Gone but not forgotten… (Donald Trump book reviews)

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] as Smock was concerned, America was already suffering from ‘a serious political virus’ when the pandemic arrived. ‘Trumpism was spread from person to person with lies, deception, propaganda, and with bullying and smear tactics’. Trump’s rallies were important spreaders of the infection. As a ‘disease of the mind’, it could also be spread by […]

An accidental tourist? A British connection to the death of Otto Warmbier

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] on 2 January 2016. It was alleged that, in the early hours of New Years Day, the then 21 year old Otto Warmbier had stolen a state propaganda poster1 from a ‘staff only’ area of the hotel (the Yanggakdo Hotel, the primary hotel for international tourists) where his tour group was staying. As the […]

In the Thick of It: The private diaries of a minister Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] ‘Netanyahu is being feted in Number 10, meeting the PM, followed by lunch, and then we let him use the FCO media suite to peddle his pro-settlement propaganda. We are supine, lickspittle, insignificant cowards. I am ashamed of my government. Instead of sucking up to him we should have taken offence and called him […]

Explaining the Iraq War; Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence by Frank P. Harvey

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Lawrence Eagleburger – had dismissed administration claims of a dramatic rise in threat level,4 hence the virtually unprecedented efforts by the Bush regime in perception management and propaganda. This is downplayed by Harvey, as is the avowedly revolutionary transformation in US strategy brought in by Donald Rumsfeld to the Pentagon. The centrepiece here was […]

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] civilians in the process – indeed continuing to kill them even while the evacuation of Kabul was underway. This pretence of concern for women’s rights is a propaganda distraction intended to cover up both the scale of the defeat suffered by America and its allies. They also want to conceal the fact that all […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] actual trends in the country and offering them a new perspective on Russia’. It looks rather as if the gallery is a Russian equivalent of the cultural propaganda work carried out abroad by the British Council. How ironic that it staged an exhibition about the values of good housing and ‘alternative models of organising […]

Dangerous Hero, and, Boris Johnson

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] PalgraveMacmillan, 2018), anti-Semitism does not even appear in the index. Their study of the 2019 general election will, one suspects, be very different in this respect. 1 propaganda assault mounted on Corbyn from all sides, one can safely assume that the book played only a very small part in preventing that outcome. To save […]

Thatcher’s Secret War by Clive Bloom

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] rogue elements in the government, military and secret services seemed to have free rein to distort facts and even kill opposition voices under the camouflage of black propaganda’. (p. 1) Well, yes, something like that, even if that is oddly expressed. But while the author’s thesis is generally correct (we might argue about ‘rogue […]

Miscellaneous reviews

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] end of the book his unwillingness to use such a term struck me as being at least as strange as the territory he is ‘mapping’. Conspiracy Cinema Propaganda, politics and paranoia David Ray Carter Headpress; UK £13.99 US $19.95, p/b www.worldheadpress.com How things have changed! Not so long ago ‘conspiracy cinema’ would have meant […]

Labour Takes Power: The Denis MacShane Diaries

Lobster Issue 88 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: […] his diary! As far as New Labour’s foreign policy was concerned, MacShane discusses the situation in the Middle East, the demonization of Saddam Hussein by the ‘ propaganda machine’, and ‘the plain fact . . . that overthrowing a tyrant in the Middle East just opens Pandora’s Box and we have no politics of […]

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