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  The Skies Belong to Us - Love...

  Brendan I. Koerner

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  In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise of the idealism of the sixties, airplane hijackings were astonishingly routine. Over a five-year period starting in 1968, the desperate and disillusioned seized commercial jets nearly once a week, using guns, bombs, and jars of acid. Some hijackers wished to escape to foreign lands, where they imagined being hailed as heroes; others aimed to swap hostages for sacks of cash. Their criminal exploits mesmerized the country, never more so than when the young lovers at the heart of Brendan I. Koerner's The Skies Belong to Us pulled off the longest-distance hijacking in American history.A shattered Army veteran and a mischievous party girl, Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow commandeered Western Airlines Flight 701 as a vague protest against the war. Through a combination of savvy and dumb luck, the couple managed to flee across an ocean with a half-million dollars in ransom, a feat that made them notorious around the globe. Koerner spent four years chronicling this madcap tale, which involves a cast of characters ranging from exiled Black Panthers to African despots to French movie stars. He combed through over 4,000 declassified documents and interviewed scores of key figures in the drama-including one of the hijackers, whom Koerner discovered living in total obscurity. Yet The Skies Belong to Us is more than just an enthralling yarn about a spectacular heist and its bittersweet, decades-long aftermath. It is also a psychological portrait of America at its most turbulent and a testament to the madness that can grip a nation when politics fail.

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  Fascism: What It Is And How To...

  Leon Trotsky

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  Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was one of the leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to Vladimir Lenin. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo. 
  Why fascism was able to conquer only in those countries where social democratic or Stalinist parties blocked the workers and their allies from utilizing a revolutionary situation to remove the capitalists from power. There is a scientific analysis of fascism. It was made by the exiled Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky not as a postmortem, but during the rise of fascism. This was — along with his analysis of the nature of Stalinism — Trotsky's greatest contribution to Marxist theory. He began the task after Mussolini's victory in Italy in 1922 and brought itto ahigh pointin the years preceding Hitler'striumphin Germany in 1933.

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  Propaganda

  Edward Bernays

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  A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays (1891 - 1995), pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed "engineering of consent". During World War I, he was an integral part of the US Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise, and sell the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy". The CPI would become the blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars would be based upon. 
  Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell Propaganda lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. To hear this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regards to organized manipulation of the masses.

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  Target London - Bombing the...

  Peter Rees

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  London was a target for Zeppelins and bombers during the First World War, for bombers, V1s and rockets in the Second, and for Cold War missiles and for terrorists in more recent times, yet rarely has the history of twentieth-century attacks on the capital been studied as a whole. Peter Reese, in this thought-provoking account, vividly describes how the destructive potential of aerial bombing and terrorist actions has increased and how Londoners have struggled to protect themselves and their city.He looks at the strategic aims of the bombing campaigns  panic, devastation, paralysis of communications and the collapse of morale - and contrasts them with the actual responses of Londoners  of civilians  who faced this new form of indiscriminate warfare. As he traces the developing theory and practice of air power, he dispels myths and misunderstandings that still surround the subject.His narrative follows the story from the commencement of the First World War when the development of aircraft accelerated and the possibilities of aerial warfare came to be appreciated  and feared. There are graphic accounts of the German raids on the city in the First World War, of the intense interwar debate about the impact of bombing, and of the ordeal that followed - the Blitz and the V1 and V2 campaigns.He also considers in the concluding chapters more recent threats to the capital which come, not from aircraft and missiles, but from the bombing tactics adopted by terrorists, and the need for appropriate responses.

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  Betting The House - The Inside...

  Tim Ross, Tom McTague

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  On 18th April 2017, Theresa May stunned Britain by announcing a snap election. With poll leads of more than 20 points over Jeremy Corbyn's divided Labour Party, the first Tory landslide since Margaret Thatcher's day seemed certain.
  Seven weeks later, Tory dreams had turned to dust. Instead of the 100-seat victory she'd been hoping for, May had lost her majority, leaving Parliament hung and her premiership hanging by a thread. Labour MPs, meanwhile, could scarcely believe their luck. Far from delivering the wipe-out that most predicted, Corbyn's popular, anti-austerity agenda won the party 30 seats, cementing his position as leader and denying May the right to govern alone.
  This timely and indispensable book gets to the bottom of why the Tories failed, and how Corbyn's Labour overcame impossible odds to emerge closer to power than at any election since the era of Tony Blair. Who was to blame for the Tories' mistakes? How could so many politicians and pollsters fail to see what was coming? And what was the secret of Corbyn's apparently unstoppable rise?
  Through new interviews and candid private accounts from key players, political journalists Tim Ross and Tom McTague set out to answer these questions and more, piecing together the inside story of this most dramatic and important of elections.

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  Sealand - The True Story of the...

  Dylan Taylor-Lehman

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  A “thoroughly researched, stranger-than-fiction” history of the world’s tiniest rebel nation, filled with intrigue, armed battles, and radio pirates (Robert Jobson, author of Prince Philip’s Century).   In 1967, a retired army major and self-made millionaire named Paddy Roy Bates cemented his family’s place in history when he inaugurated himself ruler of the Principality of Sealand, a tiny dominion of the high seas. And so began the peculiar story of the world’s most stubborn micronation on a World War II anti-aircraft gun platform off the British coast.  Sealand is the raucous tale of how a rogue adventurer seized the disused Maunsell Sea Fort from pirate radio broadcasters, settled his eccentric family on it, and defended their tiny kingdom from UK government officials and armed mercenaries for half a century. Incorporating original interviews with surviving Sealand royals, Dylan Taylor-Lehman recounts the battles and schemes as Roy and his crew engaged with diplomats, entertained purveyors of pirate radio and TV, and even thwarted an attempted coup that saw the Prince Regent taken hostage. Incredibly, more than fifty years later, the self-proclaimed independent nation still stands—replete with its own constitution, national flag and anthem, currency, and passports.   Featuring rare vintage photographs of the Bates clan and their unusual enterprises, this account of a dissident family and their outrageous attempt to build a sovereign kingdom on an isolated platform in shark-infested waters is the stuff of legend.   “Memorable . . . This idiosyncratic history entertains.” ―Publishers Weekly   “Endlessly captivating, like a thriller, and filled with crisp, evocative writing. Now, you’ll have to excuse me, I’m visiting the principality to become an official ‘Lord of Sealand.’” ―Bob Batchelor, author of The Bourbon King

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