Chapter 4 examines how the aftosa commission understood and countered opposition, using threats and targeted violence, carefully calibrated concessions, propaganda, mediation by regional bosses and powerbrokers, and information-gathering. It argues that this blend of tactics illustrates the Mexican state’s conceptions of order and security, and supports the notion of the PRI regime as a "dictablanda"- authoritarian but institutionally weak, and reliant on a complicated blend of repressive and consensual mechanisms.

The trial run of civil defence and the gas mask in September 1938 yielded several important lessons for the government. One was that it urgently needed to solve the absence of anti-gas protection for infants and toddlers, which it did by the time Britain entered the Second World War in September 1939. Until the outbreak of war, it continued to encounter resistance to these measures, and when war broke out, some conscientious objectors used their refusal to accept their gas masks as a sign of their commitment to oppose all war. As for the majority who accepted the mask as the gift of a benevolent state, the issue became whether or not they would follow instructions to carry them whenever they left their homes. The government soon came to see gas mask carrying not only as a mark of good morale, but also as indicating whether or not someone was being a good wartime citizen, willing to follow instructions in order to keep the entire civilian population safe. Mass Observation delegated respondents to survey who carried their masks, and they recorded these efforts as mapping onto attitudes towards the war effort. When the worst of the Battle of Britain had subsided with a decrease in devastating aerial attacks by April 1941, the government launched a concerted campaign, using posters, film, and staged gas mask drills to encourage the population to remember that “Hitler Will Give No Warning,” so everyone had to accept the obligation always to have a gas mask at the ready. Carrying and caring for the gas mask became a sign that you accepted your duty to participate in the war effort.

Faced with budgetary pressures, American universities have embraced propaganda within their athletics programs in order to maintain lucrative partnerships with global corporations. These university administrators become, in effect, educators-as-corporate-propagandists. This chapter examines the controversial relationship between Nike and the University of Oregon. Nike has constructed the University’s brand identity, taken control over its communications and public relations, and spread its habits and impulses to every facet of University operations. But private interests do not always overlap with public or educational ones – even to the point of violating state and federal law. The partnership between Nike and the University of Oregon casts two very different shadows over the question of usefulness of propaganda in a democratic society. On the one hand, its efficacy is unquestionable, especially in the realms of politics, business, activism, and education. On the other hand, propaganda’s utility for democracy is questionable, and in the realm of public education is often incompatible with democratic ends. America’s financially struggling public universities may need to reimagine their use of propaganda. Their success or failure may depend, ironically, on the effects of propaganda elsewhere in society: What use is a university, after all, in a society which has no use for truth?

In the wood of the suicides, Pier della Vigna, secretary to the emperor, swears on the thornbush that has become his body that he never broke faith with his lord. Though he is not a traitor, his body will hang from this tree like that of Judas, who was also a suicide. What is at stake in both crimes is a breaking of the fragile bond of faith that makes communication possible. How is it that people believe one another’s words, gestures, and protestations? and what can restore a trust once it is lost? This suicide violently broke the bond between his body and his soul, of which his body was the truest expression, because he could no longer make people believe him by means of his words. On what bond of trust can the emperor’s propagandist rely, if words and truth, like body and soul, have been severed from each other?

Zhang Chunqiao helped Mao launch the Cultural Revolution and became a core member of the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG). At the 10th Party Congress in 1973, Mao promoted him into the most powerful institution in the Chinese Communist Party, the Politburo Standing Committee, a rarely seen leap for a pre–Cultural Revolution vice-provincial-level official in the space of seven years. When his daughter asked him right after the congress whether he felt a sense of triumph, Zhang responded, “I don’t feel much. Which revolutionary base area did I build? Which army did I lead? Which battle did I win?” (Zheng 2017: ix) Despite his formal power, Zhang knew that since he was a writer and an ideologue instead of someone with faction followers throughout the party and the military, he had very little informal power. Given their limited political experience and narrow political networks in the party, why did Mao elevate Zhang and others in the scribblers mafia (笔杆子) into senior offices during the Cultural Revolution?

Chinese foreign relations and foreign trade during the Cultural Revolution’s radical phase (1966–1969) were different than during the period from 1970 to 1976. The radicals’ control of the Foreign Ministry affected the Chinese missions in Switzerland between 1966 and 1969. Because of Switzerland’s function as the Chinese headquarters in Western Europe, Swiss diplomats were among the few foreigners who remained relatively unaffected by Red Guard measures and other events in Beijing. Although diplomatic tensions occurred between Switzerland and China, these did not lead to a rupture of official relations. This preferential treatment changed during the period from 1970 to 1976, when Switzerland lost importance because China established relations with the majority of the Western nations. The anti-capitalist and anti-Western fervour of the Red Guards did not stop trade between China and Switzerland completely. In fact, Sino-Swiss trade continued – albeit haltingly – during the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution. The improvement of political relations between China and Western European countries, however, also increased Western European interest in the Chinese market. The last part of the chapter, therefore, discusses how the Swiss government and Swiss companies tried to stave off this competition in the early to mid-1970s.

No religious tradition or country seems to be unequivocally, inherently free from the threat of extremism. As a result of domestic and international acts of terrorism, much of the world seems occupied with the views and actions of Muslims, calling particular attention to the Salafi sect. Some groups belonging to this sect disseminate and promulgate their views through online periodicals, in order to solidify their ideological base and recruit new members. In particular, this chapter relates secular and non-secular characterizations of √KFR – the Arabic triliteral root referring to disbelievers and states of disbelief – to the characterization espoused in electronic periodicals from al-Qa’ida and Da’esh. Over one thousand tokens of derived lexemes of √KFR are extracted using AntConc from thirty issues, reduced to a taxonomy, and examined through the discursive strategies utilized.

Hate speech is a form of communication that targets disadvantaged social groups in a harmful way. It can be seen as a driving force behind the successes of numerous populist politicians and extremist movements. In this chapter, we argue that studying hate speech can be crucial for a better understanding of political mobilisation, intergroup relations, and social media. We describe the role of hate speech in mobilising electoral support and violence, in the promotion of racism and prejudice, as well as in shaping attitudes towards government policies. We uncover how political ideology and hate speech are interconnected, and that the left-right political beliefs do not always explain why individuals turn to use hate speech. We also outline the dilemma between the protection against hate speech and the freedom of expression principles, that are at the core of current debates on derogatory language.

Chapter 5, “Information Wars,” is the opening case study of four intelligentsia-built resistance systems, which consider how the intelligentsia responded to Nazi persecution with projects bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. It examines the one that undergirds the rest: underground information creation and trafficking that kept the elite connected and funneled news into and out of the city. In response to the closure of Polish-language press, radio bookstores, and libraries, a number of educated Poles created an underground world of secret newsletters and journals to keep the city informed about occupier behavior and the circumstances of the wider war. This project involved entangled networks of individuals who were brutally punished if caught, and the work of writing, editing, couriering, and reading underground press initiated many Varsovians into anti-Nazi “conspiracies.” Information sourced in the occupied city was not merely for local consumption but was painstakingly smuggled out by a sprawling network of Polish and international couriers toting encrypted information to the states of the Grand Alliance. This chapter argues that the ability of Poles in Warsaw to counter Nazi propaganda narratives with their own information was essential to all later successful opposition.

The Great War favoured the rapid rise of a national community and a local movement federated by philanthropical activity. While the various forms of involvement with the national cause of the war victims was conducive to the formation of a society of citizens, the veterans remained subjects for propaganda who were deprived of having a voice in matters. Even under the Provisional Government, the social assistance system for veterans was discriminatory and selective: they were required to remobilise by participating in the production effort without receiving the means to do so. In terms of functional rehabilitation, professional retraining, and the adaptation of recruitment practices, or working conditions, the national economy proved to be ill prepared for the reintegration of disabled veterans. Only the least afflicted physically and psychologically, the most determined, the least backward, and the most educated were able to benefit from private and institutional initiatives that were too scattered to form a coherent system. From the very beginning, their liberal nature ran counter to the progressive discourse’s ambition of transforming society. This extraordinary mobilisation of civilians did not transcend the deep fractures of Russian society.

From 1904 on, the question of disabled veterans was in no way neutral on the political level. It fostered health care and social welfare policy, impelled an interpretation of the ongoing war, and reconfigured notions of heroism, sacrifice, and patriotism. The period 1915–1919 was marked by the disabled veterans’ remarkable political activism under three successive regimes, two revolutions, and two wars. As the only large-scale association of First World War veterans in Russia, the All-Russian Union of Maimed Soldiers managed to rally together men linked only by a common fate. They exerted a visible influence on the solution for the ‘disabled veterans’ question’ in 1917 and put out publicity for their own cause thanks to democratisation. They did not, however, manage to unify a group suffering a host of divisions stemming from the era’s political turbulence, nor did they succeed in consolidating a common identity distinct from that of all war veterans or all disabled persons. Their rapid, forced political demobilisation during the civil war made them veterans who had experienced both the Great War and the revolution and who were durably stigmatised by the Bolshevik regime. They suffered discrimination that benefited the disabled veterans of the Red Army, the only ones deemed legitimate under the Soviet regime. The political repression only doubled the punishment of their handicap.

This chapter examines the rise of China across the 1989 divide, as a year in both Chinese and global history. It focuses on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership's response to the domestic and international crises of 1989–1992. Using previously unstudied internal Chinese materials, it argues that this period - often overlooked in scholarship of contemporary China -witnessed significant and enduring changes in how the CCP intended to guide China's rise: bifurcating economic liberalization and political liberalization, building up the institution of the leadership "core," strengthening the party, opposing "peaceful evolution," and rewriting the history of the preceding decade to emphasize a battle between "bourgeois liberalization" and Deng Xiaoping's authoritarian Four Cardinal Principles. This chapter shows how the CCP came to see itself as a socialist survivor, uniquely able to exploit the benefits of openness to global capitalism while resisting the perceived dangers. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how these crucial shifts in the period 1989–1992 have profoundly shaped the Chinese system and international images of China to the present day.

This chapter shows how Templer recognised that the MCP’s October 1951 Resolutions had shifted the strategic initiative to government, but also that it had increased the importance of winning ‘hearts and minds’. It shows how he increased both punishment and reward, and resettlement amenities and training to secure kills, until late in his term, but above all optimised the government, military and committee system, and the policy towards Orang Asli and the jungle. He created a better system and learning organisation, which in turn started to experiment with the big combined food control–Special Branch–military operations that would start to clear communist committees out of one area after another. The next chapter shows how that learning took off over 1953–4, providing a solution to the problem Briggs had not cracked: how to ‘clear’ areas. Rejecting both hagiographic and hateful accounts of Templer, it reveals the truth about the man, and about the perfecting of Malaya’s counterinsurgency apparatus and the constant refining of its recipe of ingredients.

The period between 1900 and 1920 witnessed several important developments in the production and dissemination of wartime propaganda. Most important among these developments were the rise of the popular press, the expansion of mass literacy, and the increasing centralisation of propaganda efforts as a responsibilty of central government. This chapter traces the development of propaganda methods and of literature’s complicated entanglement with propaganda from the Boer War to the aftermath of the First World War. It describes how a number of major writers – Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells – came to play important roles in the British state’s wartime communications, and how the culture of ‘suspicious reading’ encouraged by the prevalence of propaganda shaped post-war debates about the truth-telling capacities of the literary realism with which those writers were closely associated.

This chapter analyzes the rhetoric and propaganda used by both supporters and opponents of these four regimes. Arguments for and against their sovereign claims formed a distinctive discursive web that defined the unique ideological shape of these contests. The types of argument in support of their sovereign claims are grouped into three broad argument families, which thematically divide the chapter. These were: (1) arguments articulating their authentic natures and the inauthenticity of their nationalist rivals, (2) arguments trumpeting their pro-Western orientations, and finally (3) arguments about how these pseudo-states’ sovereign claims favorably compared against legal states in Africa. This chapter will provide a broad framework to categorize the varied rhetorical and symbolic contests described in more detail in the chapters that follow.

The war restructured the justice system. Hitler, haunted by the “stab-in-the-back” of 1918, assigned the courts and the Gestapo new roles to safeguard morale. The courts would issue severe sentences to deter dissent, while the political police would ensure that only true opponents faced prosecution. Draconian punishments checked defeatism, while descriptions of the convict preserved support by communicating who was targeted and why. The Gestapo enabled these sentences by resolving lesser offences. Heydrich issued new Principles of Internal State Security during the War authorizing warnings to “correct the mindset and strengthen the will” of supporters who strayed in “momentary weakness.” The new policy also permitted extrajudicial executions to “brutally liquidate” any serious threat to morale. Practically, very little changed about who and what kinds of behavior were a threat. The new policy continued targeting political opponents, criminals, and public offences. Previously, officers had intervened on a case by case basis. Now, station leaders bore personal responsibility for deciding whether to press charges. Selective enforcement passed from the state prosecutor to the Gestapo.

This chapter explores the role that monarchist beliefs played in war recruitment in Britain and in the British Empire. It looks at the ways that monarchist beliefs appeared in wartime propaganda, songs and recruitment campaigns as well as the monarchy’s importance to British legal and religious cultures. It examines how the first two years of the war saw the monarchy’s position consolidated and sacralised in Britain, arguing that the monarchy was central to British identity and associated with ideals of ‘honour’.