[…] automatically dismiss someone as paranoid, one 1964 account of the Kennedy assassination (Red Roses from Texas by Nerin E. Gunn) quotes, as an example of vicious anti-JFK propaganda, a rightist broadsheet headlined ‘Kennedy Keeps Mistresses’. I am well aware that there are left conspiracy theories as ridiculous as right-wing ones. The all-time ripe example […]
[…] a useful overview of the subject and its problems – of which the chief one is the fact that many of the so-called think tanks are essentially propaganda operations – we get accounts of the Adam Smith Institute, the Social Market Foundation and the Institute for Economic Affairs. There is much interesting detail here […]
[…] the case of ‘public diplomacy’, while public does mean open, diplomacy doesn’t mean diplomacy. ‘Public diplomacy’ is a recent term for a range of activities hitherto called propaganda, public relations, advertising and psy-ops. So while this book could have been been about the CIA, IRD, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its little […]
[…] any future referendums, ‘the government should remain neutral’. Cue apoplexy among the pro single currency groups at the prospect of not being able to use the state’s propaganda assets in the promised referendum on entry into the single currency. Hugo Young, a man who rarely if ever saw a Foreign Office line he couldn’t […]
[…] many Cuban exiles. Throughout the period following Castro’s seizure of power, there has been a bloody war being fought clandestinely and more openly in the form of propaganda pumped from the USA seeking to undermine the government of Cuba. Bacardi have been at the forefront of these attempts, being linked to convicted terrorists and […]
[…] promoting their particular reactionary policies? The book has certain problems which will make it difficult for some to read, not the least the constant repetition of Francoist propaganda regarding the Spanish Civil War; and it contains the following statement regarding the war in the former Yugoslavia, on p. 201 ‘Naturally, the Vatican feared Serbia […]
[…] PRA with the left. But by using the same methods of collecting information — garbage surveillance, infiltration of target groups, and the use of guilt-by-association in their propaganda — each of these three groups has perverted itself with clandestinism and denunciation for its own sake. This opinion of mine is based on statements from […]
[…] Mary Whitehouse case against the film ‘Scum’, which now obliges the IBA to vet potentially controversial programmes. Objections came from the Oman Government via Sultan of Oman’s propaganda adviser, Anthony Ashworth, ex IRD. Observer 29 July. See also Observer 26 June for events leading up to this. More police raids on bookshops reported in […]
[…] Elsewhere the proceedings of a RUSI conference (British and American Approaches to Intelligence edited by Ken Robertson) gets praise, and Bob Woodward’s Veil gets slagged. This is propaganda. Our (ie US, NATO) intelligence services are good things; the Soviet version is a bad thing. Story ends. But it is nicely done and by the […]
[…] to this test, millions of volumes were at risk of turning into dust; but if the dust didn’t get them they might spontaneously combust, claimed the 1987 propaganda film Slow Fires. By repeatedly presenting such untruths library administrators attracted millions of dollars of public money which was used to dispose of the very material […]
