Does the Al Qaeda Exist (II): “The Power of Nightmares”: Baby It's Cold Outside

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. The series consists of three one-hour films, consisting mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis’s narration, which were first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and have been subsequently aired in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

The films compare the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of Al-Qaeda, is in fact a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more Utopian ideologies. (From: Top Documentary Films, http://topdocumentaryfilms.com )

Episodes included: Baby It’s Cold Outside, The Phantom Victory and The Shadows in the Cave.

1- The Power of Nightmares: Baby It's Cold Outside (1 of 3): view it here or download it here

2- The Power of Nightmares: The Phantom Victory (2 of 3): view it here or or download it here

3- The Power of Nightmares: The Shadows in the Cave (3 of 3): view it here or or download it here

(To download all three parts in one file in NTSC DVD ISO form click here)

Below is a debrief of the first 20 minutes or so of episode 1.

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NB: Certain words have been 'hyperlinked' (names of people, of political parties, ...).
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THE POWER of NIGHTMARES: THE RISE of THE POLITICS OF FEAR

Part I: Baby It’s Cold Outside

INTRODUCTION

In the past politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people.

Those dreams failed, and today people lost faith in ideologies.

Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority: INSTEAD of DELIVERING DREAMS, POLITICIANS now PROMISE TO PROTECT US from NIGHTMARES. They say that they would rescue us through dreadful DANGERS that WE CANNOT NOT SEE and DO NOT UNDERSTAND! 

And the greatest danger of all is INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM: a powerful and sinister network that seeps itself in countries across the world; a threat that ought to be fought by WAR ON TERROR.

BUT…Much of this threat is a FANTASY, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media.

This is a series about HOW and WHY that FANTASY WAS CREATED, and WHO it BENEFITS. At the heart of the story are two groups: 1) the American Neoconservatives, and 2) the radical Islamists. Both were ideals borne of the failure the liberal dream to deliver a better world, and both had a very similar explanation to what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. 

Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a SECRET ORGANIZED EVIL that threatens the world, of a FANTASY politicians they found restore their power and authority. And both were the darkest fears became the most powerful.


THE YEAR IS 1949

The story begins in a summer of 1949, when a middle-aged school inspector from Egypt arrived at the small town Greeley of in Colorado. His name is Sayyed Qutb. Qutb had been sent to the US to study its educational system. But he enrolled in a local State College. His photographs appear in the College yearbook. But Qutb was destined to become much more than a school instructor. 

Out of his experiences of America that summer, Qutb was going to develop a powerful set of ideas that would directly inspire those who flew the planes on the attack of September the 11^th.

As he travelled across the country, Qutb had become increasingly disenchanted with America. The very things that on the surface made the country look prosperous and happy, Qutb saw as signs of inner corruption and decay.

This was Truman’s America, and many American today regard it a golden age of their civilization. But for Qutb, he saw a sinister side in this: all around him was crassness and corruption, vulgarity; talks centered on movie stars, automobile prices.

He was also concerned that the inhabitants of Greeley spent a lot of time in lawn care, pruning their hedges, cutting their lawn. This, for Qutb, was indicative of the selfish and materialistic aspect of American life. Americans lived this isolated lives surrounded by their lawns. They lusted after material goods. And this, says Qutb quite sassingly, is the taste of America. What Qutb believed he was seeing was a hidden and dangerous reality, underneath the surface of ordinary American life.

One summer night, he went to a dance at a local church hall. He later wrote that what he saw crystallized his vision. He talks about how the pastor played on the gramophone one of the hits of that day “Baby it’s cold outside”; he dimmed the light to create a dreaming romantic effect. And then Qutb says: chests met chests, arms circled waists, and the hall was full of lust and love.

To most people watching this dance, it would have been an innocent picture of youthful happiness. But Qutb saw something else: the dancers in front of him were tragic lost souls, they believed that they were free, but in reality they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires. American society was not going forward; it was taking people backwards. They were becoming isolated beings, driven by primitive animal forces. Such creatures, Qutb believed, could corrode the very bonds that held the society together. He became determined that night to prevent this culture, selfish individualism, taking over his own country.

But Qutb was not alone.  At the same time, in Chicago, there was another man who shared the same fears about the destructive force of individualism in America.  He was an obscure political philosopher at the University of Chicago. But his ideas would also have far reaching consequences. Because they would become the shaping force behind the Neoconservative movement which now dominates the American Administration.

He was called Leo Strauss. Strauss is a mysterious figure. He refused to be filmed or interviewed. He devoted his time to creating a loyal band of students, and he told them was that the prosperous liberal society they live in contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Strauss did want to have a school of students, to get others see what he had seen, that Western liberalism led to legalism, and that it undergone a development that at the end of which it can no longer define itself or defend itself. The development which took everything praise-worthy and admirable of human beings and made us into dwarf animals, made into herd animals and sick little dwarfs satisfied with the dangerous in which nothing is true and everything is permitted.

Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything, all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires, and this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this, Strauss believed.

It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths everyone could believe in: they might not be true, but they were necessary illusions. One of these was religion. The other, was the myth of the Nation. And in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique destiny: to battle against the forces of evil throughout the world. This myth was epitomized, Strauss told his students, in his favorite television program GUNSMOKE.

Strauss was a great fan of American television. GUNSMOKE was his great favorite and he would hurry home from the seminar which would end at 5:30 or so, have a quick dinner so could be at his seat before the television set when GUNSMOKE went on. And he felt that this was good, this show; this had a solitary effect on the American public, because it showed the conflict between good and evil in a way that would be immediately intelligible to everyone. The hero has a white hat; he is faster on the draw than the bad man; the good guy wins. And it is not just that the good guys wins but that the values are clear: That’s America…we’re going to triumph over the evils that are trying to destroy us and the virtues of the Western frontier. Good and Evil.

Leo Strauss’s other favorite program was Perry Mason, and this, he told his students, epitomized the role that they, the elite, had to play. In public, they should promote the myths necessary to rescue America from decay. But in private, they didn’t have to believe in them.

Perry Mason was different from GUNSMOKE. He is an extremely cunning man who is, as fas as we can see, is very virtuous, and uses his great intelligence and quickness of mind to rescue his clients from dangers, but who could be fooling us because is cleverer than we are. Is he really telling the truth? May be his client is guilty.

EGYPT 1950 - 1966

In 1950, Sayyed Qutb traveled back to Egypt from America. He too was determined to find someway of controlling the forces of selfish individualism. And as traveled, he began to envisage a new type of society. It would have all the modern benefits of science and technology, but a more political Islam would have a central role to play in keeping individualism in check, which would provide the moral framework that would stop selfish desires from overwhelming.

But Qutb realized the American culture was already spreading to Egypt, trapping the masses in its seductive dream. What was needed, he believed, was an elite, a vanguard, who could see through these illusions of freedom, just as he had in America, and who would then lead the masses to realize the high-arch.

The masses need to be led, and it is this vanguard group that will be responsible for the task of leading the people out the darkness into the light of Islam. Because the masses have succumbed to their own selfish desires, and he wanted the vanguard to be different, to be pure, to be standing together outside of all of this corrupt situation. Bringing people back to the truth.

On his return, Qutb became politically active in Egypt. He joined a group called the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted Islam to play a major role in the governing of the Egyptian society. And in 1952, the Brotherhood supported the revolution led by General Nasser that overthrew the last remnants of British rule.

But Nasser, very quickly, made it clear, that the new Egypt was going to be a secular society that emulated Western models. He quickly forged an alliance with America, and the CIA came to Egypt to organize security agencies for the new regime.

Faced with this, the Muslim Brotherhood began to organize against Nasser. And in 1954, Qutb and other leading members of the Brotherhood were arrested by the security services. What then happened to  Qutb  was going to have consequences for the whole world.

The testimony of survivors revealed what happened in Nasser’s main prison in the 50s and 60s. Torturers, who have been trained by the CIA, unleashed an audio violence against the Brotherhood members accused of plotting to overthrow Nasser. At one point,  Qutb was covered with animal fat and locked in a cell with dogs trained to attack humans. Inside the cell, he had a heart attack.

According to officials of that time,  Qutb thought of himself a superior sort of person, an important Islamist thinker with a strong character. But once he was locked-up in a military prison, he confessed, and detail, about the organization of the Brotherhood and his role within this organization, and about his ‘fatwas’, the most dangerous of which was that related his orders to blow-up the Kanater region in the aim of sinking the delta area being the land of infidels.

Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful, radicalizing effect on his ideas. Up to this point, he had believed that the Western secular ideas simply created the selfishness and the isolation he had seen in the United States. But the torture, he believed, showed that this culture also unleashed and the most brutal and barbarous aspects of human beings.

Qutb began to have an apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West throughout the world. He called it “jahiliyah”: a state of barbarous ignorance. What made it so terrifying and insidious was that people did not realize that they were infected. They believed that they were free and that partitions was taking them forward to a new world, but in fact, they were regressing to a barbarous age.

Qutb sensed that jahiliyah is so dangerous now because not only it was advanced by Western powers but Muslims have become infected with this jahiliyah; so now the threat to Islam is also from within; it is from without and within. It is a state of emergency because jahiliyah is a condition that pervades everything and everybody. It has even infected our power of imagination; you don’t even know that we’re sick, that we now worship materialism and the self and individual truth over the real truth. So it is an incredible sense of epic confrontation where Islam is being insulted on all fronts, from within, from without, culturally, economically, militarily. And under those circumstances, anyway of fight it become justified and legitimate, and in fact has a kind of existential weight because, somehow, it is doing God’s will on earth.

To  Qutb this force of jahiliyah has now gone so deep in the minds of Muslims that a dramatic way had to be found to free them. In a series of books he wrote secretly in prison, and which were then smuggled out,  Qutb  called upon a revolutionary vanguard to rise up and overthrow the leaders who had allowed jahiliyah to infect their country. The implication was that these leaders could justifiably be killed because they have become so corrupted they were not longer Muslims, even though they said they were.

Faced with this, Nasser decided to crush  Qutb  and his ideas. And in 1966, Qutb was put on trial for treason. The verdict was a forgone conclusion. And on Agust the 29^th 1966 Qutb was executed. But his ideas lived on.

The day after his execution, a young school boy student setup a secret group. He hoped that it one day he would become the vanguard that Qutb had called for. His name was Ayman Zawahiry. And Zawahiry was to become the mentor to Osama Bin Laden.

AMERICA 1967

But at the very moment where the ideas of Sayyed Qutb seemed dead and buried, Leo Strauss’ s ideas about how to transform America, were about to become powerful and influential. Because the liberal political order that had dominated America since the war started to collapse.

Only a few years before, President Johnson had promised policies that would create a new and a better world in America. He called it the "Great Society”: a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind. But in 1967, in the wake of some of the worst riots ever seen in America, that dream seemed to have ended in violence and hatred.

One prominent liberal journalist called Irving Kristol began to question whether it might be actually the policies themselves that were causing social breakdown. In the early 70s, Irving Kristol became the focus of a group of disaffected liberals in Washington. They were determined attempt to understand why the optimistic liberal policies have failed. And they found the answer in the theories of Leo Strauss.

Strauss explained that it was the very basis of liberal ideas, the belief in individual freedom that was causing the chaos, because it undermined the shared moral framework which held society together. Individuals pursued their own selfish interests, and this inevitable led to conflict.

As the movement grew, many young students who had studied Strauss’ ideas came to Washington to join this group.  Some, like Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukuyama, William Irving Kristol, had been taught Strauss’ ideas at the Universities of Chicago or Harvard. This group became known as the Neoconservatives.


What neo-conservatives had in common is that same doubt in what was once seemed a kind of great certainty and confidence in liberal progress. The philosophic grounds for liberal democracy have been weakened.

THE NEO-CONSERVATIVES

The neo-conservatives were idealists; their aim was to stop the social dis-integrating liberal freedoms have unleashed. They wanted to find a way of uniting the people and giving them a shared purpose. The theories of Leo Strauss would have a great influence in doing this. They would set out to re-create the “Myth of America” as a unique nation whose destiny is to battle against evil world. And in this project, the sole source of evil would America’s cold war enemy, the Soviet Union. And by doing this, they believe that they would not only give new meanings and purpose to people’s lives, but they would spread the good of democracy around the world.

The United States would not only, according to these Straussians, be able to bring good to the world, but would be able to overcome the fundamental weaknesses of American society: A society that has been suffering, almost rotting -in their language-, from relativism, liberalism, lack of self-confidence, lack of belief in itself. And, one of the main projects of the Straussians during the cold war was to reinforce the self-confidence of Americans and the belief that America was fundamentally the only force for Good in the world that had to be supported otherwise evil would prevail.

(...watch the videos to know the full the story!)