Turning Point: L'arme nucléaire et la guerre froide

A great and important documentary. I'm not sure why so many people say it's very biased or pushing agenda when it appeared to be very well balanced and mentioned many great facts from history (although most I already knew). In a nutshell... Nobody can win a nuclear war, Putin is a modern day Hitler and America must also learn from its mistakes as it doesn't always set the best example and others think they can follow suite. That's not biased against America in any way as they are a great nation. Mistakes have been made and we must all learn from history or there is not future.

Something I've researched and spoken about for a long time is the use of social media to promote Russian propoganda. You just need to look at their bots on YouTube or X to see the Kremlin at work. They aim to divide and they clearly succeed and dividing opinion online. I'm glad this among many other things is discussed. There is a reason they banned social media.

All in all good series. Does it's job as putting together the whole chain of events and giving the sense that we all just have to sit and endure the ride that the crazy leaders make us go through time and time again.

One thing that bothered me was the last episode where the east Berliners etc. Were talking that people just need to be brave again in 2024 and fight back. I agree but a good start would have been for the documentarists to be brave enough to tell the whole story that is unfolding in Europe right now. There is one hybrid warfare measure that is being used and is actively destroying the whole continent. But it is so forbidden to talk about this that even this historical document series did NOT bring it up. So how are you expecting people to have the courage to go out on the streets. Very ironic.

This new docuseries on Netflix might be the most important show you're not watching. We just finished last night and it's well worth your time; I loved it and learned a lot without much pain at all. It's a good compliment to "Oppenheimer" and the Einstein docuseries I previously posted about.

A gripping documentary with amazing archival footage, this gives a great macro-level presentation of how we ended up with a Russian invasion of a sovereign Ukraine. The documentary lays out a long cycle of events that began with the atomic bombings in Japan in 1945 and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 signaled a false end to the Cold War, which has led to Putin's attempt to rebuild the Russian Empire in the 21st century.

If you're any kind of history buff like I am, turn on this show. It really helped connect the dots, fill in many missing pieces, and frankly, made the current nightmare we're all currently living in more understandable, though no less tolerable. 😫

I nearly wrote my review at the halfway point, before deciding to see it through and ensure I was balanced. Unfortunately that didn't improve my impression of the series. There is a lot of great footage and history covered off - some fantastic insights and great scientific information too. But unfortunately they opted to inject some old fashioned propaganda into the final couple of episodes, after foreshadowing this in the earlier ones.

In short, what was predominantly a "nuclear paranoia drove the world wild with fear and led to idiotic levels of armaments at the expense of cultural, scientific, and social advancement" (on both sides to varying degrees - Soviet citizens suffering considerably more) has an underlying message of "orange man bad, Putin bad, Zelensky good, Government narrative on war is true, etc" There's no question that the aforementioned personalities are fraught with issues - but having covered the propaganda, subterfuge, and shadowy behaviour from the cold war, it is hard not to question the way they glossed over how widespread certain actions from the 50's through the 70s were, along with the way they tried to paint current situation.

I'm sure the military industrial complex overlords loved the "war is for peace" message that it felt like it ended on.

I'm old enough to remember when all documentaries were made this well . The chronological facts are masterfully done , even when it leaps back and forward through time . In fact it has to on several occasions to make a very salient point . What surprised me , was the factual gaps in my own personal recollections going back to , as early as , the Sixties . Every day is a school day , as they say. We see the folly of armed conflict and its lasting repercussions , we see people in power who should be nowhere near , man's inhumanity to man but, most importantly, why we never seem to learn from our mistakes and repeat them again and again . I was left with the over arching conclusion , that there are no "good guys" or "bad guys", we're all as bad as each other.