“Unknown Man: I’ll be around for some time. I have a mission to accomplish. […] Unknown Man: And all the time the volcano beneath our feet is seething and boiling. We are riddled through and through with conspiracies, secret societies, plots… Onek: Yes! The dirty bloody hunchbacks are plotting! Unkown Man: What hunchbacks… Onka: My […]
Gianni Di Michelis, former Italian Foreign Minister, and author of ‘where shall we dance tonight? A guide to 250 of Italy’s best discos’, las night dismissed the women behind the campaign to block expansion of the American military base in Vicenza as ‘Nimbys’*. Our disco-dancing Kissinger is far from alone, at least in the political […]
Not a very good title, really, since according to the Guardian, the trial was held behind closed doors but there are similarities with the “confession” (the Guardian’s inverted commas) of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the show trials of Stalinist Russia. The man, after more than three years under arrest quietly contemplating the error of his […]
Andrzej Zybertowicz puts up a strong, if entirely illogical, defence of the law requiring journalists to swear to whether they did or did not cooperate with the secret services of communist Poland in Wednesday’s Rzeczpospolita. Journalists should sign the loyalty declarations beacuse they are “the fourth estate.” It’s that simple. I have scoured the constitution […]
Adam Curtis‘s documentary “The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?“, shown on BBC2 last Sunday, presented the thinking person’s conspiracy theory. Think Don DeLillo rather than Dan Bown. So rather than arguing that Opus Dei covered up Mary Magdalene’s male drag act or sputtering that the Carlyle Group masterminded 9/11, Curtis suavely […]
Not all journos here are finding the legal requirement to pledge that you never informed under communism so irksome as those prima donnas who claim that this is mere humiliation, since in any case the archives are about to be thrown open to journalists (and that, as mentioned before, means nearly everyone — including you, […]
Last night BBC4 screened an solid documentary on the decline of New York City during the 1970s, a steep fall from grace that culminated in the infamous blackout/riot of July 13-14, 1977.The programme offered a survey of some of the factors that brought Gotham to its knees: the collapse of a once-dynamic manufacturing base, the […]
The day after Romano Prodi’s government fell, the majority of left-wing and right-wing newspapers frothed around the two dissenting ‘radical’ left wing senators* Fernando Rossi and Franco Turigliatto, both of whom had refused to vote for their government in the senate, helping to cause the collapse of the government. That so much attention should be […]
I spent last weekend Liverpool–the absence of postings this week can be partially explained by the fact that I was there for my brother’s stag party. The quote of the weekend was innocently uttered by a member of our party while watching Saturday’s Liverpool-Man U clash in a cavernous drinking emporium somewhere off the main […]