The Power of Nightmares

I recently heard about a new three part documentary by Adam Curtis from the BBC called "The Power of Nightmares". Its subtitle is "The Rise of the Politics of Fear" and that's just what its about. Its basic premis is that two groups have, since the 70's, slowly replaced our age of utopian dreams with an age of nightmares. Those two parties are the Neo-conservative followers of Leo Strauss in the West, and a dedicated group of extremist Islamists in the East.

The followers of Strauss believe that the failure of liberal political parties to deliver on the utopian dreams they promised have left politicians powerless and mere managers of public life rather than true heros and giants of their times. Instead of delivering giant strides in peace, human welfare and great things they declined into mediocrity and servitude of the popular masses. In the East certain groups of Islamists became disgusted with the vision of Western culture and its pursuit of individualistic freedoms over the common good and that of Islam. Furthermore those who joined with democratic institutions were putting the values of the West before those of their religion and could justifiably be eliminated.

What follows in the three hours of "The Power of Nightmares" is a litany of how bit by bit the two sides built their individual cases and discovered that the one thing that could empower their particular vision could be the nightmare scenario that some evil opposition was plotting to eliminate them. From a fictional war against a mythicaly omnipotent world wide conspiracy of terror organistations, to a struggle against the West hellbent on elimating Islam and surpressing their religion and replacing it with Western "freedom".

In the West the politicians discovered the true power that could be delivered by their manufactured nightmare struggles. Initially against the Soviet Union in the cold war, in Afghanistan and later against Islam and the likes of Saddam Hussein and their invented foe Al Qaeda. They found keeping the people permanently in fear of the bogeyman was easier than delivering the dreams they had earlier promised, and coupled with a comforter of religion almost any action in the name of self defence of "freedom" could be justified.

In the East a series of haphazard attempts to further the cause of a Islamic State were pursued setting radicals against governments corrupted by Western money, and radical groups against themselves. Eventually the events leading up to and the response after 9/11 allowed the Islamists to create their own nightmare scenario of unconditional Western aggression against Islam. Any organisation that rejected Western values and religions would now live in fear of elimination by the West, manifest primarily by the actions of the United States.

And so, as the documentary posits, the symbiotic relationship of nightmares in the East and West began and the symbiotic power struggle at the expense of the collected peoples of the East and West ensued.

To me its all very believable, the message goes down very easily - even more so than Fahrenheit 9/11 since it is delivered deadpan and within skiping a breath for lampooning George Bush or Saddam. All parties involved are portrayed as pure cold hearted plotters quietly engineering their way to power with whatever tools that present themselves. Indeed I found the entire premis so easy to swallow and the conclusions so radically transformative that it was like you were Neo in The Matrix and had just stepped out of the rabbit hole that started when you poped the red pill. Except, this is real life, these are true events. Instead of sitting on the cold steel floor of the Nebuchadnezzar you find yourself sitting in your living room contemplating another four years of George W. Bush, his kabal of neo-conservatives and the omnipresent cheerleaders of the fanatical religious right. If in four short years they could invade two countries, squander trillions of dollars of wealth, turn their back on the global opinions of 95% of the world and turn the clock back decades in respect for the environment and human rights, what then could - in the name of fear - they achieve by 2008?

The only solution is for everyone to realize the nightmare is just that, a nightmare. Its something we can all wake up from and leave behind. The global terror networks conspiring to destroy the USA are actually just handfuls of people conspiring to create similar nightmares among their own people. The diciples of fear and loathing are quickly sooth when their prophets are eliminated, and the best thing we can do is just stop listening, refute and shout the "Emperor has no clothes" until the cry is heard the world over. So I urge you, go watch "The Power of Nightmares" by whatever means you can and tell all your friends and have them tell their friends. For obvious reasons this documentary will never bee shown on US TV - its message is even more potent than Fahrenheit 9/11 - but you can easily locate it on the Internet.

To get you started I'll point you to the Information Clearinghouse which has all three parts watchable as a Realmedia stream. Its tiny and with poor audio but the message is the same. Several Indymedia sites have better quality versions, and for full high quality versions you should go download all 1.3GB via the BitTorrent file. If you don't know what BitTorrent is then you should go read this how to and download one of the clients - I recommend the Java powered Azureus client myself. If you're still really stuck, or know me in person I can give you access to the DiVx encoded AVI files or deliver you them on CD along with the appropriate DiVx decoder and player.