all we do is talk sit switch screens as the homeland chooses enemies
Via the essential and indispensible Information Clearinghouse, parts one and two of a provocative BBC documentary about the fabrications and machinations of the war on terra, "The Power of Nightmares."
Below's a snippet of Jonathan Raban's NY Review of Books summary on the film, which first aired across the pond in October of 04:
Alternatively, one might try thinking of al-Qaeda as a figment of our inflamed imaginations, a mirage conjured by a sleeper cell of neoconservative witch doctors in Washington and given suitably terrifying substance by a credulous press. This bracingly contrarian view is argued, with vigor and wit, by Adam Curtis, a well-regarded British documentary filmmaker, in a series of three one-hour programs recently aired on the BBC under the title The Power of Nightmares, and widely discussed in the UK. Fast-moving, full of ingenious musical and cinematic puns, Curtis's series is best watched as an epic political cartoon in the manner of Daumier or Ralph Steadman. It freely bends the facts to fit its vision, it distorts, it overcolors, it grossly—and entertainingly—simplifies, yet, as only a cartoon can, it captures an aspect of its subject that has so far escaped even the most skeptical observers of the war on terror.
Chronicling the simultaneous rise of militant Islamism and American neoconservatism, Curtis represents the two movements as each other's doppelgängers, both powered by disgust with the moral degeneracy of the liberal West, each under the spell of a founding godfather. As Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), the Egyptian literary critic and author of the primer of modern jihad, Milestones, inspired the Islamists, so Leo Strauss (1899–1973) inspired the neoconservatives....Plato's idea of the noble fiction, or useful lie, is here attributed exclusively to Strauss: it was the sinister Strauss, according to Curtis, who taught the neocons how to cynically manufacture myths to persuade the American people that they were on the side of goodness in the perpetual Manichaean struggle against the all-enveloping forces of evil.
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