Book review: Peter Pomerantsev's 'This Is Not Propaganda' is quietly frightening. By Steve Bloomfield

By Dilip -

This Is Not Propaganda is an exploration of the wreckage of liberal democracy and a search for the signs of its revival. What can save us? Reading, for a start. In Beijing, Pomeranstev meets Angela Wu, who researches emerging technology and cultural change at New York University. She travelled across China interviewing readers of a blogging site called Bullog, which was home to opposition voices. Its readers came from a range of backgrounds, but one thing many of them had in common, Wu discovered, was that they had been voracious readers from a young age…

In May 2014, at the height of the civil war in Ukraine, a fire broke out in Odessa’s Palace of All Trade Unions. Dozens of people died and within hours a new battle had begun over who was to blame, as Russia’s army of information warriors spread stories and images online and through state-owned media that pinned the responsibility on Ukraine’s revolutionaries.

A Final Warning by George Orwell

Alexandre Koyré The Political Function of the Modern Lie      

“War used to be about capturing territory and planting flags,” observes Peter Pomerantsev in his beautifully written, carefully reported and quietly frightening new book. But what was happening in Ukraine was an early example of something different – the information battle was becoming just as important, some times more so, than the actual fighting.

In Odessa, a group of citizens launched their own investigation, which established the truth. Not that it made a difference – hardly anyone was interested. “Everyone lives in their own reality, everyone has their own truth,” said Tatyana Gerasimova, one of the organisers of the investigation. As Pomerantsev puts it: “Faced with wildly conflicting versions of reality, people selected the one that suited them.” Part memoir, part investigation, part cry for help, This Is Not Propaganda tours the world and delves into archives, telling the stories of the new information wars, interwoven with passages about Pomerantsev’s parents’ lives. Igor and Lina were Soviet dissidents, harassed by the KGB and eventually deported, for “the simple right to read, to write, to listen to what they chose and to say what they wanted”….

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/10/this-is-not-propaganda-peter-pomerantsev-review

Andrew Roth - The problem is Putin: protesters throng Russia's streets to support jailed Navalny // Russia’s courageous historic protests against Putinism

Navalny’s YouTube video sensation: Putin’s secret palace, and “the biggest bribe in history”

STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a diagnosis

Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The Age of Cretinism

Alexandre Koyré The Political Function of the Modern Lie           

Farewell to reality

Allies of slain Putin critic Nemtsov allege cover-up after guilty verdict

Russian Justice: Sergei Magnitsky’s Torture and Murder in Pre-Trial Detention

Solidarity with Memorial: Russia’s most prominent civil rights group in danger

Nick Hopkins and Luke Harding - Intelligence sources vouch for credibility of Russia dossier author / Mark Sumner - Trump Was Bailed Out of Bankruptcy by Russia Crime Bosses

The destruction of society EUROZINE REVIEW

British banks handled vast sums of laundered Russian money

Lawyer For Russian Whistleblower’s Family Falls From Building One Day Before Hearing

Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition figure, unconscious in hospital

Simon Tisdall: Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people

Book Review: Inside the Stalin Archives, by Johnathan Brent (2009) // Books from "Annals of Communism Series", Yale University Press

Review essay - What’s Left? Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 5 new books on the Russian Revolution

Book review: Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge – life in the Stalinist Soviet Union // Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge – review

Book review: - The Conscience of a Revolutionary

Alec Luhn - Gulag grave hunter unearths uncomfortable truths in Russia

100 years of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution March 8 (February 23), International Women's Day

Anil Nauriya - Indian Struggles in 1917 : On the eve of the Russian Revolution

State memory: 1917 and Russian memory politics. By MANFRED SAPPER and VOLKER WEICHSEL

The legacies of 1917 Orlando Figes & Daniel Gascon

Madhavan Palat: Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia

The Bolshevik Heritage. By Dilip Simeon

Alexander Rabinowitch: The Bolsheviks Come to Power in Petrograd: Centennial Reflections
Marcel van der Linden: Why Leninism and Bolshevism Are Not the Same

Jairus Banaji: A Hundred Years After October Revolution, Rethinking the Origins of Stalinism

The Soviet Retreat From the Emancipative Ideas of 1917. By Arup Banerji

Mar 8, 1917: February Revolution begins in Russia

Hari Sankar Vasudevan (1952 – 2020). A tribute by Madhavan K. Palat


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