Download or read book The Paranoid Apocalypse written by Richard Landes and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text re-examines 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion's' popularity, investigating why it has persisted, as well as larger questions about the success of conspiracy theories even in the face of claims that they are blatantly counterfactual and irrational.
Download or read book The Paranoid Style in American Politics written by Richard Hofstadter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-06-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.
Download or read book Plots against Russia written by Eliot Borenstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original and timely assessment of cultural expressions of paranoia in contemporary Russia, Eliot Borenstein samples popular fiction, movies, television shows, public political pronouncements, internet discussions, blogs, and religious tracts to build a sense of the deep historical and cultural roots of konspirologiia that run through Russian life. Plots against Russia reveals through dramatic and exciting storytelling that conspiracy and melodrama are entirely equal-opportunity in modern Russia, manifesting themselves among both pro-Putin elites and his political opposition. As Borenstein shows, this paranoid fantasy until recently characterized only the marginal and the irrelevant. Now, through its embodiment in pop culture, the expressions of a conspiratorial worldview are seen everywhere. Plots against Russia is an important contribution to the fields of Russian literary and cultural studies from one of its preeminent voices.
Download or read book A Culture of Conspiracy written by Michael Barkun and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unravelling the genealogies and permutations of conspiracist worldviews, this work shows how this web of urban legends has spread among sub-cultures on the Internet and through mass media, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture.
Download or read book Waiting for the Apocalypse A Memoir of Faith and Family written by Veronica Chater and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-02-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing up Catholic in a family where the reforms of Vatican II are seen as the work of Satan. It is 1972, and Veronica Chater's parents believe that Vatican II's liberalization has corrupted the Catholic Church, inviting the Holy Chastisement—an apocalypse prophesied by three shepherds in Fatima, Portugal. To spare his family this horror, Veronica's father quits the highway patrol, sells everything, and moves the family of eight from California to an isolated village near Fatima. But Portugal is no Catholic utopia, and the family schleps home penniless to join the nascent Catholic counterrevolution: attending the Latin Mass in truck garages and abandoned buildings, serving meals to religious soldiers, breeding a new member of the faithful every year. As Veronica comes of age on the fringes of the American Dream, she rebels against a fanaticism that forbids anything modern—clothes, movies, or music. This is the story, both sad and funny, of a family torn apart by religion and brought back together in spite of the injuries it inflicted on itself.
Download or read book Paradigms of Paranoia written by Samuel Chase Coale and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ideas of Apocalypse and Conspiracy Theory in Contemporary Cinema written by Lea Weller and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Sociology - Media, Art, Music, grade: A, University of Derby, course: BA in Sociology and Film and Television Studies, language: English, abstract: The definition of apocalypse described by Burgess and Nur (2008) is “The battle at the end of the world, as described in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. Sometimes also used to describe any religiously charged major societal upheaval” (Burgess and Nur, 2008). This essay will investigate this definition and see if it fits contemporary beliefs. Ideas of the apocalypse have fascinated the public throughout history. Every society has different ideas or predictions about a global cataclysm that will end the world. The end was once interpreted as a supernatural event in which the Earth would be purified by a Deity or divine God. Scientific beliefs about a natural cataclysmic event that will end the world compete with religious theories. During the investigation of Roland Emmerich’s film of 2009, 2012, Solar flares, pole shifts, Earth crust displacement, the Rapture, the Mayan Calendar, the Hopis all give detailed accounts of how the Earth will be destroyed. 2012 shows the conflicting ideas of contemporary society; and this essay will show the various theories and how they act as a guide for surviving the end of the world. The theme of conspiracy theory is also extremely evident throughout society today and these theories are exposed in 2012.
Download or read book Notes from an Apocalypse written by Mark O'Connell and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future, by the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine. “Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.” —Esquire We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.
Download or read book One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses written by Lucy Corin and published by McSweeney's. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucy Corin's "eye popping, enlightening read" (Publishers Weekly), now in paperback. At the heart of Lucy Corin’s dazzling collection are one hundred apocalypses: visions of loss and destruction, vexation and crisis, revelation and revolution, sometimes only a few lines long. In these haunting and wickedly funny stories, an apocalypse might come in the form of the end of a relationship or the end of the world, but they all expose the tricky landscape of our longing for a clean slate. In three longer stories, contemporary American life is playfully, if disturbingly, distorted: the rite of passage for adolescent girls involves choosing the madman who will accompany them into adulthood; California burns to the ground while, on the east coast, life carries on; and a soldier returns home broke from war to encounter a witch who extends a dangerous offer. At once mournful and explosively energetic, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses is "deeply rooted in the politics and upheaval of our times" (Lambda Literary).
Download or read book Pop Apocalypse written by Lee Konstantinou and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States and its Freedom Coalition allies are conducting serial invasions across the globe, including an attack on the anti-capitalist rebels of Northern California. The Middle East—now a single consumerist Caliphate led by Lebanese pop singer Caliph Fred—is in an uproar after an attack on the al-Aqsa Mosque gets televised on the Holy Land Channel. The world is on the brink of a total radioactive, no-survivors war, and humankind's last hope is Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr., celebrity heir, debauched party animal, and Elvis impersonation scholar. But Eliot's got his own problems. His evangelical dad is breeding red heifers in anticipation of the Rapture. Eliot's dissertation is in the toilet. And he has a doppelgänger. An evil doppelgänger.
Download or read book American Literature and the Long Downturn written by Dan Sinykin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apocalypse shapes the experience of millions of Americans. Not because they face imminent cataclysm, however true this is, but because apocalypse is a story they tell themselves. It offers a way out of an otherwise irredeemably unjust world. Adherence to it obscures that it is a story, rather than a description of reality. And it is old. Since its origins among Jewish writers in the first centuries BCE, apocalypse has recurred as a tempting and available form through which to express a sense of hopelessness. Why has it appeared with such force in the US now? What does it mean? This book argues that to find the meaning of our apocalyptic times we need to look at the economics of the last five decades, from the end of the postwar boom. After historian Robert Brenner, this volume calls this period the long downturn. Though it might seem abstract, the economics of the long downturn worked its way into the most intimate experiences of everyday life, including the fear that there would be no tomorrow, and this fear takes the form of 'neoliberal apocalypse'. The varieties of neoliberal apocalypse—horror at the nation's commitment to a racist, exclusionary economic system; resentment about threats to white supremacy; apprehension that the nation has unleashed a violence that will consume it; claustrophobia within the limited scripts of neoliberalism; suffocation under the weight of debt—together form the discordant chord that hums under American life in the twenty-first century. For many of us, for different reasons, it feels like the end is coming soon and this book explores how we came to this, and what it has meant for literature.
Download or read book Love in the Time of the Apocalypse written by Gregory Blecha and published by Gregory Blecha. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though a dystopian novel hovering over the imminent collapse of American civilization at the hands of a techno-authoritarian state, "Love in the Time of the Apocalypse" is also a book about the triumph of love and humor over the fatal gravitas of life and death. It is part future nightmare part whimsical farce of the present. Love in the Time of the Apocalypse is a work of playful conspiritorial pop-delirium and pastiche full of lovable terrorists, state run breeding houses, Amish casinos, vulgar action scenes, the antichrist, tongue and cheek hyper-masculinity ("perhaps sit-ups can save the world") and a bourgeois love story to top it all. Readers who love Science Fiction, Dystopian Literature, and Conspiracy Theory will find this book chock full of fresh and clever fare. The speculative details are much more subtle than works on the post-apocalypse. The reader can feel both drawn into a bit of a future shock while at the same time remain anchored in a familiar, albeit, terrifying present. Blecha has a way of pulling from current trends of government suppression of freedoms and stretching them ever so softly to their possible conclusion. Thus, rather than a world of utter totalitarianism such at Orwell's 1984, we are presented with a more plausible, more friendly fascism that a society founded on consumerism and entertainment might bring about. Without coming across as a writer with an agenda, Gregory Blecha offers a strong but playful critique of State power, the smothering inefficiency and corruption of bureaucracy, and the role of the over-stimulated, under-critical herd of middle class consumers and middle managers of a collapsing North America. Tramps,plague victims, nihilists and nymphomaniacs along with the main character, a WASP drawn into their exciting world, make for the heroes of the story. The villains are the lifeless and systematic processes of the Federal Government, the Department of Health, the Department of Overpopulation, and the technological control systems of modern life, and yet even these are rendered with an air of playfulness that allows the reader to smile as the world comes crumbling down.
Download or read book Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times written by Alison McQueen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apocalyptic rhetoric creates dangerous politics; three great thinkers show how clear-eyed realism is our best hope.
Download or read book The Lie that Wouldn t Die written by Hadassa Ben-Itto and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the libels that have served as a means of incitement of hate against Jews, and as intellectual justification of anti-Semitism, the myth of the so-called 'Jewish Conspiracy' to gain domination of the whole world, as embodied in the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is probably the most devious and the most dangerous. Previously only analyzed in academic, footnoted studies, the history of the Protocols is presented here by Judge Hadassa Ben-Itto in an eminently readable, fascinating account, telling the stories of the numerous people involved over the hundred years that the forgery has existed. Above all, this is the story of a judge who follows the Protocols into lawyers' chambers and into courtrooms in Switzerland, in South Africa, in Germany, in the United States and in Russia, and presents the reader with a detailed critical analysis of legal proceedings which culminated in fascinating courtroom drama. The truth is revealed again and again, but the lie wouldn't die.
Download or read book The Paranoid Vision written by Mark Dillof and published by . This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike clinical paranoia, the paranoid vision is contagious; it can infect an organization and even an entire society. It hatches the disturbing conspiracy theories and apocalyptic fantasies that drive the thinking of cult members, political fanatics, terrorists and genocidal murderers. No outlook on life is more malevolent, nor more dangerous. Might it hold the key to understanding human evil? Mark Dillof explores the paranoid vision from a variety of perspectives. He even contrasts it to the comic vision. Finally, he contends that paranoids may be right: there really does exist a conspiracy; it’s to keep us ignorant of who we are and what life is all about.
Download or read book Plotting Apocalypse written by Jennie Chapman and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the not-too-distant future, and the rapture has occurred. Every born-again Christian on the planet has, without prior warning, been snatched from the earth to meet Christ in the heavens, while all those without the requisite faith have been left behind to suffer the wrath of the Antichrist as the earth enters into its final days. This is the premise that animates the enormously popular cultural phenomenon that is the Left Behind series of prophecy novels, co-written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and published between 1995 and 2007. But these books are more than fiction: it is the sincere belief of many evangelicals that these events actually will occur—soon. Plotting Apocalypse delves into the world of rapture, prophecy, and tribulation in order to account for the extraordinary cultural salience of these books and the impact of the world they project. Through penetrating readings of the novels, Chapman shows how the series offers a new model of evangelical agency for its readership. The novels teach that although believers are incapable of changing the course of a future that has been preordained by God, they can become empowered by learning to read the prophetic books of the Bible—and the signs of the times—correctly. Reading and interpretation become key indices of agency in the world that Left Behind limns. Plotting Apocalypse reveals the significant cultural work that Left Behind performs in developing a counter-narrative to the passivity and fatalism that can characterize evangelical prophecy belief. Chapman’s arguments may bear profound implications for the future of American evangelicalism and its interactions with culture, society, and politics.
Download or read book Hitler s Millennial Reich written by David Redles and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Redles offers a view of the impact and potential for millenarian movements, illustrating how Hitler's apocalyptic prophecy of a coming 'final battle' with the so-called 'Jewish-Bolsheviks', one that was conceived to be a 'war of annihilation', was transformed into an equally eschatological 'Final Solution'.
