|
|
Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Controversial knowledge > Conspiracy theories
Working from government documents and corporate records, Sauder has
compiled an impressive book that digs below the surface of the
military's super-secret underground Go behind the scenes into
little-known corners of the public record and discover how
corporate America has worked hand-in-glove with the Pentagon for
decades, dreaming about, planning, and actually constructing,
secret underground bases. This book includes chapters on the
locations of the bases, the tunneling technology, various military
designs for underground bases, nuclear testing & underground
bases, abductions, needles & implants, military involvement in
"alien" cattle mutilations, more. 50-page photo & map insert.
Beginning in the 1950s, alleged sightings of unidentified flying
objects in Canadian skies bred tension between the state and its
citizens. While the public demanded to know more about the
phenomenon, government officials appeared unconcerned and
unresponsive. Suspicion of government deepened among certain
sectors of Canadian society in the decades that followed, leading
to demands for greater public transparency and a new kind of
citizen activism. In Search for the Unknown Matthew Hayes uncovers
the history of the Canadian government's investigations into
reports of UFOs, revealing how these reports were handled,
deflected, and defended from 1950 to the 1990s. During this period
Canadians filed more than 5,000 reports of UFO sightings - many
with striking descriptions and illustrations - with branches of
government and law enforcement. Although the government conducted
some exploratory studies, officials were unable to solve the
mystery of UFOs or provide satisfactory answers about their alleged
existence, and they soon declared the matter closed. Dissatisfied
citizens responded by taking matters into their own hands, starting
UFO clubs and civilian investigation groups, and accusing the
government of a cover-up. A mutual mistrust developed between
citizens who were suspicious of their government and officials who
dismissed their fears and anxieties. This provided fertile ground
for anti-authoritarian attitudes and the cultivation of conspiracy
theories. In an era of political division, and amid heightened
awareness of states' responsibilities for their citizens, Search
for the Unknown reveals the challenges that governments face in
responding to public anxieties and preserving trust in public
institutions.
Through their part in some huge controversies, conspiracy theorists
are being branded the Number One Enemies of our times - the new
heretics. They are seen to threaten the very fabric of modern
society, spreading doubts and fears that result in Washington
Capitol invasions, transmission mast burnings or the spread of
anti-vaxx material. Yet the theorists prefer to call themselves
"truth seekers" and see the mainstream establishment as the real
disruptor, treating its increasingly harsh censorship as direct
validation of their views. In truth, the new heretics, whose
numbers are swelling, are symptoms of a wider polarization
splitting apart much of the world in ideological divisions. Many
have lost trust in politicians and the media, while nuanced debate
is crushed and information overload and manipulation breeds
uncertainty, civil unrest and mental health issues. How does the
age old strategy of divide-and-rule play out in such an
environment? Using his extensive experience of negotiating disputes
between cynics and truth seekers, Andy Thomas explores the
proliferation of conspiracy thinking, peeling back unhelpful layers
of biased thinking on all sides to find more insightful ways to
bridge the polarised divides and create a better way forward. The
New Heretics scrutinises the future of freedom of expression in a
censorious world which unwisely seeks to close down discussion of
everything alternative, expanding into a truly thought-provoking
and expansive treatise on our relationship to truth, technology,
politics and the paranormal - and the future of humanity itself.
This is the story of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories
in British politics, an intrigue that still has resonance nearly a
century after it was written: the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Almost
certainly a forgery, no original has ever been traced, and even if
genuine it was probably Soviet fake news. Despite this, the Letter
still haunts British politics nearly a century after it was
written, the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s
and 1990s, and cropping up in the media as recently as during the
Referendum campaign and the 2017 general election. The Letter,
encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary
fervour, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the
Bolshevik propaganda organization, to the British Communist Party
in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret
Intelligence Service channels, it arrived during the general
election campaign and was leaked to the press. The Letter's
publication by the Daily Mail on 25 October 1924 just before the
General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour
government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political
opponents used it to create a 'Red Scare' in the media. Labour
blamed the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been a
right-wing Establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party
have never forgotten it. The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol
of political dirty tricks and what we would now call fake news. But
it is also a gripping historical detective story of spies and
secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the
nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.
 |
Paul is Dead
(Paperback)
Paolo Baron; Artworks by Ernesto Carbonetti
1
|
R424
R383
Discovery Miles 3 830
Save R41 (10%)
|
Ships in 9 - 17 working days
|
|
|
London, November 1966. John Lennon can't speak, he can't take his
eyes off a photo of a car in flames with the body of Paul McCartney
inside. His friend is no longer there, and that means the Beatles
are no longer there, either. But John wants to know the truth, and
with George and Ringo, he starts to re-examine the final hours in
Paul's life. Set in the magical atmosphere of Abbey Road Studios
during the writing sessions for Sgt. Pepper, the definitive version
of the legend of the Paul McCartney's death.
Fascination with conspiracies is massive right now, especially
since the rise of Donald Trump, who is both the subject of many
conspiracy theories and also the purveyor of them. New theories
appear on social media on a near-daily basis, and with continual
claims and counter-claims about fake news, it's hard to know what
to believe. To help clear up the confusion, here is a new edition
of the most balanced and informed book on the topic, now updated
with all the latest events, including pro- and anti-Trump theories,
Edward Snowden's mass-surveillance claims, post-truth issues, and
much more. In this outstanding guide to conspiracies, researcher
Andy Thomas looks at all the major theories, from the Roman Empire
to the present day, exploring the social and psychological factors
that have prompted them to spread. The accounts are stripped of
unfounded opinion and presented factually, dramatically
highlighting the core issues. Are we really under everyday
mass-surveillance, as Edward Snowden claims? Is the rise of Donald
Trump and global populism a genuine movement of the people or a
manipulated social control experiment? Is there a secret governing
elite ruling from the shadows, using fear and economic manipulation
to create a network of global superstates? Could the attacks of
9/11 have been engineered by agencies within the USA itself? Andy
Thomas invites you to read accounts and analyses of these and many
other issues, to consider the facts and decide for yourself.
Since our very beginnings, human beings from all civilisations
across the globe have encountered the Others - intelligent,
self-motivated beings that are clearly not human in their origins.
This book offers the most comprehensive survey ever made of such
otherworldly visitors, from gods, angels, demons and djinns to
hobgoblins, poltergeists and ghosts to UFOs and aliens. In addition
to fully detailing the history of these encounters, the book
attempts a bold explanation (never before undertaken) of the true
nature of these beings. The book will explore the increasingly
frequent "entheogen" encounters facilitated by substances such as
dimethyltryptamine, ayahuasca, 5-Meo-DMT and LSD, as well as the
beings encountered by individuals suffering from
Alzheimer's-related Charles Bonnet Syndrome, young children's
non-corporeal companions, and the seemingly independent beings met
during lucid dreaming and near-death and out-of-body
experiences.This book continues Anthony Peake's work in developing
a completely original model of reality based upon an amalgamation
of ancient belief systems, subjective human experiences of the
extraordinary, and the latest discoveries of neurology,
neurochemistry, quantum mechanics and cosmology. This model
proposes that consciousness, far from being simply an accident of
evolution, is the actual root source of the material universe. It
suggests that at its most basic level everything that is seemingly
physical is rendered into existence by consciousness.
The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on
the "uncanny" persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy
theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index
of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and
malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward
social mobility. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a
literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuses on
the enduring American preoccupation with captivity in a rapidly
transforming world. Captivity is a trope that appears in both
ordinary and fantastic iterations here, and Susan Lepselter shows
how multiple troubled histories-of race, class, gender, and
power-become compressed into stories of uncanny memory.
Creating Chaos explores that dark side of statecraft, the covert
use of political warfare in international relations - from its
early practices during the Great Game between the British and
Russian empires, through the Cold War era of ideological
confrontation and forward into the hybrid political warfare of the
21st Century. Creating Chaos presents and illustrates the full body
of covert and deniable political warfare practices, tracing their
historical development and their use by both America and Russia
throughout the Cold War and beyond. Using the most current
information available, Hancock, a "veteran national security
journalist" (Publishers Weekly) examines the evolution of political
warfare tools and tactics in the era of the global Internet and
ubiquitous social media, evaluating their effectiveness and
illustrating the rapidly increasing levels of risk associated with
these new and untested cyberwarfare tools. Virtually no books have
studied actual political warfare beyond the Cold War, and only a
handful have provided any insights into the new and rapidly
evolving practices of the Russian Federation or of the political
warfare aspect of NGOs or other surrogate actors. A companion
volume to Shadow Warfare: The History of America's Undeclared Wars,
Creating Chaos introduces the nature and history of political
action practices, exploring a number of formerly secret American
and Russian hybrid warfare and active measures projects in detail.
With that background for context, it then extends those practices
into the twenty-first century and contemporary events, evaluating
wellestablished practices as they are being used with the newest
tools of the global Internet and social media. It demonstrates the
exponential increase in their effectiveness-and the equally
exponential risk and consequences involved.
‘Timely and troubling’ Evening Standard
‘A necessary book’ David Aaronovitch
‘Frequently jaw-dropping’ Huffington Post
From UFOs to the New World Order, the inside story of how conspiracy
theories won over America.
In November 2017, a serial climate change denier and anti-vaxxer was
elected President of the United States. The rise of Donald Trump marked
the beginning of a new American epoch: the age of the conspiracy
theorist.
Now, Anna Merlan goes undercover in America’s sprawling network of
conspiracy theorists and uncovers their secrets. She meets the
UFOlogist who claims to have travelled to Mars with a young Barack
Obama. She chats with the ‘pizzagate’ truthers who think Washington
D.C.’s favourite pizzeria is run by a satanic paedophile ring. And she
bumps into Alex Jones, the YouTube impresario who thinks the state is
using chemical warfare to turn the population gay – and who happens to
be on first-name terms with the leader of the free world.
Merlan reveals a world of innuendo and propaganda lying just beneath
the surface of US culture. It might just help explain the political
turmoil of our time.
A history so funny, so true, so scary, it's bound to be called a
conspiracy.
"Meticulous in its research, forensic in its reasoning, robust in
its argument, and often hilarious in its debunking, "Voodoo
Histories" is a highly entertaining rumble with the century's major
conspiracy theorists and their theories" (John Lahr).
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 to the assassination of JFK to the
Birther movement, David Aaronvitch probes and explores the major
conspiracy theories (and theorists) of our time. This entertaining
and enlightening conspiracy theory book-aimed to provide ammunition
for those who have found themselves at the wrong end of a
conversation about moon landings or the Twin Towers-examines why
people believe these conspiracies, and makes an argument for a true
skepticism: one based on a thorough knowledge of history and a
strong dose of common sense.
Seeking the truth about UFOs in America, Mark Pilkington and John
Lundberg uncover a 60 year-old story stranger than any conspiracy
thriller. Through the fascinating account of their quest Mark
Pilkington reveals the long history of UFOria and its parallels in
little known tales from the murky worlds of espionage,
psychological warfare and advanced military technology. Along the
way he discovers that the truth about flying saucers is stranger
and more complex than either the ufologists or debunkers would have
us believe. As he crossed the US meeting intelligence agents,
disinformation specialists and UFO hunters Pilkington was
confronted with a dizzying array of ever more outrageous claims and
counter claims. As a result he began to suspect that, instead of
covering up stories of crashed flying saucers, alien contacts and
secret underground bases, the US intelligence agencies had actually
been promoting them all along. Meanwhile he has to deal with his
own uncertainties, the suspicions of the UFO community and a
partner who is starting to believe that conspiracy theorists might
be right after all. With a fresh, funny and objective approach,
Pilkington is the ideal guide to steer us through these strange
territories, where nothing is quite as it seems and reality is just
a matter of managing perceptions.
|
|