Download or read book Warriors of Disinformation written by Alvin A. Snyder and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever thought about what really goes on behind the walls of the White House or the Pentagon? Particularly in times of political upheaval, it often seems that the government and the media work together to keep the voting public confused and distracted. In Warriors of Disinformation, Alvin A. Snyder, a former director of USIA’s Television and Film Service, reveals the various propaganda campaigns sent out by the United States during the Cold War, one of the most strained, uncertain times in American political history. Snyder examines the “shady” billion-dollar dealings dedicated to “an exaggerated version of the truth,” and how President Reagan deceived the Soviets with well-plotted plans of fabrication. Readers will be shocked by the lengths that our government went to in order to hide the truth, and to consistently lie to not only the Soviets, but also to the American people about what was going on in the “land of the free.” Warriors of Disinformation is an incredible look inside the government from someone who was on the front line. Hear stories that were never supposed to leave confidential meeting rooms and find out firsthand what went on behind closed doors. Snyder has a story to tell you, and you’d be crazy not to listen.

Download or read book Warriors of Disinformation written by Alvin A. Snyder and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Truth, so the saying goes, is war's first casualty. It follows that propaganda would be its first offspring. Founded during the early years of the cold war, the United States Information Agency is America's purveyor of propaganda and "disinformation" - a euphemism favored by the government during the 1980s. Using its broadcast vehicles (such as the Voice of America), the USIA tells the world what the American government wants the world to know. Warriors of Disinformation is a scrupulous, honest, and fascinating account of what we have been missing all these years. Snyder reveals both the high-minded principles and the lowbrow comedy and establishes the credit that disinformation's warriors deserve for helping to bring an end to the cold war.

Download or read book Abuse Your Illusions written by Russ Kick and published by Red Wheel Weiser. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third of Russ Kick’s bestselling Disinformation Guides gathers another all-star line-up of exposés: Juries have ruled in recent trials that Watergate was really about a Democratic Party prostitution ring. Ignored in the U.S. and distorted elsewhere, the Milosevic tribunal hasn’t gone the way authorities were anticipating. (We present exclusive first-hand reporting from the trial). Most theologians don’t believe in the physical Resurrection of Jesus. In 2001, the U.S. uncovered the biggest spy ring in the country since WWII, yet most people never heard about it. The U.S. is engaging in bioweapons research that violates international treaties and federal law. (The New York Times knows about this but refuses to report it). Teddy Roosevelt and Wall Street created Panama for profit. Gandhi wasn’t so wonderful, after all. These are just some of the revelations in the third of our all-star anthologies. Following up on bestsellers You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong, editor Russ Kick has again assembled a line-up of leading investigative journalists, academics, activists, commentators, and independent researchers, covering CIA assassinations, the anthrax attacks, fluoride, TWA 800, Abraham Lincoln, child protective services, the tobacco industry, forgotten uprisings, the government's missing trillions, even more revelations about 9/11 and much more. Contributors include Gary Webb, Greg Palast, Noreena Hertz, Howard Zinn, Douglas Valentine, Jim Hougan, Kristina Borjesson, Arianna Huffington and many more well-known writers—some of whom you’ll be extremely surprised to see in these pages!

Download or read book Cold Warriors written by Duncan White and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and conspiracy at the heart of the vicious conflict fought between the Soviet Union and the West During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield. In Cold Warriors, Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies, government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have been higher. Drawing upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers and books can change the world.

Download or read book Shadow Warriors written by Kenneth R. Timmerman and published by Crown Forum. This book was released on 2008-09-16 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timmerman contends that partisan bureaucrats at the State Department, the CIA, and other key agencies, together with Democratic politicians, are actively undermining the Bush administration policy at every turn, thus gutting America's ability to fight the War on Terror.

Download or read book Active Measures written by Thomas Rid and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of subterfuge. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm. Even before the 2016 election, he warned that Russian military intelligence was 'carefully planning and timing a high-stakes political campaign' to disrupt the democratic process. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new. In this astonishing journey through a century of secret psychological war, Rid reveals for the first time some of history's most significant operations - many of them nearly beyond belief. A White Russian ploy backfires and brings down a New York police commissioner; a KGB-engineered, anti-Semitic hate campaign creeps back across the Berlin Wall; the CIA backs a fake publishing empire, run by a former Wehrmacht U-boat commander that produces Germany's best jazz magazine.

Download or read book Likewar written by Peter Warren Singer and published by Eamon Dolan Books. This book was released on 2018 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social media has been weaponized, as state hackers and rogue terrorists have seized upon Twitter and Facebook to create chaos and destruction. This urgent report is required reading, from defense experts P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking.

Download or read book This Is Not Propaganda written by Peter Pomerantsev and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this "insightful" account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times). When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we've lost not only our grip on peace and democracy -- but our very notion of what those words even mean. Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, "behavioral change" salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia -- but the answers he finds there are not what he expected. Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.

Download or read book The US Public and American Foreign Policy written by Andrew Johnstone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though often overlooked, public opinion has always played a significant role in the development and promotion of US foreign policy and this work seeks to comprehensively assess the impact and nature of that opinion through a collection of historical and contemporary essays. The volume evaluates the role of organizations and movements that look to represent public opinion, and assesses the nature of their relationship with the government. The contributors utilize a number of different approaches to examine this impact, including polling data, assessments of the role of the media, and the wider consideration of ideas and ideology, moving on to examine the specific role played by the public in the policy making and policy promotion process. Engaging with new questions as well as approaching old questions from a new angle, the work argues that whilst the roles change, and the extent of influence varies, the power of the public to both initiate and constrain foreign policy clearly exists and should not be underestimated. This work will be of great interest to all those with an interest in American foreign policy, American politics and American history.

Download or read book Anti Communist Minorities in the U S written by I. Zake and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-05-25 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a new look at two controversial topics, American anti-Communism and the Cold War, this book reveals the little known history of anti-Communism in the US from the point of view of ethnic refugee/émigré groups, and also offers insight into the lives of minority groups that have hitherto not received scholarly attention.

Download or read book Transnational Television in Europe written by Jean K. Chalaby and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today transnational TV networks count among television's most prestigious brands and rank among Europe's leading TV channels. This is the first, dynamically told story of the extraordinary journey of transnational television in Europe from struggling origins to its present day boom. It is based in extensive research into the international television industry and makes full use of its author's remarkable access to leading industry figures, from Sky and Turner to Discovery and BBC World.The tale begins with a few cross-border TV channels, who fought hostile governments, faced antagonism from the broadcasting establishment and provoked the contempt of advertisers. But, Jean Chalaby argues, the planets came into alignment for pan-European television in the late 1990s, when a transnational shift in European broadcasting was produced. He shows how transnational television and globalization have transformed one another, and how transfrontier TV networks reflect - and help sustain - a global economic order in which the connection between national territory and patterns of production and distribution have broken down.

Download or read book Red closet written by Rustam Alexander and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1934, Joseph Stalin enacted sodomy laws, unleashing a wave of brutal detentions of homosexual men in large Soviet cities. Rustam Alexander recounts the compelling stories of people whose lives were directly affected by those laws, including a naïve Scottish journalist based in Moscow who dared to write to Stalin in an attempt to save his lover from prosecution, and a homosexual theatre student who came to Moscow in pursuit of a career amid Stalin’s harsh repressions and mass arrests. We also meet a fearless doctor in Siberia who provided medical treatment for gay men at his own peril, and a much-loved Soviet singer who hid his homosexuality from the secret police. Each vignette helps paint the hitherto unknown picture of how Soviet oppression of gay people originated and was perpetuated from Stalin’s rule until the demise of the USSR. This book comes at a time when homophobia is again rearing its ugly head under Putin’s rule.

Download or read book US Politics Propaganda and the Afghan Mujahedeen Domestic Politics and the Afghan War written by Jacqueline Fitzgibbon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Influential fundraising groups and senators in the US made enormous efforts in the First Afghan War to present the Mujahedeen as 'freedom fighters' – even while the CIA secretly armed them with surface to air missiles and other weapons. A mass propaganda effort was launched, aimed at portraying parts of Afghanistan as victims of communist aggression. As we know now, many of those groups that were armed became the seedbeds for organisations like Al-Qaeda. Dr Jacqueline Fitzgibbon, through a forensic investigation of the American PR of the period, argues that this militarised and fractured Afghan society for a generation – partly resulting in the mess today. This book will look specifically at the American efforts to suppress any reports which showed these forces as anti-western or anti 'American values', and instead to portray the arming of partisan groups, often an extremely dangerous course of action, as an example of American values in action.

Download or read book The End of the Cold War 1985 1991 written by Robert Service and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 26 December, 1991, the hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time. Yet, just six years earlier, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and chose Eduard Shevardnadze as his foreign minister, the Cold War seemed like a permanent fixture in world politics. Until its denouement, no Western or Soviet politician foresaw that the standoff between the two superpowers -- after decades of struggle over every aspect of security, politics, economics, and ideas -- would end within the lifetime of the current generation. Nor was it at all obvious that that the Soviet political leadership would undertake a huge internal reform of the USSR, or that the threat of a nuclear Armageddon could or would be peacefully wound down. Drawing on pioneering archival research, Robert Service's gripping investigation of the final years of the Cold War pinpoints the extraordinary relationships between Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev, George Shultz, and Shevardnadze, who found ways to cooperate during times of exceptional change around the world. A story of American pressure and Soviet long-term decline and overstretch, The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 shows how a small but skillful group of statesmen grew determined to end the Cold War on their watch and transformed the global political landscape irreversibly.

Download or read book Dangerous Ideas written by Eric Berkowitz and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating examination of how restricting speech has continuously shaped our culture, and how censorship is used as a tool to prop up authorities and maintain class and gender disparities Through compelling narrative, historian Eric Berkowitz reveals how drastically censorship has shaped our modern society. More than just a history of censorship, Dangerous Ideas illuminates the power of restricting speech; how it has defined states, ideas, and culture; and (despite how each of us would like to believe otherwise) how it is something we all participate in. This engaging cultural history of censorship and thought suppression throughout the ages takes readers from the first Chinese emperor’s wholesale elimination of books, to Henry VIII’s decree of death for anyone who “imagined” his demise, and on to the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the volatile politics surrounding censorship of social media. Highlighting the base impulses driving many famous acts of suppression, Berkowitz demonstrates the fragility of power and how every individual can act as both the suppressor and the suppressed.

Download or read book Disinformation written by Donald A. Barclay and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation:The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces–historical, psychological, economic, and culture–to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies. Disinformation explains: How human psychology—the very way our brains work—can leave us vulnerable to disinformation. How the early visions of what a global computer network would and should be unintentionally laid the groundwork for the current post-truth culture. The ways in which truth is twisted and misrepresented via propaganda and conspiracy theories. How new technology not only spreads disinformation but may also be changing the way we think. The ways in which the economics of information and the powerful influence of popular culture have contributed to the creation of the post-truth culture. Unlike the far-too-numerous one-sided, politically ideological treatments of the post-truth culture, Disinformation does not seek to point the finger of blame at any individuals or groups; instead, its focus is on how a number of disparate forces have influenced human behaviors during a time when all of humanity is struggling to better understand and more effectively control (for better or worse) challenging new technologies that are straining the limits of human intellectual and emotional capacity.

Download or read book Digital Democracy Social Media and Disinformation written by Petros Iosifidis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Democracy, Social Media and Disinformation discusses some of the political, regulatory and technological issues which arise from the increased power of internet intermediaries (such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) and the impact of the spread of digital disinformation, especially in the midst of a health pandemic. The volume provides a detailed account of the main areas surrounding digital democracy, disinformation and fake news, freedom of expression and post-truth politics. It addresses the major theoretical and regulatory concepts of digital democracy and the ‘network society’ before offering potential socio-political and technological solutions to the fight against disinformation and fake news. These solutions include self-regulation, rebuttals and myth-busting, news literacy, policy recommendations, awareness and communication strategies and the potential of recent technologies such as the blockchain and public interest algorithms to counter disinformation. After addressing what has currently been done to combat disinformation and fake news, the volume argues that digital disinformation needs to be identified as a multifaceted problem, one that requires multiple approaches to resolve. Governments, regulators, think tanks, the academy and technology providers need to take more steps to better shape the next internet with as little digital disinformation as possible by means of a regional analysis. In this context, two cases concerning Russia and Ukraine are presented regarding disinformation and the ways it was handled. Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to students and researchers within the social sciences, computer science, law and business studies, as well as policy makers engaged in combating what constitutes one of the most pressing issues of the digital age.