This Is What A Police State Looks Like

It’s not fascism, so ignore the hysterical Hitler references.  However, this short film (14 mins), compiled from the police’s own footage, is definitely one to watch.

Anyone who’s been on a demo in the last few years will have clocked the police intelligence teams, snapping up faces with their oversized cameras.  This footage shows how the operate – and reveals the lengths to which the police will go to enforce their authoritah.

Clash of the Worlds: Palestine

A BBC documentary looking at the British Mandate over Palestine and the betrayal of the Arab cause.

Noam Chomsky on Serbia, Kosovo and the West

To mark the occasion of the latest step in the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, I bring you a 2006 interview (36 mins) with Noam Chomsky on Serbian TV.

As it becomes less and less possible to hold up the invasion of Afghanistan as the good war that justifies our imperialism, tame media pundits can still look back fondly upon the 1999 bombing of Serbia as a truly humanitarian intervention. In fact that war fits the pattern set by its successors: a propaganda fairy story of saving savages from each other to disguise the violent projection of Western power.

Robert Fisk – Beirut To Bosnia

Filmed in the 1990s, this series takes journalist Robert Fisk through Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and Bosnia. He warns that the crimes of the West and Israel are breeding a culture of resistance, resentment and religious radicalism in the Middle East – a warning that the last decade has surely vindicated.

(3 episodes, 52 mins each. h/t Israel’s 60th Birthday)

1. The Martyr’s Smile

2. The Road To Palestine

3. To The Ends Of The Earth

Killer Coke

Give Coca-Cola’s empire a good shake, and it’s not just the odd Nazi that comes tumbling out.

(click here to watch all the whole programme)

Mark Thomas investigates the practises and history of the Coca Cola company, uncovering among other things its support for the Nazis, involvement in the murder of Colombian trade unionists, and environmental damage in Kerala and El Salvador – as well as the all-pervasive advertising by which it gets away with it all.

Motherhood By Choice

In the context of renewed attacks on a woman’s right to choose here in the UK, here is a short (27 min) film about the struggle for access to safe, legal abortions in the US.

(Go to Google Video)

Commanding Heights

The Battle for the World Economy

Here is an excellent three part series from PBS that presents a rather celebratory but interesting account of globalization.

1. The Battle of Ideas

A global economy, energized by technological change and unprecedented flows of people and money, collapses in the wake of a terrorist attack …. The year is 1914.

Worldwide war results, exhausting the resources of the great powers and convincing many that the economic system itself is to blame. From the ashes of the catastrophe, an intellectual and political struggle ignites between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace, each determined to reinvent the world’s economic order.