O'hara

1994 · 75380 — London: Phoenix Press 1994. 96p. bright white paperstock professionally-printed with glossy 5.75x8 inch pictorial wraps design apt but amateur. Like new. Inside skinny on British underground politics oriented to the young but not exclusively Irish of course but with a lot of earnest stuff on the Welsh underground also the Scots. O'Hara is a maverick who has studied state methodologies as well as liberation/armed insurrection tracts. He starts off analyzing a 1993 declaration from MI5 and a 1994 government lecture on state security v. "democracy." It's a little like deconstructing US government pronunciamentos but perhaps better-focussed as Britain has had genuine urban guerrillas as long as it has had state security apparatuses i.e. since about 1575. It's a complicated scenario. Sample from the text p.65: "MI5 interest in the far left hasn't precluded a close and potentially quite similar an ambitious interest in fascists. This should be no surprise: in both MI5 and Special Branch the same sub-sections investigate the far right and far left.General attitudes towards the state aside the one part of fascist activism that has definitely come in for some hype recently has been the activities of the spectral 'Combat 18' C18 to which I shall now turn." O'Hara considers this group at length analogies made to the far right in the US which is he says heavily infiltrated by American state agentry and winds up this part on p.82-3 saying "there can be little better conclusion than that reached by the Italian anarchist Sanguinetti in 1979 speaking of Italy after the Aldo Moro kidnap. He was a keen observer of the transformation of the Red Brigades into a 'Mark II' front for the Italian secret state and was himself falsely and absurdly accused of involvement with the Brigata Rossa. This I believe is the 'ideal type' future gameplan MI5 has in mind for C18 and I shall quote it Sanguinetti's text at length:" &c &c. Phoenix Press unknown books