Gar Alperovitz

On August 6, 1946, the United States dropped the first ever nuclear weapon on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, another nuclear bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were killed in the explosions and countless others were disfigured, maimed and poisoned by the effects of the bomb’s radiation. Was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary? Lifting the Fog: The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a provocative investigation into the motives that led to the building of the first atomic bomb and the decision to drop the bomb three months after the war ended with Germany. Using dramatizations based on the diaries and notebooks of the major participants in this momentous decision, including President Truman, Secretary of War Stimson and nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, the documentary presents the issues as they appeared to American statesmen.

Et si le 45e président des États-Unis n’était pas le symbole d’une ère nouvelle, mais au contraire l’aboutissement d’un processus entamé depuis de longues années ? Alors que la journaliste canadienne Naomi Klein a récemment comparé l’administration Trump à un "coup d'État des grandes entreprises", son compatriote philosophe John Saul (Mort de la globalisation, éd. Payot) estime, lui, que la confiscation de la démocratie et des biens publics par les intérêts privés a débuté dès la fin des années 1970, la première élection de Ronald Reagan en 1981 la rendant effective. Sa théorie du "coup d'État au ralenti" a notamment inspiré le journaliste Chris Hedges dans son analyse de l’état de l’Amérique.

Timewatch is a long-running British television series showing documentaries on historical subjects, spanning all human history. It was first broadcast on 29 September 1982 and is produced by the BBC, the Timewatch brandname is used as a banner title in the UK, but many of the individual documentaries can be found on US cable channels without the branding.