The Blog of Ian Pace, pianist, musicologist, political animal. A place for thoughts, reflections, links, both trivial and not so trivial. Main website is at http://www.ianpace.com . Contact e-mail ian@ianpace.com.
An important new blog article was posted by Tom Griffin on Tuesday (Tom Griffin, ‘From Kincora to PIE: Why the abuse inquiry needs access to intelligence documents’, August 5th, 2014), relating to recent reports concerning abuse at the Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, about which I earlier blogged here. In particular, Griffin’s article noted a mention in Paul Foot’s book Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan, 1989) of an article by Dr Morris Fraser (also known as Roderick Fraser), a child psychologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, who was also connected to the Paedophile Information Exchange and later to the Azimuth Trust, who was convicted of multiple offences against children in several countries (beginning in the early 1970s) and also had connections with the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and various European paedophile groups. He nonetheless often appeared or was cited on the subject of the plight of children during the troubles in Northern Ireland, and was the author of and Children in Conflict (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973) and The Death of Narcissus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), the latter a sympathetic Freudian analysis of paedophile desire as represented in literature, which continues to be cited, for example, in the introduction by Anthony Curtis to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers (London: Penguin Books, 1986) (see here for a sample). I will blog in more detail on Fraser at a later date; for now, I would recommend people read the Spotlight links given above, and in particular watch the following film about the Azimuth Trust.
The citation occurs in one of the documents belonging to Colin Wallace included in the appendix to Foot’s book. One should be wary about assuming too much from this, as it is only a citation of an article, but it opens up the possibility, suspected for a while by some, of a link between Fraser (and thus also PIE, NAMBLA, the Azimuth Trust, and various other networks in several countries) and the Kincora abuse scandal. I am reproducing the appendix from Foot’s book here, which was not included in my earlier post, for this reason.
Many voices have been raised in the midst of the plans for an abuse inquiry rightly insisting that the many unanswered questions about the dreadful abuse scandal at the Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast should also be addressed.
At a later date, I will collate in chronological order a wide range of newspaper articles past and present on Kincora; for now, one should look at the extensive collection at the Spotlight blog, and an equally important collection of pieces at the Needle blog, not least in terms of much material relating to former London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s comments on the affair. On recent calls, I would strongly recommend the below articles, not least for the highly principled words on video (in the Belfast Telegraph article from July 15th) of Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt.
There are two standard texts on Kincora. One is Chris Moore’s The Kincora Scandal: Political Cover-Up and Intrigue in Northern Ireland, with foreword by Clifford Smyth (Dublin: Marina Books, 1996), which can be accessed by those with Scribd access here. The other is an earlier text, Paul Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan, 1989), a section from which I earlier posted here. Here I include all the passages from the book specifically relating to Kincora.
The following passage comes from Paul Foot, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 394-395.
If a secret state like this is allowed to grow unchecked all democratic politicians are at risk. it is no use right-wing politicians imagining that they themselves will be safe from the secret state, perhaps because they have more in common with each other politically. The monster, once fed, will grow hungrier. The upholders of the secret state regard all democratic politicians as traitors to the true cause, and will attack them just as readily as they attacked Harold Wilson or Merlyn Rees in the past. Early on in the miners’ strike of 1984, a vile rumour about the personal behaviour of the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, started to circulate among journalists. The information was, as I eventually discovered, completely untrue. But it had about it just enough of the ‘ring of truth’ to make it sound credible. Anyone who believed it for an instant would have wanted Leon Brittan removed from office at once. After checking that the information was wrong, I then strove for many days to find its source. It was nowhere to be found. Everybody had ‘heard it from somewhere else’. Sometimes they could remember where they heard it, but that source would prove as maddeningly vague about his source – and so on, endlessly to nothing. Fortunately for Mr Brittan, the rumour never got into print. But where did it come from? So untrue was it that it could not have originated in that part of Britain where the ‘event’ was said to have taken place. It must have been entirely made up. But who could or would have made it up, save those same operators in the Intelligence service who, perhaps, did not want a Jew with a faintly liberal reputation to be leading the government offensive against the miners and in nominal control of MI5. This was by no means the first time that anti-Semitic propaganda against the large number of Jews in Mrs Thatcher’s circle has insidiously circulated among journalists and politicians.
I am in the process of preparing longer bibliographies of both published and online articles relating to issues of institutionalised abuse, specifically the areas on which I have concentrated – abuse in music schools and private schools, the Paedophile Information Exchange, and abuse involving politicians. Having recently reblogged a large number of articles from the Spotlight blog, I realise my site may not be so easy to navigate, so I am providing here a list with links of all my significant original articles.
Desiring Progress 