The Power of Nightmares #1 (Baby, It’s Cold Outside)
I’m going to try something different here. The video embedded below is an hour long. I know when I’m surfing the web and trying to get caught up on all of the blogs I read, I frequently will skip over the longer (i.e. 10-minute) YouTube videos, no matter how highly recommended they are. I’m already spending too much time reading blogs. I can’t afford an additional 10 minutes, especially if several blogs each have one.
I would like you to make an exception to my own rule in this case. This is an important documentary. It is part one of The Power of Nightmares. It was produced in 2004 for BBC2 by Adam Curtis. It is a well-researched and immensely informative look at the beginnings of neo-conservatism in the U.S. and radical Islam abroad. It shows how the neo-cons needed the Soviet Union, and later the Islamic terrorists, in order to gain and maintain power. Curtis’ premise is that:
In the past, politicians promised to create a better world.… [T]heir power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed, and today people have lost faith in ideologies.… But now [politicians] have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares.
…[T]he greatest danger of all is international terrorism.… A threat that needs to be fought by a war on terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians.… This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created and who it benefits.
At the heart of the story are two groups: the American Neo-Conservatives and the radical Islamists.
Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. Both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.
Here is the video. (UPDATE: Thanks to Eric Howe for pointing me to a better copy. If you want to download this to keep and cherish forever, go to archive.org.)
There are two more parts to this documentary. Depending on how you guys react to this one, I’ll be posting those over the next few weeks.
I’d like your reactions to whichever parts of the documentary you find the most informative. Here are a few sections that jumped out at me, along with my reactions to them.
He starts this story in 1949 and presents us with Leo Strauss, the father of neo-conservatism, and Sayyid Qutb, the father of radical Islam.
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 that held society together.
I agree that a society needs shared values to stay together. The problem is: Whose values? I don’t share his values, and he doesn’t share mine. Maybe that’s the problem with America. We truly are two different countries trying to live in the same shared geography.
To solve this problem, Strauss advocated that politicians invent a set of shared myths!
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.
That myth of America as some place special, with a unique destiny, has been peddled quite successfully. Even though Strauss and the other originators of this myth knew it wasn’t true, the vast majority of conservatives believe it is. That would explain why every time some crazy liberal says something that casts world events in a more complex manner, or even outright contradicts conservative lies, many conservatives throw a fit. That liberal’s complex story violates the simple fiction conservatives have about this country and its history. Therefore, that liberal must hate America.
By the late 1960s, the students who had studied Strauss became the neo-conservatives.
The neo-conservatives were idealists. Their aim was to try and stop the social disintegration they believed liberal freedoms had unleashed. They wanted to find a way of uniting the people by giving them a shared purpose. One of their great influences in doing this would be the theories of Leo Strauss. They would set out to recreate the myth of America as a unique nation whose destiny was to battle against evil in the world. And in this project, the source of evil would be America’s Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union. And by doing this, they believed that they would not only give new meaning and purpose to people’s lives, but they would spread the good of democracy around the world.
Neo-cons began their climb to power in 1974 by aligning themselves with a couple of people in President Gerald Ford’s administration: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chief of Staff Dick Cheney.
Over the next decade, they portrayed the Soviet Union as having more advanced weapons than they did, and as being a bigger threat than they were. One person who got suckered into this fantasy was Ronald Reagan.
The neo-conservatives were succeeding in creating a simplistic fiction. A vision of the Soviet Union as the center of all evil in the world, and America as the only country that could rescue the world. And this nightmarish vision was beginning to give the neo-conservatives great power and influence.
In 1980, neo-cons allied with fundies to get Ronald Reagan elected president. Many neo-cons got positions of power within the administration.
The neo-conservatives believed that they now had the chance to implement their vision of America’s revolutionary destiny. To use the country’s power aggressively as a force for good in the world in an epic battle to defeat the Soviet Union. It was a vision that they shared with millions of their new religious allies.
…
But the neo-conservatives faced immense opposition to this new policy. It came not just from the bureaucracies and Congress, but from the president himself. Reagan was convinced that the Soviet Union was an evil force, but he still believed that he could negotiate with them to end the Cold War.
To convince Reagan otherwise, the neo-cons fabricated data to link the Soviet Union to most acts of terrorism around the world. Reagan was duped in 1983 and began our policy of fighting secret wars around the world to counter the Soviet “threat”.
One thing I thought about while watching this was it explains the whole “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War” myth that Fox News and others have been spreading. It’s all part of their simple story. In this case, it’s the happily-ever-after part that every fairy tale has. It “proves” all of the rest of the story up to that point, and therefore lends credence to the next chapter of their pure-good vs. pure-evil fantasy: Islamic Terrorism.
Curtis ends the documentary with this:
But what had started out as the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had said was necessary for the American people increasingly came to be seen as the truth by the neo-conservatives. They began to believe their own fiction. They had become what they called “democratic revolutionaries”, who were going to use force to change the world.
Which is worse? Being lied to by somebody who cynically knows that he’s doing it just to manipulate you? Or being lied to by somebody who believes it himself? I would argue the latter. Somebody who believes that it comes down to a battle between pure good and pure evil is willing to do whatever it takes to ensure that the “good” side prevails, even if it means doing evil in the process.
April 18th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
The Power of Nightmares is also available from archive.org if anyone wants to burn an ISO image to DVD:
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD
April 18th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I’ve always found it fascinating when left wing friends of mine seem to want to think that they and the Islamic fundamentalists are on the same side, despite antithetical values on every issue except Western imperialism. The leaders of Al Queda follow American news closely–they knew exactly how the neo-con Bush administration would respond to the 9/11 attacks, and that was the point. Ultimately, they were two groups with very similar aims, and 9/11 worked (for a while) for both…
April 18th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Eric:
That’s fantastic! I didn’t know it was available there. The video quality might be better there, since what we have on Google video was digitized off of somebody’s VHS tape (Recorded in 6-hour mode. Ugh! Why does anybody use 6-hour mode?). The only thing to be aware of is the copy you link to is an abridged version of the full documentary. The full program is three hours.
UPDATE: I discovered that the three individual episodes are available here.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
YogaforCynics:
I didn’t know there were any lefties who really did think they and the radical Muslims were on the same side. I thought that was an invention of Michael Savage and the other right-wing loonies. Certainly a couple of their interim goals are the same (i.e., more sensitive U.S. foreign policy), but the overriding goals of Al-Qaeda (destruction of the U.S. and worldwide Sharia law) are very much against our self interest.
April 19th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Just remember, that’s what happened to Darth Vader.
April 19th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
I remember seeing this when it was broadcast. It was well put together, but at the time it seemed incredible that this stuff had been going on for so long. There was a temptation to dismiss much of it as conspiracy theory.
I’ll watch it again and see how it plays in the light of intervening events.
April 19th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I take issue with that statement. I agree with the general thesis that the politics of fear is very prominent and powerful in the world. I also think we’re stuck with it for a while longer particularly due to the “culture wars” that the “uber-moral” Christians and the radical sharia Muslims keep trying to fight.
But we just had a president get elected in the USA on the exact opposite platform — hopes, dreams, and a better world! You know… The thing that “failed” apparently. That has got to mean something positive!
April 19th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Why don’t we read what Strauss had to say for himself rather than what someone else says about him…?
April 19th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Graham:
What really matters is what people did with the information. Fixing or not fixing blame on Strauss is merely academic. For all we know, they misapplied his theories. We’re concerned here with the damage the neo-cons have done. The real blame lies with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:13 am
Parrotlover77,
I’m glad you posted that because I also took issue with that statement. The statement in the film was in reference to the liberal idealism of the ’60s in the US. Those dreams did not fail. There was nothing short of a cultural revolution that did make significant permanent changes in societies around the world.
April 20th, 2009 at 6:20 am
If there was a problem with the flower children, it’s that when a lot of them grew up, they got greedy and voted for Reagan because they wanted to pay less in taxes. Sort of like the teabag “movement“ (HIGHLY IRONIC IRONY QUOTES) of today…
April 20th, 2009 at 7:00 am
ParrotLover & Dvsrat:
I, too, took issue with that statement. In an earlier draft of this article, I wrote something like “Curtis claims those dreams failed.”
Johnson’s Great Society only got partially implemented. It was mostly short-circuited by the Vietnam war, which pretty much destroyed his presidency. He did manage to get some things accomplished despite this, such as the voting rights act and other reforms.
The hippie movement was a rejection of 1950s Eisenhowerism. If anything, it was the conservative dreams that failed.
The 1970s were a bizarre time of our society trying to find itself. How else can you explain disco?
By the time the 1980s rolled around, many people with ideals sold out and bought into the “greed is good” philosophy.
Curtis’ characterization of liberalism’s ideas failing is incorrect. Much of the rest of the documentary seems spot-on, though.
(I’m still waiting for someone to claim that Curtis is saying that the Soviet Union was not a threat. I don’t know if he’s going that far. I disagree with him if he is. He’s definitely saying that by the 1970s when the neo-cons began to gain power they exaggerated the threat.)
April 20th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Good point, Ron. Disco is a hard one to explain.
The Soviet Union of yesterday and the Terr’ists of today — the boogeymen — were and are a threat. The question is whether this threat is somewhere along a sliding scale of shades of gray and not just a black/white view of EVIL versus GOOD.
Which brings us back to a study I know we discussed in the past about liberals being more able to view things in shades of gray than conservatives.
It’s interesting how all of these issues seem to boil down to very simple initial presuppositions. Whether its “evolution is wrong because goddidit” or “communism is evil because ZOMG RUSKIES” or “TERRISTS KILLED US KILL ALL BROWNIES,” the mistake is always the black and white view of the world and incorrect presuppositions.
April 20th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Viewing everything as ’shades of gray’ is akin to the ideal of liberal democracies: tolerance. “All ideas are neither better nor worse”, goes the thinking, “just different.” But then, why would we value tolerance above say… intolerance, if all ideas are equal? In valuing tolerance above all other ideas we break the very rule of tolerance in the name of equality. This is exactly what Strauss warned about. At every turn we must and do judge. This site for example doesn’t see conservatism vs. liberalism in shades of gray. Strauss, in advocating the ancients, argues simply that when we judge, we must do so wisely and prudently. If we dismiss the idea out-of-hand that there can be no “black and white” or that if there is it’s unintelligible, then we’re quickly headed towards the nihilism Strauss spent a lifetime warning against.
You’ll have to forgive me, but I would hate to see Strauss’ teachings dismissed due to an alleged connection to the Bush administration. If we’re going to dismiss them, read them first.
April 20th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
I won’t argue the (mis)interpretation of Strauss, but arguing that liberal “tolerance” equates to “all ideas are neither better nor worse” is nonsense. By my previous argument, there are shades of gray. Hence, some ideas are better than others. Hence, not black and white. Hence, SHADES OF FREAKING GRAY.
April 21st, 2009 at 11:18 am
Once again, I’ll have to ask that you forgive my obtuseness.
If I understand you correctly, your rejection of a “black and white” outlook is that it is too simplistic. Life is complex, so we must look at it in shades of gray, but with some qualification. In some cases, as I understand you, there is a hierarchy between two things or ideas. But once we assert that some ideas are superior to others, or rather that some ideas are right while others are wrong, we have to admit that, while some judgments are complex, we’re no longer really talking about shades of gray. In extreme cases we’re talking about good and evil. To me, calling things gray seems to be the oversimplification that confuses the issue or possibly a mechanism of speech allowing one to pretend to withhold judgement. Perhaps I’m not understanding you, but I wasn’t enlightened by your reassertion in capital letters.
I’m reminded of the picture at the top of this page depicting Whinnie the Pooh (sp?) presumably as a neo-con in a dream/nightmare reveling in the murder of the donkey/democratic image. I find it hard to see the recognition of gray in this depiction, granted it is a cartoon…
April 21st, 2009 at 12:17 pm
I was born in ‘65. So I was 8-17 years old during the disco era. The only thing that I can explain is that it was fun. Doing the Bus Stop, The Hustle, The bump, etc. It was a smiling good time for the kids. Perhaps people had enough of the protest songs and the experimental music. Maybe we just needed a break and we only wanted to get out and boogie and have a good time. We did. In the rubble left from the riots of the ’60s we put on our happy faces and danced under the mirror balls. It was fun and we needed to have that fun.
April 21st, 2009 at 5:49 pm
For the interested, I can “explain disco”.
In the 1970’s, there was a synthetic fabric called Kiana that became popular with young people. It was popular for the same reasons that many things are popular with young people, it made relatively nice looking clothing, and it was inexpensive. Young people started wearing clothing made of Kiana.
Unfortunately, there was an unknown chemical property of Kiana. Specifically, when it is exposed to photons with the characteristic energy of tungsten filament lamps, it emits a colorless and odorless gas. The single biggest effect caused by this gas was that it had a significant impact on the nervous systems of young people. Specifically, it caused spasmodic twitching, and almost total loss of motor control.
In addition to the physical effects, long term exposure caused deadening of the centers of the human brain that control impulse inhibition. Subsequently certain types of otherwise morally lax behavior were
exhibited by frequenters of night clubs where large quantities of Kiana were exposed to light from flashing tungsten lamps… Disco had arrived.
Like many toxins, with exposure over time, a certain amount of graded immunity arises. Eventually, afflicted individuals recover and further exposure to Kiana gas looses its effect…The seeds of the demise of Disco were sewn (literally) in the very fabric that helped to create it.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Graham:
I’m not really sure what we’re arguing about here, other than your distaste at tying Strauss to the neo-cons. A lot of good ideas can go astray in the implementation. I don’t know if that’s the case here, and, frankly, I don’t care. What concerns me is that the neo-cons had an agenda from day one, which they followed fairly closely and managed to inflict severe damage upon this country. It’s the end result that counts, and those guilty of perpetrating those acts are the ones to blame.
You seem to be equating liberalism with Europe’s pansy-fied response to everything controversial. Again, this is a matter of the implementation not being a true reflection of the ideal. Just because Europeans seem perfectly happy to bend over and let mainstream Muslims rape freedom of speech in the ass over the Danish cartoons, or just because Europeans seem perfectly willing to allow radical Muslim clerics into their countries to preach hate and violence, that isn’t liberalism. That’s pussy-ism.
Liberalism allows for ideas to be complex. Conservatism doesn’t. (And of course, there are exceptions to both of these general rules) If you try to process a complex issue with a simplistic worldview, you’re unlikely to end up with a viewpoint or policy that’s well suited to the real world. If you try to process that same complex issue with an understanding of the complexities and nuances involved, there’s no guarantee that you’ll come up with the correct viewpoint or policy, but your odds are better.
Some ideas are black and white. We measure things against our shared values that we as a society have developed. Violence and killing are always bad (Occasionally, they’re less bad than the alternative.). That makes terrorism bad no matter how you look at it. Do the British belong in Northern Ireland? Mostly no (It’s complicated, of course. That one is a dark gray. They are mostly in the wrong there.). Does that justify anything the IRA has done? No. None of it. Is that black and white enough for you? Just because things can be shades of gray, it doesn’t mean that everything is.
As you rightly pointed out, this website takes a black and white view of conservatism. That’s why I don’t understand what your objection is. Actually, the grayness, which I’ve mentioned before, is that I’m not tarring all conservatives with this brush. I actually want a real (i.e., small government, low tax, anti-authoritarian) conservative party in this country. This website is just devoted to the black parts of the gray.
I get the impression that you’re saying that all liberals view things in too wishy-washy of a manner, that black and white value judgments can be applied in some situations. What I am saying is don’t blame all liberals for the foolish behavior of some of those in power.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:27 pm
The 1970s were more than just disco. It was also the Pet Rock, bell bottoms, 8-track tapes, the Partridge Family, and thousands of other atrocities. All of this reveals a nation that had moved beyond the conformity and repression of the 1950s and the rebellion of the 1960s. We were lost and in search of ourselves.
Ten years later, we gave up the search and just sold out for cold hard cash.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Another Steve:
Thank you for the history. Disco is such a statistical outlier that even the madness of the 1970s couldn’t explain it.
April 22nd, 2009 at 6:05 am
Graham – Sorry dude. All you did was slay a strawman of me. Some ideas sounding better than others does not make an issue black or white. The fact that any issue probably has many, many solutions/outcomes means there are probably many pros and cons of each. Also, my order of acceptable solutions to a situation is probably different from yours or even many of my like-minded peers. That’s where this interesting thing called “compromise” comes in. … Something the minority party in Washington seems incapable of grasping right now.
April 22nd, 2009 at 6:11 am
I should have waited to read Ron’s post before replying. So. I’ll just say, “What Ron said.”
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Ron said:
Me, too, Ron. Actually, what I really want is a political party that’s made up of grown-ups. Wish we had one of those.
dvsrat said:
I was born in ‘66 and I can’t explain disco at all. I’m just glad it’s over…
April 23rd, 2009 at 6:36 pm
If you were born a year earlier you would be able to.
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:40 pm
I forgot all about the Great ‘65/’66 Disco Schism….
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Yes, the great psychiatrist Jouhian Hilmbilb Schnygsky noted that the individual born before January 1, 1966 is most definitely better capable of explaining Disco than those born after that particular date.
Case in point; Dr. Schnygsky posed this particular test…
Can anyone born after January 1, 1966 explain this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv-5EOAOTQM
April 24th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Ron Britton As you rightly pointed out, this website takes a black and white view of conservatism. That’s why I don’t understand what your objection is. Actually, the grayness, which I’ve mentioned before, is that I’m not tarring all conservatives with this brush. I actually want a real (i.e., small government, low tax, anti-authoritarian) conservative party in this country. This website is just devoted to the black parts of the gray.”
I don’t see where the confusion is. You call them Neo-Cons, rather than cons. Conservatism is small government, low tax, anti-authoritarian. Neo-conservatism is small government (except where it isn’t), low tax (for the rich and corporations and rich corporations), anti-authoritarian (except your superiors. Obey!). “Conservatism” (preferably small-c) is more pre-Reagan Republican party. Neo-con is pretty much everybody after that. Mod-Repubs are “RINOs” now, because in the black & white world of the neo-con/Christian Right, “If you’re not for us, yer agin’ us.”
Of course, I say this while being one of them weirdo vaguely-socialistic foreigners. Your left is our center. Your right is right out to lunch. That “liberal” is considered by a large number (if not a majority) of Americans to be a bad word indicates just how fucked up your country is.
“The 1970s were more than just disco. It was also the Pet Rock, bell bottoms, 8-track tapes, the Partridge Family, and thousands of other atrocities.”
Ah, but it also spawned The Electric Company, so it wasn’t all crap.
April 24th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Modusoperandi:
I’ll have to take your word for that part of it. Everybody my age also has fond memories of Schoolhouse Rock and the original cast of Saturday Night Live, facts that still baffle me.
I’m actually going to go out on a limb and say that despite the ’70s strangeness (or maybe because of it), that decade was, overall, pretty good to me. I wasn’t as eager to see it go as everyone else was. Remember that it was followed immediately by the Reagan era, so it’s not like it was replaced by something better.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:25 am
Increasingly less true, actually. That was more of a 90s and early 2000s thing. The fact that it has been thrown up against wildly popular figures (example: Obama) has neutralized the word.
In fact, the word socialist (yes, the “S” word! ZOMG!) has also been neutralized. I wish I had the link on hand, but something like 45% of America now has a neutral or positive view of the word socialist. The largest gap seems to be the age divide. Those who nostalgically remember the cold war (WOLVERINES!) seem to think it’s just icky to be socialist. The younger generation… not so much.
You will notice that republicans are more frequently throwing the word fascist against Obama these days. That happened immediately after the survey I am referencing. You sometimes might hear liberal or socialist combined with fascist, but you will rarely hear them alone as a slander anymore. With the exception of possibly some congressional reps from districts where being anything left of Cheney will get you shot… you know, in the face.
April 28th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
They love ruining words. Words are knives, a weapon of convenience, rather than, um, words. I hope they never ruin “boobies”.
April 29th, 2009 at 6:20 am
The Janet Jackson debacle and the faux outrage that followed nearly did…
But, as I said before, words are being unruined! I never thought I’d see the day that “socialist” wasn’t such a bad word in the USA. Awesome! We can start being grown-ups again and realize that socialism, whether or not your agree with it, does not immediately mean dictatorship, like China or Cuba.
April 29th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
You realize that you’ll get quotemined as implying that it eventually means dictatorship.
April 30th, 2009 at 1:43 am
The word “boobies” does imply socialism, in that, Jesus did rise from the dead.
— You follow my logic here….
ergo the existence of turnips is solid proof of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Holy Bible…
So, I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.
When Abraham said in Genesis 22:8 “And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.”
Then the true meaning… I mean the TRUE MEANING of Jesus can be heard.
“Therefore” Jesus said, and in no uncertain terms, “I sayeth unto you — that there will be no boobies shown on TV — is that clear!!!???”
Janet Jackson just wasn’t paying attention to what Jesus was saying that day.
And she did it.
“Whateth parteth of ‘no boobies on TV’ do you not understandeth?” Yelled Jesus!
And the USA violateth Jesus’ commandment with the help of Janet Jackson.
April 30th, 2009 at 6:41 am
D’OH!
April 30th, 2009 at 6:41 am
They discovered my super sekrit plan!
May 5th, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Omqq Yur so Violent ! This is the Most Horrible thinq Iseen In Years Yuh Need a exorcismm !!!!!! Satanist !!!