(via 500 Nations - Part 1)
500 Nations is an eight part documentary on the Native Americans of North and Central America. It documents from pre-Columbian to the end of the 19th century. Much of the information comes from text, eyewitnesses, pictorials, and computer graphics. The series was hosted by Kevin Costner, and directed by Jack Leustig. It included the voice talents of narrator Gregory Harrison, Eric Schweig, Wes Studi, Edward James Olmos, and Patrick Stewart. “500 Nations tries to crystallize the sweeping events that reshaped North America- one of the largest and most pivotal stories in human history - a story we feel is widely unknown. Often painful, sometimes shocking, but in the end it is simply about understanding.” Kevin Costner
(btw, thanks brett for originally posting this in the #Native American tag)
“Life in a Day is a crowdsourced documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010. The film is 94 minutes 57 seconds long and includes scenes selected from 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 nations”
This along with Microcosmos is one of the best things to watch while stoned or sober.
Our Spirits Don’t Speak English
The Price of Sugar (Documentary)
On the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic, tourists flock to pristine beaches, with little knowledge that a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians are under armed guard on plantations harvesting sugarcane, most of which ends up in US kitchens. Cutting cane by machete, they work 14 hour days, 7 days a week, frequently without access to decent housing, electricity, clean water, education, healthcare or adequate nutrition
(via strugglingtobeheard)
(via Mumia_Abu_Jamal_-_A_CASE_OF_REASONABLE_DOUBT)
The story of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of killing Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner nearly 30 years ago, is being told (again). This time by a local documentary filmmaker.
Hill, 42, told PhillyNow that after interviewing more than 50 people for the film, “there’s been a lot of lies and misrepresentations and crazy conspiracy theories, but my investigation found him guilty.” Abu-Jamal has always retained his innocence. Hill says that Abu-Jamal “thought that America was an evil country” and that revolutionizing it into a socialist communist state was needed to make it more sustainable. The movie also centers around Abu-Jamal’s philosophy and the events in his life that influenced his behavior leading up to the murder. Abu-Jamal, a former radio reporter, is on Death Row in a Greene County, Pa., prison, where he still files commentaries for Free Speech Radio News.
CIA Mind Control Techniques: MK-ULTRA Program Brainwashing Experiments Documentary (1979) (by thefilmarchive)
TRIGGER WARNING
Mind control (also known as brainwashing, coercive persuasion, mind abuse, thought control, or thought reform) refers to a process in which a group or individual “systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s), often to the detriment of the person being manipulated.” The term has been applied to any tactic, psychological or otherwise, which can be seen as subverting an individual’s sense of control over their own thinking, behavior, emotions or decision making.
Theories of brainwashing and of mind control were originally developed to explain how totalitarian regimes appeared to succeed in systematically indoctrinating prisoners of war through propaganda and torture techniques. These theories were later expanded and modified, by psychologists including Margaret Singer, to explain a wider range of phenomena, especially conversions to new religious movements (NRMs). A third-generation theory proposed by Ben Zablocki focused on the utilization of mind control to retain members of NRMs and cults to convert them to a new religion. The suggestion that NRMs use mind control techniques has resulted in scientific and legal controversy. Neither the American Psychological Association nor the American Sociological Association have found any scientific merit in such theories.
Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, was the code name for a covert, illegal CIA human research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. This official U.S. government program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects.
Donald Ewen Cameron (24 December 1901—8 September 1967) was a twentieth-century Scottish-American psychiatrist. Cameron was involved in Project MKULTRA, United States Central Intelligence Agency’s research on torture and mind control.
Cameron lived and worked in Albany, New York, and was involved in experiments in Canada for Project MKULTRA, a United States based CIA-directed mind control program which eventually led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. He is unrelated to another CIA psychiatrist Alan Cameron, who helped pioneer psychological profiling of world leaders during the 1970s.
Naomi Klein states in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron’s research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing “a scientifically based system for extracting information from ‘resistant sources.’ In other words, torture…Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron’s experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb’s earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA’s two-stage psychological torture method.”
Mind control in popular culture: * The communal brainwashing of an entire model community via subliminal messages is a central theme in the 2009 novel Candor by Pam Bachorz. * In the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, the protagonist undergoes a scientific re-education process called the “Ludovico technique” in an attempt to remove his violent tendencies. * In his 1999 science fictin novel A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge introduces the themes of “mindrot” and controlled “Focus” later eplored in his 2006 novel. * In the novel Night of the Hawk by Dale Brown, the Soviets capture and brainwash U.S. Air Force Lieutenant David Luger, transforming him into the Russian scientist Ivan Ozerov. * In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949 before the popularization of the term “brainwashing”), the fictional totalitarian government of Oceania uses brainwashing-style techniques to erase nonconformist thought and rebellious personalities. * Vernor Vinge speculates on the application of technology to achieve brainwashing in his 2006 science fiction novel, Rainbows End (ISBN 0-312-85684-9), portraying separately the dangers of JITT (Just-in-time training) and the specter of YGBM (You gotta believe me).
Brainwashing became a common trope of films, television and games in the late twentieth century. It was a convenient means of introducing changes in the behavior of characters and a device for raising tension and audience uncertainty in the climate of Cold War and outbreaks of terrorism. * The film Brazil, depicts a fascist government similar to that in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The government controls a totalitarian society subconsciously by manipulation, intending to remain in control of the population. * Derren Brown: Mind Control (1999-2000), a television show on Channel 4
MOVE: A Documentary
“The MOVE surfaced in Philadelphia in the early 1970s. Characterized by dread lock hair, the adopted sir name of Africa, the principle unity, and an uncompromising practice of a belief, members practiced the teachings of John Africa.”
“The basic teaching of John Africa is to protect life from the enslavement of the system; which means all life. Which means animals, protect the animals from the encagement of zoos, which means protecting political prisoners from being locked up in prison, that’s our work. Our work is to protect life from the enslavement of this system.”
“Revolution to us, is not a bloody battle against the oppressors. Revolution to us means generation, it means to move forward.”
“…as long as you’re not compromising and you’re going forward, then you are victorious, you are only defeated when you stop fighting, when you give up. And it is that which MOVE understands, and it is that single principle that is defeating this system.”
MOVE is an awesome organization that rose up in the 1970s which is not talked about much today. This is worth watching, particularly if you’ve never heard of the organization before.
the anniversary of the move bombing was on may 13th (1985). i did not live in philly at the time but i was 14 when it happened and remember it like yesterday. i posted this year about it on fb, and was shocked to have people that live in philly tell me this was the first time they’ve heard about it. i live some blocks away from where the bombing happened. 11 people were killed, including children, and over 61 houses were destroyed by a bomb dropped onto the neighborhood by the police and approved by the mayor. why? because of “supposed” complaints by the neighbors of noise and trash coming from the MOVE residents. there has been not one conviction, or even a (useless) apology, over the loss of life and homes. i believe there is a link to a photo documentary in my archive where i posted about this.
(via skinlikeautumnleaves)
Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (The Oka Crisis)
by prolific First Nations documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin
A feature-length, multi-award winning documentary by Native American filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin set in the thick of the armed confrontation between Native American Mohawks and Canadian government forces during the 1990 standoff in the Mohawk village of Kanehsatake near the village of Oka in Quebec. The two-and-a-half month ordeal received brief national attention when the Mohawk warriors of Kahnawake, in support of their brothers from nearby Kanehsatake, temporarily held the busy Mercier Bridge leading to Montreal, in an effort to bring world attention to the situation. Starting with plans to construct a luxury housing development and expand a private golf course into the Pines, part of Mohawk Nation’s land, tensions rose quickly and tempers flared as Mohawks were once again fighting for their sovereignty. After a police officer was killed in a raid to expel the Mohawks from the Pines, the situation spiraled out of control. In scene after startling scene the drama escalates as the Quebec police are replaced by units from the Canadian army. With few exceptions journalists covering the crisis either evacuated or were forcibly removed. Alanis Obomsawin spent the final weeks of the standoff without a crew, shooting on video and using the slow speed on her sound recorder to stretch out her limited supply of audio tape. Obomsawin’s detailed portrayal of the Mohawk community places the Oka crisis within the larger context of Mohawk land rights dating back to 1535 when France claimed the site of present-day Montreal which had been the Mohawk village of Hochelaga. Her evocative dimension of the conflict, exploring the fierce conviction of the Mohawks and the communal spirit that enabled them to stand firm. http://www.archive.org/details/kanehsatak
(Source: video.google.com, via realitycheckindianimages)
The Canary Effect
The Canary Effect
The Canary Effect is a 2006 documentary that looks into the effects of that the United States and its policies have on the Indigenous peoples (Native Americans) who are residents.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/ - CHIEFS explores the struggles of Native American basketball players at Wyoming Indian High School.
(via realitycheckindianimages)
