 |
| Farrel Corcoran |
Clandestine communications have long played an important role in politically unstable societies, where power is contested to the point of insurgency and where the prevailing media culture is steeped in censorship and misinformation. In the pervasive atmosphere of mistrust and fear in the period of the samizdat press in the USSR, forbidden texts were reproduced by hand and often concealed by the craft of the bookbinder inside ideologically approved books, to be shared with friends under the noses of Soviet censors. When the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini was forced to move to Paris from his first exile in Iraq, good French telephone and postal services gave him the opportunity to swamp his home country with recordings that preached revolutionary ideas inside mosques and private homes in Iran, despite the vigilance of the shah’s secret police.
During the conflict in Northern Ireland, a small number of documentary films were made which debunked many of the media stereotypes of the Troubles and challenged the dominant state narrative of the conflict by focusing on its causes and its victims. Pirated copies of films banned by the British government were circulated between families ...
Continue reading @ Dublin Review Of Books.
No comments