Propaganda In Focus

Dr Lucy Morgan Edwards worked with women on Community and Public health projects in Kandahar & Herat during the Taliban regime. Following 9/11 she remained in Afghanistan undertaking a variety of roles including as an election monitor, freelance journalist and Political Advisor to the EU Ambassador and to the EU Chief Election Observer of the 2005 Parliamentary elections. Her book, ‘The Afghan Solution; the inside story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and how western hubris lost Afghanistan’ was published in 2011. Her Doctoral thesis research interest was ‘Western support to warlords in Afghanistan from 2001-2014 and its effect on Political Legitimacy’.

21st Century Wire’s Patrick Henningsen closes the symposium with a final panel discussion with the day’s presenters.

Dr. Richard Ellefritz discusses state crimes against democracy as well as the origins and pejorative use of the term ‘Conspiracy Theory’. Dr. Ellefritz is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of the Bahamas. During his doctoral program, he applied his area of concentration in social movements to the 9/11 Truth movement. His ongoing research on movement-countermovement dynamics compares his interviews and ethnographic research with the 9/11 Truth movement to its countermovement antagonists. His area of research specifically focuses on the role of anti-conspiracy discourse in stigmatizing and silencing speech that raises troubling questions about historically significant events.

Dr. Piers Robinson discusses how propaganda was used to help launch the ‘War on Terror’ following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Dr. Daniel Broudy discusses the government and media messaging similarities employed during both the “War on Terror” era and the subsequent Covid-19 era. Dr. Broudy works in Japan and writes about intercultural interpretations of texts, symbols, sounds, and images. He integrates his post-graduate studies in psycholinguistics to help students see beyond the façades erected in mainstream media to deceive the public and manipulate emotions to obscure the empirical world.

Opening comments by Patrick Henningsen of UK Column and Dr. Piers Robinson, co-founder of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies and the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 ‘Global War on Terror’.

Matt Campbell lost his brother Geoff on 9/11. Geoff was one of 67 British victims. Over the years Matt has been campaigning for justice for his brother, putting pressure on the authorities in the US and the UK. In August of 2020 he started a legal challenge with the Attorney General in the UK to reopen his brother’s inquest.

David A. Hughes discusses the problems with broaching 9/11 evidence in the Academy which conflicts with the official government narrative. David received his M.A. from Christ Church, Oxford, his M.St. from Worcester College, Oxford, and holds doctorates in German Studies and International Relations from Duke University and Oxford Brookes University, respectively. Since 2013, he has taught International Relations at the University of East Anglia, Royal Holloway (University of London), Nottingham Trent University, and the University of Lincoln.

The discussion following the symposium presentations included debate over how academia might be reformed and emphasised the need for scholars to develop innovative and more fully independent epistemic spaces in which genuinely critical research can be undertaken.

Dr. David Miller’s presentation sets out the details of his experience at the University of Bristol, the concerted campaign to smear him, his firing, and then the subsequent and successful industrial tribunal which found that Bristol University guilty of unfair dismissal. David’s vindication was also a land mark ruling protecting the right to criticise Zionism.

Professor Oliver Boyd-Barrett develops a discussion of the larger historical context in which states have intervened in the policing of public speech and have attempted to control only the 'acceptable' ideas, the 'official' points of view, and the (re)production of knowledge.

In 2017 Dr. Piers Robinson established the Working Group on Syria, Media and Propaganda which was quickly subjected to mainstream/corporate media attacks. In this presentation, Piers describes these character assassination/smear attacks as well as setting out the motivations for them. The controversy the working group had stumbled upon was that of a strategic deception, perpetrated by the US, UK and French governments, regarding chemical weapons attacks in Syria and the corruption and manipulation of the Fact Finding Missions (FFMs) co-ordinated by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

In this talk, Professor Jared Ball discusses the context in which the field of Black-Africana studies is situated within the Western academy and the challenges and various pressures exerted upon academics at traditionally black colleges in the United States. How is academic discourse at present affected by strange paradoxes? He presents a perspective that is hardly broached about a field of study that had emerged as an officially unsanctioned intellectual bloc of the black liberation struggle which has since become elemental to the sanctioned effort by the state to suppress collective memory of that struggle. The talk deconstructs keywords such as “colonisation”, “insurgency”, “empire”, and “citizen” to bring clarity to W.E.B. DuBois' concept of the “propaganda of history”. Jared can be found@imixwhatilikeon most social media, and his decades ofemancipatory journalism, media, writing, and political work can be found atimixwhatilike.org.

Professor Daniel Broudy references the earlier work of Herbert Schiller and his effort to explain how centres of power and authority reproduce the status quo by controlling the names and definitions of keywords and concepts through access to the “informational infrastructure”.

Dr. Piers Robinson introduces the symposium presenters and outlines the Organisation for Propaganda Studies and Propaganda In Focus.

Dr. Piers Robinson introduces Propaganda In Focus and outlines the importance of propaganda study in modern discourse.