sins.’ This may be a side-swipe at historians like David Anderson and Caroline Elkins who were involved in the case brought by ex-Mau Mau detainees against the British government in the High Court last year. One of the by-products of that case,3 was the revelation of hundreds of files on British decolonisation generally, not only Kenyan, hidden away in a highly secret government archive at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire. They had been deliberately concealed in order to fool future historians. Some were even forged. Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, British High Commissioner in South Arabia just before Mitchell’s arrival there, was one of the chief offenders here, doctoring documents before they were deposited. Some of those will have been related to the ‘torture’ charges. Did all this come out after Edwards completed his book? If so, he has been desperately unlucky. Even if it’s not the ‘business of historians’ to take sides in these controversies, it is their duty, surely, to help establish the facts. The Hanslope Park evidence, once it has been sifted through, is bound to make a difference. In this respect, Edwards may have been too trusting of the British state as the guardian of its own history. Aside from all this, however, Edwards clearly admires Mitchell’s ‘leadership’ skills. These he attributes in large part to the fact that he was a ‘man’s man and a soldier’s soldier’, which probably translates as ‘masculinist’ in fashionable 3 And of Calder Walton’s researches, reported in his Empire of Secrets. British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (2013).
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present-day gender terms. He certainly was that. His ‘loyal’ wife Sue, who performed her duty to her husband and the British Empire (apart from giving them babies) by ‘organising the wives’ while the regiment was away, thought it was all to do with ‘an attitude of mind’, mainly of ‘courage and determination’. That, as she told a Daily Mail interviewer in 1972, ‘is what the dominant male is all about’. And dominant males – and females; I’m sure she would have included Margaret Thatcher if the interview had been ten years later – were also what any country needed if it was to become or remain ‘great’; and what Britain singularly lacked in the ‘socialist’ 1960s, which explained its sad decline. In particular its leaders were unnecessarily squeamish about coming down hard on their adversaries, on the grounds that it might only provoke further resistance; a view that Mitchell rejected comprehensively. You had to ‘fly the flag’, ‘whack or woo’ the tribes, let the Gollies know who was boss – and they would respect you for it. It was because they had forgotten this in Palestine and Cyprus, and now in Aden, that the British had failed there. That was ‘not the case in Malaya and Kenya, where sterner counsels prevailed.’ (One presumes he knew exactly how ‘stern’ they were in both places.) So macho worked. This of course is a common right-wing way of looking at things, albeit probably less widespread today. Judgments of Mitchell differed – in fact violently clashed – at the time. On the one hand there were those who saw him as ‘the Last of the Praetorians’ (the title of Edwards’ final chapter) who in days gone by had won its great Empire for Britain, then guarded it; and now in these sad days of national decline could do more than ensure it didn’t simply fade into oblivion, with one last burst of old-time heroism to keep the imperialists’ spirits up. By this reading, if there had been more Mad Mitches around in the 1950s and ’60s, Britain would still be ruling over pine and palm today. Few historians would agree with this – History is more complicated than that – but it is, in truth, a difficult counter-factual to disprove. Aaron Edwards still seems to cling on to it, or aspects of it anyway, with the strong imperial-nostalgic, anti-Labour, anti-UN bias of
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this book; and what he himself calls his ‘worm’s-eye’ view of the events portrayed in it, which coincide with Mitchell’s stance: that it was always the ‘man on the spot’ who knew best. Even at the time he was criticised for this, and for showing little understanding of the ‘wider problems’ – the context – of the events he was involved in; which he denied, but was undoubtedly true. He had after all a very limited and one-sided – if intense – experience of life and the world. The rival judgment was perhaps best expressed by his fellow Scot, Labour MP Tam Dalyell, in the House of Commons in July 1968: who did ‘not doubt that Colonel Mitchell is a very brave man’, but simply ‘wished to remark’, that in the broader context of the time ‘I do not want to be represented abroad in the Arab world by this kind of man.’ Apparently that ‘caused outrage’ on the Tory side of the Chamber. Tories like that are rarer today. One hopes that this book – by a Sandhurst Senior Lecturer, not in History but in Defence and International Affairs – won’t encourage a resurrection of them at the Royal Military Academy. (I’m sure its History lecturers will provide some balance.) This apart, however, it’s useful for historians to try to understand all perspectives, the worm’s as well as the bird’s, especially from a time, fifty years later, when this particular genus of worm seems almost extinct. Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law, through its author’s obvious empathy with Colin Mitchell, provides a valuable insight into the mind of this sort of military imperialist, now long gone.
Bernard Porter is (among other things) a historian of the British Empire. His books include The Lion’s Share and Critics of Empire.
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Some Warren Commission stuff......
Anthony Frewin
A CRUEL AND SHOCKING ACT The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Philip Shenon New York: Henry Holt & Co, 2013 Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 625 pps.
The subtitle is misleading. It should read, more correctly, The Secret History of the Warren Commission. But hold on, that’s not even correct because there’s precious little revealed here that could be described as secret. Allen Dulles turning up in his slippers and nodding off, for instance? Didn’t we read about that in Epstein’s Inquest back in 1966? Unless I’m suffering from some ‘critical community’ terminal myopia, such ‘secrets’ that are revealed are trite and of little or no consequence. You know, the sort of thing you’d find not rocking the boat in a Reader’s Digest article. Perhaps a better and more accurate subtitle would be: Some Warren Commission stuff. Shenon was approached at his desk on the New York Times by a ‘prominent American lawyer’ who was ‘a young staff investigator on the Warren Commission’ and urged ‘to tell our story’. This is what Shenon has attempted to do; but he’s a prisoner of his sources, walks the straight and narrow, and is remarkably incurious for a journalist (but then he did work for the NY Times and he is writing about the JFK assassination). Nowhere does he reveal the identity of this lawyer, which is curious: fifty years later the guy can’t put his head above the parapet? It is taken for granted by Shenon from page one that there are two immutable and incontestable facts about the
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assassination: 1) Oswald shot JFK, 2) Oswald shot Tippit.1 These are so manifest to Shenon that he scarcely bothers to discuss them. (Why bother when you’ve got stellar eyewitnesses like Howard Brennan and Helen Markham?!) You know, it would be like marshalling evidence to prove the sky is blue. What’s the point? If there is any criticism of the Warren Commission it so low key and muted that the reader would hardly notice it; but even this criticism is soon deflected to the Commission’s inquiry agents, the FBI and CIA, and centres on what exactly Oswald was doing in Mexico City. Shenon argues that if the investigations there had been done properly evidence would have been discovered that proved the Cubans to be behind the events of Dealey Plaza. Yes, the Cubans, stupid! And if no concrete evidence has been forthcoming it just goes to show how sneaky and devious those Cubans are at covering their tracks. The book seems to have generally received good reviews – in the mainstream media, that is. So, no surprises there; but these are reviews that, based on internal evidence, seem to be authored by writers with only a rudimentary understanding of the assassination, indeed if that. Let’s take, as an example, a review that appeared in London in The Independent, 15 November 2013, by a Will Dean whose previous credits are largely television reviews. Dean’s opening paragraph: ‘In the acknowledgements to this masterful piece of modern history a name stands out. That of Don DeLillo. In his thanks Shenon marvels at how close DeLillo's fiction came to the truth about the Kennedy murder and the Warren Commission which was set up to get to the truth of what happened on that day in Dallas.’ Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra, a fictionalised account of Oswald, has always been a firm favourite of the mainstream media and it’s one of the very few books on the assassination
1 There’s actually a third one, too: Jack Ruby had no assistance from anyone in the Dallas PD in gaining access to the basement, and he shot Oswald on the spur of the moment (no hidden agenda). How do we know this? Simple: he left his dog unattended in his car, proof that he intended to return.
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these reviewers seem ever to have read. They feel more comfortable with a novelist than mere researchers; besides DeLillo can supply insights and understanding that will always elude the non-fiction writer (!). The second para is more DeLillo and Dean quotes from Libra wherein the Warren Report is described as ‘the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to a hundred’, a document ‘[so] lost to syntax and other arrangements, that it resembles a kind of mind-spatter’. If anyone can explain what this means I’d be mightily obliged; and, further, why is it cluttering up the review? What’s this got to do with anything? But, I guess, we’re in The New Yorker/Malcolm Gladwell territory where JFK’s assassination is now merely a literary event or cultural artefact (going with this is the belief that we’ll never get to the truth about it, so why bother?). DeLillo’s description of the Warren Report is so wide of the mark it really is nonsense. The Report is a cogent and well argued document, but one based on faulty findings, omissions, selectivity and the striving to substantiate a prior conclusion. And what is mind-spatter? Shenon’s book is an attempt to ‘understand the mind- spatter of the report [sic]’ continues Dean. Further, ‘Days after the killing, as conspiracy theories were already beginning to swarm regarding plots by the Cuban and Soviet governments, President Lyndon Johnson wanted to nip them in the bud’ and thus initiated the Warren Commission. But hold on a second, there were plenty of conspiracy theories involving others, like the CIA, the domestic far Right, Texas oil interests, and so on, though Dean chooses not to mention these. Dean reveals that the Commission is a ‘key part’ of Kennedy history (!) and says that DeLillo describes it as the ‘Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination’. The OED is not a narrative so, perhaps, the Bible or the New Testament might be a better comparison. Or even What Katy Did Next. But why bother to quote this? (He’s a novelist! We gotta listen.) Dean recounts Shenon showing that the commissioners did very little work themselves and how the day-to-day investigation was principally done by the young lawyers, ‘several well-
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meaning young men trying to find the truth in a morass of lies’. Oh, yeah? A couple, yes, but most of them were adhering to Warren Commission general counsel J Lee Rankin’s instruction to Wesley Liebeler: ‘We’re supposed to be closing doors around here, not opening them.’ Dean continues: ‘What Shenon reveals is not the vast conspiracy imagined by some, but just the sheer scale of confusion regarding the events in Dallas at the time and the many half-truths, back-covering and evasions which allowed the conspiracy to fester.’ So, was the Warren Commission a conspiracy? It purported to get to the truth and go where the evidence led, but we now know that this was manifestly not the case, that the Commission decided from the get-go that Oswald was a lone mad nut who not only assassinated Kennedy but also murdered Patrolman Tippet. The Commission’s job was to produce the prosecutor’s brief.2 Echoing Shenon, Dean says one of the biggest failures of the federal agencies is the tracking of Oswald in Mexico City (‘It is not the conspiracy imagined in Oliver Stone’s execrable film JFK.’ 3) This was the biggest failure? A first year student of the assassination could come up with a dozen other failures starting, perhaps, with Oswald’s relationships with the FBI and the CIA. Dean continues, ‘Even his [Shenon’s] asides reek
2 The highly detailed and unassailable study of the Warren Commission’s failings and, most importantly, that its conclusions were already decided from the very beginning, is Gerald D. McKnight’s Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2005). Interestingly, McKnight’s book is listed in Shenon’s extensive bibliography but he either didn’t read it or chose to ignore it in writing the book. 3 Execrable? I don’t think even Stone’s bitterest enemies would describe his films in terms of production (direction, editing, etc) as execrable. For a film that approaches the foothills of execrableness try Peter Landesman’s Parkland (2013). It’s tagline is ‘November 22, 1963, 12:38 pm - A trauma patient is rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. His name is President John F. Kennedy.’ However, the end credits contain this: ‘All characters in this film are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.’ This piece of junk has been sliced-and-diced by James DiEugeio in Reclaiming Parkland: Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).
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of deep reporting. We learn, for instance, that a CIA staffer in Mexico City served in the OSS (the CIA’s precursor) with an agent Julia McWilliams, best known to millions as the celebrated chef Julia Child’. Deep reporting? Big deal! Dean’s concluding paragraph: ‘There is enough uncovered here to give the JFK “truthers” another 50 years of speculation, but that is thanks to the details and errors revealed by the author. It is a sober, gripping study of one of history’s most overstudied [sic] moments, a work fit to rank alongside the previous masterpiece of the murder, William Manchester’s Death of A President’. So, the critics are now to be known as ‘truthers’! What next? Are we to be known as ‘deniers’ (you know, Warren deniers, Oswald deniers, etc)? And another curious word, ‘overstudied’. This means to study too much or too hard, to study to excess. So, the Kennedy assassination has been overstudied. Perhaps Dean could inform us of the academic criteria he uses to ascertain when an historical event has been overstudied, and to give us further examples. When exactly did the case become overstudied? What year? The plain fact is that there is nothing uncovered here to give the ‘truthers another fifty years of speculation’ or fifty minutes for that matter. The show has moved on and for Dean to make this statement exposes his ignorance of the critical literature. In fact his ignorance extends to the Warren Commission itself. He writes of the ‘final 26-volume report.’ Wrong. The Report is one volume. Subsequently published were 26 volumes of Hearings (and exhibits).
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White House Call Girl The Real Watergate Story Phil Stanford Washington State: Feral Press, 2013, $17.95, p/b Feralhouse.com
One of the unanswered questions in the received versions of the Watergate affair was: why did the White House ‘plumbers’ want to bug the phones at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the Watergate complex? The DNC was a bureaucratic entity, not where the political action was. In his memoirs, Richard Nixon recalled his reaction to learning of the burglary: ‘...... Anyone who knew anything about politics would know that a national committee headquarters was a useless place to go for inside information on a presidential campaign. The whole thing was so senseless and bungled that it almost looked like some kind of a setup.’ 1 In his Secret Agenda (1984) Jim Hougan showed that one of the phones the ‘plumbers’ targeted was being used by DNC staffers to book hookers.2 The ‘plumbers’ were after dirt. This theme was reworked a little in Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup: The Removal of Richard Nixon (1991) and this book is a further elaboration of the hooker theme, based round the author’s acquisition of the phone book of one of the women, and it confirms and thickens Hougan’s original research of 30 years ago. The author’s thesis is this: the CIA were running a honey trap, using prostitutes in a room wired for film and sound. In their search for dirt on Democrats, the Nixon ‘plumbers’ looked likely to uncover this and the CIA’s assets within the ‘plumbers’ – ‘ex’ CIA officers McCord and Hunt – deliberately messed-up the bugging of the DNC office in the Watergate complex, triggering the scandal. This is plausible but not provable.
1
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This tale, taken with the account by Robert Merrit of his time as a gay informant/agent provocateur in Washington in this period,3 convey a vivid picture of political sleaze in America’s capital, as well as being an exemplar of Peter Dale Scott’s original conception of parapolitics as being the ‘dark quadrant where CIA, private intelligence operations and Mafia operations overlap.’ They’re all here, but centrally it isn’t actually certain who was running the honey trap. If this isn’t ‘the real Watergate story’ – Watergate is many stories – this is nicely written, with many interesting photographs and substantial endnotes.
Robin Ramsay
3 Watergate Exposed, reviewed at
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The President and the Provocateur The parallel lives of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald Alex Cox Harpenden (UK); Oldcastle Books, 2013, £12.99, p/b
This is Alex Cox’s take on the Kennedy assassination; and ‘take’ is apposite because this is Alex Cox the filmmaker1 and occasional contributor to these columns. Cox presents two parallel narratives, the lives of JFK and Oswald from 1960 until their deaths in Dallas, intercut with the politics (and parapolitics), domestic and international, of the time. This creates a striking effect, which is difficult to quite put a finger on. The macro/micro contrast between Oswald’s strange life, shuttling about at the behest of some intelligence agency or agencies – the provocateur in the subtitle being only one of his roles – within some of the hottest years of the Cold War and the rise of black America, adds a poignancy to the events: Kennedy and Oswald, heading for oblivion at the hands of wider forces. For example – and I took this at random – in three pages at the end of the chapter on 1962 Cox describes: * General Edwin Walker hiring a Scotsman, William Duff, as a batman; * Oswald at a family reunion of which his brothers spoke after his death, one saying Lee Harvey had changed so much he could hardly recognise him;2 * Kennedy watching a movie in the White House, the Kirk Douglas-Walter Mattheu (then) contemporary western, Lonely Are the Brave; * Kennedy meeting with the Joint Chiefs to discuss military budgets and apparently dissenting from the American nuclear missile targeting strategy of mass civilian deaths; * Kennedy touring nuclear missile bunkers in Omaha; * a black church being bombed in Alabama; * Kennedy meeting black American leaders and British PM Harold Macmillan; 1 Best known for Sid and Nancy and Repo Man but see
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* Kennedy addressing Cuban exiles and apparently promising another attack on Castro. Even though much of this is familiar from previous accounts, it doesn’t feel like just another synthesis of the extant material. Cox’s narrative structure and his frequently unusual choices from the mountains of available data – the America neo-nazi and segregationist right get more attention than usual, for example – make it feel fresh. And because he is discussing events leading up to the shootings, the book is not laden down with details of the cover-up and the medical evidence. (Cox reminded me that most of the literature on the Kennedy assassination is about events after it.) Cox is not a big JFK fan: he thinks he dragged his feet on civil rights (I think Cox underestimates the purely political problems this presented) and dismisses his apparently less imperialistic foreign policy directions as expressed by the Alliance for Progress (I think he is a little harsh on this).3 Even so, as Cox describes Kennedy’s conflicts with most of the major lobbies in America, from the mafia to US Steel, his eventual murder feels unsurprising. He does not suggest a solution. He asks (p. 284): ‘Was there an assassination conspiracy, as Bertrand Russell and his Committee feared?....’ This is odd. Like most of the better writers on the subject, he may not be sure of the conspiracy’s composition but Cox knows there was an ‘assassination conspiracy’. All the books in his bibliography argue that and it determines his selection of material from the half century of research. He continues: ‘...... Over the years, pretty much everyone Jack Kennedy offended, and everyone Lee Harvey Oswald met, has been accused of involvement: the FBI; CIA; ONI; the KGB; Cuban intelligence; anti-Castro Cubans; the mafia; White Russians; the KKK and NSRP.’ Who is missing from the list? Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, one of the first to be suspected of doing the dirty deed, who dropped off the researchers’ radar as they came to
3 See for example
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focus on Oswald’s intelligence links. Evidently Cox isn’t impressed by the accumulated evidence of the last 15 years that LBJ’s gang did it. But this is a minor detail. It’s an original treatment of over-familiar material, a fine book, nicely written.
Robin Ramsay
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The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 Christopher Clark London: Allen Lane, 2012, £30 (h/b); Penguin, 2013, £10.99 (p/b)
There are many things that can be done while one is asleep. Bellini wrote a delightful opera about somnambulism. However it is difficult to share the same sense of fascination or repose even a century after the outbreak of the Great War. Somehow it defies any standard of human sensitivity to allude to the acts and omissions leading to the millions of slaughtered men and boys at the hands of the greediest financial and industrial elites known to recorded history as the result of ‘sleepwalking’. Consider the most peculiar omission in this prize-winning story written by a young man from the Dominions: that the author has managed to write over five hundred pages about the Great War with scarcely more than ten pages about the British Empire – then the undisputed world power (not unlike its North American cousin today). All the attention is focussed on Sir Edward Grey, HM Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1905 until 1916. Strangely enough the name ‘Grey group’ is used as attribution for Britain’s foreign policy. Although many of the British sources cited in The Sleepwalkers should more appropriately be attributed to the Milner Group – for those uninitiated this is the closely-knit group of primarily Oxonians who initially joined Cecil Rhodes, led by Alfred Milner (Secretary of State for War under Lloyd George) – and who, together with the Lord Salisbury, were the most powerful force in British imperial politics at least until the end of World War I: ‘Grey was not the puppet-master; the men of the new policy – Bertie, Hardinge, Mallet, Tyrrell and so on – were not manipulated or controlled by him, but worked alongside him as the members of a loose coalition driven by shared sentiments. Indeed, Grey was quite dependent on some of these collaborators – many of his decisions and memoranda, for example, were modelled
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closely on reports from Hardinge.’ (p. 202) Who these collaborators were has already been explained by Carroll Quigley in his 1981 (posthumous) study of the Anglo- American Establishment.1 Quigley – far from a hostile scholar – objected that by means of entrenched control/influence of the principal academic institutions and publishers this group, concentrated in the Rhodes Trust and certain Oxford colleges, have been able to write their own history for the public and suppress any other views. The Sleepwalkers is another proof that Anglo-American historical scholarship regarding British imperial history is still tightly controlled.2 People have claimed to previously have no grounds for supposing that their government leaders lie about the grounds and plans for wars. But since Mr Blair’s deceits to promote the recent Gulf wars is a matter of record, then there can be no excuse for writing anything which gives prima facie credence to the public conduct of government officials, including their rationale for such conduct. As Quigley noted – and anyone who has held genuinely nonconformist academic opinions will have experienced – the best way to suppress uncomfortable or disagreeable facts is to ignore them. The Sleepwalkers might be viewed as a naive piece of work from a young scholar from ‘down under’.
1 Now available free as a PDF at
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However such naiveté or careless omission of the world’s great power in 1914 has been amply rewarded – the author recently received a royal (Regius) chair in history at Cambridge – as have been most of the official historians of the Milner Group. However a more important issue than the scholarly neglect of the most important power in the world at that time and the most important group of collaborators with Sir Edward Grey is why this book appears now and why has it been so thoroughly promoted in Germany. It is true that the author, who spent several years at the Free University of Berlin and wrote several books about Prussia, has spent enough time on his subject to warrant writing about the end of Prussia as a polity. However just as no one seriously doubts that Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was written as an imperial textbook and that the Classics were developed as a discipline in England and Göttingen to supply scholarship to defend European colonialism,3 it is worth asking what policy purpose The Sleepwalkers is intended to defend. Great Britain has pursued two consistent foreign policy principles since the French Revolution. The first is to control the seas and the access to cheap (or free) raw materials (including labour) throughout the world. The second has been to keep Europe divided against itself both to assure access to its markets and to weaken potential imperial competitors. This was a policy understood even in those ancient days before NATO or the European Union. It was one of the main reasons that England was called ‘perfidious Albion’ on the Continent. This meant that the British Empire governed by playing its European competitors against each other. In Germany The Sleepwalkers has been received either as a welcome relief or a naive attempt to make German militarism seem innocuous or unintentional in the months leading up to July and August 1914. How does the author attempt to relieve Germany of its historical war ‘guilt’? The answer is rather simple and therein lies the ground for suspicion. The author explains that in essence Germany’s leaders did not
3 See here Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (London: Vintage, 1991).
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understand the gravity of the Serbian ‘threat’. This is a serious shift in the World War I narrative that is by no means accidental. 1991 was the year in which German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher unleashed what became a vicious aerial bombardment of Serbia and the destruction of Yugoslavia, commencing with his recognition of Croatia’s independence. By the time NATO bombs ceased to fall on Serbia, there was no Yugoslavia and the way was cleared for one of Europe’s biggest contraband trafficking hubs under NATO management: Kosovo. Back then the media was full of reports about how horrid Serbs were and the danger that Russia would feel obliged to defend the Serbian state. It didn’t and everyone was relieved. Today in the Ukraine NATO is engaged in overt and covert operations to separate the country from what the West would call ‘Russia’s sphere of influence’. There is every indication among the mass of Germans that they disapprove of this indirect attack on Russia. Nonetheless the German mass media has been entirely on the side of NATO, condemning everyone who dissents as a ‘Putin- Versteher’ (someone who ‘understands’ Putin). After some ten years of virtually silent deployment of German armed forces in Afghanistan to provide support to the CIA’s war there, it now appears as if European NATO units may be necessary to support the right-wing usurpers that have ruled in Kiev since last year. There are two ways to justify this short of an outright attack by Russian forces – still unlikely since Putin has resisted every provocation to date. One involves absolving the remaining guilty consciences among Germany’s elite and the middle class that supports it, thus making outright war seem civilised again. The other complementary approach is to reiterate that it is not Germany (or any other NATO power) that is escalating the crisis but Slavs – Ukrainians who sympathise with Russia or even consider themselves to be Russian (like so many West Germans seem to think they are Americans). By reminding the educated German that World War I was caused by Serbs and Russians, it is not far-fetched to adopt the position that Russia still protects those Slavs who are essentially the cause of the
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Great War (and, if we wait long enough, also caused World War II). The Sleepwalkers is written like a plenary indulgence granted by the unnamed Anglo-American elite that has profited from every major European war in the 20th century to those whom it would recruit again in its ‘association of helpers’ – witting and unwitting instruments of neo-imperialism (a.k.a. globalisation). By ignoring any serious discussion of the British Empire, its ruling elite, or the global economic and psychological warfare that was waged by it against its European competitors in the years between 1871 and 1914, this book shows that it is the author who was probably sleepwalking, not the European imperialists who, together with Great Britain, wantonly slaughtered more than four million people on the Western front and up to twenty million overall for profit and power. For the record, World War I was fought by six empires: the British Empire, the American Empire, the French Empire, the German Empire, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Three were destroyed and two became vassals of the USA. It is a good time for all of us to wake up.
Dr. T P Wilkinson
Dr T P Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket in Heinrich Heine’s birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003).
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Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War Douglas Porch Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, £17.99, p/b
This is a ferocious book. The author, Douglas Porch, has written a number of very good books over the years (The French Secret Services, The Conquest of Morocco, The Conquest of the Sahara and more), but nothing quite like this. It was conceived, he tells us, ‘in the classrooms of the Naval Postgraduate School where I teach company and field grade US and international officers’. Here he encountered officers newly returned from Iraq and Afghanistan who were ‘not only unsettled by their experiences in these countries, but also persuaded that the hearts and minds counterinsurgency doctrines they were despatched to apply in 2007 were idealistic, when not naïve, impracticable, unworkable and perhaps institutionally fraudulent. In short, they had been sent on a murderous errand equipped with a counterfeit doctrine’. What Porch has set his sights on is the US school of counterinsurgency, associated with David Petraeus, that came to prominence in 2007 when the extent of the Iraq fiasco could no longer be concealed. Petraeus and his associates claimed to have a developed a formula that, if applied with enough determination, resources, time and political will, could defeat insurgency anywhere. As Porch shows, this supposed formula had more in common with alchemy than chemistry. Counterinsurgency (or COIN to use the US acronym), according to Porch ‘consists of the application of petty war tactics that its advocates since the 1840s have puffed as infallible prescriptions for effortless conquest, nation-building and national grandeur’. He goes on to insist that claims that counterinsurgency has produced success in small wars, ‘at least at a reasonable strategic, financial, and moral cost, have relied on a mythologized version of the past too often supported by shoddy research and flawed, selective analysis of cases. History cooked as COIN
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folklore can lead to people getting killed because it fails to convey that each insurgency is a contingent event’. This is absolutely crucial. Even a cursory survey of British post- 1945 counterinsurgency campaigns proves the point: success in Malaya and Kenya because of contingent circumstances and failure in Palestine, Cyprus and South Yemen, once again because of contingent circumstances. And yet nevertheless the British Army claimed to have discovered an infallible methodology for the defeat of insurgency that could be implemented anywhere. Even the Americans fell for this, at least until the British performance in Basra and Helmand. One problem for the COINdinistas, as Porch labels them, is that whereas once armies could inflict frightfulness on civilian populations without any domestic consequences, this became more difficult with the coming of representative government. Even in the 1840s, ‘the litany of cruelty, pitiless violence, and human misery inflicted by Bugeaud on the Muslim population of North Africa’ had to be dressed up for French domestic consumption as something noble. Governments and armies began to systematically lie about the methods they used in crushing insurgency and rebellion. Out of this came the ‘hearts and minds’ approach that the British laid particular claim to in the post-1945 period. As Porch points out, these new humanitarian concerns could sometimes have ironic consequences! At least one of the pretexts for the US war with Spain in 1898 was revulsion at the brutal counterinsurgency methods used by the Spanish General Valeriano Weyler in Cuba. The methods which the Americans went on to use to suppress insurrection in the Philippines were so brutal that they ‘made Weyler seem like a pacifist’. Porch is especially good on the French influence on modern US counterinsurgency thinking. He discusses the influence of David Galula, a veteran of the Algerian War. Galula, he writes, ‘is acceptable to modern COINdinistas’, but only because ‘he sanitised his account of the Algerian war’, portraying his activities ‘as “armed social work” among grateful Muslims’. This was a travesty. More honest was the account of General Paul Aussaresses ‘with his descriptions of
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the torture and disappearance of Muslims by the French army, collective reprisals and summary executions that were integral to French COIN’ and were sanctioned at the highest political level. Interestingly, Aussaresses actually taught at Fort Bragg in the early 1960s and went on to advise both the Chilean and Brazilian military in the 1970s. But what of the British? Surely we were different from the French and the Americans? For many years it was successfully insisted that the watchwords of British counterinsurgency were ‘hearts and minds’ and ‘minimum force’. It was this approach that had produced victory in Malaya and Kenya (although it was best not to dwell on Kenya too much!) and later on in Northern Ireland. A substantial literature celebrated British counterinsurgency prowess with the likes of Robert Thompson, Richard Clutterbuck and Frank Kitson being accorded the status of counterinsurgency gurus. Attempts to challenge this consensus were batted away without too much difficulty.1 Until that is, the New Labour decision to provide military support for the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Certainly, the British record was most vulnerable in Kenya where it was always clear that terrible atrocities had been carried out by the military and the police. Two particular books, David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged (2005) and Caroline Elkins’ Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (2005) made it impossible to argue with any credibility that the Kenya campaign showed any real concern for either ‘hearts and minds’ or ‘minimum force’. Both these books should be read by anyone concerned with the history of modern Britain. A more general reassessment of the British Army’s counterinsurgency reputation was prompted by the defeats that were inflicted by insurgent forces in Basra and Helmand. In Basra, the British ‘failed in plain sight’. By early 2007 the British force ‘had all but surrendered its primary base in the southern city of Basra, and, according to Thomas Ricks, was “hiding in the airport”’. The British ‘combined brutality toward the population…...torture of suspects à la Kenya, Aden, and 1 My own British Counterinsurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland (2002) is a good example of this.
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Belfast with tactical and operational lethargy’. British failure was particularly galling for the Americans ‘who had endured for some time British swaggering about their COIN superiority’. While the performance of the Army in these campaigns might have been disastrous, its public relations has been superb, indeed positively triumphant, because most British people have no idea whatsoever of the humiliation inflicted by the insurgents and, indeed, regard the Army as having been ‘successful’. Defeat in Basra and Helmand certainly made it easier to question both the successes achieved and the methods used in earlier campaigns. This critical reassessment of British counterinsurgency has achieved the status of a new consensus2 – at least in academic circles – although there are still a few desperate holdouts at Sandhurst. As for Porch’s extremely erudite and immensely valuable book, it has to be said that he is really beating a horse that has already died. The COINdinista triumph in the US was extremely short-lived and in retrospect can be seen as having more to do with public relations than with any substantial military reorientation. It was intended to disguise the extent of the US failure in Iraq rather than usher in a new era of global counterinsurgency. Although the Obama administration at least initially appeared to endorse a counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan, this was soon abandoned. Instead what we seem to have emerging as the new US strategy is a determination to disengage itself from direct military involvement regardless of the consequences on the ground. Libya, Syria, Iraq and soon Afghanistan will bear testimony to this strategy. Obama has chosen instead a strategy of supposed precision intervention by special forces and drone assassins together with the use of proxy armies. We British, faithful as always, are, of course, busy reconfiguring our shrinking military to fit in with the new US approach.
John Newsinger
2 David French’s The British Way in Counterinsurgency 1945-1967 (2011) is the cornerstone of this critical consensus.
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John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic working on a new edition of his book, British Counterinsurgency.
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Business, propaganda and terror
The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam Douglas Valentine 1990 Reissued by Open Roads as e-book in the new series ‘Forbidden Bookshelf’ curated by Mark Crispin Miller, 2014.
Dr. T. P. Wilkinson
Douglas Valentine explained the purpose or at least the subject of his study of the Vietnam Phoenix Program as ‘terror and its role in political warfare’. He is generous, like most Americans — even critical ones — when he writes: ‘It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations — ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies — the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept. This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost?’1 Valentine is generous to his readers since he ascribes to them ideals which while attributed to the US regime and naively held by many, in fact bear little resemblance to the political reality in the USA. Valentine is not ironic. His book is written with sincerity to readers in a frustrating appeal to transcend their sentimental illusions and look honestly at the real political praxis of their country in a war it just happened to
1 Valentine alludes here to Malcolm X’s notorious reaction to the assassination of John F. Kennedy: ‘[President Kennedy] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon, Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they always made me glad.’ This is by no means hyperbole since meanwhile a wide range of historical literature asserts that Kennedy’s assassination was integrally related to the policies pursued by the US regime in Vietnam.
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lose. In this sense it is also a polemic — although no way polemical in style — to learn the right lessons from the US invasion, occupation and genocidal war against the people of Vietnam. The Phoenix Program was first published twenty four years ago, fourteen years after the Congressional investigations that exposed and swiftly washed it from public memory. After successful attempts to bury this book, e.g. Morley Safer’s attack in the New York Times,2 this essential study of US political warfare has been reissued as an e-book. One can only hope that the reign of terror in and by the US that expanded vastly with the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan will finally reach the consciousness of the white ‘Left’ and those whose sentimental attachment to the American creation myth is sincere enough to rebel against the two-plus centuries of imperial hypocrisy which engendered this bureaucratic terror system under the Stars and Stripes. To place the Phoenix Program in its proper historical perspective, however, it is necessary to grasp the genealogy of the regime responsible for its inception. This regime predates Vietnam. This author has reiterated elsewhere that it is scarcely possible to understand the role of political warfare in the US without returning to 1776, to the moral turpitude of the Founding Fathers.3 These leading lights of the nascent American empire began their journey to Vietnam when they declared independence from the British Empire in order to preserve that peculiar institution known as chattel slavery that the mother country was being forced to abolish in the rest of its colonies. Although the official history claims that this separation was intended to secure liberty in the face of British tyranny,
2 Morley Safer, ‘Body Count was their most important product’, New York Times, 21 October 1990. Morley Safer was probably one of the most well known TV correspondents in US homes during the war. It was not what he said about Valentine’s book that counted but the fact that this ‘face’ of the Vietnam War said anything at all. 3 T. P. Wilkinson, inter alia ‘The Moral Equivalence of the Founding Fathers’, Review of Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, in this issue of Lobster.
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the fact was that the liberty to be secured was deliberately withheld from the majority of the country’s inhabitants, Native Americans, African slaves, and European indentured servants (white slaves). The liberties enumerated in the unilateral declaration of independence and later in the Constitution were — and were generally recognised as such at the time — those deemed consonant with free trade for the Anglo-American settler elite, both merchants in the North and latifundista in the South. The fundamental structures created by the Constitution were in fact designed to prevent majority rule and protect the political terror apparatus maintained by the elite for that purpose: for example, the system of indirect election, the gerrymandering of electoral districts to favour slaveholders and the maintenance of the infamous slave patrols. Much confusion and consternation arises as to why the Second Amendment to the US Constitution proclaimed, ‘a well- regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’ In fact, the amendment was justified by James Madison to prevent the federal government from passing laws to restrict the slave patrols raised by the governments of the Southern states to maintain slavery.4 Under the banner of ‘Indian Removal’ — an early form of what would later be called ‘pacification’ — the Anglo-American settler elite proceeded to seize the entire North American continent. This later became known inter alia as the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny. In fact this was nothing less than the annihilation and/or enslavement of non-whites from sea to shining sea. Largely oblivious to this constant commercial adventure, wave after wave of European immigrants were deliberately co-opted while serving as arrow or cannon fodder until, with the annexation of California, only British Canada and Mexico south of the Rio Bravo had not been conquered. The wide Pacific was opened to further invasion and exploitation.
4 See also Thom Hartmann, ‘The Second Amendment was ratified to preserve slavery’, Truth Out, 15 January 2013 at
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However it was not until the war against Spain garnished Cuba, the Philippines and sundry islands in the Caribbean and Pacific basins that official American discourse began to admit imperial designs. Apparently this admission was only deemed necessary once the US began to seize territory from other European powers. One of the consequences of this century of North American conquest was the physical and ideological isolation of the emergent ‘white’ settler majority paired with the extermination of the indigenous and chronic incarceration of the terrorised ex-slave African-Americans. In the prelude to the next campaign of Anglo-American conquest, World War I, the still Southern-dominated regime in Washington, together with the merchant-industrial class in New York and Boston, launched what might be called the greatest international corporate advertising campaign since the hegemony of the medieval Roman Catholic Church — presaging today’s so- called ‘social media’: the Committee on Public Information, a.k.a. the Creel Committee. Although primarily instituted to propagate the US regime’s aims for entering the European Great War of 1914, the central message, both at home and abroad, was the fabrication of American history as the fulfilment of Enlightenment humanism. Applying the combined resources of the US industrial and banking cartels, every available mass medium was harnessed to create and disseminate stories about the virtues of the US and the ‘American way of life’ — of course, without Native Americans, Blacks, Chinese or Mexicans and other non-whites. This enormously successful campaign not only persuaded ordinary Americans to work, fight and die for the speculative advantage of the US war machine, it also succeeded in creating the myths which have deceived the peoples of European colonial empires into believing that the US was indeed exceptional, a potential ally in the fight for freedom and dignity being waged from Ireland to India. Without acknowledgement of this campaign and its combination of propaganda and terror (the ‘five minute men’, ‘the war to make the world safe for democracy’, the Palmer
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raids, and the Klan)5, no-one can begin to comprehend how something like Phoenix could arise. Nor is it possible to grasp how, despite revelations in the Church and Pike committees of the 1970s,6 this vicious system not only remained in tact but has been growing exponentially, largely unknown and unchecked to this day.
Propaganda and terror: ‘the business of America is business’7 The greatest mystery — or better said, mystification — to be overcome is the apparent contradiction between America’s proclaimed principles and the intensity of its covert operations practices. Philip Agee once called the CIA, ‘capitalism’s invisible army’. He recalled that one of his first tasks as a junior CIA officer had been to conduct background checks on Venezuelan applicants for jobs at the local subsidiary of a major US oil company.8 In fact, his conclusion after quitting the ‘Company’ was that capitalism could never be maintained without an 5 The ‘five minute men’ were propagandists trained by the Committee of Public Information to be able to render a seemingly spontaneous speech ‘within 5 minutes’ at any venue in order to agitate for US war aims. Woodrow Wilson pronounced that the US was entering WWI for this purpose. Wilson’s attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer led the sweeping police raids against political dissidents between 1919-1920. The Ku Klux Klan was re-founded in Georgia in 1915 and became a notorious paramilitary terror organisation directed mainly but not exclusively against African-Americans. With membership reaching to the highest realms of US government, it operated throughout the South and Midwest with impunity for most of the 20th century. It was glorified in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, based upon the novel The Clansman. Although occasionally members have been charged and convicted of serious crimes, the organisation has never been outlawed. 6 Two special committees of the US Congress, named after their respective chairmen, Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike. These select committees investigated the illegal activities of the CIA, FBI, and NSA between 1975 and 1976. 7 Calvin Coolidge, ‘After all, the chief business of the American people is business…’ Reported in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 25 January 1925. 8 Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, (Harmondsworth, Penguin: 1975) p. 103. See also John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (1984).
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extensive military and secret police force to suppress opposition to it. Officially, US national security means the protection of its territory, fundamental ‘freedoms’ and the interests of the US abroad, including certain allies who are deemed necessary for the aforementioned protection. In practice US national security means guaranteeing the conditions suitable for what US President Calvin Coolidge defined as ‘America’s business’. Smedley Butler put it more bluntly when describing his career as a member of the US Marine Corps.9 The CIA and other covert action agencies (over which the CIA has ultimate control) were founded to protect Business. In the US the collective term for opposition to US Business was ‘communism’. 10 However this translation of the ‘Cold War’ slogans does not suffice to explain what the US, in particular the CIA, was doing in Vietnam. The answer has to be sought in the Korean War — one of the best-concealed periods of US history.11 When the US conquered Japan in 1945, the military government under General Douglas MacArthur set about rebuilding Japan as an industrial bridgehead by which the US could pursue its domination of the Asia-Pacific basin, including China. When China was ‘lost’ to the People’s Liberation Army under Mao Tse Tung in 1949, the US lost its business bases on the mainland, concentrated in Shanghai. Their fascist ally Chiang Kai-shek was forced to retreat to Formosa. At the same time Korea, which had become a Japanese colony, with US blessing, at the beginning of the 20th century, was dominated in the South by
9 Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (1935). See
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US Forces (USMGK).12 The US regime had invaded in 1945 in order to preserve it as a strategic resource for the reconstruction of Japan under its suzerainty. Korea and Vietnam were considered strategic — for Business — because they could both deliver the cheap food (rice) and mineral resources needed to feed Japan’s workers and factories. The defeat of Japan only meant that the US assumed the burden of sustaining the Japanese industrial economy. It immediately aligned itself with the feudal landlord class of both countries as a means of continuing the flow of resources to Japan. In Korea, this provoked massive peasant uprisings, which the USMGK helped to subdue together with fascist gangs under the tutelage of American mission- educated Syngman Rhee. However, both Korea and Vietnam had developed strong independence movements, aimed at ending colonialism and battle-hardened in their resistance to the Japanese. These independence movements were committed to land reform for the masses of peasantry, and were concentrated in the southern parts of each country. Both the Korean and Vietnamese independence movements enjoyed mass support, for economic as well as nationalist motives. Essentially the Korean War was fought by the US to retain the status quo ante while the armies under Kim Il-Sung fought to reunite an independent Korea.13 Unlike in Korea however — where war scuttled diplomatic agreement to unite Korea under one national government — the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh had succeeded in forcing France to withdraw and agree to formal reunification processes in Geneva. The US had forced the French government to negotiate by ending its support for the colonial regime. Hence it was diplomatically obliged to proceed with the plans for elections agreed in the Geneva Accords.
12 USMGK = US Military Government in Korea. Established ostensibly to disarm the Japanese forces, the military government became the backbone of the Rhee regime. 13 Food and natural resources, especially Korea’s enormous tungsten reserves, were both deemed essential for US heavy industry, whether in Japan or at home.
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Nonetheless Vietnam had been an important food supplier to Japan that the US needed to control along with Korea. To maintain this flow of cheap resources from Indochina, it was necessary — as in Korea — to protect the post-colonial elite in Saigon and enforce the land and tax system upon which the hyper-exploitation was based. In that sense Vietnam was no different in the eyes of the US regime than any of its Latin American banana republics. Unlike Latin America, however, the Vietnamese had a strong and heavily armed resistance with mass support, successful in battle against the Japanese and the French. The challenge of US policy was to suppress the resistance in the South and establish a client regime capable of policing the extractive structures installed by the French and Japanese. The Geneva Accords constituted a major obstacle since, unlike Korea, where the US was able to prevent international agreement on reunification, the US was legally compelled to permit Vietnamese independence. Hence the necessity of covert operations — and enter the CIA. In order to create, stabilise and defend a permanent partition of the country, it was necessary to establish a regime in the South that would be permanently recognised as a separate country. As in Korea the US was faced with an elite compromised by its collaboration with the French and Japanese. Covert action, the deployment of ‘advisors’, was intended to select and have elected people who would enjoy some credibility as nationalists while complying with the needs of US Asia-Pacific corporate strategy. It is necessary here to recall that the American public was told that South Vietnam was a democracy threatened by ‘communism’ because this was the general term used in the West to define any and all opposition to Western capital. It was impossible to tell the American public that the US was defending the ‘American Way of Life’ in Southeast Asia: a) because endemic US racism did not admit Asians to be
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entitled to the same life as ‘white’ Americans;14 and b) unlike Europe and Latin America, there were no widely held assumptions justifying US control over Asian territory.15 In fact until the faked Tonkin Gulf incident, Vietnam remained largely invisible within the United States. As resistance to the perpetuation of the neo-colonial regime in Saigon increased, along with diplomatic demands from Hanoi for compliance with the Geneva Accords, ‘advisory’ activity was intensified. Meanwhile it had become clear that were elections to be held the government in Hanoi would win and the Saigon regime would collapse. Despite this certainty and the intelligence showing that there was absolutely no popular support for the elite in Saigon, the decision was made to have Ngô Dình Diem deposed in favour of a regime whose leader might be more marketable. The assassination of Diem in 1963 only aggravated the crisis on the ground.16 The US President, Lyndon Johnson, ordered pacification of the peasantry to be intensified. That was and remains the CIA’s remit. However, it became clear that the CIA could not do the job alone. Any day the Hanoi government could decide to oppose Southern (US) procrastination and rightly claim that the Geneva Accords had been breached. In order to pre-empt Hanoi’s actions, Johnson used the Tonkin Gulf incident in August 1964 as a pretext to invade the South and bomb the North. As Nelson Brickham, the architect of the Phoenix Program, explained in an interview with Valentine, the US military was brought in to ‘shield’ the covert pacification campaign until a stable government could be established permanently with the capacity to rigorously police the 14 Any doubt as to this can be removed by examining the history of US laws against Asians as well as the notorious mass internment of Japanese-American citizens from 1942 until 1946. This was not only a landmark for ‘white’ abuse of Asians but generated windfall profits for those who acquired the homes and property of the incarcerated. 15 The US had finally recognised Philippines independence in 1946 and made Hawaii a state in 1959, ending formal colonial rule in the Pacific — for the most part. 16 Diem was assassinated on 2 November 1963. John F. Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963, leaving Lyndon Johnson with the consequences.
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peasantry. Brickham’s preferred instrument was the Special Branch of the National Police.17 The CIA had been in Vietnam since 1954. But now time was of the essence.
From ashes to ashes Valentine’s autopsy of the Vietnamese Phoenix Program starts by recognising that the CIA was (and is) central to US corporate policy. In Vietnam the Company developed ICEX, a.k.a. Phoenix, as an intensive corporate management and public relations campaign for what is called ‘nation-building’.18 The overall aim of ‘nation-building’ is to destroy the indigenous and nationalist infrastructure — what Americans would consider to be their state and local government together with all the social organisations and networks by which communities are organised and maintained — and replace it with one that operates on the same basis as US corporate infrastructure. In a sense the CIA was developing what would later be called — also euphemistically — private-public
17 Special Branch is the name given to the political police/intelligence branch of the regular (usually) civilian force in Britain, the Empire and Commonwealth countries. First organised as the Special Irish Branch of the Metropolitan Police in 1883, this form became the model for British secret police units throughout the empire, e.g. in India (1888) and Palestine (1937), the security branch in South Africa. The Malaysian Special Branch was a preferred instrument of Sir Robert Thompson in his successful efforts to suppress the Malayan insurgency (1948 – 1960). The importance of Special Branch cannot be overestimated. Brickham felt it essential that civilian policing, not military repression, be used to maintain control in Vietnam. 18 ICEX = Intelligence Co-ordination and Exploitation, the name first given to the project to co-ordinate all the CIA and other covert activities in Vietnam, also called ICEX-SIDE. ‘Nation-building’ is a term in US imperial vernacular used to imply that there are peoples in the world who occupy territory but have no mature political, social and economic institutions with which to live (like the US wants them to live, that is). It is a descendent of the ‘white man’s burden’ and the British myth about educating peoples for self-rule. The term survives today in US foreign policy language. Its real meaning is the creation of Phoenix-like structures, often with the support of NGOs and so-called ‘civil society’ organisations in places where the US has or is attempting to destroy indigenous institutions, e.g. in Iraq or Afghanistan. That is why it has been rightly said that the US National Endowment for Democracy has simply absorbed a range of functions and technologies developed in the CIA.
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partnerships. The idea was that the US regime could install systems like the ones with which it had traditionally controlled local governments and economies in Latin America for the benefit of US corporations.19 Like other CIA operations, there was to be a multifaceted campaign to paint the Hanoi government as puppets of Russia or China, invent a regime in Saigon that would embody ‘real Vietnamese independence’ and create the machinery by which that regime could preserve itself. At the same time this effort had to be sold both in the USA and abroad within the dominant post-war decolonisation discourse. Here the central elements were ‘revolution’ and ‘development’. Part of the reason for this marketing strategy was a belief fostered in academia, especially in area studies, that any post-war dispensation would have to take the steam out of revolutionary socialist/nationalist movements by packaging modernisation as a revolutionary process. Initially the US could benefit from widely held beliefs about the creation of the US as a non-Marxist (pre-Marxist) revolutionary success story, complete with a healthy national spirit. On the other hand it was impossible to retain the rhetoric of the pre- war European colonial powers given the UN Charter and its promise of national self-determination. The US regime was also able to market itself as the ideal development agent. Unscathed by World War II, it had already devoted substantial efforts to ‘rebuild’ Europe and supply food and other economic aid to countries left in distress after the war. US ‘free trade’ policy was sufficiently ambiguous to be sold as a realistic alternative to the constraints imposed by Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium on their colonial possessions. In other words, capitalising on the hugely successful propaganda campaigns since 1914, the US was able to profit from good will abroad and naiveté at home to launch what would become Phoenix. Free trade meant that US corporations deliberately avoided the costs of governing economically profitable
19 In 1954, the CIA had very successfully returned Guatemala to United Fruit. Its unsuccessful campaign against Cuba notwithstanding, the Company was confident in its capacity to create and manage Business-friendly regimes.
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territories. Instead, what has been called ‘an archipelago of empire’ was preferred.20 This meant expanding the British principle of indirect rule by creating and supporting nominally independent regimes that bear all the social costs through extortionate taxation, while assuring that labour and natural resources are freely accessible to US corporations — in Vietnam’s case, particularly those operating in Japan. Unlike industrial economies, peasant economies, such as those prevailing in southern Korea and Vietnam, are still structured around land ownership and use. Industrialised populations such as those of Europe and the US already have structures easily manipulated by corporations: employment, housing, entertainment, and mass consumption. Conflicts are reduced largely to issues like wages and working hours, healthcare and pensions — essentially monetary problems. In rural economies conflicts focus on land ownership and access, availability of agricultural inputs, and the maintenance of family and village structures. Thus the CIA was confronted with a peasantry for whom land reform and peaceful cultivation in villages within families were paramount. In Latin America, the US regime had inherited the colonial latifundia systems imposed by the Spanish centuries ago. Southeast Asia was completely different. Of course this did not prevent the CIA from taking action. Drawing on what they thought were the lessons of US counter-insurgency in the Philippines and Sir Robert Thompson’s model Malayan campaign, a variety of tools were developed on the assumption that there are in essence two Vietnams south of the DMZ, the demilitarised zone, created under the Geneva Accords of 1954 to separate North and South Vietnam.21 The task of the CIA was to disaggregate them. The term that emerged was ‘VCI’ or Viet Cong Infrastructure (Vietnamese communist infrastructure). The ‘real’ Vietnamese were to be corralled and branded while the ‘communists’ were to be culled from the herd.
20 Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea (2009). 21 The most frequently cited source for Thompson’s campaign is his Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences in Malaya and Vietnam (1966).
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Since this distinction was an ideological fiction — albeit an indispensable one — two processes were needed: one which would create the real herd of South Vietnamese, identifiable at least by demonstrated loyalty or dependence on the Saigon regime; and one which would continuously cull the ‘enemy’ from the herd. This loyal herd could be led to the elections that would validate the Republic of Vietnam (South). The rest could be ‘captured, turned, or killed’. This is essentially the way corporations create markets for superfluous products. There was no need for the Saigon government since most Vietnamese were justified in believing that when the French withdrew it was only a matter of time before the country would be unified under one government. However, to create a viable client regime the CIA had to create a market for it. The term ‘infrastructure’ denoted the fact that Vietnamese society, especially in the rural areas where the Saigon regime was scarcely present, functioned without any need for the US clients. Although the term is also used as a euphemism for ‘cadre’,22 members of the Vietnamese Communist Party in the South, this limited use obscures the strategy underlying Phoenix and the US regime’s presence. In order to create the ‘Saigon product’ so to speak, there had to be a need for it — namely an administrative apparatus reaching into the village level which could make demands on the population and at least nominally satisfy local wishes. It is fair to say that no-one who had spent any time in the country believed that there was any demand for ‘Saigon product’ among the peasantry. Hence the only way to create and stimulate that demand was to reach into the depths of rural life and do everything possible to destroy the indigenous 22 ‘infrastructure’ – When the CIA officers tried to explain what was meant by ‘infrastructure’ to the Vietnamese, none of them understood the word the way the CIA meant it – organisational structure, ‘the shadow government’. They could only grasp the term in its literal sense, telephone lines, roads, electricity grid, etc. Finally someone hit upon the term ‘cadre’ as an approximation of the targets. This word could be more easily explained to the Vietnamese. While this seems like a banal aspect, one must not forget that the terminology used by the CIA to describe the program was also part of the psychological deception Phoenix entailed. Technical terms were far from trivial.
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structures, both economically and socially. Ideally this vacuum would be filled speedily by US-subsidised Saigon infrastructure. This was the underlying theory of the strategic hamlet program and all the activities of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).23 Because the Saigon regime was and remained unable and unwilling to provide the substitute infrastructure, the nation building (counter- insurgency) programs never acquired the varnish of acceptability that they enjoyed among the middle classes in the West. Of course this did not mean that the programs bundled under ICEX/Phoenix were to be abandoned. Quite the contrary: they were to be refined. Just as corporate marketing and design departments in seemingly innocuous sectors like automobile and electronics are dedicated to producing anything — if there is a promise of reportable profits or increased market share — the corporate propaganda and terror campaign introduced to Vietnam by the CIA became a self-perpetuating system. To meet the need to show that the herd and the culls were being managed effectively — profitably — measurement and reporting systems were borrowed from the leading edge of management and organisational theory. General William Westmoreland was discredited for ‘accounting fraud’ while waging the military side of the campaign.24 However such fraud was inherent in the overall strategy, both covert and overt. As there were not two Vietnams but only one, it was absurd to try to measure the numbers of the
23 USAID was an organisation under the US State Department with the mission to execute ‘development aid’ type projects around the world. In Vietnam it was responsible for ‘revolutionary development’ programs, mainly through CORDS, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. This was also part of what was called euphemistically ‘winning hearts and minds’ (WHAM) or civic action in rural areas. In addition, USIS, the US Information Service, was the State Department psychological operations arm, also active in Vietnam during the war. 24 General William Westmoreland filed a libel suit in 1982 against CBS News for alleging that he had manipulated intelligence and estimates of enemy strength, in part contributing to near military disaster during the surprise Tet Offensive in 1968. The case was settled out of court.
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phantom herd, ‘real Vietnam minus VC’. The only thing that could be measured was the number of victims and no one had an interest in honest reporting there. In order to invent South Vietnam, it was necessary to fabricate a South Vietnamese population, complete with features that ought to distinguish it from North Vietnam. The US attempt to do this in Korea had failed; leaving it with only one choice — permanent military occupation. The CIA, certainly guided by its numerous successes in Iran, Latin America, and Africa, undertook the ambitious task of manufacturing not only a client regime, but a whole country. The Company drew on its vast repertoire of propaganda and terror methods, tried and tested throughout the world, and concentrated them in Southeast Asia. When it found itself unable to work alone, it brought in massive military cover. It was hoped that MACV would prevent the NVA from attacking and ejecting the Saigon regime and at the same time prevent the ‘enemy’ below the DMZ from deposing the US clients on their own or rendering the South ungovernable from Saigon.25 Meanwhile Saigon’s incompetent, corrupt and generally useless police and civilian administration were to be indoctrinated and trained to maintain this invented herd of South Vietnamese, needed to maintain the fiction of a separate Vietnamese state — a state that was to continue the hyper-exploitation of the South within the overall US Asia-Pacific imperial archipelago. Douglas Valentine shows in lucid detail how this campaign emerged, who was responsible — both for policy and operations — what actually was done and with what consequences. The Phoenix Program is not a theoretical work but it is more than a case study in the US propaganda-terror system. By carefully refraining from opinions about the actors or actions, he forces the reader to weigh the preponderance of evidence as to the nature of this purely CIA — and hence purely American form of political warfare. He also forces the critical reader to transcend revulsion and examine a complex
25 MACV = Military Assistance Command Vietnam, the unified command structure for the US military invasion of Vietnam. NVA = North Vietnamese Army, the regular land forces of the government in Hanoi.
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bureaucratic system, created by the same people who create the management systems used to organise and discipline workers and consumers — short of killing them. The reader needs to pay careful attention to what seem to be technical details such as nomenclature or reporting structures. These details have survived in US political and economic warfare systems to this day. One could say that they were first systematically applied in Vietnam, only to be revised and tapered for future targets of the US regime. Not least the dramatis personae should be studied carefully. Phoenix, like any elite club, produced many alumni who have gone on to make and guide policy and wage political warfare against the targets of the US regime.26 In Western mythology it is not the end of the phoenix that counts but its rebirth from the ashes.
Dr T P Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket in Heinrich Heine’s birthplace, Düsseldorf. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003).
26 The late Richard Holbrooke began his ‘foreign service’ career at USAID in ‘rural pacification’ in Vietnam, spending his formative years in the Phoenix program. It should not surprise anyone therefore that he was assigned to help bring Serbia to submission or that his last assignment was co-ordination of the US wars in South Central Asia. Before John Negroponte acquired his Honduran notoriety, he had also served in Vietnam with Holbrooke.
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‘The Brief Humbling of Rupert Murdoch’
Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch Nick Davies London: Chatto and Windus, 2014
In his memoirs, Damian McBride describes Rebekah Brooks as ‘the most powerful person in Britain’ during the years he was Gordon Brown’s press adviser: ‘she exercised her influence over government and society with a day-to-day determination and zeal that could be downright intimidating’.1 Can it be true that our political leaders allowed themselves to be dictated to by Rupert Murdoch’s representative in the way he suggests? Surely he must be exaggerating. If true, it makes a mockery of any notion of democracy and we are instead confronted with the grim truth that we are ruled by a collection of oligarchs, courtesy of their pet politicians. And, of these oligarchs, by far the most powerful since the early 1980s has been Rupert Murdoch. Unfortunately Nick Davies’s tremendous Hack Attack demonstrates quite conclusively that far from exaggerating, if anything McBride understated Murdoch’s influence, the extent to which modern Britain has been shaped in his image, and the way politicians, both Labour and Conservative, were willing to be of service. Most of the reviews of Hack Attack have focussed on the dramatic story of how Davies and the Guardian hunted down the truth of the hacking scandal despite all the obstacles put in their way by News International, Scotland Yard, the Press Complaints Commission, the rest of the media, and a varied cast of kept politicians. Certainly the story is gripping; but as Davies himself observes, what started out as a ‘simple crime story turned out to be a story about the secret world of the power elite and their discreet alliances’. What he has to tell is a story of a quite incredible degree of collusion between Scotland Yard and News International. To all intents and purposes, the police refused to investigate the
1 Damian McBride, Power Trip, (London, 2014), p. 427
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hacking of the voice mails of senior politicians up to the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. Their first loyalty seems to have been towards Murdoch’s people rather than the elected government (although in their defence this was probably no more than recognising where the real power lay in contemporary Britain). Particularly telling is an episode as late as February 2010 when Assistant Commissioner Yates told Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor, that there was no evidence that Prescott had been a target, when they knew for a fact that he had. Yates just could not be trusted – an incredible state of affairs. As Davies puts it: ‘It was as if now there were two versions of reality. There was the official version, aggressively promoted by News International and endorsed by the police and the PCC and the Conservative Party and most of the rest of Fleet Street. Then there was the version which was being shown to me by a small collection of nervous off- the-record sources – journalists, private investigators, the managers and lawyers of various celebrities – who told a very different story.’ The close relationship between senior policemen and News International that Davies reveals is quite shocking, even to those of us who already have extremely low expectations of the Met. What about the Press Complaints Commission? As Davies points out, you could not really expect much from a body that had Murdoch’s right-hand man, Les Hinton, as chair of its Code of Practice Committee. This was like putting a syphilis bacterium in charge of a VD clinic. You really could not make it up! Instead of taking steps to root out the routine criminality at News International, the PCC continued to deny that there was any until the Guardian was able to establish incontrovertibly that there was. While the story of how the News of the World’s criminality was finally exposed makes for compelling reading, the meat of the book has to be what it tells us about Gordon Brown’s relationship with Murdoch and his representatives and what Cameron had to do to get Murdoch to change sides. As Davies
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points out, since 1979, ‘no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch....Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown have consistently cleared their diaries and welcomed him to the inner sanctum of their governments (and then disclosed as little as possible of what passed between them).’ Brown, in this respect, was no different from his predecessors, continuing ‘to cuddle up to News International’. At one point, when Rebekah Brooks became involved with her future husband, Charlie, an Old Etonian racehorse trainer, ‘she personally told the prime minister that the government should abolish the horse-race levy....Two Downing Street advisers say that Brown asked them to look into it and to speak to Charlie Brooks “to make him feel involved”.’ It was Rebekah Brooks, we are told, who dictated Ed Balls’ illegal sacking of Sharon Shoesmith, the head of Haringey’s child services department, at the end of 2008. And such was Brown’s desire to please, he even appointed Les Hinton’s partner as a Downing Street policy adviser. All this is pretty revelatory; but most shocking is Davies’ chronicling of Murdoch’s influence on government health policy while Brown was still Chancellor. When Brown announced a boost in health spending in 2001, the Sun attacked the decision. This ‘panicked Brown who contacted the Sun and agreed to rearrange his diary so that he could go to their office that day in order to make peace....Brown sat down with the Sun’s outspoken right-wing political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, for an interview which, according to one of those present, rapidly became a negotiation about policy. Kavanagh insisted that Brown should accept the advice in that morning’s Sun for the NHS to start buying in services from private medical businesses.....Kavanagh won.’ Later when Brown was opposing Blair’s policy on foundation
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hospitals, it was Murdoch who insisted that he drop his opposition if he ever wanted to be prime minister. According to one of Davies’s sources, ‘Rupert Murdoch personally told Brown that he must support the “marketisation” of the health service’. Why did a whole generation of political leaders pay court to Murdoch? Davies sees fear as the decisive factor and, while this is obviously important, arguably he does not give enough weight to the fact of ideological congruity, the extent to which Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and, of course, Cameron shared his world view. The question of context is also obviously important. The defeat of the trade union movement in the 1980s has left big business pretty much unchallenged. The days when the Sun’s socialist predecessor, the Daily Herald, could be banned from holding a rally at the Albert Hall and the electricians’ union could force the management to back down by threatening to turn the lights off throughout the whole of Kensington are sadly (and hopefully only temporarily) gone. It is the shift in the balance of class forces that has left the country in the hands of the likes of Murdoch. Where did it all go wrong for Brown? After everything he had done, why did Murdoch decide to support David Cameron, someone he affected to despise as an over-privileged toff? Both Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch2 were urging Murdoch to back the Tories, something that he did with great reluctance. He recognised that Brown was a hard-nosed right- winger who could certainly be trusted to take whatever measures were necessary to protect the interests of the rich and super rich during the recession. Brown had proven himself more than amenable to furthering the interests of News International. What seems to have persuaded Murdoch to ditch him was the Tories’ readiness to take measures to inflict serious financial damage on the BBC by freezing the tv licence, weakening Ofcom and waving through the Murdochs’ take- over of BSkyB. It was not that Brown would have balked at such measures so much as that he did not realise how
2 According to one of Davies’s sources, the seriously weird James ‘is so paranoid that he keeps a gun under his bed in London, in case the proletariat try to break in and do him an injury’.
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important they were to News International. On 29 September 2009, the Sun announced its change of allegiance, launching a sustained campaign of ferocious abuse that rivalled its earlier character assassination of Neil Kinnock. Brown was savaged for the failure of British forces in Afghanistan, made personally responsible for the death of every soldier killed, in brutal front page attacks. The Sun’s anti-Brown offensive was so vicious that Brown actually complained to Murdoch that the Sun was damaging the war effort in Afghanistan. In an unprecedented step, he arranged for Murdoch and Brooks ‘to be given an off-the-record briefing by the then head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett..... Sir John warned them that the Taliban were using Sun stories as propaganda and that they were damaging British military morale’. Brooks apparently was having none of this, but Murdoch promised to tone the attacks down. It never happened. Getting Cameron into Downing Street took priority. The peculiar morality of the super patriotic Sun is completely captured by its willingness to undermine the military effort in Afghanistan for political advantage. After Brown’s defeat, Murdoch, Brooks and co must have felt that their power and influence had reached new, triumphant heights. With Andy Coulson at No 10, with Brooks having established herself as Cameron’s best friend and riding partner3 and with their creature Gove at the Department for Education, potentially opening up vast new opportunities for profiteering from the privatising of state education, an unprecedented domination over British society and politics seemed possible. It was not to be; and for this we all have to be duly grateful to Nick Davies. The Guardian’s revelations, Leveson, the hacking and bribery trials, surely these have brought Murdoch’s domination of British politics to an end. Certainly the BSkyB take-over has had to be put on hold and the planned move into education
3 Rumours of an affair between Brooks and Cameron can be safely dismissed as tabloid gossip and as for the idea that when Cameron signed off texts to Brooks with ‘lol’ he did not mean either ‘lots of love’ or ‘laugh out loud’, but ‘leg over later’, well this is just so much nonsense.
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provision, which Murdoch believed was potentially as lucrative as satellite tv, has been abandoned. But while Coulson has been jailed, Brooks was acquitted with the assistance of a defence team that in terms of funding and resources simply outgunned the prosecution. And as Davies acknowledges, what we have seen is only ‘the brief humbling of Rupert Murdoch’. My own view was and still is that as long as he controlled the Sun any damage inflicted would be temporary. This was also clearly the view of the likes of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson who have both continued courting the man as if nothing has happened. Indeed, Davies ends on a decidedly downbeat note. He writes that the fact is that ‘very little has changed’ in the aftermath of the scandal and even more pessimistically that ‘when Rupert Murdoch dies, another chairman will replace him. It might not be a man or woman from his bloodline, but that chairman’s power will be the same. Or if Rupert Murdoch sells every newspaper he owns in the UK – or if he sells every newspaper he owns in the world – there will always be another ambitious businessman waiting to fill his place, some Russian oligarch or Middle Eastern oil magnate or Chinese billionaire. For a while, we snatched a handful of power away from one man. We did nothing to change the power of the elite.’ The truth does not set you free. It merely makes you aware of the conditions of your enslavement. This is a necessary first step, however, and Hack Attack is an important contribution to this endeavour.
John Newsinger
John Newsinger is a semi-retired academic working on a new edition of his book, British Counterinsurgency.
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The Hawks of Peace Notes of the Russian ambassador Dmitry Rogozin London: Glagoslav Publications, 2013 www.glagoslav.com
When I was offered this by the publisher I was attracted by the subtitle: Rogozin had been Russian ambassador to NATO and I thought there would be some tales of NATO politics. But there isn’t any of that. What the author – who is currently Putin’s deputy – gives us is ‘insider’ accounts of events in the old Soviet Union post-1989 and a kind of political manifesto. Little of his historical stories meant anything to me. I know nothing of the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia and Chechnya and cannot evaluate the significance of this version. The only thing I noticed was the common thread through them that the West was unable to report these events sensibly. Of much more interest is the author’s political concerns; and as deputy prime minister his attitudes may also be those of the rest of the Russian leadership. Centrally they are: an unselfconscious patriotism which is now rare in Western liberal democracies, and shame about the last century of Russian history. With the exception of the Great Patriotic War, everything since 1917 is written off as a series of disastrous wrong turnings. But if everything since 1917 has been a mistake, what is left? The church and Russian culture, chiefly its literature; and the claim that Russia is now a leader of Christianity against the decadence of Western social liberalism (hence the anti-PC stance of the current regime).1 ‘Promotion of illegal drugs and of alcoholism, degenerative art, prostitution, propaganda of homosexuality and paedophilia, offences against religious and national feelings are those openly anti- national and anti-social manifestations of the perverse liberalism that should be banned unconditionally.’ (p. 1 This is discussed in a very interesting essay about contemporary Russia, ‘Putinism and the Anti-WEIRD Coalition’ at
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123) The author is also greatly concerned about the declining Russian population and the position of Russian minorities in the former Soviet republics. Thus, in part, the recent events in Ukraine and various comments recently attributed to Putin about the Russian military capacity to invade neighbouring states if necessary to protect those minorities.2 What he does not discuss is striking: there is almost nothing about the control of the economy by the oligarchs. Post-Soviet Russia is an odd place (by our standards of what is ‘normal’) and this book conveys that. The essay I cite in the first footnote, ‘Putinism and the Anti-WEIRD Coalition’, includes this: ‘Simply put, Vladimir Putin is the stuff of Western progressive nightmares because he’s what they thought they’d gotten past. He’s a traditional male with “outmoded” views on, well, everything: gender relations, race, sexual identity, faith, the use of violence, the whole retrograde package. Putin at some level is the Old White Guy that post-moderns fear and loathe, except this one happens to control the largest country on earth plus several thousand nuclear weapons – and he hates us.’ Mr Rogozin has similar views and, for that reason, despite a truly awful translation job, in those parts I could understand this is an interesting and instructive read.
Robin Ramsay
2 See ‘Putin “privately threatened to invade Poland, Romania and the Baltic states’ Daily Telegraph 18 September 2014 at
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The Establishment And how they get away with it Owen Jones London: Allen Lane, 2014, £16.99 (h/b)
When Owen Jones appeared as the bright young Oxford ‘leftie’ columnist in The Independent to replace the disgraced Cambridge plagiarist Johann Hari, my hopes were not high. But they were sustained by a markedly more radical and consistent view of the world than those of his predecessor – one of the columnists for conflict at the time of the Iraq War – and lifted by his 2011 book Chavs. Following David Aaronovitch’s route to The Guardian, Jones does not seem likely to emulate the reactionary trajectory of that ex-CP activist into the arms of Rupert Murdoch and The Times. The son of Militant Tendency parents, Jones seems to be holding to and developing his progressive views despite the lure of many media appearances. His new book is is a fine achievement, covering much of UK society touched on by Henry Fairlie in his 1955 use of the phrase ‘the Establishment’ and the 1959 essay collection of the same title edited by Hugh Thomas. It is apparently selling well and is a refreshing antidote to all those who think Britain is going to the dogs while its young play with their mobiles, the middle aged are weighed down and their elders turn to face the wall. We have lively interviews – some of the best using pseudonyms – with those from within his Establishment of the City, the media, think-tanks, Westminster, the police, business, the foreign policy establishment and PR. And we also have a lot from their victims, from those losing jobs and benefits to those losing their limbs and liberties. We also hear the little-heard voices of Establishment critics, from economists shunned by the orthodoxies of the past 30 years to those actively campaigning for better ways forward. In examining the Coalition government claim that
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austerity was demanded by excessive public spending he has ex-Bank of England governor Danny Blanchflower saying: ‘George Osborne told me himself that all of this was about spin and politics’. We hear from ex-Afghanistan-serving soldier Joe Glenton: ‘The main reason we were there wasn’t security here in Britain or security there in Afghanisatan. It was because of a perception that we’d failed in US eyes.’ And from Jones himself, a lucid and persuasive writer, we have this on the followers of the right-wing ‘outrider’ voices, from Sir Keith Joseph and Madsen Pirie onwards, following the MP’s expenses scandal: ‘The outriders had preached the rolling back of the state, and their sermons were picked up and amplified by politicians. Those people portrayed as dependent on the state became particularly demonized, with MPs playing a key role in focussing public anger on the poorest in society – which proved extremely effective at deflecting scrutiny from those at the top. It’s ironic, then, that the individuals most vociferous about rolling back the state were often the most desperate to milk it – even though, in many cases, they were already independently wealthy. As far as expenses were concerned, MPs were distinctly off-message – in this case, their own.’ At 30 Jones seems quite well read, certainly more than this reviewer was at that age. But for those seeking a glass more than three-quarters full, there are deficiencies. For someone who apparently spent two years on postgraduate study of US history, Jones is weak on tracing links with UK in matters of intelligence and Atlanticism more broadly. He mentions, for example, Anthony Crosland, but not his CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom spell. He mentions the Heritage Foundation, but not its documented involvement in the Thatcher era ‘think-tanks’. There’s not a word on the British American Project and other well- documented Atlanticist networks. Jones refers to personnel at Policy Exchange, but not its current director, Dean Godson, a former member of the Reagan administration, whose brother
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and father have also been key figures in US-UK relations. He also steers clear of the pro-Israel lobby which, to this reviewer, is an important addition to the Establishment of the 1950s described by Fairlie, Thomas et al. To write of Neil (now Lord) Kinnock and Labour without mentioning Robert Maxwell and of New Labour without reference to Michael (now Lord) Levy and Jon (now Lord) Mendelsohn is a serious omission. Some readers may find Jones a bit thin in places they know in depth. But wasn’t it ever thus, especially with young writers working on a broad canvas? There will be time to deepen and extend this fine and timely book. The Establishment is good stuff – the angry and intelligent voice of a new generation of Britons.
Tom Easton
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Lethal Allies British Collusion in Ireland Anne Cadwallader Cork: Mercier Press, 2013, £12.99 (p/b)
The story should be familiar: in the 1970s Northern Ireland’s state forces – the police (RUC), the military (UDR) and military reservists, almost exclusively Protestant – shared personnel, weapons and intelligence with the Loyalist (Protestant) paramilitaries. And so when those paramilitaries began killing Catholics – because they were Catholics, not because they were Republicans; sectarian not political killings – the police investigations were perfunctory when they weren’t engaged in obstruction, cover-up and – occasionally – killing. The powers-that-be in Stormont and London chose not to do anything about this for fear of alienating what it perceived as the host (Protestant) population. In the earliest mainstream account of these Loyalist killings, Martin Dillon and Denis Lehane’s Political Murder in Northern Ireland (1973), the absence of prosecutions for these murders was attributed to the police force, the RUC, being overwhelmed by the number of deaths. On the ground, however, the fact that there was also collusion between the state and the Loyalist paramilitaries was known by British Army personnel: Fred Holroyd, for example, who was there in the mid 1970s, wrote about this in his memoir War Without Honour (1989); and it was discussed in Roger Faligot’s The Kitson Experiment (1983) and Martin Dillon’s The Dirty War (1988) and is the subject of Sean McPhilemy’s The Committee (1998) and Bill Rolston’s Unfinished Business: State Killings and the Quest for Truth (2000) – and these are just books I have on my shelves. There are many others. This account differs from previous versions. First, it largely eschews the preceding literature on the subject and the three state whistle-blowers, Holroyd, Colin Wallace and John Weir, and uses as evidence official documents: some in the UK national archives, the Barron Report into the bombings in the Irish Republic,1 and, in particular, the reports of the 1 See
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Historical Enquiries Team, a group of police who have been investigating or reinvestigating the many unsolved murders in Northern Ireland.2 Second, it concentrates on the deaths – 120 in all, largely the work of one group, ‘the Glenanne gang’ 3 – in a particular area of Northern Ireland. There are things I didn’t like and things I would have done differently. There are hundreds of pages which describe the murders. Each incident is accompanied by thumbnail sketches of the victims, all of the ‘He or she was a wonderful person/father/daughter/’ variety, which are mawkish, tedious and irrelevant. The book would have been better – tighter, brisker – without them. Omitting Wallace and Holroyd means that a dimension to this, the conflict between the various state agencies is largely absent; and there isn’t enough on the reasons for the political system’s seeming indifference to all these deaths. But these are perhaps minor points when placed against the detailed analyses of the murders which are an irrefutable account of the collusion between state forces and the Loyalist paramilitaries. And providing that, I’m sure, was the author’s aim.
Robin Ramsay
2 See for example
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