Contemporary History & Politics

A 2023 Documentary Film by Kenichi Watanabe. Audio in French with subtitles in English, Italian and Spanish (click on CC for subtitles). A Franco-Belgian couple who settled in Japan in the 1920s witnessed a remarkable moment in history: The rapid industrialisation and adoption of western customs as well as the militarisation of the country over two decades, from its conquests in Asia to its terrible defeat in 1945. Their story is a gripping journey through Japan at a time of rapid change, war, and ultimately the end of an empire.

A 1971 Documentary Film by Patricio Guzmán. Audio in French with subtitles in English, Italian and Spanish (click on CC for subtitles). A focus on the first year of the Popular Unity government in Chile, where Salvador Allende was elected as President in September 1970.

A 2025 Documentary directed by Johanna Becker and Johannes Preuß. Audio in German with subtitles in; English, Italian, French, Spanish and German (click on CC for sutitles) Stockholm, 24 April 1975. Six individuals armed with pistols, machine guns, grenades and explosives, infiltrate the West German embassy. They called themselves the "Holger Meins Commando", named after the member of the Red Army Faction (RAF) who had died in prison a few months earlier... German Embassy siege in Stockholm, Sweden, was a hostage standoff initiated by the Red Army Faction (RAF) on 24 April 1975. Collectively, the attackers referred to themselves as Kommando Holger Meins, after Holger Meins, a RAF member who had died of starvation during a (collective) hunger strike in Wittlich Prison on 9 November 1974. The RAF group carried out the attack with the goal of forcing the release of RAF members and others from prison in West Germany. During the siege they stated: "The Holger Meins Commando is holding members of the embassy staff in order to free prisoners in West Germany. If the police move in, we shall blow the building up with 15 kilos of TNT." The group consisted of six members: Karl-Heinz Dellwo, Siegfried Hausner, Hanna-Elise Krabbe, Bernhard Rössner, Lutz Taufer and Ulrich Wessel. They entered the embassy, took thirteen embassy officials hostage (or twelve officials, according to some sources), including ambassador Heinz Dietrich Stoecker, and then proceeded to occupy the upper floors of the building. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, having experienced another hostage crisis just weeks before, was not prepared to negotiate with them. In response, economic attaché Hillegaart was made to stand at a window, and was then shot three times. With the murder of Hillegaart, the attackers announced they would execute one hostage every hour until their demands were met. Part 2: https://rumble.com/v6zie3a-stockholm-1975-terror-at-the-embassy-the-bomb-part-2-multisub.html

Part 2: Red Army Faction terrorists have occupied the West German embassy in Stockholm for seven hours. They have already killed one member of staff and are threatening to kill a hostage every hour if their demands are not met.

A 1992 Observer Film Company production for BBC Television, created by Allan Francovich, narrated by John Rowe. Part 2: https://rumble.com/v6z5xcs-operation-gladio-the-puppeteers-part-2.html A 3-part series revealing the crucial role the CIA has played in manipulating the political affairs of post-war Europe through the Gladio. The film features extensive interviews with Vincenzo Vinciguerra, from his jail cell in Italy, Libero Gualtieri, who headed up The Italian Parliamentary Inquiry into Operation Gladio, and around 40 other people involved with Operation Gladio. Vinciguerra supports Federico Umberto D'Amato's claim that he founded the Club de Berne. D'Amato was an Italian secret agent, who led the Office for Reserved Affairs of the Ministry of Interior of Italy, from the 1950s till the 1970s, when the activity of the intelligence service was undercover and not publicly known. D'Amato was born in Marseille, and during World War II he worked for the US Office of Strategic Services. After the end of the conflict he was at the head of the North Atlantic Treaty Special Office, a link between NATO and the United States. In 1974, two days after the Piazza della Loggia bombing, he was removed from the position and assigned to the boundary police, although he kept a strong influence on the office until the 1980s. D'Amato was a member of Propaganda 2 (P2), a secret masonic lodge involved in numerous political and economical scandals in the 1970s. The Club de Berne (CdB) is a deep state milieu described as "a preferred platform for exchange" between secret services, an operational structure that grew out of personal contacts, practically without democratic supervision. Members include the intelligence agencies of the 28 states of the European Union (EU), Norway, Switzerland and Israel, and the US intelligence agencies enjoy “observer status”. Other participating services include Australian ASIO and Canadian CSIS. The Counter Terrorism Group (CTG) is an offshoot of the Club and shares terrorism intelligence. Operation Gladio is the codename for clandestine "stay-behind" operations of armed resistance that were organized by the Western Union (WU) also referred to as the Brussels Treaty Organisation (BTO), and subsequently by NATO and the CIA, in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies. The operation was designed for a potential Warsaw Pact invasion and conquest of Europe. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, "Operation Gladio" is used as an informal name for all of them. Stay-behind operations were prepared in many NATO member countries, and some neutral countries. During the Cold War, right-wing armed groups engaged in the harassment of left-wing parties, torture, terrorist attacks, and massacres in countries such as Italy. The role of the CIA and other intelligence organisations in Gladio—the extent of its activities during the Cold War era and any responsibility for terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the "Years of Lead" (late 1960s–early 1980s)—is the subject of debate. In 1990, the European Parliament adopted a resolution alleging that military secret services in certain member states were involved in serious terrorism and crime, whether or not their superiors were aware. The resolution also urged investigations by the judiciaries of the countries in which those armies operated, so that their modus operandi and actual extension would be revealed. To date, only Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter. The three inquiries reached differing conclusions as regarded different countries. Guido Salvini, a judge who worked in the Italian Massacres Commission, concluded that some right-wing terrorist organizations of the Years of Lead: La Fenice, National Vanguard and Ordine Nuovo were the trench troops of a secret army, remotely controlled by exponents of the Italian state apparatus and linked to the CIA. Salvini said that the CIA encouraged them to commit atrocities. The Swiss inquiry found that British intelligence secretly cooperated with their army in an operation named P-26 and provided training in combat, communications, and sabotage. It also discovered that P-26 not only would organize resistance in case of a Soviet invasion, but would also become active should the left succeed in achieving a parliamentary majority. The Belgian inquiry could find no conclusive information on their army. No links between them and terrorist attacks were found, and the inquiry noted that the Belgian secret services refused to provide the identity of agents, which could have eliminated all doubts. A 2000 Italian parliamentary report from the left wing coalition Gruppo Democratici di Sinistra l'Ulivo reported that terrorist massacres and bombings had been organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions who were linked to American intelligence. The report also said the United States was guilty of promoting the strategy of tension. Operation Gladio is also suspected to have been activated to counter existing left-wing parliamentary majorities in Europe. The US State Department published a communiqué in January 2006 that stated claims the United States ordered, supported, or authorized terrorism by stay-behind units, and US-sponsored "false flag" operations are rehashed former Soviet disinformation based on documents that the Soviets forged. Part 1: Reveals the origins of Operation Gladio in Italy. Teams of secret operatives have bombed and murdered innocent civilians to keep control of Europe for their political masters. Developed from "Stay-behind" - CIA, NATO and SIS clandestine networks at the end of World War 2 to resist the communist threat - this secret network changed from being defenders of state security into attackers of the established political order. It's only since the Gladio's existence was acknowledged in 1990 that the impact of its shadowy role in post-war Europe has emerged.

Part 2 deals with the organisational structure and their operatives activities. Infiltration into various terrorists groups and co-operation with Secret Services in some of the major massacres that took place in Italy in the so-called "Years of Lead", such as Piazza Fontana and Bologna railway station bombings. Part 3: https://rumble.com/v6z5y5w-operation-gladio-the-foot-soldiers-part-3.html

Part 3 examines the truth behind the kidnapping - and the subsequent assassination of Aldo Moro - and the killing of five men of his escort. Aldo Moro at that time was probably, together with Giulio Andreotti, the most powerful politician in the country. He was spoken about openly as the next president of the republic and precisely that March 16, the Parliament was preparing to vote for confidence in the new government led by Andreotti, a government strongly supported by Moro, against many of his own party comrades: for the first time since 1947, the Communist Party would be an integral part of the majority. There was also discontent among the communists but his kidnapping and the massacre of the men of his escort overshadowed all the doubts that still hovered among the parliamentarians the evening before: the Chamber first and the Senate afterwards took very little time to vote for the confidence in the Andreotti government, in order to have an executive with full powers in what would be considered as the most difficult days in the history of the Republic. This episode also reconstructs a series of unexplained and bloody killings a few years earlier in Belgium, when masked gunmen murdered people shopping in supermarkets (Brabant Massacres). Voice of Aldo Moro: Sir Ian McKellen Note: Since the time of this documentary, a lot of new information have come out in regards to Aldo Moro's assassination. New documents have been declassified and as from 2 October 2014 to 22 March 2018 a new parliamentary commission of inquiry was set up, to investigate on the case.

Le Cousin Jules (English: Cousin Jules) is a 1972 Documentary Film by Dominique Benicheti. Filmmaker Dominique Benichetti, who died in 2011, was in his 20s when he began working on “Cousin Jules,” and spend five years recording the daily lives of two French farmers who live alone in the countryside. There is almost no dialogues, and there is no music. This is quiet study of French rural life. An ode to rural France and the simple joys of life. The film captures the daily routine and rituals of Jules, a blacksmith, living with his wife, Felice, on a small farm in the French countryside. Both were born in 1891, but they represent a way of life that is much older. Jules, a blacksmith, works with a hand-cranked bellows and a battered metal stove, hammering out hasps and hinges with an ease and precision that represent generations of handed-down know-how. Jules and Félicie are residents of what is sometimes called “la France profonde,” a steadfast agricultural domain that has existed in parallel, and sometimes in opposition, to the industry and cosmopolitanism of Paris and other French cities.

The Mayfair Set, subtitled Four Stories about the Rise of Business and the Decline of Political Power, is a BBC television documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis. It explores the decline of Britain as a world power, the proliferation of asset stripping in the 1970s, and how buccaneer capitalists helped to shape the climate of the Thatcher years, by focusing on Colonel David Stirling, Jim Slater, Sir James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland—members of London's elite Clermont Club in the 1960s. Curtis wanted to engage with the moral ambiguity of figures such as Goldsmith. Episode 1: The opening episode focuses on Colonel David Stirling and the birth of the global arms trade in the 1960s. Contributors: Charles Gordon-Lennox, 10th Duke of Richmond, friend of David Stirling John Aspinall (filmed 1971) Maj. Bernard Mills, ex-SAS; commander in Yemen Operation Colin Campbell, friend and business partner of David Stirling Said Aburish, Arab historian Col. Johnny Cooper, ex-SAS; commander in Yemen Operation Lord Healey, Minister of Defence 1964–70; Chancellor of the Exchequer 1974–79 Geoffrey Edwards (archive), Saudi-based arms dealer Lord Caldecote, Director, English Electric 1953–69 Sheikh Ahmed Yamani, Saudi Energy Minister (interviewed 1974) Victor Lownes, head of British Playboy 1966–81 Marilyn Cole, receptionist at Clermont Club 1974–77 Mayfair resident (filmed 1974) Col. David Stirling (filmed 1974) Kate Losinska, Head of Civil and Public Services Association 1979–82 Dr Mohammed Abu Shadi, Head of Arab Investment Bank (filmed 1976) Ronald Ellis, Head of Ministry of Defence Arms Sales (filmed 1977) Episode 2: https://rumble.com/v5dwbxp-the-mayfair-set-entrepreneur-spelt-s.p.i.v.-episode-2.html

Episode 2: The rise of accountant, game theorist and asset stripper Jim Slater, who became famous for writing an investment column in The Sunday Telegraph under the nom de plume of The Capitalist. Contributors: Sir Anthony Grant, Conservative MP 1964–97 Jim Slater Malcolm Horsman, executive, Slater Walker 1965–71 Andrew Coote, manager, Cork Manufacturing 1965; son of Colonel Coote Christopher Fildes, financial journalist since 1963 Una-Mary Parker, Mayfair socialite, 1960s John Aspinall Brian Basham, financial journalist, 1960s Eric Armitage, chief accountant, Lonrho 1969–72 Tiny Rowland (interviewed 1973) Col. A. J. Aylmer, nephew of General Spears Dr Mathias Mpande, Deputy Minister of Mines, Zambia Terry Smith, City analyst John Bentley, head of Slater Walker satellite 1970–75 (archive) Sir James Goldsmith (archive) Maj. Colin MacKenzie, member of Lonrho board 1961–73 Douglas Hurd, political secretary to Edward Heath 1968–75 Capt. Bill Wilming, Tiny Rowland's pilot 1968–91 Episode 3: https://rumble.com/v5dweos-the-mayfair-set-destroy-the-technostructure-episode-3.html