Kyle Burke's REVOLUTIONARIES FOR THE RIGHT

[Anthony Thorne]

Interesting review, thanks.

There might be others but the longest discussion of the American Security Council that I know of is here.

https://isgp-studies.com/american-security-council

[David Andrews]

Anthony, I'm reading the Google Books edit of Revolutionaries for the Right - it's all I can afford right now. It's premature to judge a book with absent chapters; the main chapters on Central America in the 1980s, for instance, are missing. However, I notice a seeming complete innocence of the financing anti-Communism through drug dealing. Is the entire book devoid of this aspect? Not even the Rockefeller family could have underwritten the Contra War without drug trafficking. (And why would they?)

Some figures well ensconced in the drug trade - Jiang Jieshi in China and Taiwan, and a certain US general well known to the Contra effort - are never mentioned apart from their relations with straight-up financial backers and zealotry leagues. Didn't any of the latter drop their funding and associations with the Contras when the Oliver North drug scandal surfaced? Did any groups support drug financing?

I understand that the book is an academic study of anti-Communist organizations in the west, but these covert wars, and Vietnam, weren't fought in a vacuum free of crime. It seems that the nexus of dirty money and clean money is inseparable from this story. Do the BCCI, Nugan-Hand Bank, and other corrupt financial institutions even make appearances? Otherwise, this is less a history than a phenomenology.

[Anthony Thorne]

I can't answer those questions as I haven't got around to reading the book yet unfortunately. I'm starting a read through of Peter Dale Scott's two most recent (pre DALLAS '63) books, and the area you described seems to be covered in depth in those. Will return to Burke's book when I have a chance later.

[David Andrews]

I can't answer those questions as I haven't got around to reading the book yet unfortunately. I'm starting a read through of Peter Dale Scott's two most recent (pre DALLAS '63) books, and the area you described seems to be covered in depth in those. Will return to Burke's book when I have a chance later.

When you have time, could you drop the names of those PD Scott books you mention? Scott is quite prolific. THANKS

[Anthony Thorne]

The two Scott books are AMERICAN WAR MACHINR and AMERICAN DEEP STATE. Chapters from each are floating around as solo articles, I think at Asia Times and elsewhere, but the books offer a lot more material.

[David Andrews]

Thanks, Anthony. I've been listening to podcasts featuring Kevin Ryan, and his views on Richard Clarke and others in the Clinton Admin rather reinforce my views on John O'Neill.