“Eusynoptos” takes its title from the Aristotelian notion of εὐσύνοπτος: “easily taken in at a glance.” In the Politics, Aristotle maintains that the size of a city is strictly delimited by the number of citizens that can be visually comprehended at a glance. But what if a machine were to augment the sensory capacities of humans? Could a political entity then be expanded beyond its natural limits? Confronting these questions in his film theory, Walter Benjamin modernizes eusynoptos by showing how the movie camera records large masses of individuals in a manner impossible for the naked eye. Informed by Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Marxism, the coda examines the reception of Nazi propaganda films in the United States in order to develop a critical theory of collective spectatorship that promotes a rational politics, thereby pressing back on an irrationalist tradition in aesthetics leading from Schelling and Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to fascism.

UNIDOS was the center of the youth movement in support of MAS, and their takeover of the TUSD school board meeting (4/26/11) made national headlines. The students engaged in civil disobedience because the state found TUSD out of compliance and the school board was going to take the first steps toward eliminating the program without substantive public input. This chapter details those events from a firsthand account, the massive militarization of subsequent school board meetings (e.g., 150 armed officers, many in riot gear, at a meeting of 500 people), and the subsequent conspiracy theories that rose to prominence (e.g., that former Ethnic Studies professor Ward Churchill orchestrated the whole thing).

This chapter details the ways that core anti-MAS leaders in Arizona and throughout the country helped foment attacks on the program through a massive, loosely coordinated misinformation campaign involving official public statements from elected officials, legislation, television appearances, op-eds, and rightwing radio shows. The rhetoric is directly compared to that used to currently attack and sometimes ban Critical Race Theory throughout the country.

This chapter links the creation of MAS to the historical creation of Ethnic Studies – setting the record straight on the nature of this type of education amidst massive amounts of local and national misinformation. It details what MAS was, the effects of the program on student academic success, while examining how critically engaged, educated Mexican American students came to be seen as such a “threat” to the state.

This an assessment of the main themes and arguments of the book. Looking back at Brexit, what is most striking is the subsequent economic decline of the UK – a consequence of Leave demagogues diverting voters’ attention from economic risks. Brexit’s populism was a manifestation of the Europe-wide rise of identitarian politics, the normalisation of national populism and the drift toward authoritarianism. These trends went with viewing the world as a collection separate sovereign nation states. A national population was imagined as a homogeneous mass, potentially embodied in a single sovereign leader. Seeing nations as separated entities brings a focus on foreign others, exemplified in the Brexiters’ fixation on immigration into the UK. Demagoguery, bound up with ‘post-truth’ culture, is used as an explanatory concept throughout this book, but requires redefinition in the age of mass media, data collection and psychological profiling. The most important conclusion is that Brexitspeak, Brexit policies and Brexit attitudes in government constitute threats to representative democracy, foreshadowed in the referendum process and actions by post-Brexit governments.

Though their experience was in no way typical of American service in the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war have dominated American perceptions of the conflict. A small, strikingly homogenous group, the POWs were important because of, not despite, their unusual character. As most were pilots captured while waging air war against North Vietnam, they were subjected to harsh treatment by Vietnamese authorities, who sought to make them confess and repent their aggression against the Vietnamese people. But because aviators tended to be older, well-educated, white, career officers who identified deeply with the United States and its mission in Vietnam, American POWs were determined to resist Vietnamese coercion. In enduring torture rather than admit guilt, they inverted the wars moral framework, representing themselves as victims of Vietnamese aggression. Because they so neatly embodied the nation as its white majority wished to imagine it, their suffering and sacrifice worked to redeem the American cause in Vietnam and restore national honor. This chapter explains this phenomenon through close attention to the POW experience in North Vietnams prisons.

Lucas L. Schulte analyzes “The Book of Isaiah in the Persian Period.” This was a crucial time in the book’s overall development. He shows how Persian emperors were able to enlist scribal elites in various subject nations and win their support. The well-known Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon may be the most prominent example, but Isa 40–66 also reflects its own interpretation of this international Persian Royal Propaganda Model. This chapter also shows how the later parts of the book of Isaiah interacted with religious and sociopolitical issues in the postexilic Persian province, comparing and contrasting it with the viewpoints of Ezra and Nehemiah in particular.

This chapter focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department. Between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, IRD operations in the subcontinent peaked. At the time, the Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China. However, cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain’s propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one openly focused on Communist China; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviet Union. Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India. The chapter also recovers the importance of nonaligned nations in the story of Cold War covert propaganda and reveals that India was never a passive player in the propaganda Cold War.

The CIA remained a fixture at the heart of Indian civil debate throughout the 1980s. To the very end of the Cold War, the political fortunes of Indira Gandhi, and her son, and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, were intertwined with a series of espionage scandals in which, almost inevitably, the CIA figured prominently. This chapter examines the Reagan administration’s reliance of the CIA as a cold war foreign policy tool and its difficulties in securing Indian support to counter what officials in Washington perceived to be an alarming and unacceptable expansion in Soviet disinformation activity in the subcontinent. It explores the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and how these two tragic events came to be connected by South Asians with the Agency and its earlier CIA involvement in subversion and political assassination in the Global South. As the Cold War approached its end, and Hindu nationalism, rampant corruption, and political violence gripped India, the chapter considers why national powerbrokers in the subcontinent were once again unable to resist urging citizens to ‘look the other way’ and attribute the country’s troubles to a ubiquitous foreign hand?

In order to determine what really happened when Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker met with Niels Bohr in occupied Copenhagen in September 1941, this visit has to be placed in several contexts. By this time the German uranium research had demonstrated that atomic bombs were probably feasible, even if not for Germany during the war. The summer 1942 German offensive against the Soviet Union had not yet begun to falter, although Heisenberg was nevertheless privately very anxious about the war. The Germans alienated Bohr and his colleagues by their participation in cultural propaganda and nationalistic and militaristic comments about the war. A comparison with Heisenberg’s other lecture trips abroad shows that he acted the same way in other places. Heisenberg’s subsequent efforts in 1942 to gain support from Nazi officials by both describing the power of atomic bombs and the threat that the Americans might get them first also do not fit with an attempt at Copenhagen to forestall all nuclear weapons. Instead the best explanation for the visit is Heisenberg and Weizsäcker’s fear of American atomic bombs falling on Germany.

Essays of the ‘age of catastrophe’ encompassing the two World Wars have been judged aesthetic failures because, in their argumentative force and dogmatism, they break with a fundamental commitment of the essayistic: to provide an open, even democratic relational space between reader and writer. This has hindered our ability to recognise them as important objects of historic memory. Assuming that the rhetorical power of the essay may just as often be used to defend truth and justice as to agitate for and justify violent conflict, this chapter will examine the essayistic mode of political essays by Rudyard Kipling and Vernon Lee. It will argue that political essays often display the same longing for connection and attachment that has long been deemed the cornerstone of the literary essay.

No foreign humanitarian organization garnered more support from Americans during (and after) World War I than did the Fatherless Children of France Society. From New York City, the Franco-American private philanthropic organization rapidly raised a wave of humanitarian response for the children of France’s war dead, doing so through strategic communication and tireless networking. Members of the FCFS toured US cities, states, and territories, opening chapters and addressing assembled crowds, constantly collecting funds. Speakers vividly described the plight of starving babies in devastated France and invited those who had witnessed the trauma of children to testify. Much of the campaigning was done by women representing local committees. Americans were offered a choice on how to spend their humanitarian dollars. From the moment they became sponsors, they could be involved in the process of selecting their orphans. Most importantly, the FCFS reached the wealthy, middle, and working classes alike. In involving school children, laborers, and members of churches, clubs, and associations, the FCFS encouraged a spirit of cooperative – and sometimes competitive – humanitarianism. As a result, the FCFS mobilized large sections of US society to “adopt” some 300,000 French children who were victims of war and kept the aid flowing from 1915 to 1921.

Philanthropic organizations generally operate through networks of political and social élites, mobilizing the wealthy and influential. That was no less true during World War I. The colonies established by the CFAPCF were under the direct patronage of wealthy individuals – Americans who donated parts of their fortune and lent their properties to care for and house relatively small groups of children who were victims of the war: ill, injured, or displaced. The FCFS, which provided money directly to war widows caring for their fatherless children, marshaled the empathy and energies of the American public – initially expatriate Americans in France but eventually wide cross-sections of American society – to support some 300,000 children.