Battle for Algiers, 2003--Present.

If you've never seen the Oscar-Winning movie The Battle for Algiers, you owe it to yourself to see it. Not only is it one of the greatest examples of cinema verite ever filmed, it is also a riveting story and a terrible portent of the wasted lives and money we are spending waging a war that has been un-winnable since we started it. I am reminded of this because I just watched a short video called "Know Thine Enemy" which was posted as an op-ed on The New York Times web site. Check it out here: http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=8e9862a9f3a8216027ef2f9ecd1c3bc5345b4134
You might also want to check out the film's site: http://meetingresistance.com/

By the way, whether or not you agree with the politics expressed in this particular post,the trailer on the Meeting Resistance site is as fine a piece of advertising as I have seen in a long time.

Finally, this is from the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Richard Hofstadter writing in a 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Think of our current junta, and the Republican candidate dwarves.

"The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse."