Lobster on Real Conspiracies Versus Conspiracy Theories: Part Two

Bale then goes to contrast the non-existent groups of the bogus conspiracy theories, with real conspiratorial groups, which have exerted a genuine influence, such as the Afrikaner Broederbond, the extremist Afrikaner nationalist group that was ultimately responsible for the adoption of apartheid. He writes

No Monolithic Conspiracy
There has never been, to be sure, a single, monolithic Communist Conspiracy of the sort postulated by the American John Birch Society in the 1950s and 1960s. Nor has there ever been an all-encompassing International Capitalist Conspiracy, a Jewish World Conspiracy, a Masonic Conspiracy, or a Universal Vatican Conspiracy. And nowadays, contrary to the apparent belief of millions, neither a vast Underground Satanist Conspiracy nor an Alien Abduction Conspiracy exists. This reassuring knowledge should not, however, prompt anyone to throw out the baby with the bath water, as many academics have been wont to do. For just as surely as none of the above mentioned Grand Conspiracies has ever existed, diverse groups of Communists, capitalists, Zionists, masons and Catholics have in fact secretly plotted, often against one another, to accomplish various specific but limited political objectives.

No sensible person would claim, for example, that the Soviet secret police has not been involved in a vast array of covert operations since the establishment of the Soviet Union, or that international front groups controlled by the Russian Communist Party have not systematically engage in worldwide penetration and propaganda campaigns. it is nonetheless true that scholars have often hastened to deny the existence of genuine conspiratorial plots, without making any effort to investigate them, simply because such schemes fall outside their own realm of knowledge and experience or – even worse – directly challenge their sometimes naïve conceptions about how the world functions.

They Do Exist
If someone were to say, for example, that a secret masonic lodge in Italy had infiltrated all of the state’s security agencies and was involved in promoting or exploiting acts of neo-fascist terrorism in order to condition the political system and strengthen its own hold over the levers of government, most newspaper readers would probably assume that they were joking or accuse them of having taken leave of their senses. Ten years ago I might have had the same reaction myself. Nevertheless, although the above statement oversimplifies a far more complex pattern of interaction between the public and private spheres, such a lodge in fact existed. It was known as Loggia Massonica Propaganda Due (P2), was affiliated with the Grand Orient branch of Italian masonry, and was headed by a former fascist militiaman named Licio Gelli. In all probability something like P2 still exists today in an altered form, even though the lodge was officially outlawed in 1982. Likewise, with the claim that an Afrikaner secret society, founded in the second decade of this century [the 20th], had played a key role in establishing the system of apartheid in South Africa, and in the process helped to ensure the preservation of ultra-conservative Afrikaner cultural values and Afrikaner political dominance until 199. (sic). Yet this organisation also existed. It was known as the Afrikaner Broederbond (AB), and it formed a powerful ‘state within a state’ in that country by virtue, among other things, of its unchallenged control over the security services. There is no doubt that specialists on contemporary Italian politics who fail to take account of the activities of P2, like experts on South Africa who ignore the AB, are missing an important dimension of political life there. Nevertheless, neither of these to important organisations has been thoroughly investigated by academics. In these instances, as is so often the case, investigative journalists have done most of the truly groundbreaking preliminary research. (pp. 21-2).

He then goes on criticise the attitude of historians like David Hackett Fischer, who have identified those theories that attribute too much power to secret organisations as part of the ‘furtive fallacy’, but then go too far the other way in insisting that the only significant influences are those that are above board and public, and that nothing of any significance has ever been by clandestine groups. He writes

To accept these unstated proposition uncritically could induce a person, among other things, to overlook the bitter nineteenth century struggle between political secret societies for, at least, between revolutionaries using non-political secret societies as a ‘cover’ and the political police of powerful states like Austria and Russia, to minimise the role played by revolutionary vanguard parties in the Russian and communist Chinese revolutions, or to deny that powerful intelligence services like the CIA and the KGB have fomented coups and intervened massively in the internal affairs of other sovereign states since the end of World War II. In short, it might well lead to the misinterpretation or falsification of history on a grand scale.

It is easier to recognise such dangers when relatively well-known historical development like these are used as illustrative examples, but problems often arise when the possible role played by conspiratorial groups in more obscure event is brought up. It is above all in these cases, as well as in high-profile cases where a comforting ‘official’ version of events has been widely diffused, that commonplace academic prejudices against taking covert politics seriously come into play and can exert a potentially detrimental effect on historical judgements. (p. 21-2, my emphasis).

He concludes

There is probably no way to prevent this sort of unconscious reaction in the current intellectual climate, but the least that can be expected of serious scholars is that they carefully examine the available evidence before dismissing matters out of hand.

The proposals by YouTube, the Beeb and the Tory Party to set up monitoring groups to rebut ‘fake news’ go far beyond normal academic prejudice against taking real secret politics seriously. They are an attempt to present a very comforting official version of politics, which in the case of the Tory party means suppressing and falsifying the horrific assault their policies have had on British institutions, industry, and people since Maggie Thatcher. They are trying to shore up the decaying economic edifice of neoliberalism by presenting its opponents as wild-eyed radicals in the grip of loony conspiracies, producing ‘fake news’.

And the same is true of Israel lobby, which tries to hide its attempts to pervert British and American politics through lobbying and the sponsorship of leading politicians. It also uses the existence of malign, anti-Semitic conspiracies as a weapon to smear genuine historians and activists, who support the Palestinians in their struggle for dignity and equality, or simply want to correct their lies, as anti-Semites. People like Mike, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and so many, many others. They need to be stopped. Now.

The article is available at the magazine’s website. However, early issues, like 29 are behind a paywall. The editor, Robin Ramsay, has also written a book on conspiracies, where he makes the same distinction.

George Galloway Speaking at the ‘Stop the War Coalition’ Conference at TUC Congress House, 2015

I’ve been putting up a series of videos this week of George Galloway speaking on particular topics. As I’ve said, I’ve got strong reservations about Galloway, but he is absolutely correct about many issues. He is correct about Jeremy Corbyn not being a Trotskyite. He is correct about Ken Livingstone speaking the truth when he said that the Nazis and the Zionists co-operated to send Jews to Israel. And this is another speech in which he shows that he was also correct about the Iraq Invasion.

This is a video of the speech Galloway gave last year at the TUC headquarters in London to the Stop the War Coalition. He begins by thanking some of the others attending and speaking, and quotes approvingly Dr. Mustafa, who said that they will never surrender. He states that this should be the Coalition’s motto, as they will never surrender criticising and opposing Britain’s participation in this imperialist war. He then says of an American speaker, that he wishes everyone in America were like her, and everyone in Britain like them. He then goes on to describe his last conversation with Tony Blair ‘before I see him at the Hague to give evidence against him’. It was outside the gents’ lavatory in the House of Commons, where he met Blair and Alistair Campbell, whom he describes as a ‘6 foot 3 Goebbels’ tied to Blair’s hip. Galloway states that he told Blair that there were no al-Qaeda in Iraq, but if he goes ahead with the invasion, there will be hundreds and thousands of them, and they will spill over into our streets and countries.

He goes on to state that he’s telling that story, not to say ‘I was right’ but to make the bigger point that if they were lying then – and he states the media has been wrong, except when its been telling bigger falsehoods – then why should we believe them now, when they tell us we should be prepared for further military action in foreign nations. He then tells a story about his reply to a retired general about a possible future war with Russia over Latvia. Galloway speaks every year at the Hay-on-Wye ‘How the Light Gets in Festival’, and he states that ever year the panel gets more and more loaded against him. Last year the chairman and two of the other panellists were against him. But even there, the audience recognises the truth. At that event, the panel and a recently retired general from the NATO secretariat said that British mothers must get used to the fact that their sons may be required to shed their blood in our new front line in Latvia. Galloway replied that he didn’t think many British mothers new where Latvia was, or that it was our new front line. But he knew that they would not accept their son’s lifeblood being shed on his artificial front line.

He also says that at Hay-on-Wye, three of his opponents told him that Russia was the aggressor in the Ukraine, and that there were Russian troops in the Ukraine. He states that there is no Russian aggression in the Ukraine. But there are British and American troops in the Ukraine, and NATO aggression in the Ukraine and all around the borders of Russia. He makes the point that this is a stranger world than Orwell imagined, and these people can tell you that war is peace, and truth is lies, with a straight face and a posh accent.

He states that they have to continue challenging them over their attempts to rewrite history, and point to the fact that the Stop the War Coalition was and is right. He mentions that before he came there he was watching footage on his phone from RT of a 70-year old man being savagely beaten by Israeli soldiers for not leaving his home. How is it, he challenges the audience, that the Palestinians are described as the terrorists, when the majority of the terrorism is committed by the Israelis, and always has been?

He asks the audience to look at what the West has achieved in Syria, where the Jihadis are nearly at the gates of Damascus, and there is hardly a Christian priest, monk or nun, who has survived unscathed by the barbarians. He states that if they take power in Damascus, then no person will be safe from ‘these heart-eating, head-chopping barbarians’. He describes them as the true children of Bush and Blair. He rhetorically asks how proud David Cameron, William Hague and Peter Hammond will be after the caliph comes to power in Damascus, after he has demolished all the churches, destroyed all the historic building, and massacred everyone he wants to massacre. He then recalls how he and one of the organisers of the conference were among the last men standing in the 1980s when they told Reagan and Thatcher that by creating the mujahideen, they had opened the gates to the barbarians. He states the barbarians are using our weapons, and driving around in our Humvees. He says that the government’s crimes could be listed far into the night, but the important point is to remember what the German revolutionaries said nearly a century ago: our enemies are many, but our primary enemy is right at home. He ends by urging everyone to join the Stop the War Coalition, as there are too many people, who agree with them but haven’t joined, or are in organisations that agree, but haven’t affiliated. The current people are getting older, but their brains are still good. However, if people want a Britain and America that still feels like their countries, they should join them.

I’m not a member of the Coalition, but everything he says here about the war, and the preparations for war in Latvia, is correct. It sounds like the general he met at Hay-on-Wye was the same general that wrote the book predicting that by May next year, Russia would have invaded Latvia and we would be at war. Contrary to the line that Private Eye is pushing, it appears very much that it is the Russian population that is being persecuted by the Ukrainians under a far-rightwing government that includes Nazis. There is footage on YouTube apparently showing American and British soldiers in the Ukraine. And both Counterpunch and Lobster have argued that the aggressor in the Ukraine isn’t Russia but NATO. Having turned the Middle East into a bloodbath, they are lying to turn the Ukraine and the Baltic into another.

Lobster on Private Eye’s Smearing of Harold Wilson

Private Eye’s continued attacks and smears against Jeremy Corbyn on behalf of the New Labour establishment aren’t the first time they’ve run smears against a Labour leader. Of course, the Eye’s business is mocking just about every public figure, including and especially politicians. But sometimes this becomes something much more sinister: deliberate disinformation on behalf of the Secret State.

In the 1970s the British and American secret services were convinced that Harold Wilson was a KGB agent, including the head of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton. Various individuals connected with MI5 discussed overthrowing him in a coup, and imprisoning radical journalists, along with other subversives, in an internment camp in the Outer Hebrides. I’ve blogged about this before. It’s in ‘Red’ Ken’s 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour. Francis Wheen, a Guardian journalist and frequent guest on BBC Radio Four’s topical comedy quiz, The News Quiz, also discusses the paranoia about Wilson and the plots to unseat him, including the formation of private armies and articles by the Times demanding that he be replaced by a coalition government. One of those, who also believed Wilson was a Soviet agent was a junior Conservative politician, Margaret Hilda Thatcher. Many of these conspiracy theories were based on forged documents circulating in the media, which look very much like they were concocted by MI5 as a deliberate attempt to spread dissatisfaction. And one of the magazines that ran this disinformation was Private Eye.

Lobster, in issue 17 for November 1988 ran an article by Steven Dorril, then the magazine’s co-editor with Robin Ramsay. Entitled ‘Five at Eye’, this reported and commented on a piece published the year previously by the Guardian that the Eye may have been used to spread this deliberate black propaganda. Much of the material was published in the Eye by Auberon Waugh, who predictably denied any secret service involvement. In fact, Waugh had extensive connections to MI5 and also the extreme Right. He tried to join the Foreign Office, being recommended by MI5’s head, Roger Hollis. Hollis’ brother, Christopher, was his godfather. Christopher Hollis had been a member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, was a contributor to various far right periodicals like Action and the World Review. During the War Waugh’s family had connections to those working in Middle East intelligence including Tom Driberg, the Labour politician, who also contributed to the Eye and MI5. Another colleague was Roger Fulford, who had also worked with Hollis. Auberon Waugh’s first job was at the Torygraph, and Dorril comments that it looked very much like an internal MI5 posting. In the 1970s the Washington Post claimed that the London papers were ‘flooded’ with intelligence assets, specifically referring to the Torygraph. One of Waugh’s closest collaborators at the Eye was Patrick Marnham, a contributor to the magazine’s ‘Grovel’ column.

When Wilson was re-elected in 1974, Marnham started receiving information packs from MI5 through a colleague on the Times. This material discussed Wilson’s position at the Board of Trade issuing import licences to a group of import-export dealers, known as the ‘East-West Traders’, who did business with the Soviet Union. Martin Tomkinson, another Eye journalist, stated he had a contact with the intelligence agencies, who believed that Wilson was too concerned with promoting Anglo-Soviet trade. The traders, who included Sir Rudy Sternberg, Lord Plurenden and Lady Beattie Plummer, were suspected by MI5 of being Soviet agents. In fact, Wilson discovered that Sternberg was a spy, but for MI6. Dorril’s article also contains a selection of pieces from the Spectator and the Eye, and the MI5 documents leaked to Marnham, with appropriate comments. The article also contains snippets from Dr Kitty Little’s pamphlet, Treason at Westminster, which was similarly paranoid about the East-West Traders, and by Peter Dally, who wrote for Asian Outlook. Both Dally and Birdwood were British representatives to the World Anti-Communist League, a far-Right organisation that included extreme Conservatives and outright Fascists and Nazis.

Reading between the lines, my guess is that there still is a link to MI5 at the Eye, despite the fact that it has, on occasion, been quite prepared to challenge the official line, such as over the Lockerbie bombing. All of the Eye’s founders – Richard Ingrams, Peter Cook, Willie Rushton, Auberon Waugh were British public school establishment. One other frequent contributor was John Wells, who was the French teacher and headmaster at Eton. Its present editor, Ian Hislop, comes from the same background. The real radical at the Eye was Paul Foot, of the ‘Footnotes’ column, which has continued after his death as ‘In the Back’. Foot was accepted, however, because he also came from the same middle class, public school background, and shared their tastes.

If the intelligence services are involved, it’s probably because Corbyn and the Labour left threaten the dominance of the Israel lobby within the Labour party. Blair was very close to the Zionists through Lord Levy, and the accusations of anti-Semitism directed against Jeremy Corbyn and members of the Labour left stem from the fact that they have criticised Israel for its persecution and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The Zionists have become particularly shrill and defensive because the BDS campaign is having an effect in forcing Israeli businesses out of the occupied territories on the West Bank. Despite the inquiry and its finding that Blair was what his opponents had told the world all along – a warmonger – this is all about protecting Israel and maintaining the neocon policies in the Middle East.

The Political Abuse of Anti-Semitism Accusations: Jeremy Corbyn, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia

I’ve put up a whole series of article attacking and debunking the accusations of anti-Semitism, which have been directed against the Labour party, and more specifically its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. As I’ve shown, these are all false, gross distortions of history and offensive personal smears of decent men and women. Ken Livingstone, for example, was entirely correct when he said that Hitler favoured at one time the emigration of Jews to Israel. He did. The Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious of those responsible for the Holocaust, aided people smugglers in getting Jews into Palestine, then under the British Mandate. They also supplied arms to the Haganah, the clandestine Jewish military organisation in Palestine, so that it could aid the British in suppressing the Arab rebellion against British rule – the First Intifada. This is documented in the work of the Jewish historian and passionate Zionist, David Cesarani, on the Holocaust and the origins of the Israel. Naz Shah, one of the others, who have been accused, has the support of her local synagogue. This surely provided good testimony that whatever faults she may have, anti-Semitism isn’t one of them. As for Jackie Smith, one of the others slandered with this accusation, she is a veteran anti-racism campaigner. Her mother was Black British civil rights activist, who was deported from America for her activism by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Her father was a Russian Jew, and her partner is also Jewish.

The source of these allegations lie in the Blairite wing of the Labour party, who are desperate to use any tactic to cling on to power, and the Israel lobby. These latter are determined to smear anybody and everybody, who objects to their oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians, as an anti-Semite, even when these are other Jews, such as the head of Bernie Sander’s Jewish outreach department in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

I’ve also been struck by the way the anti-Semitism allegations recall earlier attempts to discredit left-wing political leaders, in fact and fiction. David English, the editor of the Daily Mail, believed Ken Livingstone was an anti-Semite, and continued to press the issue for about a year in the early 1980s. There was also a piece on the Going Underground news programme on RT, hosted by Afshin Rattansi, which compared the anti-Semitism smears with the plot of the 1980s novel and Channel 4 series, A Very British Coup, in which the media and opposition politicians manufacture false accusations of anti-Semitism to discredit a genuinely popular left-wing Labour Prime Minister.

And the Soviet Union under Brezhnev also used accusations of anti-Semitism in its campaign against the proposed democratisation of Communist Czechoslovakia under its leader, Anton Dubcek, in 1968. Dubcek wished to free his country from the rigid control of the Soviet Union. While remaining very much a Communist, he also planned on introducing platform of reforms aimed at liberalising the country, while retaining the Communist party’s privileged position as the country’s leading political authority. He was going to allow a certain degree of political freedom, in allowing non-Communist groups and voluntary societies to be formed. Inside the Communist party, the policy of ‘democratic centralism’ was to be replaced by democracy and the free discussion of ideas. The security services was to be made responsible solely for defending the Czechoslovakian nation, and not for protecting the Communist parties. The command economy was going to be weakened, to allow greater consumer choice. State enterprises were not going to be privatised, but were going to be freed from the constraints of following the plan, and allowed to manage their own affairs. He was also in favour of something like workers’ control, and the democratic election by the workers of the management committees. In many ways, it prefigures much of Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union during Perestroika.

All this was too much for Brezhnev’s USSR, which invaded. One of the reasons for the Soviet Union’s hostility to the reforms, according Hugh Lunghi, in his introduction to the book, Dubcek’s Blueprint for Freedom (London: William Kimber 1968) was the fear that the USSR’s covert operations manipulating and dominating its satellites would be revealed by Dubcek’s de-Stalinisation campaign. Dubcek was determined to go ahead with the investigation of Stalin’s terror and the rehabilitation of the old thug’s victims. This would almost certain produce evidence of the activities of the Soviet Union and its secret police in destroying the opposition to the imposition of Communism and those countries’ direct control by Moscow.

Dubcek was, however, genuinely popular amongst the peoples of Czechoslovakia. Surprisingly, he also had the backing of the Czechoslovak secret police. When the KGB tried to infiltrate the country disguised as Czechoslovak secret agents, their passports and documents were in such awful Czech that the country’s real agents had no trouble recognising them and rounding them up. They were then delivered to the Russian embassy with the explanation that their Czech was so terrible, they must obviously be American spies.

Unable to find anyone willing to collaborate with them in a puppet government to replace Dubcek and his supporters, the Soviet authorities tried instead to grind him down by stalling his reforms and trying discredit Dubcek and his supporters. One of the ways they tried to do this was through entirely spurious accusations of anti-Semitism. Lunghi writes:

About a month later, on October 11th, Dubcek repeated [not to introduce a secret police terror campaign] in a major speech in which he explained why the Czechoslovak leadership had refused to authorise a programme of unjustified arrests and dismissals which “some Communists” (he did not specify in which country) demanded for anti-Semitic and other reasons. “Some individuals,” said Dubcek, “think this is now the time to move towards excesses similar to those of the ‘fifties, that this is a time to return to the deformities of sectarian non-Leninist methods.” Communists should understand, continued Dubcek, that “”socialist thought in our country is not deformed, for example, by anti-Semitism…” (p. 29, emphasis Lunghi’s). Several of those forced out of office on the orders of the Russians were the victims of anti-Semitism. These included Dr. Frantisek Kriegel, who was accused of being a ‘Zionist’. (p. 30). Which sort of prefigures the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jackie Smith, who’s half-Jewish, has a Jewish partner, and is a dedicated campaigner against racism. Or against Rhea Wolfson, who, despite being Jewish, was dropped as a candidate for the NEC by her constituency party on the advice of Jim Murphy, because she was connected with Momentum, which was an anti-Semitic organisation.

It seems the Blairites and their allies are following a very old pattern of using allegations of anti-Semitism to smear left-wing opponents. Well, the joke in Private Eye about Gordon Brown had him as a Stalinist apparatchik, issuing diktats, decrees and party purges like the thug himself.

Hope Not Hate: Neo-Nazi Group to Goose-Step in Bristol this Saturday

Hope Not Hate, the anti-racism, anti-religious extremism organisation has reported on their website that the New British Union will be holding a demo in my fair city this coming Saturday. The NBU are an outfit that parties like it’s 1939: they march around in an approved uniform of black slacks, tops and caps, waving banners with a lightning bolt symbol not too far removed from that of the British Union of Fascists. How they get away with this I don’t know, as I understood that political uniforms were made illegal when the government cracked down on Mosley and co.

Hope Not Hate says not to worry too much, as they only have 11 members, one of whom lives in Cyprus. They also speculate that another two may be members of Zionist organisations seeking to disrupt them. That’s also likely to be true. I did wonder, however, if it was a general excuse these organisations make when they fall out with each other. It’s not over ‘ideological’ differences, but because there are ‘Zionist’ spies in their ranks.

The stories at: http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/blog/insider/bristol-and-bust-4719 Go there for more information and pics of the Mosleyite wannabes.

I’m not actually very sure what they hope to achieve. Bristol’s got a very ethnically mixed population, with sizable Black and Asian minorities. Like other cities of this type, it’s got its racial strains and there is a branch of SARI in St. Paul’s, I believe, for the victims of racial attacks. But mostly, touch wood, it’s a cool place. If you go down to the centre, you’re far more likely to be faced with charity canvassers, the homeless selling the Big Issue, and the normal run of buskers, than fiery-eyed maniacs preaching jihad or race war or whatever other bloody nonsense.

The EDL also turned up here a few years ago, and there was trouble then. It annoyed my mother to think that they could campaign successfully in Bristol, and cause trouble. My own feeling is that there could be trouble due to this bunch of morons, but most likely they’ll be treated the way they should – and ignored, leaving them to slink back to wherever they came from, shamed at not being able to get even a rise out of the people of this great city.