Popular Culture
- The origins of the Kimberly Process were dramatized in Ed Zwick's 2006 motion picture Blood Diamond. The film helped to publicize the controversy surrounding conflict diamonds and led to worldwide awareness of the Western African involvement in the diamond trade.
- The James Bond film Die Another Day uses conflict diamonds as a central plot point throughout the film.
- The music video for the Kanye West song "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" from the album Late Registration is about the illicit conflict diamond trade. The song samples the theme from another Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever.
- The video game Far Cry 2, set in an unnamed Central African country in the midst of civil war, uses diamonds as currency.
- The book Diamonds in the Shadow by Caroline B. Cooney involves a refugee family smuggling blood diamonds into the United States from Africa.
- In the Nicolas Cage film Lord of War, blood diamonds are used as currency to purchase firearms.
- In 2011 Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger published the documentary Ambassadøren (aka 'The Ambassador') about the trade in diplomatic passports in order to make money with blood diamonds.
- The Hawaii Five-0 episode 'Kalele' (originally aired March 19, 2012) involved the smuggling of conflict diamonds where a Liberian national is involved.
Read more about this topic: Blood Diamond
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)