The Nazi Party came to power in 1933 in a Germany devastated by the Treaty of Versailles and Great Depression, and paralysed by a huge unemployment crisis of over 6 million. Six years later it was arguably the greatest power in Europe, tearing across the continent in relentless pursuit of ‘Lebensraum’. What happened in between might therefore be chalked up to nothing less than an economic miracle. It was not. When defining economic success on the regime’s own terms, namely au

Political satire is not hard to come by. A recent example of it, however, on the Green Party’s official Facebook Page, may have cheapened this already-common currency. It’s form was simple and standard enough as memes goes. An animated character is shown faced with a choice between two buttons, the look on their face betraying the difficulty they feel in deciding – the joke being that the choice is meant to be painfully obvious. The subject of the Green Party’s ire in this

In violation of the constitutional conventions that Britain usually holds dear, Britain will endure a long, directionless interval following Keir Starmer's resignation on 22nd June. The election of a new leader, Andy Burnham, who was sworn in as MP also on the 22nd June after winning the Makerfield by-election, is the likely replacement. If Burnham’s leadership bid faces no contest, he is likely to take over in the 17-20th July period, rather than in September, as some have s

Alongside Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life stands as his defining attempt to theorise what he perceived to be the cultural malaise permeating British society ever since the end of the 1970s. Published in 2014, 5 years after Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life argues that we are currently living through a “slow cancellation of the future” in which, for a variety of reasons, older generations are more likely to be “startled by the sheer persistence of recog

Nearly 40 years ago, Manufacturing Consent was released by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky to widespread acclaim. The book is principally famous for conceptualising the “Propaganda Model”, explaining how journalistic biases are created and propaganda spread in a market-based media environment. The model explains how consent is manufactured for power-elite decisions in Western societies – not through an elite conspiracy or collusion but as a natural consequence of power accumu