Documentaries

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PLASTIC DEFENCE is a documentary about illegal 3D printed firearms in Europe and the decentralised network behind them. These guns are robust, they don't blow up in your hands, and they're untraceable. What's more, they're being made in people's bedrooms.

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Germany also manufactured large amounts of chemical weapons for World War II. The population was prepared for a gas war. Mustard gas—sometimes called ‘Deadly Lost’ in German—had already been used in the First World War. The dangerous agent played an important rôle in the second as well.

‘After the [Fascists] came to power, they began with [further] rearmament. One aspect of that was making warfare agents for Germany. They built factories to manufacture the toxins, which then had to be filled into munitions. In total, there were seven munition‐filling centres built that worked with mustard gas.’

German chemists were behind some of the most gruesome discoveries in modern warfare. A 1938 propaganda film showcased the power of the nerve agents tabun and sarin:

‘After just a few seconds, the motor neural stem cells are paralysed, and breathing ceases. Severe asphyxiation cramps follow. Breathing is stopped while a heartbeat can still be detected.’

In the end, even the [Third Reich] backed away from using these weapons of horror.

There is also a theme that recurs throughout this documentary:

The costs are an obstacle. Germany’s most toxic hole, Dethlinger Pond in Lower Saxony, could easily become the world’s most costly one. The clean up comes with an estimated €15,000,000 price tag.

[…]

Now the authorities say it’s up to the new owners to clean up any old ordnance. But the investor doesn’t want to pay for it, because that would mean passing on the cost of his toxic legacy to buyers and tenants.

[…]

Other studies have shown that public areas are also contaminated with arsenic, an uncomfortable truth for the City of Berlin. After decades of [ignoring it], authorities have to face up to this toxic wartime legacy, and it’s likely to cost them a lot.

(ETA: orthography.)

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From "Alternative Views" TV program

"Americans go to Nicaragua, they're welcome there, they go by the dozens of thousands to witness, to document these things. Eight thousand people killed, all civilians, killed. Mostly women and children. And this is a deliberate technique of the CIA, it's part of crippling a country, it's part of forcing it, traumatizing it, paralyzing it, until it grinds to a halt, until you've broken it completely, and then, as Reagan would dream, you can put in the marines eventually, and people will welcome the marines as they hand out care packages from their trucks because they're so crushed and so desperate that anything would make them feel better."

"They're trying to create conditions in Nicaragua, they have in northern Nicaragua for five years, where the farmer can't get his produce to market, where children can't go to school, where the government administration of the country grinds to a halt, where hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people where international capital is is scared off, as john was saying so very very well. the techniques are raw terrorism."

"The CIA today is running 50 covert actions, this came out in one of the oversight committee's debates, destabilizing almost one-third of the countries in the world today. That cannot make this world a calmer more peaceful safer place for anybody to live in it. Nicaragua's only the most famous one."

"The Sandinistas searched for an independent position in foreign relations and pluralism at home. They sought to break their economic dependency on north American markets and US transnational corporations, despite tremendous obstacles such goals have been achieved though to varying degrees. Campaigns in health and literacy carried out with enthusiastic popular support have won international praise. A unique land reform plan was developed and implemented winning support even from the US agency for international development in 1981, and elections were held last November. But the heavy weight of external aggression has taken its toll. the country is now focusing much of its energies on defense in order to defeat the Contras."

"By 1984 the united states congress had begun to grow weary of supporting the Contras. Thousands of civilians had been killed and the contras were going nowhere there were the reports of the CIA mining of Nicaragua's harbors and a CIA printed manual containing instructions in assassination and terrorism was revealed. Congressional leaders began to feel that the CIA had gone astray and aid to the Contras was temporarily halted by Congress. However, Contra aid continued to flow from unofficial sources."

"What we've been able to tell there's three routes--first of all, during the time when the countries were getting the official government pay from the united states, it was vastly in excess of the amount of money that had been appropriated--but the three routes, that have since been supposedly shut off, appear to be: One, selling American military equipment at fire sale prices, at unbelievably cheap prices to shell companies that turn out to be companies that are owned by the CIA, which in turn then give it to the Congress. That's one way. The second way is laundering the money through El Salvador, Honduras, and Israel, as we reported in the New York Times about on January 12th. The third way is leaving enormous amounts of military supplies around in Honduras after these incredible war games and then everybody goes out for a beer and the Contras come in and load up a few trucks and drive away and nobody saw it happen."

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An Al Jazeera investigation spills the lid on the bureaucratic sabotage of labour party officials against its leadership and its supporters throughout the Corbyn era

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In the five years between January 2015 and January 2020, drone strikes killed 909 Afghan civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Through interviews with victims, civilians who were mistakenly targeted, a former U.S. drone operator and independent investigators, "Remote Killing" exposes the numerous human tragedies caused by these unmanned but ruthless killers.

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I'd wager that regardless of how much you think you know about Hollywood's sick portrayal of Arabs and Muslims, it goes far deeper than that. Incredibly elucidating doc that I recommend 1000%.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/321700

In the spring of 1992 documentary filmmaker Dong-won Kim met Cho Chang-son and Kim Seak-hyoung, two North Koreans arrested by South Korean authorities years before. Convicted of spying for the North, they were incarcerated and spent thirty years as political prisoners. These men, and many others like them, underwent conversion schemes in prison that involved torture: those who renounced their communist beliefs were released from prison early. The others, known as "the unconverted," served their full terms. None could return home to the North, however, until the turn of this century, when tensions between North and South eased significantly. Director Dong-won Kim followed these men for ten years, documenting how they survived -both physically and psychologically, the dehumanizing time spent in prison, and their quest, once released, to finally go home.

Some lines appearing in the documentary:

In 1972, there were more than 500 long-term communist prisoners in South Korea. About 350 of them were converted by the conversion scheme. 19 died because of the conversion scheme, 117 died of illness in prison. 102 had been released as unconverts till the end of 1999.

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconverted_long-term_prisoners

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_(film)

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Great 70's documentary on the shortcomings of the mexican revolution of the 1910's, its betrayal and the failure of the mexican political structure to provide for its population

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