2005.8.11=4[#223]:4703.7.7[+++#4]:U#4 Up to 8.11 blog & finish emails.

Fair cool mild: First regular US home morning: Up 6:20 as Mei leaving, clean bedroom & computer area w chicken brush all through. Jung tel on grass cutter's fee, and as mom is going out in the morning, needing me to go afternoon to get tv moving for her, then resume quick newspaper and diary/calenders on bed. Off to regular breakfast at 8:45. Lung in & off, Mei in & off, meantime answer [C] R w "Back to Switzerland and the Peoples of the World #100000, #10002-4". Mei back near 12:30, start blogs again, in response to Ron's post in [C]'s long-running subject on "Subway shooting today", about the Nightmares: from 8.8=1 to here, to post the following 3 urls. 3:42pm, when it's the rare occasion Mei is free here. Resume w emails now, and finish them roughly around 5:20pm. Prepare to go to bed quite early at 10:30, 11:30 bed writing diary, but Mei on tv. #0. "The Power of Nightmares": Shadows: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3970901.stm Phantom: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3951615.stm Bush/Bl: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm -------------------- From [C] R's post: "" Re.., it seems very unlikely that you saw the series, which places you in kind of a difficult position to criticise it... instead, you merely demonstrate your prejudices. The Series documented the parallel growth, and development of the beliefs of Islamists on one hand, and Neocons on the other. The point the series made - very clearly - is that the rise of each dependended very heavily on the other's existence as a "bogeyman". The shows followed a tried and trusted format: intercutting of narative with clips of the people involved making their own cases. The paradox being that while both Al Quaeda and the Neocons rose to importance based on their claims that the other posed an imminent threat to their own people's way of life... without the other to exaggerate into a major threat, neither would have achieved success. Without the vast amounts of "most wanted" free publicity, Al Quaeda would have gone the way of its (many) predecesors, and sunk into oblivion. Without the threat of a (significantly pre-9/11) Al Quaeda to inflate, the neocons would be "just members of another think tank." The two are Siamese twins joined at the hip and, feeding on the terror they they each tell us we should feel about the other. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3951615.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3970901.stm His documentary took as its starting point the year 1949, when two men who would prove massively influential to the establishment of Islamic terror groups and to the neo-Conservative American tendency that now dominates Washington were both in the US. One was an Egyptian school inspector called Sayyid Qutb whose ideas would directly inspire those who flew the planes on the attacks of September 11. Qutb's summer visit to Colorado revolted him so much - he could see nothing there but decadent materialism - that he went home thinking that modern liberal freedoms were eroding society's bonds and that only a radical Islam could prevent its destruction. Meanwhile, in Chicago, an obscure political philosopher called Leo Strauss was developing a similar critique of western liberalism (though without the Islamic answer to individualism's purported ills). He called on conservative politicians to invent national myths to hold society together and stop America in particular from collapsing into degraded individualism. It was from such Straussian reflections that the idea that the US's national destiny was to tilt against seeming foreign evils - be they the Soviet bloc or, later, fundamentalist Islam - was born. But the film is even more incendiary for its analysis of what Curtis controversially insists is the largely illusory fear of terrorism in the west since 9/11. Curtis argues that politicians such as Bush and Blair have stumbled on a new force that can restore their power and authority - the fear of a hidden and organised web of evil from which they can protect their people. In a still-traumatised US, those with the darkest nightmares have become the most powerful and Curtis's film castigates the media, security forces and the Bush administration for extending their power in this way. "It has really touched a nerve with people who realise something is not quite right with the way terrorism has been reported." For these reasons, one might well think that The Power of Nightmares would provide a usefully chastening corrective to the prevailing orthodoxy if it were shown on US television. But it seems extremely unlikely that it will be. While a two-and-a-half -hour film version is to be given a prime-time Cannes screening, and while the original three-hour series will be shown tonight on al-Jazeera along with a live interview with the director, US telly has run scared from showing it. "Something extraordinary has happened to American TV since September 11," says Curtis. "A head of the leading networks who had better remain nameless said to me that there was no way they could show it. He said, 'Who are you to say this?' and then he added, 'We would get slaughtered if we put this out.'" Surely a relatively enlightened broadcaster like HBO would show it? "When I was in New York I took a DVD to the head of documentaries at HBO. I still haven't heard from him." He has little hope that he will. [Another nail in the coffin of the old "left wing media bias"myth?] Did the BBC have similar com punction about commissioning the series? "No. And the response from viewers was overwhelmingly positive. Ninety-four per cent of the emails were in favour." That said, some comments on the BBC message boards for Curtis are less enthusiastic. Iain Foster from Portsmouth wrote: "I have sat through your documentary tonight. I hope your programme is shown again following the next terrorist attack. You sound like the hedgehog who claims that cars won't hurt you!!!! I'm amazed!!!!!!!" But the repeat screenings for the series on the BBC show a very different attitude towards The Power of Nightmares from what is prevalent on US TV. "What happens on US TV now is that you have a theatre of confrontation so that people avoid having to seriously analyse what the modern world is like - perhaps because of the emotional shock of September 11," says Curtis. "People take so-called left or right positions and shout at each other. It's almost like the court of Louis XIV - people taking elaborate positions and not thinking very much." "" --------------------------- Another related R's post: "" > R: There was an award-winning documentary series a few months back on BBC, which made the interesting and relevant point that the underlying "theologies" of both the neocons and of Islamic fundamentalism differ only in a few details compared to their similarities.... DF: Sounds like typical BBC propaganda to me.... The only Americans who got to see the documentary in their own country were those who attended the San Francisco International Film Festival. But transcripts of the three episodes (each in two halves) can be found at: http://silt3.com/index.php?id=572 http://silt3.com/index.php?id=574 http://silt3.com/index.php?id=575 http://silt3.com/index.php?id=576 http://silt3.com/index.php?id=586 http://silt3.com/index.php?id=587 Here's a taster of the final half of episode three (picked pretty much at random - it was the page I C&P'ed the URL from, and so happened to be open) The Shadows in the Cave (second half) ... 10 11 2004 - 00:08 The Power of Nightmares Transcript of the second half of Episode 3, he Shadows in the Cave?(first half) full-length Bittorrent file Originally aired on BBC 2, 3 November 2004, 9 pm Written and produced by Adam Curtis Transcribed by Mike Conley [ FADE TO AFGHANISTAN EXTERIOR ] VO: The terrible truth was that there was nothing there because Al Qaeda as an organisation did not exist. The attacks on America had been planned by a small group that had come together around bin Laden in the late 90s. What united them was an idea: an extreme interpretation of Islamism developed by Ayman Zawahiri. With the American invasion, that group had been destroyed, killed or scattered. What was left was the idea, and the real danger was the way this idea could inspire groups and individuals around the world who had no relationship to each other. In looking for an organisation, the Americans and the British were chasing a phantom enemy and missing the real threat. JASON BURKE , AUTHOR, L QAEDA?: I was with the Royal Marines as they trooped around eastern Afghanistan, and every time they got a location for a supposed Al Qaeda or Taliban element or base, they turn up and there was no one there, or there be a few startled shepherds, and that struck me then as being a wonderful image to the war on terror, because people are looking for something that isn there. There is no organisation with its terrorist operatives, cells, sleeper cells, so on and so forth. What there is is an idea, prevalent among young, angry Muslim males throughout the Islamic world. That idea is what poses a threat. [ CUT TO WASHINGTON , D.C., MONUMENTS AND SKYLINE ] VO: But the neoconservatives were now increasingly locked into this fantasy, and next they set out to uncover the network in America itself. PAUL WOLFOWITZ , US DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE : This is a network that has penetrated into some 60 countries, including very definitely our own, and it�s got to be rooted out. Our intelligence priority, in many ways, is getting after the network here in the United States first. We will do whatever we need to do to go after these networks and dismantle them. "" ------------------- Another one by R: "" DF: This reviewer you quoted says that the film maker thinks the threat of terrorism is an "illusion"! I assume this was written before 7/7/05! Far from it. Curtis thesis isn't that terrorists don't exist. It's simply that there's no vast and well-organised worldwide conspiracy directing it. Well.... not outside of the imagination of people like Rummy and GW, anyhow. Rummy has an interesting track record on assessing the strength of the enemy. By his reckoning, in the late 1980's, the USSR's failing economy was a smokescreen, put up to hide a vast arsenal of new wonder weapons developed in secret Russian bases. The trivial matter of the CIA being totally unable to find any shred of evidence to support this view only served to PROVE Rummy's hypothesis. The weapons were so new, and so powerful that the Russians had gone to extra trouble to hide them. If Rummy's hypothesis was correct, then Russia's deception plan got slightly out of hand... when their economy collapsed two years later. Does this remind anyone of his absolute certainty, just over a decade later, that ANOTHER nation was building a vast and secret arsenal - that (yet again) turned out to be SO secret that nobody could find it? Al Quaeda's #2 man appeared on TV today, doing what Al Quaeda does a lot of - kind-of taking credit for the London attacks without actually saying "we were behind them". And also without offering any indication that Al Quaeda had a clue that they were going to happen until they heard about it on the radio. And GW appeared on TV almost immediately, doing what HE does a lot of - namely blaming the whole thing on OBL and claiming that this proves his attack on Iraq was justified. The expert commentators from RUSI and the ISS were wheeled out and expressed a consensus that the terrorists were almost certainly "Al-Quaeda wannabes", but not part of the organisation itself, or even in contact with it. Which, oddly enough, is almost exactly what Curtis suggested in his documentary. Next time GW falls off his bicycle, or chokes on a pretzel, expect a press release from OBL, not quite claiming responsibility.... but sounding vaguely smug and mysterious. And watch the knee-jerk reaction by the US media - "GW targetted by Al Queda assasins!" The terrorists are out there. The vast and complex organisation behind them isn't. It's just smoke and mirrors. If there WERE a vast organisation, things would be so much easier! R