Clockwork Orange: The continuing project

Sorry for the lack of posting; I've got stuff to do. But I did want to direct your attention to the new project undertaken by Adam Curtis, the famed British documentarian who gave us The Power of Nightmares. It seems to be called Bugger.

It ties in with a lot of books I've been re-reading lately -- books about the CIA's James Jesus Angleton and his British followers. As you know, I think JJA masterminded the plot against JFK. But the Angletonians in the UK, as personified by Peter Wright, masterminded a plot of their own against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and against the former head of MI5 Roger Hollis.

Both were suspected of being Soviet spies. And in both cases, the evidence was non-existent.

All of that nonsense ultimately traced back to the international cult of Angleton. Angleton himself, like Joe McCarthy, was a drunk. It's odd how substance abuse plays such a large role in right-wing fantasyland.

The British aspect of this intrigue is a tale best told in two books I highly recommend, David Leigh's The Wilson Plot and Smear!, a masterwork by Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorrill, the founders of Lobster. (Ramsay and Dorrill has since had an acrimonious split.) Curtis seems ready to delve into this territory, but -- as it often the case with him -- he casts his net much wider. Perhaps too wide.

The plot against Wilson was, amusingly enough, code-named Clockwork Orange. If you care to get "Wikipedia deep" into the matter, go here and then here and then here.

Is this history relevant to our time? Of course. Angletonism is alive and well -- in fact, it is a driving force within the contemporary Tea Party right.  One might consider Angleton's mail-opening program to be the forerunner of the NSA's current outrages. Every time you see a right-wing blogger (or a pundit of the Ann Coulter school) speak as though all Democrats are secret bolshies, you're hearing from the ghost of Angleton.

Clockwork Orange never died. 

More to come...