This chapter interrogates how local memory was mobilized and militarized by the viceroyalty to legitimize its authority in the face of growing popular resistance. It centers on the reuse of the Norman imperial palace, the Palazzo Reale, at mid-century and its protracted modernization, which, in turn, paved the way for the rebuilding of the Porta d’Africa and the Porta Nuova, two centuries-old city gates closely associated with contemporary Habsburg campaigns in North Africa. In Palermo, appropriation laid the foundations of a new architecture of power: one built on an emergent ideology of empire that balanced the rhetoric of triumphalism with the recognition of local mythography. Looking to local political discourse that claimed the city’s historical autonomy, the chapter contrasts these projects with contemporary acts of colonial foundation in the Crown’s American viceroyalties. In doing so, it situates Palermo within a newly global Habsburg imperial imaginary.

This conclusion synthesizes the book’s findings and draws lessons for understanding and countering authoritarian propaganda. It argues that service propaganda—reaffirming and informative coverage tailored to pro-regime citizens—functions primarily as a tool of belief maintenance rather than persuasion, sustaining autocrats’ bonds with their supporters over the long term. While effective, this model faces inherent risks: crises can erode trust when reaffirming content conflicts with citizens’ lived experiences, and catering to supporters creates a strategic lock-in difficult to reverse. The conclusion draws four lessons for combating authoritarian messaging. First, truth alone is insufficient—citizens prefer propaganda because it meets their informational and emotional needs, and media literacy interventions often fail or backfire. Second, weakening propaganda requires undermining the regime’s connection to citizens, a task best accomplished by capitalizing on crises and exogenous shocks rather than information provision alone. Third, independent journalism remains essential: even with a small audience, it sustains oppositional thinking and preserves professional capacity for future democratic openings. Fourth, resisting authoritarianism requires playing a long game—supporting institution-building and engaging not only liberal opponents but also the broader public that has found meaning in authoritarian propaganda.

Why do citizens in autocracies believe state propaganda, even when its falsehoods are obvious? This introduction argues that existing explanations—persuasion, intimidation, and epistemic confounding—fail to account for how authoritarian media build credibility. The book advances an alternative framework: “service propaganda,” in which state-controlled media cultivate trust by serving pro-regime majorities. Authoritarian media reaffirm supporters’ identities and worldviews while meeting their informational needs, earning credibility—and making it easier to spread outright disinformation. This consumer-oriented approach is analogous to partisan media in democracies. Drawing on large-scale text analysis of Russian state television and extensive surveys, the book examines Russia under Vladimir Putin as a crucial case in comparative context. The introduction outlines the book’s contributions: reframing propaganda as a service to supporters, centering citizens’ role in co-constructing authoritarian narratives, and illuminating why independent journalism struggles to compete. It also previews implications for policymakers seeking to counteract propaganda in autocracies and beyond.

This chapter examines why most Russians trust state-controlled media over independent news sources, even as they acknowledge the political bias of the former. Drawing on an online survey and a large-scale source reputation experiment, it shows that trust in propaganda outlets is deeply rooted in political orientations: Putin supporters overwhelmingly trust state television and other state-controlled media, perceiving them as accurate and patriotic, while extending little credibility to independent outlets. Opposition-minded citizens are considerably more skeptical of propaganda but often still consume and trust state news agencies. The chapter demonstrates that state media’s perceived credibility boosts belief in propaganda stories by 2–5 percentage points—a modest but cumulatively significant effect. It also examines how citizens justify trust in biased media and why common news literacy practices, such as cross-checking with other sources, can backfire in state-dominated information environments, where coordinated propaganda reinforces itself across outlets. Together, these findings explain why independent journalism struggles to attract audiences in autocracies: the Kremlin’s service propaganda cultivates genuine loyalty among supporters, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of consumption and trust that independent reporting cannot easily break.

Crusading never possessed strict practical coherence. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this plasticity became inescapably apparent through the diverse, often partial application of crusading forms witnessed by an increasing volume and range of evidence, from increased bureaucratic recording of social activity to advancing rates of literacy and the introduction of printing. Such developments were parallelled by an unprecedented expansion of European horizons in Africa, southern and eastern Asia, the Atlantic and the Americas and by the irreparable fragmentation of established religious structures within Christendom. Only as one strand in devotional expectations, academic debate, political action and communal behaviour did crusading remain a recognisable, if decreasingly normative, cultural reference in the two centuries separating the rout of an allied Burgundian–Hungarian army by a combined Ottoman–Serbian force at Nicopolis on the Danube on 25 September 1396 and the defeat of the confessionally blessed Spanish Armada in the English Channel in the summer of 1588. This period was an age of fractured crusading.

On 1 July 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte’s army landed near Alexandria; by the end of the month he had crushed local forces outside Cairo in a fearsome display of firepower and discipline. In spite of French claims to be sympathetic towards Islam their brief governance of Egypt was characterised by ignorance and brutality towards the local population. One observer framed his views in a particularly pointed fashion: ‘The Egyptians could not remotely stand the French because of differences of religion, language and clothes; not to mention the old enmity that had existed between them since the time of the Sultan Baybars. The troops of King Louis of France came to their defeat here at the hands of the Muslim army [1250], and the memory of this is perpetuated by the name given to the town – Mansurah (meaning ‘the victorious’).’

Between December 1671 and the summer of 1672, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) addressed what amounted to a call for a new crusade against Egypt to the French king, Louis XIV. Leibniz’s Projet de conquête de l’Egypte deliberately situated its appeal in the history of French crusading, played upon the king’s piety and evoked the defeat of St Louis IX’s Egyptian crusade (1248–54) as a failure to be redressed. Devised partly as an attempt to divert the French from war in the Netherlands and partly as a call to unify Western Christian monarchs against a common foe on behalf of his employer, the Elector of Mainz, Leibniz’s plan seems never to have reached the French king.

Matchbox labels were the perfect vehicle for propaganda. Small and portable, matchboxes were easy to distribute and carry. This facilitated the spread of propaganda messages across borders through the labels that adorned them. This chapter puts a spotlight on the labels that were used to push political interests and agendas, including those that promoted the British Empire and its mission.

This chapter examines the central role of radio and music within the mass media cultures of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, arguing that entertainment broadcasting functioned as a crucial, if often understated, instrument of political legitimation and social cohesion under fascism. The chapter traces the institutional development of German and Italian radio networks, emphasizing their hybrid political and commercial imperatives, and situating radio within a broader media ecology that blurred distinctions between propaganda and entertainment. Through analyses of request concerts, talent competitions, and touring variety programmes, it shows that the regimes cultivated participatory listening practices that integrated audiences into imagined national communities. At the same time, it demonstrates that these projects were inherently unstable due to listener agency and the persistence of distracted listening. The chapter argues for a more nuanced understanding of radio as a political medium whose power under fascism resided less in explicit messaging than in its capacity to produce shared sonic experience.

This introduction examines the widespread contemporary use of “fascism” as both a historical term and a lens for understanding current political movements. It argues that fascism is increasingly invoked to describe phenomena ranging from populist far-right parties to extremist groups, reflecting fears that its appeal is pervasive, emotionally resonant, and resistant to legal containment. Recent publications, often aimed at broad audiences, have popularised diagnostic approaches, such as Umberto Eco’s concept of “Ur-Fascism,” which identifies recurring ideological traits without offering a precise definition. The discussion extends these concerns into the realm of music, questioning simplistic assumptions about fascist aesthetics and highlighting the complexity of cultural participation under such regimes. It proposes that music’s role in fascism cannot be reduced to propaganda but must be understood across broader social practices and historical contexts. The text introduces a volume that adopts a comparative, flexible approach to analysing the multifaceted relationship between music and fascism across time and place.

This chapter examines how music functioned as propaganda in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and follows Jacques Ellul in locating propaganda’s power less in overt political messaging than in an ability to integrate and mobilize populations within a developing mass culture. Under Italian fascism, musical attempts to channel collective emotion incorporated all genres, from patriotic marches like E.A. Mario’s Noi tireremo diritto to works of modernist high culture, such as Luigi Dallapiccola’s Musica per tre pianoforti. Yet the cultural sphere of Italian fascism was neither fully controlled nor stylistically uniform. Elite composers such as Dallapiccola maintained aesthetic distance from the regime’s anthems, reflecting ongoing class divides beneath fascism’s rhetoric of unity. Mass culture—radio, cinema and light music—operated semi-independently from the regime, drawing heavily on American idioms. Fascist Italy’s most effective agitational propaganda arose from popular songs like Faccetta nera, whose eroticized colonial fantasy captivated the public more successfully than officially commissioned music. Nazi Germany similarly relied on technologically mediated musical consumption, emphasising integration over explicit mobilization. While Nazi youth sang aggressively ideological songs, high art music rarely embodied explicit National Socialist themes. The chapter concludes, by way of contrast, with the identification of a specifically fascist musical form in Italian works, whose grand, slow codas—notably that of Bàrbara Giuranna’s X. Legio—modelled the regime’s philosophy of collective, self grounding historical power.

This chapter examines the innovations of “Liberty Printer” John Holt as well as his heated rivalry with loyalist printer James Rivington. An organ of the Sons of Liberty, Holt’s New-York Journal orchestrated America’s first news distribution service, which publicized British abuses in Boston, helping unite the colonies against a new, common enemy. With the arrival of the British in 1776, Holt would print his newspaper, sporadically, on the run. These wartime issues reveal the chaos of war as well as Holt’s own dire straits as he continued to serve his constituents. In James Rivington, Holt found an equally talented rival. Rivington’s Gazetteer was a modern marvel, which served the Tory cause as fervently as the Journal served the Patriot cause. In examining the parallel lives and prints of Holt and Rivington, this chapter showcases their modern print innovations, elicits a sharper understanding of the role of wartime propaganda, and interrogates the complicated decision of allegiance for Loyalists, Patriots, and the many Americans who remained neutral throughout the duration of the war.

This chapter positions William Burroughs within the radical tradition of avant-garde manifesto writing, arguing that his cut-up experiments, pamphlets, tape texts, and prose manifestos from the late 1950s through the early 1970s exemplify the genre’s urgency, performativity, and call to action. Drawing on the lineage of Marx, Futurism, and Dada, Jimmy Fazzino explores how Burroughs weaponized language and media to dismantle structures of “Control” through techniques of textual sabotage and sonic disruption. Works like Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS, and The Revised Boy Scout Manual are read not only as aesthetic provocations but as revolutionary acts aligned with the manifesto’s historical function. Addressing Burroughs’s contradictions – including the inflammatory rhetoric of his guerrilla texts – Fazzino examines how Burroughs redefined literature as a site of resistance, merging art and life in a performative praxis designed to make things happen.

The torpedoing of the troop transport SS Tuscania on February 5, 1918, was the U.S. Army’s first mass-casualty event of World War I. Along with dozens of British crew members, 215 American soldiers perished. The disaster sent shockwaves across the United States and led to a scandal in the War Department, as angry families demanded more accurate lists of the living and the dead. Several important reforms came in the wake of the tragedy, including the addition of serial numbers to U.S. Army identification discs (or “dog tags”) and new guidelines for the proper care of personnel rosters. While the military struggled to meet the public’s expectations, propagandists responded to the sinking energetically. “Remember the Tuscania!” instantly became a ubiquitous war cry on the American home front. At the same time, visual messaging linked the Tuscania’s fatalities to a new symbology of wartime death, one built around the motivational figure of the Spartan Mother and the icon of the Gold Star. Largely forgotten today, the sinking of the Tuscania offers a revealing case study in the evolving relationship between the U.S. government and the families from which citizen-soldiers are drawn.

Although Hollywood and the US Department of Defense had previously collaborated in wartime, a post-Vietnam War alliance produced a new type of censorship and propaganda. In both blockbuster films and TV, Hollywood allowed the Pentagon to remove unwanted themes and to affix propagandistic storylines in exchange for borrowing hardware and personnel. Entertainment liaison offices for US armed services regularly meet producers’ requests for expensive military “props” in exchange for script control, a practice quietly carried out on hundreds of Hollywood productions. Only recently through Freedom of Information Act requests has it been revealed how films like The Transformers and Top Gun series feature authentic military aircraft and weapons because the government excised script traces of military war crimes, sexual misconduct, and incompetence. While not formally acts of censorship or propaganda, exacting script approval that sneaks in military public relations has yet to undergo public or Congressional scrutiny.