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A Movie Recommendation And Open Thread
Adam Curtis' new masterpiece, Bitter Lake, was unfortunately only released for the iPlayer platform. But there are now some free sources available online.
The movie, again with fantastic music and pictures, tells the grant political story of the last seventy or so years using historic and current footage. The (non-)development of our world is investigated using the example of Afghanistan and the outer forces involved in it.
From Curtis' own description:
It tells a big historical narrative that interweaves America, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia. It shows how politicians in the west lost confidence - and began to simplify the stories they told. It explains why this happened - because they increasingly gave their power away to other forces, above all global finance.
...
[I]t is important to try and understand what happened. And the way to do that is to try and tell a new kind of story. One that doesn’t deny the complexity and reduce it to a meaningless fable of good battling evil - but instead really tries to makes sense of it.
The movie is quite long, some 140 minutes, but highly recommended.
Part 1, 2 and 3.
Use as open thread.
Posted by b on May 17, 2015 at 02:42 PM
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2015/05/a- ... hread.html
The origins of violent jihadism can be traced to Greeley, Colo., of all places. That’s according to a new CNN documentary by Fareed Zakaria.
“Why They Hate Us,” a one-hour special airing April 11, locally at 7 p.m., is Zakaria’s effort to answer the question first posed after 9/11. He returns to the topic 15 years later, in the wake of terrorist attacks in Boston, Brussels, Beirut, Paris, Mumbai, Ft. Hood, and San Bernardino.
According to the documentary, the global movement based on anti-Western hatred traces to Greeley in 1949 and a church dance where “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” happened to be playing. Sayyid Qutb, a puritanical, conservative Muslim was so horrified by what he saw there (males and females touching, dancing), that he returned to Egypt to advocate a return to Sharia law by Arab nations, the rejection of modernization and democracy – and violent retaliation against America and the West for ‘corrupting’ the Arab World.
A vintage phonograph record player and black-and-white pictures of a dance hall purport to represent this dramatic turning point in Greeley.
With less dramatic fanfare, intelligence experts, policy influencers, religious scholars and others weigh in on the root causes, whether Islam is an inherently violent religion, what misinterpretations and bad translations have wrought, and what can be done to avoid further bloodshed.
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