Politics and Paranoia

by Robin Ramsay

Covers espionage, MI5, MI6, CIA, 9/11, New Labour and much more.

Genres: Politics

300 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book presents nearly 20 talks and short articles given by Robin Ramsay between 1987 and 2004. It distils his thoughts on political conspiracy, the deep state, the pusillanimity of Labour parliamentarians and politics in general.

The nature of the book and his own relatively circumscribed set of interests mean that there is a fair amount of repetition in the book but he has the good grace to warn us of this in the introduction.

The pieces are also not chronological but thematic so the net effect is not to see someone developing their thoughts through time but of having a particular world view of which the different themes are facets.

He is also famously uninterested in compromise or pleasing people at the cost of the truth (as he sees it) so he hits you head on in the first article with a disquisition on the possibility of past Deep State experimentation with mind control which is not the easiest concept to accept.

However, he rarely goes into the darker recesses of paranoia and, in fact, is a corrective to it because his core thesis is that conspiracies abound at the parapolitical level simply because of the way small groups of people co-operate by their nature - there is no grand conspiracy as in the X-Files.

He makes the excellent point that we should not assume that just because someone covers something up, they were responsible for the crime or the abuse. I suspect we see this in the current VIP child abuse fiasco as much as in the JFK assassination.

What happens is that the crime may be connected to those covering up the crime who had no idea what was happening or going to happen and, if they did, would probably stop it, bring it under control and ensure we, the people, heard nothing more - cue Kincora Boys' Home.

But he is persuasive in his evidence that crimes have been committed - including not merely black propaganda to destroy the reputations of individuals (a crack at this was recently directed at me) but burglary, destruction of documents and even framing people for manslaughter.

He does not get everything right and has the disarming ability to admit when he was wrong in a footnote but his core theses remain very persuasive. If the stories are repetitive, it is clear that some truths do have to be repeated over and over again to get traction.

I am convinced by his description of how Britain was de-industrialised (I was a Gould man myself, the 'king across the water', leaving behind a small number of left-wing equivalents of the Jacobites) but think that battle has long since been lost.

With a Conservative Government in office until 2020 and the worst possible Labour 'regime' regime from 1997 to 2010, Britain has now been fully de-industrialised except for our huge armaments industry, as we see with the collapse of the unsalvageable steel sector.

The dependence on the killing machines of working class skilled jobs in Labour marginals is at the root of the party-historical clash between the Corbynistas and the Labour Unions over Trident - the latter know it is all evil but it is more evil to them to put good men on the dole.

The Deep State that emerged in the First World War and lived off the Cold War has created a country that is literally drugged on the selling of high end military equipent to 'regimes' that the politicians like to condemn 'sotto voce' for their 'abuses'.

The internal contradictions would be funny - indeed it is funny when we have the solution of nuclear submarines to be built at huge cost without warheads! - if we were not talking about mangled corpses of civilians, especially children, in hot spots around the world.

The Deep State - the national security state brilliantly explored by Professor Hennessy [ https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ] - is the natural successor of the Imperial State of Palmerston and Salisbury but no one has told the politicians that not only is the Empire dead but that its industrial base has died too.

What we have now is a shell of an economy in terms of manufacturing that relies on WMD as threat and deterrent because, if it was not used, the country would collapse in weeks as 80 million people would have no resources to survive in a blockade.

This is the comical paradox of the Deep State - the entity constructed to preserve the 'Empire' (shrunk back to the size of John Dee's) has been instrumental in ensuring that it could not survive long in a real confrontation. And so we flog guns to others just to keep the damn thing going.

The political problem Robin is addressing is one of narrative. Whoever holds the dominant position in society dictates the narrative. That narrative will be self-serving by the nature of things and things will be done - whether state murder or media manipulation - to preserve it.

There are a number of narratives explored in this book that I find persuasive - for example, that the successive political asassinations in the US of reforming figures in the 1960s were not a set of coincidences but that those responsible for the cover up were not necessarily responsible for the crimes.

Similarly, he has done his home work and understands how the Cold War manipulation of the British Left by the US must be seen as instrumental in the coming to power of the Blair-Brown 'regime' (whose effects on a supine foreign policy are there for all to see). I was there, dear reader, and saw it at close quarters ... but that is another story.

Finally, I think he is right that the British Deep State was implicated, or at least parts of it were, in the destruction of the Wilson-Callaghan 'regime' and the rise of Thatcher and, though this is not all the story, it a part of the story that is conveniently neglected by contemporary historians.

The question of the Deep State is a relevant one for us to consider. It is an issue that should concern us not only in relation to the US, the UK and the 'White Commonwealth' but also Russia, China, Germany, Israel, indeed, all states that use 'national security' as a policy excuse.

Most countries seem to have a crisis or succession of crises that permit the construction of a State within the State which comes to take a role in picking and choosing its masters, creating the dominant narrative and is prepared to act criminally or cover up criminality if necessary.

The Church Committee in the US uncovered a catalogue of dodgy actions by the CIA in the period to the early 1970s but that country has slipped quickly back into its old ways under cover of the 'war on terror'. The Russian case is particularly well known because it suits our masters to expose it.

The British case is perhaps most disturbing of all because the British public has been represented by supine politicians, especially those in the Parliamentary Labour Party, whose love affair with the State and executive office has avoided and evaded all serious inquiry until recently.

The British State apparat is a construction of the two world wars and their struggles for survival but it was built on the war on communism as long ago as the 1917 Revolution and now on terrorism. Its signal crisis was Northern Ireland where it crossed several criminal boundaries.

The re-application of the mentality suited to de-imperialisation in Kenya, Cyprus, Aden and Malaysia - Kitson included - to peoples within the United Kingdom took us very close to the sort of 'dirty war' we saw in Latin America, close but not quite as bad.

Terrorism is now also about British subjects who happen to be the migrants allowed in on cheap labour globalisation (masked as humanitarianism) and organised crime involves Britons who operate as globally as their rulers.

The temptation to go too far is going to be there - the US certainly bit the apple of evil with Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition and Blair and Straw were clearly uninterested in asking too many questions.

However, in a rare appreciation of a State of which I am eternally suspicious, I see signs that the current British state is making real efforts to create a framework of law and order for its actions, albeit under possibly excessive pressure from the human rights lobby.

The British State is divided. Some want to retain Crown Power to its near-arbitrary militaristic maximum. Others see that the People are essential allies in the preservation of the State and, for a few years at least, the Corbyn Left provides a genuine anti-State quasi-republican critique of it.

This book is largely historical. It is about a world that has gone or is beginning to die. But the essays are worth reading simply to remind us why the State - all States in free countries - is regarded with suspicion by a substantial minority of its population.

Rebuilding trust is going to be a mighty task. This book tells us, quite clearly in my opinion, that States do not deserve our trust until they become more accountable at their Deep State level - indeed that there should be no Deep State at all - and 'fess up' to past bad behaviour.

The State as security apparat is not going to unravel itself. Politicians instinctively fear the Leviathan they think they will become masters of. Their instinct is to become - like nearly all Labour Home Secretaries - more authoritarian even than their own civil servants.

This is the reverse of the instincts of British politicians in the 1940s who liked tough laws on their books which they enforced lightly and only harshly because the security apparat pressed them to do so with the same sort of manufactured fear stories we get about terrorism.

Parliament is supine and the media virtually in the pocket of the State at this level. Politicians may be crushed under its heel but the State's security stories get free rein with damn-all critique. Yet the wisest in State and politics know that the crises of post-globalisation now need our trust.

[Disclaimer: Robin Ramsay is founder and editor of the parapolitical 'Lobster'. In the mid-1990s, I wrote long analytical pieces for it which are still available until I was too busy with other matters. Two of the talks in the book were derived from invitations that, directly or indirectly, emanated from me.]

[Kriegslok · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robin Ramsey is the editor of Lobster, a journal of the dirty side of politics that politicians are either involved in, don't understand, or realise that getting tied up in will end their promising careers. Ramsey has charted the rise of New Labour and the fall of old (and understood and predicted many of the aspects that many of us failed to appreciate at the time or since), he has also dug into the secret state and the intelligence services to reveal a range of skullduggery and incompetence by our guardians that makes you alternately shiver and weep and pretty much realise that we are all doomed. This book is a collection of Ramsey's lectures/talks to a range of audiences over the last couple of decades. All good, if maniacally depressing stuff! If you still have any faith in our political system read this!

[Picnic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robin Ramsey author of Politics and Paranoia presents an account of- covert action, destabilisation, strategic theory, economics, politics, para-politics, Colin Wallace, Fred Holroyd, whistle blowers, New Zealand, Australia, nuclear weapons, Blair, Brown, espionage, MI5, MI6, CIA, 9/11, conspiracy theories, New Labour plus much, much more.
Politics and Paranoia takes a deeper look into the complex role of the intelligence services and the impact it has on political power.

It has some tricky parts but I found it enjoyable to read. It is refreshing to read an account of politics regularly overlooked by the mainstream media.