Welcome to North Korea

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3742145385913859804#

The winner of the 2001 International Emmy award for Best Documentary, Welcome to North Korea is a grotesquely surreal look at the all-too-real conditions in modern-day North Korea.

Dutch filmmaker Peter Tetteroo and his associate Raymond Feddema spent a week in and around the North Korean capital of Pyongyang — ample time to represent the starvation and deprivation afflicting a good portion of the population, and to offset such “contemporary” imagery as cars and public facilities with the conspicuous nonuse of these trappings.

As the filmmakers reveal, the North Koreans have no opportunity to compare their existence with that of the outside world, due to the near-total cutoff of news and free transportation. The one predominant feature of this oppressed nation is manifested in the scores of statues, sculptures, and iconic paintings of North Korea’s Communist dictator Kim Jong II, who has gone to great and sometimes ruthless lengths to convince his subjects that he has inherited godlike powers from his equally “divine” father, the late Kim II Sung (whose mummified body still lies in state, à la Lenin).

Were this not all too painfully true, Welcome to North Korea could easily pass as a grotesque fairy tale, out Grimm-ing anything found in Grimm. The film made its American TV debut via the Cinemax cable network on March 18, 2003.

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Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons

 

 

This programme shows that abuses like those documented in Abu Ghraib are commonplace in the USA’s overcrowded and understaffed prisons. Prisoners are shackled and hooded ‘for their own protection’; pepper spray is used as an alternative to physical force, but in sufficient quantities to cause second-degree burns; beatings are frequent and sometimes fatal. The programme suggests that the cause is not a few ‘bad apples’, but a pervasive culture of dehumanisation and brutality.

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Pandora’s Box

 

It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror. To do so, they would use the methods of science. Pandora’s Box was a six part 1992 BBC documentary television series written and produced by Adam Curtis, which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. Curtis’ later “The Century of the Self” had a similar theme. The title sequence made extensive use of clips from the short film Design for Dreaming, as well as other similar archive footage.

 

Part 1:  The Engineer’s Plot

The revolutionaries who toppled the Tsar in 1917 thought science held the key to their new world. In fact, it ended up creating a bewildering world for millions of Soviet people. In this light-hearted investigation, one industrial planner tells how she decided the people wanted platform shoes, only to discover that they had gone out of fashion by the time that the factory to manufacture them had been built.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8639026381197734332#

 

Part 2:  To The Brink of Eternity

Focusing on the men of the Cold War on whom Dr Strangelove was based. These were people who believed that the world could be controlled by the scientific manipulation of fear – mathematical geniuses employed by the American Rand Corporation. In the end, their visions were the stuff of science fiction fantasy.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1341195904328574735#

 

Part 3:  The League of Gentlemen

Thirty years ago, a group of economists managed to convince British politicians that they had foolproof technical means to make Britain great again. Pandora’s Box tells the saga of how their experiments have led the country deeper into economic decline, and asks – is their game finally up?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6378502245261130859#

 

Part 4:  Goodbye Mrs Ant

A modern fable about science and society, focusing on our attitude to nature. Should we let scientists be the prime movers of social or political change when, for instance, DDT made post-war heroes of American scientists only to be put on trial by other scientists in 1968? What kind of in-fighting goes on between rival camps before one scientific truth emerges, and when it does emerge, just how true is it?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8992996773895395024#

 

Part 5:  Black Power

A look at how former Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah set Africa ablaze with his vision of a new industrial and scientific age. At the heart of his dream was to be the huge Volta dam, generating enough power to transform West Africa into an advanced utopia. But as his grand experiment took shape, it brought with it dangerous forces Nkrumah couldn’t control, and he slowly watched his metropolis of science sink into corruption and debt.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6271849785012587578#

 

Part 6:  A is For Atom

An insight into the history of nuclear power. In the 1950s scientists and politicians thought they could create a different world with a limitless source of nuclear energy. But things began to go wrong. Scientists in America and the Soviet Union were duped into building dozens of potentially dangerous plants. Then came the disasters of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl which changed views on the safety of this new technology.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6904524736774008710#

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The Money Masters

How International Bankers Gained Control of America

 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936#

 

The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole…Their secret is that they have annexed from governments, monarchies, and republics the power to create the world’s money…” THE MONEY MASTERS is a 3 1/2 hour non-fiction, historical documentary that traces the origins of the political power structure that rules our nation and the world today. The modern political power structure has its roots in the hidden manipulation and accumulation of gold and other forms of money. The development of fractional reserve banking practices in the 17th century brought to a cunning sophistication the secret techniques initially used by goldsmiths fraudulently to accumulate wealth. With the formation of the privately-owned Bank of England in 1694, the yoke of economic slavery to a privately-owned “central” bank was first forced upon the backs of an entire nation, not removed but only made heavier with the passing of the three centuries to our day. Nation after nation, including America, has fallen prey to this cabal of international central bankers.

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The Tank Man

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3219548376600109729

Standing in front of a column of tanks, no one around him, he was all alone with his shopping bags in his hands. He climbed on top of the tank, banged on the lid and said “get out of my city, you’re not wanted here”. Tank Man, or the Unknown Rebel, is the nickname of an anonymous man who became internationally famous when he was videotaped and photographed during the Tienanmen Square protests on 5 June 1989. Several photographs were taken of the man, who stood in front of a column of Chinese Type 59 tanks, preventing their advance. The most widely reproduced version of the photograph was taken by Jeff Widener (Associated Press), from the sixth floor of the Beijing Hotel, about half a mile (800 m) away, through a 400 mm lens. Another version was taken by photographer Stuart Franklin of Magnum Photos. His photograph has a wider field of view than Widener’s picture, showing more tanks in front of the man.

Franklin subsequently won a World Press Award for the photograph. It was featured in LIFE magazine’s “100 Photos that Changed the World” in 2003. Variations of the image were also recorded by CNN and BBC film crews, on videotape, and were transmitted across the world.

The still and motion photography of the man standing alone before a line of tanks reached international audiences practically overnight. It headlined hundreds of major newspapers and news magazines and was the lead story on countless news broadcasts around the world. In April 1998, the United States magazine TIME included the “Unknown Rebel” in its 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

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Liberty Bound

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1360211088519253730

Liberty Bound takes an entertaining look at America’s ongoing struggle to keep a comfortable balance between democracy, capitalism, and fascism. This is a film about historic events that shape history. It is a film about courage and fear; ignorance and knowledge; propaganda and rhetoric.

Christine set out to answer these questions on her quest across America: What is fascism and why does that word increasingly appear in the alternative and foreign media when referencing the United States? Are we losing our civil liberties? Is our very constitution and Bill of Rights in jeopardy? Do Americans know what their government is doing? How much of the daily news is well-disguised propaganda?

Through original footage, archived footage, and interviews with people such as Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, and Michael Ruppert, Liberty Bound explores the state of the union and its ostensible move toward fascism. We talk with people who have been interrogated by the Secret Service and threatened with arrest for doing such benign things as sending an email, turning around during a Bush speech, and having a philosophical discussion on a train.

Christine also explores the unanswered questions surrounding the attacks of 9/11, and she takes a closer look at the timeline of that terrible day. She examines the US Government’s reasons for going to war with Afghanistan and Iraq. She also delves into the accusations that the Bush Administration knew about the 9/11 attacks and their warlike agenda is actually centered on oil.

Finally, she studies the elements of previous empires and fascist states as compared to recent occurrences in the United States: the loss of civil liberties, police brutality, homeland security, etc. Liberty Bound leaves us with the question: “Is the United States bound for liberty – or does it just have liberty bound?

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Beyond Elections Redefining Democracy In The Americas

What is democracy? Freedom, equality, participation? Everyone has his or her own definition. Across the world, 120 countries now have at least the minimum trappings of democracy – the freedom to vote for all citizens. But for many, this is just the beginning not the end. Following decades of US-backed dictatorships, civil wars and devastating structural adjustment policies in the South, and corporate control, electoral corruption, and fraud in the North, representative politics in the Americas is in crisis. Citizens are now choosing to redefine democracy under their own terms: local, direct, and participatory.

In 1989, the Brazilian Worker’s Party altered the concept of local government when they installed participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, allowing residents to participate directly in the allocation of city funds. Ten years later, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was swept into power with the promise of granting direct participation to the Venezuelan people; who have now formed tens of thousands of self-organized communal councils. In the Southern Cone, cooperative and recuperated factory numbers have grown, and across the Americas social movements and constitutional assemblies are taking authority away from the ruling elites and putting power into the hands of their members and citizens.

Featuring interviews with: Eduardo Galeano, Amy Goodman, Emir Sader, Martha Harnecker, Ward Churchill, and Leonardo Avritzer as well as cooperative and community members, elected representatives, academics, and activists from Brazil, Canada, Venezuela, Argentina, United States, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, and more. Beyond Elections is a journey that takes us across the Americas to attempt to answer one of the most important questions of our time: What is Democracy? Extras include video, audio, and resource materials on participatory democracy.

16 parts

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The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons (2004)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8653788864462752804

In this grimly compelling film, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris tackles one of his most perplexing and ambiguous subjects: former defense secretary Robert McNamara, widely identified (and in many quarters reviled) as the architect of the Vietnam War. The octogenarian McNamara, a former head of Ford Motor Co. whose government service began during World War II, is filmed via Morris’s invention, the “Interrotron,” a device that allows interviewer and subject to look into each other’s eyes while also staring directly into the camera lens. This enables the subject to maintain eye contact with the audience, and given the frequently disturbing nature of McNamara’s revelations, it makes for quite an eerie viewing experience. He discusses at length the Allied campaign against Japan in WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the costly, protracted conflict in Vietnam. From his musings Morris extrapolates 11 “lessons,” which are presented one at a time to impose film structure.

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Orwell Rolls In His Grave

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4467655342219448521

These commercial entities now vie with the government for control over our lives. They are not a healthy counterweight to government. Goebbels said that what you want in a media system – he meant the Nazi media system – is to present the ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity. Director Robert Kane Pappas’ ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE is the consummate critical examination of the Fourth Estate, once the bastion of American democracy. Asking whether America has entered an Orwellian world of doublespeak where outright lies can pass for the truth, Pappas explores what the media doesn’t like to talk about: itself. Meticulously tracing the process by which media has distorted and often dismissed actual news events, Pappas presents a riveting and eloquent mix of media professionals and leading intellectual voices on the media.

Among the cast of characters in ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE are Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, Vincent Bugliosi, former L.A. prosecutor and legal scholar, film director and author Michael Moore, Rep. Bernie Sanders, Danny Schecter, author and former producer for ABC and CNN, and Tony Benn, former member of the British Parliament.

From the very size of the media monopolies and how they got that way to who decides what gets on the air and what doesn’t, ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE moves through a troubling list of questions and news stories that go unanswered and unreported in the mainstream media. Are Americans being given the information a democracy needs to survive or have they been electronically lobotomized? Has the frenzy for media consolidation led to a dangerous irony where in an era of more news sources the majority of the population has actually become less informed? ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE reminds us that 1984 is no longer a date in the future.

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Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1070329053600562261

The conspiracy-themed release Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement attempts to make a case for the idea that the governments of the contemporary world are uniting to form a “new world order” and enslave all of humanity, murdering 80% of the global population. Subtopics include the formation of the Bilderberg Group, the evolution of the North American Transportation Control Grid and the collapse of the USA.

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