Lobster 75 Is Up With My Book Review on British Pro-Nazis and Nazis during World War II

I put up a post this morning about a book I’ve reviewed for Lobster, the conspiracy/parapolitics magazine, of Richard Griffiths ‘What Did You Do in the War?’ on the activities of the British Fascist and pro-Nazi right from 1940 to 1945. This has been rather late being posted, as the webmaster is very busy with work. I am very pleased to say that it has now gone up, along with the first parts of Lobster 75, the new issue of the magazine for summer 2018. The magazine comes out twice yearly.

Apart from my article, there is editor Robin Ramsay’s own column and roundup of news of interest to parapolitics watchers, ‘The View from the Bridge’, Garrick Alder on how Richard Nixon also tried to steal documents covering his lies and crimes in Vietnam, and his sabotage of the 1968 peace talks years before the Watergate scandal. Part II of Nick Must’s article on using the UK Foia. There is also a review of Jeffrey M. Bale’s book The Darkest Parts of Politics, which is an extensive examination of corruption, violence, terror committed by governments and political organisations around the world; And John Newsinger’s devastating review of Gordon Brown’s My Life, Our Times. Brown’s book is intended to present him as some kind of lefty, but Newsinger shows that instead Brown was a consistent supporter of Blair’s neoliberalism, who had no qualms about sucking up to Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre, with whom he is still friends. He also wanted to impose a graduate tax following Blair’s imposition of student fees. He also argues that Brown’s protestations of innocence about the claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction is similarly unconvincing. Brown claimed that MI6 lied to them. Newsinger argues instead that either Brown’s very naïve, or he’s also lying. And he shows how the humiliation the British army has suffered in Basra in Iraq and Afghanistan was due to cuts imposed by New Labour. Oh yes, and Brown’s also a close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing maniac now running the Israeli government and ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

He also argues that if Brown had won the 2010 election, austerity would now be imposed by a New Labour government, there would be a state visit arranged for Donald Trump – Brown recently went over there to give a very sycophantic speech to Congress, as well as more privatisation, more cuts to welfare services, and the graduate tax.

Lobster 75 is at https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue75.php.

Please read, if you’re interested in knowing what’s really going on behind the lies of the lamestream press.

Lobster on Polly Toynbee and the Guardian’s Bias against Jeremy Corbyn

I found an interesting little snippet in Garrick Alder’s ‘Holding Pattern’ in Lobster 71, for Spring 2016 which casts a little light on the paper’s vehement bias against the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Entitled ‘The Toynbee Prize’ it runs

‘By nature, Labour people are optimists, believing in progress, often against the odds, trusting in the human ability to improve our condition and shape society well, and not just for the sharp-elbowed. Optimism is in our DNA. I have always found some political project I can believe will work.’ (Emphasis supplied)

Thus wrote Polly Toynbee, Limehouse Declaration signatory and failed SDP parliamentary candidate in the class of ‘83 that sank the Foot incarnation of the Labour Party. She composed these words for a December 2015 column in The Guardian, a paper that has endorsed the Liberals, then SDP, then Liberal
Democrats at five of the last 10 General Elections (including both of the 1974 elections and the election in which Ms Toynbee stood). It is a harshly critical column, written with the unmistakable aim of undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party on the occasion of his 100th day in the
role.

Has there been a more nakedly cynical piece of journalistic misrepresentation at The Guardian during the last decade than that represented by her drawing a veil over trying to scupper the Labour Party by joining the SDP and the calculated juxtaposition of the two sentences italicised in the above quote?

Polly Toynbee is thus revealed as having joined the SDP, which was formed by right-wing members of the Labour party in a desperate attempt to destroy the Labour left, while the Groaniad has fluctuated between supporting Labour and the Liberal Dems and their predecessors. Clearly La Toynbee was trying to pass herself off as a Labour party person, when she was and is nothing of the kind, or is only tenuously. But it was clearly a calculated attempt to appear as a loyal party member or supporter so that her attempts to disparage and help unseat Corbyn would be accepted by those who really do support Labour.

The piece is at: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster71/lob71-holding-pattern.pdf Scroll down until you find it.

Lobster: Garrick Alder on World War I as a Battle for Democracy

Garrick Alder, in his piece ‘Holding Pattern’ in issue 69 of the parapolitical magazine, Lobster, has a very interesting piece about the current myths flying about the First World War. Alder has been contributing to Lobster for many years, and I think I’ve seen his name amongst the credits as one of the ‘elves’ on QI. Amongst the other snippets of interest to the watchers of the murkier parts of history and the political landscape is the piece, ‘Set in Stone’. In this he follows a contemporary war memorial, that placed the date of the end of the First World War not as 1918, but the following year, 1919. The War was supposed to have ended on 11/11/1918, but there was an extension to allow the allies to advance and occupy the Rhineland.

He also notes that as its the centenary of the War’s outbreak, there has been a lot of talk about how the War was fought to protect democracy. He found this disquieting, a feeling probably shared by many of his readers. He points out that at the time Britain was not a democracy, and the monarch still held considerable power behind the scenes. So where did this myth come from?

Alder states that it

seems to have sprung from US President Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda advisor Edward Bernays, who helped Wilson craft an oftquoted slogan about ‘making the world safe for democracy’ to encourage the USA’s voters into supporting a war they had hoped to avoid.

and concludes

So the lie of the war being fought in the name of democracy was being told during the war itself. History is being rewritten under our noses – and this time, there are no living witnesses left to protest against it.

Bernays was Freud’s cousin, whom Adam Curtis identified in his excellent documentary, The Century of the Self, as the person, who incorporated Freud’s psychological theories into advertising and then into politics as a way of manipulating public opinion. As for the First World War, the catalyst was the campaigns of the Yugoslav peoples to gain more independence from their Austrian overlords. The War itself was fought not for democracy, but to decide the balance of power in Europe.

The article’s at http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster69/lob69-holding-pattern.pdf, on page 21.