The Government's Underground Zines Weren't Sold at the Record Store
If you've ever romanticized the underground press of the 1960s and '70s— underground comix , mimeographed manifestos, photocopied punk newsletters, stapled conspiratorial pamphlets and the countless self-published zines that shaped counterculture—you know they were every bit as profound as the mainstream books that filled library shelves. They challenged politics, mocked institutions, experimented with art, and often predicted cultural shifts long before polite society caught up. You might be surprised to learn the largest publisher in the world wasn't some guy in a basement with an IBM Selectric. It was the U.S. government. Not because it wanted to launch the next issue of Zap Comix . It simply wanted millions of people to change their minds. Recently, the Khajistan archive assembled an extraordinary collection of psychological warfare leaflets dropped over countries including Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Seen together, they feel less like m...