The Power of Nightmares

[Briar]

The first part of this series aired last night. Do whatever you can to see it!

This is how the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1327786,00.html)
previewed it:

The making of the terror myth

Since September 11 Britain has been warned of the 'inevitability' of catastrophic terrorist attack. But has the danger been exaggerated? A major new TV documentary claims that the perceived threat is a politically driven fantasy - and al-Qaida a dark illusion. Andy Beckett reports

....

Starting next Wednesday, BBC2 is to broadcast a three-part documentary series that will add further to what could be called the dirty bomb genre. But, as its title suggests, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear takes a different view of the weapon's potential...

This is from a review of the first episode:

...Curtis focused on two key figures in postwar political philosophy - Egyptian Sayyid Qutb and American Leo Strauss - whose ideas were so similar that you could hardly see the join. Both found Truman's America to be some kind of immoral hell on earth. Both thought personal freedom was the road to perdition. Both their philosophies led, by a maze-like route that Curtis rendered clear, to an unreasoning hatred of the USSR. And when the USSR was out of the way - can you see what comes next?

They turned on each other.

There's no point in regurgitating Curtis's arguments, not that I'm equal to the job, but there were some highlights worth recalling. Donald Rumsfeld featured as a key player in the Ford administration, banging on about the Red Peril as early as 1975. When the CIA said there was no evidence for weapons of mass destruction, he commissioned a report that used that very lack of evidence as proof of their existence. At the same time, Qutb's disciple Ayman Zawahiri was figuring out that mass murder of "non-Muslims" (ie everyone apart from his gang) was justifiable. Rumsfeld went on to we-all-know-what. Zawahiri went on to inspire Osama bin Laden. As this tale unfolded with grisly logic, Curtis bombarded us with sights and sounds that had a logic of their own. He raided archives well - there was some lovely footage of clean-cut American youth at a 50s dance, an image that, to Qutb, proved the hopeless decadence of the west. But it was when Curtis got playful that his cinematic skills really took the breath away. At the end of the film, we saw Taliban fighters dancing to that same schmaltzy 50s groove; never has a complex point about the cyclical nature of history been so deftly made....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv_and_radio/story/0,3604,1331957,00.html

[minkyboodle]

1. unbelievably great docu

For those of you who are usenet inclined. A Divx Capture of this Docu was posted alt.binaries.documentaries on 10-21-04. Its probably still there on many of the usenet servers. If it isn't and you are still desperate there is always a giganews trial account :)