June 11, 2007
The Power of Nightmares
We are still living the frightening reality of a Neocon gambit to drag the whole country into a frenzied archaic Dark Ages of hate-based morality. Through their devil’s bargain with religious fundamentalists they formed the radical right to wage a global war against anyone who disagreed with them. Only a few years ago that might have sounded like a fantastic mix of science fiction and conspiracy theory. But too much about the disastrous path they set in motion has come to light to ignore the reality of the situation anymore. The Power of Nightmares, which first aired on BBC 2 television in late 2004, charges that in a post-ideological world governments have found it necessary to retain their power through the manufacture of mythological evil and the spread of fear. If you’re looking for examples of political censorship in the US, check out the three-part documentary. It has yet to be released in this country. Writer-producer Adam Curtis had this to say about the state of US broadcast journalism in a quote from The Guardian: “Something extraordinary has happened to American TV since September 11. A head of the leading networks who had better remain nameless said to me that there was no way they could show [the documentary]… He said, ‘We would get slaughtered if we put this out.’” The question is: by whom, the minority of fanatics who currently run the nation? Luckily, the film series is not too hard to find. All three episodes are viewable in their entirety on Google Video. Subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, it charts the ascension of the Neocons in American politics and makes some remarkable revelations about their connection to the spread of radical Islam. To begin with, the documentary makes the connection between Neocon founder Leo Strauss and the Islamic radical Sayyid Qutb. Shortly after his encounter with Strauss, Qutb went back to his homeland and founded the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in which the young Osama bin Laden got his first taste of revolution. We all know the rouge’s gallery of Strauss’s most prominent students Stateside: Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl, etc. They were all weaned on Strauss’s simple-minded ideas about world domination. After all, his favorite TV show was the Western Gunsmoke in which the good guys literally wore white hats and the villains dressed in black. Strauss’s second favorite show was Perry Mason, because of the attorney’s superior intellect and unnatural guile. Along with their mad dog allies like Donald Rumsfeld and Darth Cheney these guys cut their teeth in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations before conscribing the hapless buffoon Dubya into their reactionary cause. In other words, these guys fingerprints are on the most corrupt administrations in our country’s short history. There are many festering cesspools never addressed in the documentary such as the Neocon association with the Rushdoonyites who advocate a taliban-like moral code and legal system on the home front based entirely on the Old Testament. The connection between their appeal to fundamentalism and the same confusion of political means for ends by the Strauss inspired Islamic fanatics is made clear enough, even if the whole story of their treachery to our way of life remains to be told. Among the documentary’s most important points is the way in which our government created the myth of Al Qaeda as a homogenous, organized army of darkness. It is a painful reality that the war in Iraq makes abundantly clear. Journalists covering the US occupation constantly have to point out that Al Qaeda in Iraq are overwhelmingly actually really mostly Iraqis who are fighting against US forces supposedly there to protect an embattled, walled-in Green Zone government. The obvious question arises: If the Iraqi government was actually Democratic, why would the might of our military need to protect them. Clearly, as a retired Army officer recently commented, the US choice for government in Iraq is “rotten to the core”. The blaring problem with a US President who is a slave to the interests of the Petroleum Industry and reactionary religious groups who want to roll our moral code back to something similar to the Taliban makes any appeal to Democracy foolish. The Bushevic insistence on the recent elections in Palestine made their position on Democracy abundantly clear to the entire world. Dubya, himself, was most upset that the corrupt US backed Fatah government could lose so sorely to Hamas which he had roundly labeled as terrorists. Once again, the simplistic Neocon fantasy of good vs. evil blew up in its face. Will the corporate US media ever allow these basic truths any coverage? The answer is, without a doubt, No! At a time of clear crisis, when we should really be thinking of the way our value system is being exploited and corrupted by a small but wealthy vocal minority of zealots and bigots who control our national media and corporate culture, our ability to see something like The Power of Nightmares becomes all-important. The facts are right there. And since the documentary was produced two of its stars —Wolfowitz and Rummy— have been forced out of their offices in the clean up effort. Have we really become so alienated from our most basic principals that the kind of revelations this film series makes about the way our government has divided us against ourselves and fed us false information is too much for our collective conscience to bare? If so, our current situation is far worse than any science fiction writer or conspiracy theorist would ever dare to imagine.