Marc Ferro

This program shows how simple and logical it all was—one step at a time, from the bitter defeat of World War I and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, the wrangling of the Weimar democracy, the economic crisis... Then the fear of Communism, the threat of violence, and the Nazi promise of law and order was so seductive that the mass of Germans were willing to overlook a little repression here and a little there, until it became a point of honor for Germans to witness brutality without flinching. Forced after the war to look at what they had done, the Germans would not or could not see.

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This film presents the point of view of an Arab from Algeria who rebels against colonization. He analyzes the process of awareness, the transition to revolt, to armed insurrection. Algeria and the settlers are seen through this lens and not the way a Frenchman saw the country. He gives voice to the Arabs at a time when this word was not heard: sometimes it was not even produced, at least publicly. The testimonies are based on real propositions, most of them were made to the author during his stay in Algeria from 1948 to 1956, then in 1958 and 1959. The comments are borrowed from the texts of Arab theorists of the revolution Algerian. This film thus completely evacuates the point of view of those who are not insurgents; he does not give the opinion of the colonists. It is the direct expression of what was the revolt of a colonized person: it thus constitutes the very type of the historical document.

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This program uses Lenin’s own words to tell the story of the Bolshevik rise to power: the overthrow of the Tsar and of the Kerensky government, the efforts at world Communist revolutions and the readiness to compromise in order to save the revolution in the Soviet Union, the ascendancy of the struggle against socialism over the struggle against capitalism. Thus the program explains the political background of the establishment of the totalitarian Soviet state and of its economic, social, and cultural policies—the precise institutions and policies that would in our time cause the destruction of what Lenin created by the force of his single-minded personality, his political acuity, his powerful oratory...and the weaknesses of the divided democratic opposition.

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