Banana Republicans

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Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] £7.99   This is well written, detailed and documented. The authors describe how American business funds the American right and how that right operates: its think-tanks, its propaganda outfits, its hired hack journalists, its PR firms; and how it commissions and disseminates phoney research, runs smear campaigns and psy-ops, gerrymanders electoral districts, and steals […]

All the news that fits

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Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

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 […]

The Cecil King coup plot

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] 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 […]

Demos

Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)

[…] Independent 1994-96 at the time Mandelson was an advisor. Jim Heartfield describes Geoff Mulgan and Jacques’ relationship as that ‘between the old Central Committee Chair and his propaganda officer’. Geoff MulganInitially worked at the Greater London Council, he was a 1986-87 Harkness Fellow (which reinforces Anglo-American links) at MIT, and has led Demos since […]

Behind right-wing conspiracy theories

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] 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 […]

Briefly: Ideas. Blitz to Blair. Covert Network. etc

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] 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 […]

Fifth Column

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] weak, demoralised and out of control – MI5 was clearly not regarded as much better. All this was positioned in the context of a history of simplistic propaganda that London had become a haven for Islamic extremists – the trite nonsense exemplified by Melanie Phillips’ too easy adoption of the French propaganda term ‘Londonistan’. […]

Notes from the underground part 3: British fascism 1983-6

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[…] that man must again learn to live in harmony with the forces of nature instead of waging constant war against them.’ (28) The practical (as opposed to propaganda) consequences were few, however. In 1985 one Michael Fishwick (later editor of NF News) was expelled from the Hunt Saboteurs Association. Enquiries made of the HSA […]

Who’s afraid of the KGB

Lobster Issue 6 (1984)

[…] pseudo-social science – ‘a longitudinal study’ etc, complete with graphs and diagrams – the authors repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot (feet?) by citing examples of Soviet propaganda ‘falsehoods’ which are, to anyone outside the ranks of the fruit-cake right-wing, manifestly true. For example, in the study of Soviet propaganda themes 1976-1979, they tell […]

Hess, ‘Hess’ and the ‘peace Party’ (Book review)

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] off were not the same pilot and plane that arrived. Somewhere en route a switch had been made. In the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, there are a number of entries after Hess’s flight to Britain expressing his bafflement that no propaganda was being made with Hess. (Hess was bunged in […]

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