Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) £25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book – perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch’s British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been … Read more
[…] industry. Break up Capitalist Concerns and establish British Workers Co-operatives’.(36) As if this wasn’t enough, by late 1985 it was declared in NF News that the ‘ propaganda of NF News will in future, more fully reflect our revolutionary stance’ (emphasis added).(37) So, in early 1986 it should have come as no surprise when […]
[…] Cultural Cold War was to be waged had grown directly out of their political activities during the late 1940s. Above all, the principle on which the American propaganda effort was founded, that is cultural freedom, was exactly the one they themselves had been defending ever since the 1930s.'(16) So while there were shared ideas […]
[…] 1947: We demand that the Home Secretary make full use of all powers he possesses under the existing law to prevent the spreading of Fascist and anti-semitic propaganda and we urge the Government to introduce legislation making such propaganda illegal in this country.(23) D. H. Snell, secretary of a branch of the Amalgamated Society […]
[…] career as an author only as cover for his intelligence activities.() Gallagher commented: ‘It is true. The Paris Review was a hoax, part of the CIA world-wide propaganda effort.’ Through a friend, Gallagher located James Rentchler, who at first was identified only as a retired Foreign Service officer. Gallagher agreed to approach him on […]
[…] He is well versed in the intricacies of the Information Research Department, the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other agencies of the formal apparatus of Cold War propaganda and combines this with a detailed, analytical knowledge of the British and US film industries. The author has a fascinating chapter on the screening of George […]
Flat Earth News: An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media Nick Davies London: Chatto & Windus, 2008, £17.99, For many taking a dissenting view of our national life, The Guardian and The Observer have long been part of our diet – the morning fix that sustains us in our […]
[…] not as if there was an alternative that could command enough widespread support. As Ellwood described in the case of Italy, the site of the biggest ERP propaganda effort, the diffidence of the population and resistance from government and management was not enough to derail the process. The key question for the ERP in […]
[…] later be used against the labour movement of Britain, was a well worn theme of left discourse in the 1970s, both in dramatic fiction and in left propaganda. One sees it in the canon of John Gould’s dramas for the BBC, during this period, such as The Donati Conspiracy and State of Emergency, and […]
[…] line, sometimes successfully. Quite why the rest of Whitehall put up with IRD’s incompetent meddling until 1976 remains a mystery: Carruther’s account of the politics of official propaganda does not get that deep. Anybody interested in IRD – or the wider issues of propaganda in British counter-insurgency policies – will find important new material […]
