POLITICS AND PARANOIA BY ROBIN RAMSAY
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
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.
Mr. Ramsay’s comment about the MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX brings up questions about the unseen power of economic interests in US and elsewhere. Since JFK may have been assassinated when he tried to derail the beginning of the Vietnam war, it makes me wonder (and worry) about how Barack, if elected, could personally survive his promise to end the war. We in America may think we’re voting for change, but how naïve is that? Can ANYONE stand up to the MIC? They must be earning billions each month with the current US ‘actions.’ The biggest questions are; Who are they, To what extent do they control the destinies of countries around the world, and, How do we wrestle back control of our lives? They must figure we’ll buy the latest logic: IRAQ WAR + FIGHTING TERRORISM = WE CAN RAISE GAS PRICES THROUGH THE ROOF. And now Bush will probably get oil drilling passed for off the California coast and Alaskan wilderness (they’ve been trying to get this through for years…). Now OUR pain at the pumps, which THEY created, is used against us! Not a pretty picture.