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

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[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 […]

Labour Takes Power: The Denis MacShane Diaries

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[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 […]

Miscellaneous reviews

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[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 […]

Moscow Gold: ‘the Communist threat’ in post-war Britain

Lobster Issue 25 (1993)

[PDF file]: […] CPGB member knew nothing of the Soviet money, and to most of them ‘Moscow Gold’ was a joke, at best; at worst just another piece of crude propaganda from the Right.2 No wonder the remaining CPGB members were so shocked in 1991 when they discovered that the right’s view of the CPGB as a […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] took this seriously. The claim is true in one profound but unstated sense: the Conservatives will continue to harass those who are not employed. Thirty years of propaganda against those dependent upon the state has resulted in a public climate hostile to almost all those claiming benefits: the ‘deserving poor’ category has now shrunk […]

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

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[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 view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] Robert Parry at the Consortiumnews wrote: ‘Few Americans understand the ugly history behind the Nazi-affiliated movements that have gained substantial power in today’s U.S.–backed Ukrainian regime. Western propaganda has made these right-wing extremists the “good guys” versus the Russian “bad guys.”’ 39 None of this is mentioned in Elizabeth Pond’s ‘How Vladimir Putin lost […]

Dangerous Hero, and, Boris Johnson

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[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 […]

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