Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War

It gives you a wide view of history narrowing down to the modern day as to why things are the way they are, and how by learning from this we can we prevent catastrophes from happening in the future.

It's really important to watch it for us, as humanity, to understand our need for the ability to choose and speak freely, and how suppressing that freedom leads to dehumanization, excess patriotism, and personal selfish ambition.

If you do disagree with something while watching it that's respectable, but in the end the best perspective the documentary can teach you is the understanding that in the end peace and freedom of choice is what humanity wants and needs.

Really recommend it, and I usually don't review movies, but I can't stress it enough - watch it to the end. Because it helps you to form an educated opinion about the present day. And most importantly, how we can truly influence the future.

My overall rating is subjective and not that important. I'm writing this review because of one very subtle moment I noticed at Ep4 42:00.

The CIA officer Brian Latell says Fidel Castro wrote to Khrushchev: "You must strike preemtively with all of your nuclear forces against american targets. You must not wait for the Americans to fire." Yet he conveniently omits the true context of the letter (that in fact did urge the soviets to strike) but only IF the americans invade Cuba first.

This might not seem like a big deal and the interviewers opinion is not necessarily the one of the series.

But such subtle details (and there might very well be quite a lot more) completely shape what kind of worldview the viewer takes away. Just wanted to tell everybody to be careful with the statements and the possible lens through which the story is told.

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. 😫

Every American needs to *actually* watch this. Put all their vitriol aside and consider the entire series before rating/commenting. I realize this is impossible, but I just had to state it so maybe ONE person will consider what we're all here for.

This series ties generations together to make sense of where and why we are here, politically. It's laser focused, as far as I'm concerned, toward the very important wide view message that we need to fully comprehend what us humans have done in creating these massive annihilation nuclear devices.

I truly think if you disregard this whole work, you are for the destruction of cultures, land, identity, environment, and humanity itself. Not a great place to be.

I lived this Cold War as a child in the US who learned to duck and cover, and now living as an adult in east Berlin, and as father to a Berlin child whose mother is from the DDR. I have heard the family stories directly, from Oma explaining propaganda in WW2 through the resistance against the STASI by my family and friends here in Germany.

This is a documentary masterpiece of complicated truth and history.

Every American and European must watch this series and as one who knows Ukrainians, I am a better person to now understand this complicated would view leading up to this very misguided and unjust war in Ukraine.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.