Phil Tinline

Ghosts of Iron Mountain (MP3-Download)

The Hoax that Duped America and its Sinister Legacy Ungekürzte Lesung. 540 Min.

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Produktbeschreibung

How did America end up trapped in a nightmare of conspiracy theories, in which millions see the government as an evil 'deep state'? It didn't begin with Donald Trump, and it won't end with him. In Ghosts of Iron Mountain, Phil Tinline traces the roots of today's fears back to the years after the Second World War, when America was the most powerful nation the world had ever known. He tells, in vivid, entertaining and brilliant detail, the story of a literary hoax that shocked a nation. Its impact – and its astonishing afterlife – reveal America's fears as you've never seen them before. In 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a group of New York writers cooked up a satirical response to the Dr Strangelove-like thinking prevalent in Washington. They concocted what appeared to be a top-secret government report into what would happen to the USA if permanent global peace broke out. Report from Iron Mountain claimed that winding down America's vast war-making machinery would wreck the economy and tear society apart, necessitating draconian controls over the population. It was published as non-fiction – and was frighteningly convincing. Journalists tried to find out who had written it. Worried memos reached right up to the president. It became a bestselling cause celebre. Even when the hoax was revealed, many refused to believe it wasn't real. Denial became proof of truth. The Report was seized on by eager figures on the far right and in the militia movement, who insisted that it revealed terrifying government conspiracies to pollute the environment, enslave Americans and even instigate eugenics. It helped to shape the movie that has done more than any other to revive conspiracy theory: Oliver Stone's JFK. And it spawned a second hoax, which has helped sustain its bizarre relevance right up to today. Ghosts of Iron Mountain traces this story through a gallery of vivid characters, from the radical academic C. Wright Mills and the writers EL Doctorow, Victor Navasky and Leonard Lewin in 1960s New York, to the Hitler-loving far-right impresario Willis Carto, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the conspiracy theorist William Cooper, L. Fletcher Prouty (the 'Mr X' of JFK), and the ranting broadcaster Alex Jones. This is one of the great stories of our time, and an entertaining, compulsively readable narrative that reveals how nightmares about its own government drove America crazy.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Apollo
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. März 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781035903863
• Artikelnr.: 71293997

Autorenporträt

Phil Tinline is a British freelance writer and documentarian. He is the author of The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares , which was chosen as The Times (London)’s Politics Book of the Year. Over the course of twenty years working for the BBC, he has made and presented many acclaimed documentaries about how political history shapes our lives. He has also written for The Times (London), The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph (London), The New Statesman (UK), BBC History Magazine, and  Prospect. A graduate of Oxford University where he obtained a degree in English language and literature, he lives in London. Kai Bird is the coauthor with Martin J. Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which was the inspiration for the film Oppenheimer, winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. His other books include The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms, and The Outlier. Bird is the winner of the 2024 BIO Award for his contributions to the art and craft of biography. His many other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation. A contributing editor of The Nation, he lives in Kathmandu, Nepal, with his wife and son.

Rezensionen

Astonishing... an account of a brilliantly conceived spoof that has quite unintentionally changed the course of history, feeding a frenzy of conspiratorially minded narratives that have poisoned the electorate and threaten our civic discourse. The spoof would be hilarious if it were not so dangerous.