The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

Adam Curtis on Cannes and "Last Days

I still feel that Curtis didn't spend enough time talking about who benefits from these official nightmares, and how.

Music

* Title theme: "The Big Ship" on Another Green World by Brian Eno
* Incidental: "Becalmed" and "In Dark Trees" on Another Green World by Brian Eno
* Incidental: Soundtrack from "Citizen Kane", film score by Bernard Herrmann, 1941.
* Incidental: Soundtrack from "The Ipcress File", by John Barry
* Incidental: Soundtrack from "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion", by Ennio Morricone
* Part 1 credits: "Baby, It's Cold Outside" by Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer
* Part 2 opening: "Also Sprach Zarathustra"
* "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle" (possibly by Singer-Gene Autry; Music-Joseph Lilley;Lyrics-Ranke Loesser, c1942)
* Afghan war: "Colours" by Donovan
* Part 3 credits: "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" by B.J. Thomas

Living in no TV land, I have never seen it.

i haveta say, the 'AQ doesn't exist' line looks a bit thin now. i was never sure why leo strauss was such a big figure in the show. is he more important than, i dunno, hayek or milton friedman?

or

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050620&s=bergen

It still amazed me about Kissinger, how rational and beacon-like he was presented as being, but then I don't know that much about him and so the 'convenience' of this series results in one wanting it to consist of twelve hour-long parts or something.

Neocon motto: "Occam's Razor is booooolsheeeet, plus Occam sounds suspiciously Arabic"

"In fact, the Islamist terrorist threat to the United States today largely emanates from Europe, not from domestic sleeper cells or, as is popularly imagined, the graduates of Middle Eastern madrasas, functional idiots who can do little more than read the Koran. Reid is British, Al Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui is French and the 9/11 pilots became militant in Hamburg. The attacks in Madrid last year that killed 191, and the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, demonstrate that men animated by Al Qaeda's worldview have recently conducted significant acts of terrorism in Europe, a trend that is likely to accelerate as continued heavy Muslim immigration into Europe collides with widespread racism to create a population of alienated Muslims who often feel that no matter how much money they make, or how long their families have been in the country, as Pakistanis in London they are never quite British, or as Algerians in Paris they are not quite French, or as Moroccans in Madrid they can never be really Spanish. These are not powerful nightmares; they are a reality, a view that Curtis may finally come around to when a significant terrorist attack is carried out in London, which British authorities regard as inevitable."

maybe but with so much to condense into under 3 hours there's only so much you can mention, and considering how contrived Qubt's and Strauss's ideas were or rather how badly they were put into practice...

I should hold off until I see the final episode though clearly.

Why does this thesis now look thinner than it did before? Because bombings have happened on British soil?

alba -- yeah, because the attacks have continued. also, i've never really seen AQ presented as a command-and-control organization like the IRA. but cell-like structures are hardly unusual -- FLN and the french resistance both had them. so does the cia, in some ways -- agents don't know other agents. there's no contradiction between being pyramidal (which AQ is -- money comes from somewhere!) and cell-like.

The third episode again repeats a lot of what's gone before, steve. But at the end, it has interesting stuff about Blair et al. being obsessed with the verdict of history, in the sense of being neurotic about not having dealt with something (ie. Islamist terrorism) that later is shown to engulf our society. An obsession with the worst case scenario. Fear of getting it wrong isn't a motor of confident and successful leadership.

What's wrong with repeating things? Have you investigated al Qaeda at first hand yourself? No - you are repeating other things (that it is "cell-like" etc.) And that's fine.

alba -- yeah, i can see that but there are links between the cells, example: funding, and training camps. 'follow the money' and that.

I'm ever so hungry.

xpost

But overall, as a society, we didn't. Not enough to do anything about it. And I'm thinking about how eugenics was such a respectable and popular notion among intellectuals etc.

Really? Most of the literary intelligentsia seem to have been pretty much on the Right.

really? orwell, connolly, isherwood, auden, day lewis, spender, fucking leavis, greene, green, the left book club...?

Just a little humour there, to lighten our load.

Prospect is £4.50! Is the rest of it any good? Last time I got it it was Billy Bragg and Gordon Brown talking about Britishness. I thought it poor.

I like the Carey book, but it's about a slightly earlier generation.

Sure, mainstream politicians in england were culpable, but the popular movement here was big -- in France, it had real potential (although things got fucked-up over Spain). In any case, the popular movement against fascism in Western Europe was far more of a genuine presence than, say, the Stop The War movement is now. People like Stafford Cripps in the Labour Party were sympathetic, and it definitely formed cadres for the reformed Labour Party of 1945.

I've heard there is a guy in the US called Al Nino, and people periodically ring him up and complain about the weather.

Animal Liberation Front = ALF. Alf seems a pretty cuddly British name.

episode 3 i thought was the weakest... i almost thought the doc should've gone right up to sept. 11 and no further, as all the post-9/11 stuff seemed quite rushed, and most of it i'd seen before. also weak: when it suddenly became about the UK--i know this is a bbc doc, but i didn't get ANY sense of how britain got involved, or how neo-conservatism got a foothold there (while neo-c's ascension in the states was clearly and patiently spelled out). it seemed like an abrupt change.

also interesting that the word 'oil' wasn't used once in the program. obv i understand that curtis wasn't taking the syriana approach and that he didn't want to open a whole other kettle of words... but it still begged the question.