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.
RMB
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 11th.
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 29th 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!)
