Top 10 False & Misleading Documentaries Of All Time

Documentary, noun - A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.

So says the American Heritage Dictionary. Given that definition it's probably somewhat surprising that so many blatant propaganda pieces are now self-described as documentaries in this morally inverted, opinion-as-truth day and age.

The glaring similarity between all false and misleading documentaries is the blunt approach they take to the truth. Threads of facts are linked together in a way that appears credible but fails to stand up to much scrutiny and, in many instances, it is left to the viewer to form an opinion as to the accuracy of what's being presented. This device is always used in these sorts of documentaries. "If a plane didn't hit the Pentagon then what did?" asks French 9/11 Nutjob Thierry Meyssan. The role of a real documentary is not to ask a question and leave it up to an audience that lacks knowledge and competence to provide the answer. The role of a documentary is to tell us, definitively, what happened.

I have a question for those that wallow in the culture of conspiracy theories. If you had to bet your life by being on the winning side of a case in a court of law then would you choose to side with the blunt truth approach of of Loose Change or the detailed forensic analysis of Popular Mechanics?

And without further ado, I present for you the Kerplunk Top 10 False & Misleading Documentaries of all Time.

1. Der Ewige Jude - 'The Eternal Jew' is a famous 1940 Nazi propaganda piece produced at the insistence, and under the constant supervision, of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany's Propaganda Minister. Its aim was to justify the exclusion of Jews from society, and their ultimate destruction. The Jews are presented as corrupt, filthy, lazy, ugly, and perverse: they are an alien people which have taken over the world through their control of banking and commerce, yet which still live like animals. It states that rats are the parasite and disease carriers among animals and claims that Jews are their human equivalent. It's available at Google Video and, while spending an hour of your life watching this remarkable piece of history, remember that it was part of a program that led to the death of six million innocent people. To give you some idea about its attitude to Jews, here's what it has to say about the most famous one of the 20th century when presenting his photo, "The Relativity Jew, Albert Einstein, who masks his hatred of Germans behind his obscure pseudo-sciences." It's your moral duty to watch this documentary, as it's only by understanding the environment preceding the Holocaust that we can hope to prevent any future ones. When you see what passes for truth in the Middle East (see #5 below) what with their ridiculous claims of Israeli occupation and Jewish inferiority along with Ahmadinejad's attempt to recast Israel as the cause of all the region's troubles, it doesn't take too much imagination to believe that a second Holocaust could certainly take place.

2. Fahrenheit 9/11 - Michael Moore started his documentary career with Roger And Me, a movie about how General Motors was destroying Flint, Michigan. He claims that GM head, Roger Smith, wouldn't meet with him. However, the tapes of the interview released by Smith prove otherwise. Starting with this low regard for truth, Moore developed a series of documentaries including Bowling For Columbine (also on this list) before producing his most flagrant fabrication to date - Fahrenheit 9/11. Taking the side of the 'little guy' has proven to be a very successful formula for Moore, as he now commands speaking fees in the tens of thousands, lives in a million dollar apartment in Manhattan and sends his kids to private schools. Like all good propagandists he is very good at what he does. He never quite says anything that is provably false, but creates false impressions indirectly. From falsifying a Florida 2000 election headline to claiming that Saudi nationals were allowed to leave the US before the flight curfew was lifted, Moore brilliantly ties half-truths and irrelevant facts together to give us Fahrenheit 9/11. Unfortunately, the whole premise is a complete lie. But, hey, that's why it made this list.

3. An Inconvenient Truth - I often wonder whether Hollywood will look back in shame at having bestowed a Best Documentary Oscar on this hysterical, one-sided, scientifically flawed Apple Keynote presentation. According to the Oscars' website, "Because the Academy numbers among its members the ablest artists and craftsmen in the motion picture world, the Oscar represents the best achievements of the year in the opinion of those who themselves reside at the top of their craft." I presume that they're all so wildly deficient in the use of PowerPoint or Keynote that they were completely wowed by Gore's own Michelangelo-like mastery? By the way, it's not just the Academy that will be embarrassed; it won 16 other best documentary awards at various film festivals. Not to be outdone by the IPCC, Gore dismisses their predicted 19 inch rise in sea levels by 2100, adds another 18-odd feet and wipes half of Manhattan off the map. He presents 'helpless' polar bears swimming in the sea while their habitat melts away but fails to mention that polar bear populations are now at record levels. He highlights the 2003 European heatwave in which temperatures hit 104F/40C claiming 35,000 lives but ignores the 1921 European heat wave that also hit 104F/40C not to mention how many die each year due to extreme cold. He implies that Hurricane Katrina was a result of global warming but forgets to tell you that the world's foremost hurricane expert, Bill Gray, says that there's no connection. He presents ice-core data showing a correlation between CO2 and temperature rise but fails to point out that CO2 rises occur after the temperature has risen. And, of course, the infamous Hockey Stick makes an appearance. From start to finish it's a fabrication that even Michael Moore or Joseph Goebbels would be impressed with. A worthy inclusion here.

4. Loose Change - The video has apparently been downloaded more than a million times and is often referred to by 9/11 Nutjobs as being the definitive proof that 9/11 was an inside job. Unlike Fahrenheit 9/11, Loose Change makes the pernicious claim that the government actually fired missiles at buildings and attached bombs to civilian aircraft in order to kill its own people. Presentations like this one and Michael Moore's feed into the denial philosophy that pervades the Muslim world in which some 80%+ of them not believe that Muslims carried out the attacks on 9/11 and that the Jews had something to do with it. It's been so profoundly debunked that I don't need to go into details here. What makes me really wonder about what sort of world we live in is that there are otherwise sane, rational, well-educated people that saw what happened on 9/11, have seen the debunking yet still walk around believing that, at the very least, the government knew it was going to happen or, at worst, orchestrated it themselves. Anyway, it's crap of the highest order and it belongs on this list.

5. Horseman Without a Horse - This may not be one you've heard of but is, in fact, a documentary that helps maintain Arab hatred of the Jews and was a roaring success in the Middle East when it first appeared in 2001. The documentary ran for 30 weeks, involved more than 400 actors and had a budget of 8-9 million Egyptian Pounds. From the review in Egyptian weekly Roz Al-Youssu, "For the first time, the series' writer courageously tackles the 24 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, revealing them and clarifying that they are the central line that still, to this very day, dominates Israel's policy, political aspirations, and racism. The series' first scene is set in 1948, after the retreat of the four Arab armies and the Zionist invasion of the land of Palestine. From this point, there is a flashback to the mid-19th century." Hold on, you say, wasn't the Protocol of the Elders of Zion a hoax perpetrated by the Russian secret police, the Okhrana, at around the time of the turn of the 20th century? That's right but in the Arabic world, and increasingly in the whole of the Muslim world, cultural identity trumps truth. Therefore, the fact that 'The Protocols' comports with their own racist view of the world simply confirms its validity. I've said it before and I'll say it again, while the culture of the Middle East remains one of denial and oppression in which documentaries like this can not only see the light of day but be received to such high acclaim, we will never be able to appease them, implement a two-state solution and achieve peace in the region.

6. The Corporation - As one reviewer (embarrassingly, an Australian) writes, "This is an extraordinary film about the creation of the American corporation, its legal organizational model, its global economic dominance and its psychopathic tendencies, and its incredible ambition to influence every aspect of culture in its unrelenting pursuit of profit. After viewing this film, it becomes all too evident that these large corporations have too much power, whose mandate is not the common good of the people, and who will go to any lengths, legally and otherwise, in the pursuit of profit and the bottom line." That The Corporation only takes aim at American companies, which are described as 'pathological', should be the first clue that you're watching a piece of anti-US propaganda. Naturally, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, SAP, Volvo, Airbus, Nokia, Toyota, Louis Vuitton, Honda, Samsung, Nescafe, Philips, Hyundai, L'Oreal, Zara, Armani, BP and Shell are only in business for completely altruistic reasons and don't focus on making a profit like those greedy American companies. It must be just a fluke that they make all that money. One irony is that the documentary shows the genesis of the American corporation being in Europe. It lists layoffs, union busting, industrial accidents, and sweatshops among The Corporation's human evils, adds in dangerous products, toxic waste, pollution, and synthetic chemicals to make sure poisons are covered and then rounds out with the effect of clear cutting, carbon dioxide emissions and nuclear waste on the environment to make it a slam dunk of Western socialist grievances. There's a great irony in the film that its makers missed. In describing the corporation as being made up of malevolent, power hungry men who suppress the rights of workers so that they can't achieve to their full potential, ruin the environment and present an existential threat to the rest of us they in fact describe...socialism. Human catastrophe, unparalleled environmental destruction and unrelenting global ideological projection are all signature effects of socialist states. American corporations fulfil the greatest moral good society expects from them - the provision of worthwhile employment to over one hundred million people - and they do it at a pay scale that tops the world.

7. Bowling For Columbine - If you think that An Inconvenient Truth's 17 awards is mindboggling then where does this one fit with its 28 awards? I've outlined above Moore's proclivity for bending the truth and he was at it again, big time, with this 'documentary' on the Columbine school shooting tragedy. As Moore-watcher David Hardy describes it, "Moore altered history, misled his viewers, and edited the footage and audio in such a way as to reverse the meaning. In one case, he took a speech of a person he desired to target; the problem was that the speech was in fact conciliatory and mild. So he spliced in footage from another speech, cut out paragraphs, and spliced the beginning of one sentence to the ending of another. In another, when he wanted to criticize a political advertisement, but it wasn't as pointed as he wanted, he spliced together two different political ads, then added titling which was in neither." The level of contempt for the truth Moore has is demonstrated by his use of NRA President, Charlton Heston's, famous "I have only five words for you: 'from my cold, dead, hands" remark, which is spliced in with news of weeping children outside of the Columbine school. The fact that Heston didn't make the statement until 13 months later seems not to bother this morally malnourished, calorie over-nourished blight on humanity. Factually barren, 'Bowling' is another very worthy member of this list.

8. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear - The premise of this documentary is that the perception of the threat of terrorism is greater than the reality due to forces in the government fanning the flames of fear in order to justify their activities. The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence. Clearly, the documentary's maker, Adam Curtis, has not read Lawrence Wright's definitive work on the subject of Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower, which last week won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. In The Looming Tower, Wright gives a complete history of the roots of radical Islam, starting with Sayid Qutb in the 1940s and working through to the formation of Al Qaeda, its time in Somalia and move to Afghanistan. The threat of Al Qaeda is all too clear and Curtis' attempt to lower our defences is not only dishonest but downright dangerous.

9.The Men Who Killed Kennedy - One of the best known documentaries on the JFK assassination, it appeared in 1988 as two one-hour episodes and expanded into a nine hour series over the next five years. The whole thing has been done to death, of course. Think 'grassy knoll', think Dealey Plaza. Who was the 'Umbrella Man'? The Single Bullet theory. Lee Harvey Oswald's erratic personality. The Mafia (including the French Mafia). The Cubans. The Soviets. Jack Ruby's shooting of Oswald... Gerald Posner's brilliant Case Closed goes through all of the major claims supporting a conspiracy and comes to the only plausible conclusion that the evidence sustains - Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and assassinated the President from the 6th floor window of the Texas Book Depository. He had the correct training, weapon, motivation and psychotic personality to carry out the act and he did so. There are a veritable plethora of JFK conspiracy documentaries, books and websites. They all have the same meme and they're all crap.

10. Super Size Me - Morgan Spurlock's amusing yet hopelessly flawed documentary aims to demonstrate that McDonald's food is bad for you. He chooses to chow down on the Golden Arches' finest cuisine morning, noon and night for a month and, if asked whether he'd like to be Super Sized then he has to accept. He was also not allowed to walk more than 5,000 steps in a day (that's probably about two miles) and eat McDonald's salad every tenth meal. Unsurprisingly, Spurlock added 24.5 pounds and suffered all sorts of health problems. Also, the Super Size was only offered 9 times out of the roughly 90 meals he ate, which calls into question the validity of the documentary's title. The reality, of course, is that if you eat 5000 calories of anything a day, including organically grown vegetables, then you're going to look like the Michelin Man before too long. That obesity is referred to as an 'epidemic' is one of the great modern myths. There's nothing epidemiological about people voluntarily stuffing their faces with thousands of extra calories a day, spending all of their free time sitting on the couch in front of the TV while also, paradoxically, chugging down a Diet Coke. We do no exercise. Of course we're all carrying a bit of excess condition.