John Simkin

One more question John, whay do YOU think of these theories? Do you think Wilson was a Soviet agent? Do you think the KGB killed Gaitskel to make him PM?

I do not think Wilson was a Soviet agent. KGB had a successful strategy of leaking information to cause maximum disruption in Britain's secret service. Right-wing members of the organization wanted to believe that communists had infiltrated the Labour Party. This justified their attempts to overthrow Wilson once he became prime minister. Nor do I believe Gaitskell was murdered. My main interest in this case, as with the JFK assassination, is the role of secret service agencies in politics.

See:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=18278

Going on pure memory here, but as I recall, the Connery Bond films were pretty non-ideological. The villains were part of amorphous oreganizations like SMERSH and SPECTRE. The Roger Moore Bonds were explicitly anti-soviet and anti-communist.

I don't know that there's any big point to be made of this......just sayin' .

We do know that Ian Fleming had right-wing views. So did his wife, Ann, who was having an affair with Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party between 1955-1963.

Others know more about this than I but LBJ was very shrewd and I doubt he would telegraph anything like that to anyone outside his trusted circle and especially not one of his biggest enemies. Johnson did apparently want his buddy Connolly with him and Yarborough with JFK but that is not suspicious, who would you rather go for ride with, a close friend or someone you hate?

I definitely would not want to ride in a car with someone who might be a target for a shooter.

JFK and LHO were reading one of Fleming's novels about this time.

Reading or re-reading the original Bond books is a wonderful way to while away the hours. These were the ultimate beach/holiday books of the 1950's and 1960's. Both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were each reading an Ian Fleming novel at the time of the assassination in November of 1963. The books are full of politically incorrect stereotypes and crude misogyny, but are also an enormous source of sheer reading pleasure. Flemings' books are clearly to the right of the Bond Movies--Fleming is a determined anti-communist. His first villain, Le Chiffre, is a sadistic communist paymaster who works as a go- between the Soviets and radical French trade Unions.

Source:

http://americanconse...nds-london.html

Exactly right. Further details can be found in Andrew Lycett's, Ian Fleming (1996).

Ian Fleming worked for Naval Intelligence,he also met JFK at a party,were Its quoted he suggested hat he had a way to get rid of Fidel Castro, the Communist leader of Cuba. This got Kennedy's interest, since Castro had been a thorn in the side of Kennedy.Castro's beard was the key to getting at Fidel,Flemming said,without the beard,Castro's Trademark,he would look like anyone else.So Flemming told JFK to announce that they found particles of radioactivity were attracted to beards and bearded people could become radioactive and make them Sterile.This was sure to make,Macho Castro shave it off.

Much to the amusement of JFK.

Oswald was thought to be Naval Intelligence,he also depicted himself as a James Bond style character.

Ensign Kennedy was assigned to ONI,Office of Naval Intelligence.

All this is true but I was thinking of something that was happening on the day before the assassination.

What connects John Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Ian Fleming and the assassination?

Ralph Yarborough was on the left-wing of the Democratic Party in 1963. Yarborough was the only member of the Senate representing a former Confederate state to vote for every significant piece of civil rights legislation. This included the Civil Rights Act (1957) and Civil Rights Act (1960). LBJ therefore hated Yarborough and this is why he made so much fuss about where he sat in the motorcade.

Yarborough continued to be a strong critic of LBJ after he became president. This was especially true of his foreign policy.

http://www.spartacus...Kyarborough.htm

I also brought up this subject in August, 2005 (without any response):

http://educationforu...?showtopic=4780

This extract is very interesting:

Hugh Aynesworth, JFK: Breaking the News (2003)

Liberal Ralph Yarborough, for example, detested centrists such as Connally and Johnson-and with some reason. The governor and the vice president were never seen doing the senator any favors. Just the opposite. On this trip they seemed determined to put Yarborough in his place.

Connally was scheduled to host a private reception for JFK at the governor's mansion in Austin that Friday night: Yarborough was absent from the guest list.

Yarborough's response to that snub: "I want everybody to join hands in harmony for the greatest welcome to the President and Mrs. Kennedy in the history of Texas."

Then: "Governor Connally is so terribly uneducated governmentally, how could you expect anything else?"

On Thursday afternoon in Houston, Yarborough had defied Kennedy by refusing to ride in the same car with LBJ. He chose instead to be seen with Congressman Albert Thomas. In San Antonio that morning, Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood was gently nudging the senator toward Johnson's limo when Yarborough saw Congressman Henry Gonzalez, a political blood brother, and bolted toward him. "Can I ride with you, Henry?" he asked.

That evening, employees at Houston's Rice Hotel heard JFK and LBJ arguing over Yarborough in the presidential suite. Kennedy reportedly informed Johnson in strong terms that he felt Yarborough - who had much better poll numbers in Texas than Kennedy - was being mistreated, and the president was unhappy about that.

lol. Some nutter "broke" into the Leveson rooms through a supposedly-secure corridor, and called Blair a "War Criminal", accusing him of receiving money from JP Morgan to allow them to rip Iraqi banks off for £20billion....

EDIT : http://www.guardian....tors_picks=true

He was not some "nutter" he was telling the truth.

JFK Archives/Mystery Deaths

Also see Vincent Bugliosi's "Reclaiming History", pages 1012-1020.

"The vast majority of the witnesses on the various mysterious-death lists of the conspiracy theorists (e.g., Jim Marrs's book Crossfire lists 104 witnesses) weren't connected with the case in any known way whatsoever, and had absolutely nothing of any known value to say about the case. .... But of those who did have a connection -- such as Roger Craig, Earlene Roberts, Lee Bowers, and Buddy Walthers -- all of them, without exception, had already told their story, most of them on the public record, so what could possibly be achieved by killing them?" -- V. Bugliosi; Page 1018 of "Reclaiming History" (c.2007)

One of the main objectives of killing witnesses who have come forward is to stop people who also know things from coming forward.

Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party, died at the Middlesex Hospital, London, of the rare disease lupus erythematosus, on 18th January 1963. He was replaced as leader of the Labour Party by his long time enemy, Harold Wilson. Some members of MI5 believed that Wilson was a Soviet agent. Anatoli Golitsyn also told them that Gaitskell had been poisoned by the KGB.

A senior figure in MI5, Peter Wright, explained in his biography Spycatcher:

Much has been written about Harold Wilson and MI5, some of it wildly inaccurate. But as far as I am concerned, the story started with the premature death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963. Gaitskell was Wilson's predecessor as Leader of the Labour Party. I knew him personally and admired him greatly. I had met him and his family at the Blackwater Sailing Club, and I recall about a month before he died he told me that he was going to Russia.

After he died his doctor got in touch with MI5 and asked to see somebody from the Service. Arthur Martin, as the head of Russian Counterespionage, went to see him. The doctor explained that he was disturbed by the manner of Gaitskell's death. He said that Gaitskell had died of a disease called lupus disseminata, which attacks the body's organs. He said that it was rare in temperate climates and that there was no evidence that Gaitskell had been anywhere recently where he could have contracted the disease.

Arthur Martin suggested that I should go to Porton Down, the chemical and microbiological laboratory for the Ministry of Defense. I went to see the chief doctor in the chemical warfare laboratory. Dr. Ladell, and asked his advice. He said that nobody knew how one contracted lupus. There was some suspicion that it might be a form of fungus and he did hot have the foggiest idea how one would infect somebody with the disease. I came back and made my report in these terms.

The next development was that Golitsin told us quite independently that during the last few years of his service he had had some contacts with Department 13, which was known as the Department of Wet Affairs in the KGB. This department was responsible for organizing assassinations. He said that just before he left he knew that the KGB were planning a high-level political assassination in Europe in order to get their man into the top place. He did not know which country it was planned in but he pointed out that the chief of Department 13 was a man called General Rodin, who had been in Britain for many years and had just returned on promotion to take up the job, so he would have had good knowledge of the political scene in England.

There is in fact another possibility. Gaitskell was having an affair with Anne Fleming, the wife of Ian Fleming. Had the novelist used his contacts in the SIS to kill Gaitskell? Was Peter Wright's story part of a cover-up.

Interestingly, in 1968 Wright became involved with Cecil King, the publisher of the Daily Mirror, in a plot to bring down Wilson's government and replace it with a coalition led by Lord Mountbatten.

http://www.spartacus...TUgaitskell.htm

David Gold talking about why it was important to win promotion this year: "It would have cost probably another £30m.... If you own 150 oil wells, then it's no problem. If you own 150 Ann Summers shops... it is."

For the first-time I am beginning to believe that senior members of Murdoch's empire will be held to account. Cover-ups are always the easier bit of any conspiracy to proove. I cannot see how Rebekah Brooks is going to get out of this one. Interestingly. the strategy of David Cameron a year ago was to argue that he was a close friend of her husband, Charlie Brooks and that he spent time with Rebekah via her husband. This was not true. Although they both went to Eton they were not friends at school. Cameron was three years younger than Brooks at school (three years is a lot when you are at Eton). This was a cover-story. Yet, by arresting and charging Charlie, Cameron is linked even closer to the case.

Thank you for this thread, Mr Simkin.

I came across this study on Dorian Gray a while ago as a part of my De Profundis research. It's an interesting reading material.

The Evil in Dorian Gray:

A Psychoanalytic Study of the Protagonist in The Picture of Dorian Gray

http://dooku.miun.se...final essay.pdf

Thank you for the link. It is interesting that Wilde later came to change his view of art. For example, in 1898 Wilde published The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a poem inspired by his prison experiences. It included an account of the hanging of Charles Thomas Wooldridge (1866–1897), a trooper of the Royal Horse Guards, who had murdered his wife while suffering from mental illness. G. K. Chesterton described the poem as "a cry for common justice and brotherhood very much deeper, more democratic" than other forms of protest.

Naturalism

http://www.online-li.../naturalism.php

Oscar Wilde

and the Aesthetic Movement, and the Cult of Beauty in Art and Design

Report of the lecture given by

Dr Anne Anderson BA PhD FSA

on 26 January 2011

http://www.cranleigh...org/rev1101.htm

Thank you for that. It is a shame that most of the writers mentioned are not read very much today. I am a great fan of people like Frank Norris, Jack London and David Graham Phillips.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jnorris.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JlondonJ.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAphillipsDG.htm

In 1889 Oscar Wilde met twenty-three year old poet, John Gray. He immediately fell in love with Gray. Wilde later described him as being: "Wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world." A mutual friend, Lionel Johnson, said that he had the "face of a fifteen" year-old boy. George Bernard Shaw recalled that he was "one of the more abject of Wilde's disciples".

Wilde decided to write a story that would revive a debate that he had with James McNeill Whistler, four years earlier. Wilde had argued that poetry and prose were superior to painting and sculpture because the writer could make use of all experience rather than a part: "The statue is concerned in one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone."

Wilde also wanted to challenge the new naturalism movement that was headed by the novelist Émile Zola. Wilde argued: "Zola's characters have their dreary vices, and their still drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and imaginative power. We don't want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders." He suggested that "the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art".

The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20th June 1890. The story tells of a young man named Dorian Gray (John Gray), who is being painted by Basil Hallward. The artist is fascinated by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him. Lord Henry Wotton meets Dorian at Hallward's studio. Espousing a new hedonism, Wotton suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses.

When Dorian Gray sees the portrait he remarks: "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day in June... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that - for that - I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!" In the story Dorian's wish is fulfilled.

Richard Ellmann has argued: "To give the hero of his novel the name of Gray was a form of courtship. Wilde probably named his hero not to point to a model, but to flatter Gray by identifying him with Dorian. Gray took the hint, and in letters to Wilde signed himself Dorian. Their intimacy was common talk... Wilde and Gray were assumed to be lovers, and there seems no reason to doubt it." As a result some critics believed the book, named after his lover, promoted homosexuality. On 30th June, 1890 The Daily Chronicle suggested that Wilde's story contains "one element... which will taint every young mind that comes in contact with it."

The most hostile review came from Charles Whibley in The Scots Observer. "Why go grubbing in muck heaps? The world is fair, and the proportion of healthy-minded men and honest women to those that are foul, fallen and unnatural, is great. Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten; and while The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he contributes to Lippincott's is ingenious, interesting, full of cleverness, and plainly the work of a man of letters, it is false art - for its interest is medico-legal; it is false to human nature - for its hero is a devil; it is false to morality - for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity. The story which deals with matters fitted only for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera is discreditable alike to author and editor. Mr Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals."

Whibley's comments about "outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys" was a reference to the so-called Cleveland Street scandal. This was particularly offensive to Wilde. The scandal involved Arthur Somerset, the son of the 8th Duke of Beaufort and the Henry James FitzRoy, the son of the 7th Duke of Grafton, who were said to have frequented a homosexual brothel off the Tottenham Court Road. According to Harford Montgomery Hyde, the author of Oscar Wilde (1975), this was "where telegraph-boys from the General Post Office were able to earn additional money by going to bed with the Cleveland Street establishment's aristocratic customers." Wilde saw this as an attempt to link him with a homosexual scandal.

Wilde wrote to William Ernest Henley, the editor of the newspaper: "Your reviewer suggests that I do not make it sufficiently clear whether I prefer virtue to wickedness or wickedness to virtue. An artist, sir, has no ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colours on his palette are to the painter. They are no more, and they are no less. He sees that by their means a certain artistic effect can be produced and he produces it. Iago may be morally horrible and Imogen stainlessly pure. Shakespeare, as Keats said, had as much delight in creating the one as he had in creating the other."

Wilde was concerned by the suggestions that he was trying to promote an illegal act. He decided to turn the short-story into a novel by adding six chapters. He also took the opportunity to remove some of the passages that indicated that The Picture of Dorian Gray was about homosexual love. Wilde also added a Preface that was a series of aphorisms that attempted to answer some of the criticisms of the original story. This included: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written."

Wilde also used the Preface to attack the naturalism movement: "No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style... No artist is ever morbid... Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril... The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim."

You can see a picture of John Gray here:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/WILDgray.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jwilde.htm

David Cameron texted Rebekah Brooks before she quit NI, claims biography.

http://www.guardian....-rebekah-brooks

David Cameron texted Rebekah Brooks in the week she quit as News International's chief executive over the phone-hacking scandal to tell her to keep her head up, it has been claimed in an updated biography of the prime minister.

In a sign of his closeness to some of the most controversial News International chiefs Cameron told Brooks that she would get through her difficulties, just days before she stood down.

It has also emerged that he agreed to met her at a point-to-point horse race so long as they were not seen together, and that he also pressed the Metropolitan police to review the Madeleine McCann case in May last year following pressure from Brooks.

The prime minister then sent an intermediary to Brooks to explain why contacts had to be brought to an abrupt halt after she resigned. The authors say the gist of that message was 'Sorry I couldn't have been as loyal to you as you have been to me, but Ed Miliband had me on the run'."

The revelation comes in the week that Cameron's closeness to Brooks will come under intense scrutiny when she gives evidence to the Leveson inquiry on Friday. It is not known whether precise details of her text exchanges will be published by the inquiry, but it is thought that at certain points she was in repeated daily text contact.

Claire Tomalin is an outstanding biographer. I highly recommend Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1991), Shelley and His World (1992), Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987), Jane Austen: A Life (2000), Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002), Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2007) and Charles Dickens: A Life (2011).

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jtomalin.htm

I have recently redesigned my website. This now makes it possible to promote books, articles, etc. on every one of my 11,000 pages (over 6 million page views a month). For example, I have a book of the week that appears on every page. I am currently displaying Peter Janney’s book Mary’s Mosaic. Feel free to send me your books when they come out for consideration for this spot.

I also have my Spartacus Educational Facebook page update on every page. This enables me to promote books, articles, etc. on every page. My Twitter feed is also on every page. Again, send me details if you want to get anything out to a mass audience.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/

Interesting article on Harrison Livingstone.

http://www.montereyherald.com/local/ci_20563866/kennedy-assassination-is-authors-lifes-work

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTlytton.htm

Several phrases used by the writer in his novels have become clichés. This includes, "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "talent does what it can, genius does what it must" and "the pen is mightier than the sword".

Some researchers might be interested in the following email:

My parents went to Arlington Heights High School in the late 50's.

Bobby and Billy Hale knew Lee Harvey Oswald as did most of the students at AHHS because he made sure everyone knew who he was and what he believed in. I asked dad if he ever remembered if the Hale brothers would've had a run in with him. Dad described an incident where Oswald wanted to join the football team and was turned down. He really made an ass out of himself on the field at practice in front of the team. The Hale boys were there.

Kathleen was friends with my mom. She was a shy girl and was very much in love with Bobby Hale. But...all the kids in mom and dads crowd knew that John Connelly would never accept their relationship as this didn't benefit him socially or politically.

So...they did what most teens did at that time...get pregnant and sneak to Oklahoma and get married. They did and then ran to Florida due to their parents finding out. John did not know that she was pregnant.

Now...this is what happened according to the kids back home who were "in the know".

I B Hale found them using his contacts then Connelly and Hale flew into Florida and Connelly confronted Kathleen alone and informed her that if she didn't come back with him and annul the marriage never to see or speak to Bobby again that she would be disowned...she would have no family...no money...no chance at a life and that Bobby's father was in agreement. They would be destitute.

Bobby was out looking for her as their neighbor told him that she ran out of their apartment after two men had stopped by. Bobby had suspected what had happened and was frantic. When he came home...the apt door was open...he heard her in the bedroom...walked in the door just as she pulled the trigger.

Bobby was never the same. He became angry and very antisocial.... He went off the deep end and never came up for air.

Everyone was devastated by the needless loss. The spin doctors went in to full time damage control so that only their close classmates knew the truth of what really happened.

Now...you know too.

It has emerged that the Conservative MP Louise Mensch was the Murdoch's main protector on the culture, media and sport select committee. In the televised sessions she appeared to be highly critical of illegal activities employed by News International. However, according to Paul Farrelly, one of the Labour MPs on the committee, in private, she always argued that the two Murdochs were not responsible and led the Tories into voting against whether Murdoch is a fit and proper person to run an international company. Is it for money or do the Murdoch press have something on Mensch. After all, we now know that the Nes of the World reporters were told to dig up dirt on the committee members. This included employing private investigators to spy on these members.