Documentaries to learn about politics, history

[jbischke]

Planning to run for office at the national level someday and one of the things that I find fascinating and yet no so little about is foreign affairs (i.e. political and military history). I've watched a few documentaries like Fog of War and really enjoyed them as a means to learn more about the world. I was wondering if anyone has other suggestions along these lines?

[Brutha]

Read books.
Try to understand why someone in history did the things he did.
Even when you don't share the same values as that person, you can still be able to understand which values motivated the person to act.
Don't reason that people did bad things because they are evil.

The pictures in a documentary have emotional effects that aren't helpful when you want to build understanding of an issue. You pick up the narrative of the story without thinking for yourself.

[Stu]

Foreign Affairs is tough because there arent really a lot of movies out there that focus on the policy aspect like fog of war. You could look at movies based on real events like Thirteen Days (based on the cuban missile crisis and a very good movie) but really like Brutha said, you've got to read.

If you're willing to read and you're really serious about becoming informed on foreign affairs what you need is a subscription to Stratfor, they know what theyre talking about when it comes to this kind of stuff. Other than that, there are a lot of good newspapers (New York Times, BBC (not a newspaper I know but very similar), weeklys (Times, Economist (is economist weekly?)) and more academic journals (Foreign Affairs, Atlantic) to keep you up to date.

As for history...maybe go buy a textbook from your local university bookstore?