POLITICS AND PARANOIA BY ROBIN RAMSAY
Two days after Picnic Publishing asked me to do a blog for my Politics and Paranoia I went to Paris. (My brother-in-law works there and his flat is available some weekends when he comes back to London. It’s 7 hours door-to-door by train.) In Paris I had a quick squint at the famous bookshop opposite Notre Dame, Shakespeare and Company, which has been supplying English-language books since the days when James Joyce is said to have done some of his writing there. Just before the tourist hordes had made it there from their hotels, in the second-hand boxes on the pavement outside the shop I found two books which I wanted: William Domhoff’s The Higher Circles (1971) and David Brock’s Blinded by the Right (2002).These books sort of bookend my reading/writing life, the contents of Politics and Paranoia, and recent US politics. Domhoff is an American sociologist who analysed the American ruling class (he called it the Upper or Governing Class and the Power Elite) and, in so doing produced some of the first academic work on what are now known as the elite policy planning groups: in foreign policy, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations. In so doing he moved into intellectual territory which had hitherto largely been of interest mostly to a conspiratorially-minded section of the American Right, centrally the John Birch Society. When I began educating myself in post-war history in 1976 in the University of Hull, Domhoff was one of the names I came across early in my journey through the card indexes on American history. When Domhoff’s earlier book on this subject, his 1967 Who Rules America?, appeared it was seized upon by the conspiracist American Right as support for their theories about having ‘lost’ America to an elite East Coast conspiracy. In the final section of The Higher Circles Domhoff discusses the conspiracist Right’s use of his material. What is interesting now is that the group he discusses was then a very tiny minority to the right of the Republican Party, and of little political significance. By the time we get to Brock’s Blinded by the Right, his account of being a part of the ‘vast conspiracy’ (Hilary Clinton’s expression) on the right which was running against the Clinton administrations, elements of that conspiracist group, especially the Christian fundamentalists, have become a major power in the land. The lunatics had taken over the political asylum.
As well as being an insider’s view of the ‘vast conspiracy’, Brock’s memoir is a fascinating warts-and-all portrait of many of the major players on the Republican Right in and around Congress and the Senate in the 1990s. And what a bunch of screwed-up, hypocritical, intellectual and moral pygmies they were! Brock’s account puts new life into the old world view of the left that those on the right are either stupid, venal or psychologically damaged. I’ve spent nearly twenty years trying my best to shake off that view of the right only to have it revalidated by Brock.
And what has all this to do with my book? Well, the book contains talks I have given from 1986 to 2004 and having put them all together it is clear that the those talks are dominated by Britain’s relationship with the United States and American power. Chronologically the book starts with a talk to a CND conference on the US attempts to destabilise ‘nuclear free’ New Zealand and what potential lessons this might have for a Labour Party which was then still (just) anti-nuclear, has several goes at explaining the Colin Wallace-Peter Wright material on the ‘Wilson plots’ (in which a major part of the conspiracy theories about Harold Wilson-as-KGB came from elements within the CIA), and ends with several attempts to explain/understand the take-over of the Labour Party by the pro-American Blair tendency. In between these sections there are ruminations on the rise in our culture of conspiracy theories – almost all of which come from America. In short, the book is mostly a series of discussions of Britain’s role as America’s poodle; and these begin in the America which Domhoff describes and end in the America depicted by Brock.
August 17th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Robin -
Great to see you writing a blog. It’s good that we don’t have to wait for a new Lobster to get some of your thoughts! Always thought-provoking.
I am hopefully not alone in thinking you are of much more value than “Britain’s answer to Michael Moore”
Best,
Andrew
August 18th, 2008 at 2:27 am
Andrew: Robin is still finding his way around blogging and might not find your comment . . .
Re. Michael Moore. You are quite right. RR hated the comment too and never wanted to run with it. His useless publisher – who is penning this reply – thought it would bring him to a wider public . . .
FYI: Robin now has his own blog on the picnic website. (You have left your comment in the Author Blog. Since then, we have set up a separate blog for him.)
If you go into http://www.picnic-publishing.co.uk , you will find a tab ‘Political Blog’ next to the ‘Author Blog’ tab. Robin posts here when he feels like it. The ones up to date are well worth looking at.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:58 am
I read somewhere that the average blog is read by 3 people. So I just need to two more to make it to average…..
my difficulty with blogging is that whenever I think of something worth saying a bit of my brain says ‘ This might be a piece for Lobster’. I guess I will just have to get used to using the blog as place for first drafts and stray thoughts. Of which here’s one. The Independent had a front page headline last week about the war?conflict?skirmish? in Georgia: “After a war lasting six days in which scores have died”. Scores? Of course they have no idea about what is going on down there: no sources other than tainted/propaganda sources; and no reliable figures on deaths. ‘Scores’ is a sub’s bet-hedging guess, I suspect: gotta put something but has no information.
The real point about the Georgia thing is seeing the US and Russian military-industrial complexes getting back on the road – contracts, careers back on track. Just for a minute there peace almost broke out! In this country, where politics has yet to be completely corrupted by money, it is difficult for people to grasp that US foreign poplicy exists mostly to renrich the military-industrial complex. As in: why have Poland and Georgia in NATO, given the geo-political damage this will do to relations between Russia and the rest of Europe? There will be a clause in the contracts somewhere which forces them to buy US weapons systems. That’s the price of entry.
August 24th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
@admin – thanks, I found the other blog not long after leaving that comment! Will tune in for future posts.
@Robin – I’m sure we readers won’t mind if there is some overlap between work here and in Lobster. Most of us are probably happy Lobster is there at all, I have no idea if anything exists that would cover the same ground.
The Georgia stuff is interesting, I didn’t quite know where to hang it, but good old economics makes as much sense as anything else. But what’s in it for Georgia? They essentially chose sides and regard NATO membership as some kind of international legitimacy, and are prepared to become a US client state? Forgive my complete ignorance of these things.
August 24th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
@admin: forgot to mention about the Moore thing. Don’t be too hard on yourself, you’re no doubt going out on a limb publishing the stuff you are so good for you!