Movie Review: 1971 (2014)

PBS Documentary will have you on the edge of your national security state

1971The story of a notorious 1971 activist burglary of an FBI office that lead to exposing the Bureau’s numerous abuses against dissidents.

“In 1971, long before Edward Snowden’s revelations of NSA surveillance, a group of [young antiwar activist] citizens broke into a small FBI office in Pennsylvania, took every file, and shared them with the public. Their actions exposed the FBI’s illegal surveillance program of law-abiding Americans. Now for the first time, these anonymous Americans who risked everything share their story publicly.”

This movie is a white-knuckle ride through late 1960s and early 1970s America, when brutal national-security-state fascism was no longer a dream of the power elite… it was a stark reality. Thanks to the War in Vietnam and the militaristic regime of Richard Milhouse Nixon, millions of young Americans had to face the grim reality that, as John Lennon put it, the world was indeed “being run by insane men for insane purposes.” Continue reading