Britain America And Anti Communist Propaganda 1945 1958

This book demonstrates that propoganda was a primary concern of the postwar governments of Clement Atlee and Winston Churchill and traces the implementation of Britain's propoganda policy at all levels.

In the Cold War battle for hearts and minds Britain was the first country to formulate a coordinated global response to communist propaganda. In January 1948, the British government launched a new propaganda policy designed to 'oppose the inroads of communism' by taking the offensive against it.' A small section in the Foreign Office, the innocuously titled Information Research Department (IRD), was established to collate information on communist policy, tactics and propaganda, and coordinate the discreet dissemination of counter-propaganda to opinion formers at home and abroad.

A range of clandestine Cold War activities in Asia, from intelligence and propaganda to special operations and security support, is examined here. The contributions draw on newly-opened archives and a two-day conference on the subject.

Britain's Secret Propaganda War is the first book to be written about The Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) -- an important chapter in the history of the Cold War. The narrative is driven by actual accounts of IRD covert operations and includes a number of "exclusives." The IRD was set up under the Labour Government in 1948 and clandestinely financed from the Secret Intelligence Service budget. A large organisation with close links to MI6 -- with whom it shared many personnel -- it waged a vigorous covert propaganda campaign against Eastern Bloc Communism for nearly thirty years using journalists, politicians, academics and trade unionists -none of whom were "unwitting." Such famous names as George Orwell, Denis Healey, Stephen Spender, Bertrand Russell and Guy Burgess helped or backed the work of IRD.

How was anti-communism organised in the West? This book covers the agents, aims, and arguments of various transnational anti-communist activists during the Cold War. Existing narratives often place the United States – and especially the CIA – at the centre of anti-communist activity. The book instead opens up new fields of research transnationally.

A wide-ranging study of developments in global French-language cinema

In Defending Democracy in Cold War Finland, Marek Fields offers an account on the various informational and cultural strategies Britain and the United States used during the early Cold War decades in order to increase their influence in Finland.