All too often, the phrase "corporate free press" is something of an oxymoron. Whether to maximise sales, to attract advertisers, or simply to promote the interests of their wealthy owners, the mass media open strange, self-serving and grossly distorted windows onto the world.
This website is another window. Here you'll find documentaries, lectures and interviews following a different editorial line.
A more apt title for the programme would have been BNP Women as only one of them is married to a BNP member, and though a lot of it is old material in comedy terms (you think they’d be prepared for some of the questions and be a little more polite with members of the public!) it’s worth watching to compare what the women say with the glowing review on the BNP website, where the three are described as “fine ambassadors” for the party…
Decades before the rise of Hitler, the German elites’ quest for Lebensraum led them to a more aggressive colonisation of their newly-acquired African territories, in what we now call Namibia. This culminated in the systematic annihilation of two native peoples, through slave labour and concentration camps. (h/t Popper’s List)
The African survivors’ descendants are still lobbying the German government for recognition and reparations for the genocide today, while many of the racial theories and demobbed soldiers went on to play important roles within the Freikorps and the Nazi movement. The genocide of the Armenians is now slowly gaining recognition, but the precursors to fascism in European imperialism remain a taboo subject.
More conventional and in-depth profile of Collett, and more disturbing too.
This one goes inside the BNP project and explores Collett’s ego and ideology, while ReBrand is a more shoe-string kind of affair, showing him with real people in the real world. I think both sides of the BNP are worth looking at.
We mark Palestine Solidarity Week with this excellent documentary (57 mins), looking at the network of settlements used by Israel to control – and to annex – vast sections of the West Bank, and the apartheid wall that consolidates them.
All racism is unacceptable, of course, but some forms are more acceptable than others. The portrayal of Arabs in Hollywood cinema is one such form of accepted racism. Rooted in the European phenomenon of Orientalism, but evolving with American foreign policy, offensive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes pop up in the least expected places.
Planet Of The Arabs
This award-winning – but fun – montage (9 mins) collects half a century of racist film clips. See how many you can identify.
Reel Bad Arabs
An interview on Democracy Now! (starts about two mins into the clip) with Jack Shaheen, author of Reel Bad Arabs, and an excerpt from the film of the same name (about 26 mins in total)
In a previous post, we looked at how America’s “War on Drugs” is used to wage war on Colombia. This 1999 documentary (92 mins, in English after a brief introduction in Dutch) shows the other side of the coin: an increasingly powerful “growth industry” built around locking up Americans – mainly poor, black Americans – and slowly moving towards a privatised police state.
Given recent developments in England, this is a very relevant warning on both sides of the Atlantic.
Throw Away Your Telescreen! 