An Israeli security company, International Security and Defence Systems (ISDS) — with the very active support of the Israeli government — was brought in to advise the Brazilian government on security measures during the 2014 World Cup and this year’s Olympic Games.
On its advice, in 2010 a large contract was awarded to Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) for drones, electric fences, ground radar, sensors and satellite technology.
Rupert Murdoch has emerged virtually unscathed from the phone hacking scandal, which some naive optimists hoped might actually bring his empire down. This much has been clear for some time, but it was made public on 21 December when David Cameron, George Osborne and half of the rest of the cabinet attended a Christmas drinks party at Murdoch’s London flat. The Conservative government was collectively acknowledging Murdoch’s rehabilitation.
Many years ago there were those on the left who argued that the working class in the US, Japan and Europe had to be written off politically and that the agency of revolutionary change was now the peasantry in what was then called the Third World.
These people invariably also wrote off the working class in the Third World as a labour aristocracy. Most but not all of the adherents to this position were Maoists of some kind.
With this book we can see that this species of left politics has mutated. The working class in the US, Japan and Europe is still written off.
Over the past 15 years a creeping process of outsourcing has been taking place inside the military. John Newsinger argues that the use of mercenaries and contractors undermines democracy.
The Iraq war will be seen as a turning point in the history of warfare. Not because of the illegality of the invasion or the unprecedented incompetence of the occupation, important though these were, but because it was the first modern public-private war.
At the end of March 1933 Guy Liddell, a senior MI5 officer, visited Berlin to liaise with the Prussian political police organisation that was soon to become the Gestapo.
He was given privileged access to the results of their operations against the German left and produced a report on “The Liquidation of Communism and Left-wing Socialism in Germany”. He quite freely acknowledged that “Jews, Communists and even Social Democrats have undoubtedly been submitted to every kind of outrage”.
Today when the working class is under sustained attack from the Tories, John Newsinger's new book on the class war in Britain is timely. Here he picks out the lessons from the explosive year of 1911.
The year 1911 is one of the most important in British history. It is not remembered as such because there were no royal babies, no great military conquests or massacres, no notable parliamentary occasions.
Instead it is important because the mass action of hundreds of thousands of British working class men and women shifted the balance of class forces in their own favour.
Living standards were falling, work was intensifying and management tyranny was becoming increasingly oppressive. A fightback was inevitable.
The Tories' commemoration of the bicentenary of Waterloo is another example of their wish to boost the image of the armed forces today. John Newsinger relates the real reasons for the battle in June 1815.
The Conservative right was determined to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Waterloo bloodbath in style.
After all, the centenary in 1915 had been spoiled by the fact that, at the time, the British were allied with the French against the Germans who had been Britain’s allies in 1815.
Indeed, there had been more German troops in the field that year fighting the French than there were British.
An ex-miner, fiercely proud of the working class, Dennis Skinner has stood out as an uncompromising opponent of Tory governments and their works since he was first elected as a Labour MP in 1970. In his “reminiscences” he makes it absolutely clear that he will die a socialist, a fighter for the class. What marks him out though is his commitment to “extra-parliamentary action”.
He stabbed the first prisoner, leaving him to die in agony from the wound, shot the second in the stomach so he could watch him die as well, and the third he set on fire with a phosphorous grenade so he could watch him burn to death.
After hearing that hundreds of racists had joined in the lynching and mutilation of a black labourer, Robert Charles called on black people to take up arms in self-defence. John Newsinger tells his incredible story.
On 23 April 1899 Sam Hose, a black farm labourer, was lynched in Palmetto, Georgia, after killing his employer in self-defence. An excursion train was run from Atlanta carrying over a thousand people to watch the spectacle with the guard famously calling, “All aboard for the burning.” Even by the standards of the time (more than 80 black men and women were lynched in the US in 1899), Hose’s lynching was a brutal affair. His ears, fingers, face and genitalia were cut off in front of a jeering crowd of men, women and children.
