R.I.P Comrade George Blake. The last remaining Cold War double agent (that we know of.)

[William of Walworth]

I'm not sure what you are asking for - people who do know of Dorril and his work to vouch for the book?

Yes, essentially.

I was only wondering whether there's any reason why hs article or book lacked credibility or not -- I don't know much about Dorril or his work

On the face of it, that Observer article seemed informative and interesting, but is there any reason why not?

 

[deeyo]

if you want daring capture of spies, even protected by foreign intelligence services, if you want them to answer for their crimes in a court of law, and after their appeals been turned down by the supreme court - justice will prevail - the traitors hanged by the neck until dead, dead, dead, lily-livered liberals and their hypocritical outrage be damned - iran's got you covered.

Admin of Anti-Iran Website Ruhollah Zam Executed - Politics news - Tasnim News Agency

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Ruhollah Zam, the administrator of ‘Amad News’ counterrevolutionary website and Telegram channel who had orchestrated anti-government riots in Iran, was hanged on Saturday morning.

www.tasnimnews.com

 

[DaveCinzano]

Yes, essentially.

I was only wondering whether there's any reason why hs article or book lacked credibility or not -- I don't know much about Dorril or his work

On the face of it, that Observer article seemed informative and interesting, but is there any reason why not?

He was one of the original co-editors of Lobster before he and Ramsey went their separate ways (for a time they separately published their own iterations of the magazine too).

His Wilson Plot book is very readable. His MI6 one, less so. His style is dense and thoroughly footnoted. Generally speaking I would say he works more with secondary than primary written evidence, though he does manage to bring together a wide variety of sources, some very esoteric.

He did face some criticism for the MI6 book, but from memory these tended to be about relatively minor typos or misunderstandings from obscure sources spread across what is a doorstep of a book.

Also, the MI6 book is not a general history of SIS - it is specifically interested in special operations, more akin to those of a Department than a Circus nature.

 

[William of Walworth]

DaveCinzano : Thanks for that , it's really helpful.

Years ago, I did actually read most of Smear (couldn't quite finish it though -- it's a doorstep!)

I get the idea from your comments that the shortness of the Observer article I quoted is s bonus!

And that (re-)reading Le Carre is more rewarding

Still, Dorril did give plenty of information in the article about George Blake, which is no bad thing

 

[JimW]

How disruptive in economic terms was the GPCR?

Morning Idris, was very late when I replied last night, just had a flick through my copy of Chris Bramall's book Chinese Economic Development and it does seem to be as I recall - bit of a slump during 67-68 at height of Red Guard movement but over the ten year period still sustained growth and improved living standards etc. His whole section of the late Maoist economy is good and addresses problems with the data and so on. he had a separate paper I also have called In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning that specifically looks at living standards in Sichuan since 1931, where he has this:

These institutional features of the 1930s were swept aside by the Revolutionary settlement. The landholdings of the landlord class were expropriated and redistributed to the middle, poor, and landless peasantry. These small holdings were later amalgamated to form collective farms. These latter, necessarily involving collective ownership of other complementary means of production such as livestock, implements. and transport equipment, did much to eliminate the more extreme inequalities in income that remained after land reform (though progressive land taxation during the 1950s was operating towards the same end). Some inequalities remained by the 1970s. deriving mainly from differences in work-point earnings, but even these were offset by the impact of income from private land and the incomes in cash and kind to be garnered from the exploitation of the positions of power and responsibility abrogated by the cadre class.
That these residual inequalities were trivial by comparison with those that prevailed in the province in the 1930s is certain. Massive inequalities in landownership had been eliminated, and in a pre-industrial economy such as Sichuan's, this was decisive (in the rural sector at any rate) in removing the most glaring income differentials.
Of course the data on which these conclusions are based are fragmentary and difficult to interpret. Of course it is impossible to delineate the precise parameters of income inequality in either period by the computation of village Gini coefficients. Of course there are many areas and issues on which we know little and would like to know more. Of course this justifies to some extent the Maoist socioeconomic development model, the horrors of which in terms of human rights we are only now beginning to understand. But we cannot be blind to the genuine achievements wrought in Sichuan after 1949. The lot of many of the poorest members of society was improved in almost every sense by means of a redistributive programme on a vast scale. The rural landscape did not merely change between the 1930s and the 1970s. It was transformed.

 

[dylanredefined]

When my mother lived in Spain I used to go to a German bar for the beer and after one session I summoned up the courage to ask about the wall coming down . Some spoke English but the bloke behind the bar translated for me . Most of the people in there had tales about how lazy the East Germans were , that one west German would do a job but the East Germans would expect 4 do do it etc etc . Aside from some old guy sitting by himself who said ‘the west Germans economy meant if you worked hard there was less jobs because they didn’t need you , in the East the economy’s job was to provide work , we didn’t have unemployment’

They also had the stasi and would shoot you for trying to leave the workers paradise and a waiting list for Trabants.

 

[The39thStep]

They also had the stasi and would shoot you for trying to leave the workers paradise and a waiting list for Trabants.

That's true ( except for the workers paradise) however my point was that people who actually lived there had a more complex experience of the regime

 

[tim]

They also had the stasi and would shoot you for trying to leave the workers paradise and a waiting list for Trabants.

327 people were killed on the GDR border during the whole of the cold war. East German border claimed 327 lives, says Berlin study.

So different from life in the Capitalists' paradise.

Los Angeles police officers have continued to kill civilians at alarming rates and under questionable circumstances in the last three months, despite a summer of unprecedented activism and growing political pressure from lawmakers.

Most recently, two deputies with the Los Angeles sheriff’s department (LASD) fatally shot a bicyclist, 29-year-old Dijon Kizzee, who was fleeing after officers tried to stop him for an alleged “vehicle code” violation. The killing on Monday of yet another Black man in South LA was one of more than 10 fatal police shootings in the LA region since the George Floyd protests erupted at the end of May.

In total 1000 killed by LA police in the last 20 year
'Reign of terror': A summer of police violence in Los Angeles

Which makes it much safer to live in LA than in Bakersfield.

In all, 13 people have been killed so far this year by law enforcement officers in Kern County, which has a population of just under 875,000. During the same period, nine people were killed by the NYPD across the five counties of New York City, where almost 10 times as many people live and about 23 times as many sworn law enforcement officers patrol.

The deaths span from January to the early hours of last Sunday morning, when a man accused of firing at officers during a foot chase in downtown Bakersfield was shot and killed. One senior Bakersfield police officer has been involved in at least four deadly shootings in less than two years. Another officer separately shot dead three people within two months in 2010. Other law enforcement officers in Kern County have meanwhile been involved in deadly beatings of unarmed men, sex crimes against women and reckless car crashes resulting in criminal convictions.

“They have some fine officers here, but unfortunately they have some bullies and thugs who often run the show,” Henry Mosier, who worked for the county as a public defender for a decade before his recent retirement, said in an interview.

The County: the story of America's deadliest police