Tariq Ali at the Parkland Conference

Tariq Ali speaks at the Parkland Conference in Edmonton, Canada, on November 16, 2008. Amazing speech on The Dictatorship of Capital: Its Impact on Politics and Culture. With the fall of the Berlin Wall what happened to diversity and freedom of expression? How did market-realism establish its ascendancy in Western culture? He also quotes from and addresses the admirable culture of resistance that is an integral part of Arab poetry.

The Evilness of Power - A Documentary on Authority

Few, if any documentaries I have come across go as deep into what motivates people to commit acts that our conscience normally would never allow. Montageing commentary from a host of intellectuals and shards of history, recent politics and popular culture to back them up, this film makes a powerful case that the evil people do to each other is not inherent in human nature: it requires authority and hierarchy to come about.

On www.anarchy.net, the creator of the film had this to say about his montage documentary:
"My motivations for creating The Evilness of Power are varied. I wanted to clarify the ideas and channel the strong emotions I'd been internalizing since I became an activist in 2004 and which I had been sketchily trying to articulate in my youtube channel since late 2006. I also realized that there weren't that many documentaries dealing exclusively with the concept of hierarchy--perhaps none at all--. I noticed how relatively easy and effective it would be to weave together some of my youtube videos with parts of programs, films, documentaries etc to offer a more comprehensive examination of hierarchy and hopefully contribute to revolutionary change."

Edward Said on 'The Clash of Civilizations' and Cultural Imperialism

In 1993 Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington wrote an essay titled "The Clash of Civilizations?" and later he expanded into a book with the same title, but without the question mark. Edward Said, late Columbia professor rips Huntington's thesis to shreds, and with it, the kind of reductionist, 'realist' world view that 'The Clash of Civilizations' is an expression and symbol of. Literary theorist and activist Edward Said has provided indispensable insight into the cultural side of contemporary imperialism.

Orientalism and other books by Edward Said

Media critic and historian Robert McChesney, talks about the essential role of journalism for meaningful democracy, and puts forward a radical proposal to address the challenges faced by news media in the current economic crisis, and into the future.

Playwright Harold Pinter's masterfully eloquent and flamingly critical Nobel Prize acceptance speech on anglo-american foreign policy since the second world war and it's surrounding 'tapestry of lies'.

Sociologist and Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on objective violence or violence inherent in systems. Double click on the video for the whole intruiging interview in which Žižek talks about ideology, psychoanalyses the (liberal) left, and necessity of radical thinking.