Let's try and get 1,000,000 replies to this post

Wasted The Great said:
I would love to hear the reasoning behind that!
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I'm patching up a paper on pre-9/11 depiction of Afghanistan in movies. And, there are really only two films from the last 30 years that come to mind. This and an Iranian one from 2001.  :halo:
 
Perun said:
I'm patching up a paper on pre-9/11 depiction of Afghanistan in movies. And, there are really only two films from the last 30 years that come to mind. This and an Iranian one from 2001.  :halo:
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The Living Daylights had some scenes in Afghanistan. Not sure if it is enough of a link for your research.
 
Albie said:
The Living Daylights had some scenes in Afghanistan. Not sure if it is enough of a link for your research.
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Hmm, I totally forgot about that one. It does warrant a mention, especially because it somehow touches the issue of opium, which Rambo does not address. Thanks for the tip!  :ok:
 
Perun said:
It does warrant a mention, especially because it somehow touches the issue of opium, which Rambo does not address.
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A not directly unimportant issue when discussing the past, present and future of Afghanistan ...
 
Indeed. But my problem with the Afghanistan issue is the same as with most other conflicts. People put much emphasis on the suffering of the people, leaving the impression that these people can't do anything else than suffer. While this evokes sympathy, it can't evoke empathy, and therefore only leaves people sitting in their chairs hopelessly and switch the channel because 'you can't do anything about it'. However, if you actually presented these people as part of a cultural heritage with distinguished achievements, it would make people think, 'hey, this is worth preserving!' and a lot more would be done to help them.

My conclusion from my studies related to Afghanistan and this paper so far, is that the only piece of media that does go in that direction is, grotesquely enough, Rambo III.
 
I saw a quite interesting (and provoking) documentary from Afghanistan recently - about a young woman trying to get out of her marriage with a violent, criminal man - her father had more or less been forced to sell her to this man because of debt. And these people were not in the Taliban ... it made me think, what are we Westerners trying to do there? If the Afghani government, with our help, is able to wipe out the military capacity of the Taliban totally (not very likely) - what is left?

(Getting a bit too serious for this thread now?)
 
We have an Afghanistan thread, so we can move this discussion there. In fact, I did explain my views on this matter there:

Perun said:
Yeah, in the end the Soviets also negotiated with their initial enemies. Same pattern.


I think that we are facing a much more in-depth problem than we are realising right now. In fact, I believe that we are at the start of something so big that we have trouble imagining it.

When the Iron Curtain fell, Francis Fukuyama wrote that history has reached its end. The rival to the system of Western Democracy, Communism, has failed and its former subjects are now striving to become Democratic. Economic prosperity, so the common idea, is only possible with open markets- and open markets presuppose political freedom, because traditionally, there has always been trade of goods and ideas.

Face it, we all believe that. We all believe that we live in the best system in the world, and that it is our moral duty to export this system and bring the freedom we enjoy to every other people in the world. That's why we are in Afghanistan- to turn the country into a free, democratic nation.

And that is why we want to win this war so bitterly, and why we will not accept to have lost it. Democracy can not lose. Democracy is the winner. It is the best, nay, the only way to live. Democracy must not lose. Anybody who claims that there are other ways to live, and that Afghanistan is not compatible to our way of life and is best left in its traditional ways is a traitor to humanity. The people in Afghanistan are benighted, and we must enlighten them. The only ones who resist are either uneducated and stupid, or deluded by a reactionary ideology. It is completely impossible that the people of Afghanistan do not want our Democracy. Or, as we would say in newspeak, does not compute.

So the Soviets wanted to bring Communism to Afghanistan. It did not work because Communism is wrong, because Communism does not work. The Soviets were wrong. There is only one system that works, and that is ours. Admit it, that is what we all believe. It is totally impossible that we are wrong. We defeated Communism. We prevailed. We are right. We have the best system in the world, and we must give it to everyone, or else we are inhumane. Afghanistan must become a Democracy because every country must become a Democracy at some point. That is the goal of history. It is an inevitable development. It may take years, decades or centuries, but that is the essential end.

That is what we believe, and that is why there will be many more dead in Afghanistan, no matter whether we will succeed in the end or not.

And here's why it matters that we remember the Soviet war. The Soviets believed the exact same thing we do, only that they applied their belief to Communism, not to Democracy. Their failure in Afghanistan was the failure of Communism, and that is what ultimately turned the Soviet Union to dust.

I think that unless we give up our belief that Western Democracy is the one right thing for everybody, the one size that fits all, Afghanistan will mark the begin of the end of our empire. It wouldn't be the first one to fall here.
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Perun said:
I'm patching up a paper on pre-9/11 depiction of Afghanistan in movies. And, there are really only two films from the last 30 years that come to mind. This and an Iranian one from 2001.  :halo:
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Hmm, interesting. I wonder if there are more.
 
Imaging a Win7 SSD using Ubuntu, onto an external HDD. All to troubleshoot a Tosh lappy that freezes up at odd times.
 
It's funny how so much troubleshooting/imaging/etc is done with a Ubuntu live CD.
 
I found between 30 and 40 titles older than 2001:
http://www.imdb.com/keyword/afghanistan ... lease_date

Some examples:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122298/
Uncivilised (1937) A white authoress, looking for a story in the outback, is kidnapped by an Afghan slaver, betrothed to a white jungle-man, and menaced by a jealous half-caste rival, a hostile witch-doctor, his crazed-killer son, and opium smugglers! Written by Anonymous

Beatrice Lynn, a young novelist,decides to penetrate the unknown Kimberly Range district to search for the mythical, she thinks, white ruler of a tribe of aborigines. A Mounted Policeman DISGUISES himself as an Afghan slave trader and, after several days of guiding the exploration party, abducts Beatrice for use as a lure to get into the forbidden territory in an effort to break up the opium-smuggling ring that keeps the natives in a state of war. The un-named policeman knows there is a white king and that the white king is seeking a white bride, but he reaches the territory only after a narrow escape from a mad-killer tracking the party. Mara, the White King, takes Beatrice as his White Queen, but does not force his attentions upon her and this impresses Beatrice no little. Meanwhile, Trask, the opium smuggler, is trapped by the policeman and, after a fierce battle between the tribe's deposed witch doctor and his son, the afore-mentioned mad-killer, with the killer's tribe at their back, Mara's warriors emerge victorious. When the Policeman, no longer posing as an Afgan slave-trader, leaves Beatrice stays in the jungle as the white ruler's white queen.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051219/
Zarak (1956)
An Afghan Outlaw finally saves a British Officer at the cost of his own life.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073341/
The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
Two British soldiers in India decide to resign from the Army and set themselves up as deities in Kafiristan--a land where no white man has set foot since Alexander.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112911/
Dukhovnye golosa. Iz dnevnikov voyny. Povestvovanie v pyati chastyakh (1995)
Plot Keywords:Afghanistan | Russian Army

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0170896/
Cold War (TV mini-series 1998)
A 24-part series which deals with the relations between the United States, the Soviet Union and their respective allies between the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096716/
Plot Summary for "Traffik" (TV mini-series 1989) The Hamburg police arrest an international businessman, charging him with smuggling heroin from Pakistan. While he's on trial, his trophy wife, a former Olympic swimmer, discovers steely ruthlessness within herself. In Pakistan, the British home minister tours the poppy-eradication project and returns to London to find that his daughter is a heroin addict. While trying to save her, and helped by a crusading attorney, he learns the limits of government policy. Fazal, a peasant burned off his land where he farmed poppies, goes to Karachi and works for Tarik Butt, a murderous drug lord. Fazal's frankness and sense of worth are his strength and his liability. Stories cross and collide.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0143305/
Inside Afghanistan (1988)
Inside Afghanistan examines the struggle for the future of Afghanistan between urbanized, Westernizing modernizers and the traditional Muslim world of the villages, still based on clan and feudal ties. Without preaching, the film breaks the stereotypes of Communist "puppets" and heroic "Freedom Fighters" to give the viewer a new understanding of the tragic and complex struggle for change in Afghanistan - a struggle that is far from over. Inside Afghanistan looks first at the educated, urban modernizers and reformers who saw a Soviet-style "revolution" as a way to bring Afghanistan into the modern world: army officers, women teachers and medical students, doctors at a children's hospital, boys at a Soviet orphanage, government officials, party members, and a rare interview with then-President Najibullah himself. We have tea with an Afghan captain, his Russian wife, and their two sons, as he explains the bond he feels with the other Afghan officers who trained in the Soviet Union...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130443/
Afghanistan 1362 - Erinnerung an eine Reise (1985) Documentary

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094618/
Afganistan - The last war bus (L'ultimo bus di guerra)(1989)
Lesser "sequel" to a good little Viet Nam war film. Here it's Afghanistan (the film bears the on screen title Afghanistan : The Last Warbus). The plot has a Green Beret going into to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation on a request by his dying father, a general, to retrieve some papers that he had hidden in a bus sometime before. Along the way he rescues some American POWs and finds that things are not as he thought. Low budget, often low rent film that's not high on the realism level (an armored Soviet helicopter is easily brought down by a couple of shots of a sawed off shotgun.) nor is it really internal consistent (the wrecked bus with the papers that is later fixed up and used for escape changes from the sequences where its found in the rubble and when its used as a means of escape). It's film that is at best okay in a time wasting sort of way. The problem is that there is too much talk and not enough of the action is truly engaging. You never really forget that this is a low rent movie. You just don't care. It's the sort of thing that just briefly passes before your eyes and then its done and you move onto the next thing with out ever looking back. You'd be better off looking for something more meaningful, say watching the original WarBus another time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365940/
Witnesses (I) (1988) documentary

Another Bond film: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ja ... d_in_films
This is a list of locations in which films of the James Bond series have been set and filmed.

The countries Bond visits all over the world are almost always filmed on location. Only the following countries appear in Bond movies, but were not actually shot on location: Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Albania, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Macau, China, Uganda, Madagascar, Montenegro, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Vietnam, North Korea, South Korea, Bulgaria, and the USSR. (Although more recent Bond films were shot on location in the Czech Republic, Russia, Germany and Azerbaijan.)
--> find Tomorrow Never Dies -->
Tomorrow Never Dies:
Khyber Pass Afghanistan/Pakistan
Hamburg Germany
South China Sea China
Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam
 
Albie said:
It's funny how so much troubleshooting/imaging/etc is done with a Ubuntu live CD.
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Yeah, it's quite amazing!  This is my first real attempt to do anything like that, but I think it will work.
 
I'm sitting at my laptop, watching tv, and I decided to check out MSN.. I go there to read about sports, check out the world, etc.  Not a bad site.

However, always pay attention to your typing-- because www.msn.com is one thing, but www dot men dot com is NOT what I expected to see. I will always pay attention to the letters I put in the address bar.  always.  You do not want to see that site.

But I can laugh at myself now.

barely....
 
I watched Black Dynamite tonight with my friends. Hilarious movie, if you like parodies - this is a parody of a blaxploitation flick.
 
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