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Each September from 1933 to 1938, the Nazi Party held spectacular rallies at Nuremberg. These Reichsparteitage (National Party Days) were vast and meticulously staged managed extravaganzas in which ritual and ceremony played an important part.The Rallies had two key objectives. The first was to focus public attention on the success and power of the Nazi Party and so connect with the public conscience and build a close bond between Party and people. Secondly, and perhaps even more important, they...

In these Internet-dominated times, the concept of the mainstream media as the gatekeepers of information has been crashed. In many ways this is a positive step, as bloggers, website operators, and activists can spread their messages without using the mainstream media as a conduit. Citizen journalists have been able to expose and report on many important topics, such as the Boston Marathon bombing, the Arab Spring, and police brutality. Grassroots movements, like the Bring Back Our Girls Twitter...

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 foren...

Delving into the rationale behind influential communication, The Power And Influence Of Illustration helps you understand how to work with a message to create convincing illustrations for your audience. Alan Male explains how illustrative imagery can lampoon, shock, insult, threaten, subvert, ridicule, express discontent and proclaim political and religious allegiance. He explores how its tools have been used in the past, and looks at how contemporary illustrators can use their own wor...

This unique book analyzes the discourse of militant organizations affiliated with al-Qaeda. It interrogates the discourse of these extremist organizations, which publish their own newspapers. These publications, widely distributed to the local population, play a critical role in securing and maintaining public support for the militant organizations. The book examines how these organizations discursively construct the socio-political reality of their world, in the process defining the Self and th...

Raised to be "flowers of the nation," the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and at first embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966, but then split into warring factions. Investigating the causes of this fracture, Guobin Yang argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same co...

Red Scare examines a number of popular films, comic books, novels, and more through the lens of the Cold War. Red Scare examines the historical context for anti-communism in popular culture during the Cold War era, the various ways popular culture depicted the communist threat, and how this changed over time from the Red Scare hysteria of the late 1940s to the revived fear of the Soviet threat during the Reagan era. The book details a number of creative works produced and published during th...

This book is about how we can build back truth online. It provides solutions so that we can repair our existing social media platforms and build better ones that prioritize value over profit, strengthen community ties and promote access to trustworthy information. This book explains the problem of misinformation within the larger context of “information disorder.” It provides a road map with six paths forward to understand how platforms are designed to exploit us, learn to embrace agency in our...

In a Reformation kingdom ill-used to queens, Elizabeth I needed a very particular image to hold her divided country together. The ‘Cult of Gloriana’ would elevate the queen to the status of a virgin goddess, aided by authors, musicians, and artists such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Hilliard, Tallis and Byrd. Her image was widely owned and distributed, thanks to the expansion of printing, and the English came to surpass their European counterparts in miniature painting, allowing courtiers to carry a...

This open access volume presents the latest research in propaganda studies, featuring contributions from a range of leading scholars and covering the most cutting-edge scholarship in the study of propaganda from World War I to the present. Propaganda has always played a key role in shaping attitudes during periods of conflict and the academic study of propaganda, commencing in earnest in 1915, has never really left us. We continue to want to understand propaganda's inner-workings and, in doing...

Corruption, fake news, and the "informational autocracy" sustaining Putin in power After fading into the background for many years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia suddenly has emerged as a new threat-at least in the minds of many Westerners. But Western assumptions about Russia, and in particular about political decision-making in Russia, tend to be out of date or just plain wrong. Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin since 2000, Russia is neither a somewhat reduced versio...

It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in irresistible ascendance and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the United States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance. Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, Toby C. Rider chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the...

The far right is on the rise across Europe, pushing a battle scenario in which Islam clashes with Christianity as much as Christianity clashes with Islam. From the margins to the mainstream, far-right protesters and far-right politicians call for the defence of Europe's Christian culture. The far right claims Christianity. This book investigates contemporary far-right claims to Christianity. Ulrich Schmiedel and Hannah Strommen examine the theologies that emerge in the far right across Europe,...