jawfish

Review: The Power of Nightmares
john posted in politics & culture on January 25th, 2006

Available as a down load from The Internet Archive
BBC site description

The Power of Nightmares is a three-part BBC documentary which parallels the rise of Neo-Conservatives in America and Revolutionary Islamic Fundamentalists in the Middle East. Whether you accept all the film’s theses or not, there are striking similarities between the movements. More important are observations of how they feed off each other, how they use the other as scapegoat and phantom enemy.

As a film: There are the usual too-fast cuts, fancy camera footwork, amped-up music, and randomly metaphorical images that seem to be in style at the moment. The Brits call this “tarted-up.” The narrator’s voice is a bit murky, and the interviews are cut very short. I saw it in a theater at the University, and most people sat through all three hours. As yet there is no rental DVD, so the digitally minded will have to download to their PC. It’s no Sorrow and the Pity, but it does have interesting footage of the main characters and events.

It’s not advocating anything, instead it’s a historical critique of what we’ve been told, and how and why we were told. It’s a debunking of the myth of the War on Terror.

The series’ main parallels between Neo-Cons and Radical Islamists:

They arose at about the same time, the 1950’s and 60’s.

Each springs from an emotional sense that Western liberalism is somehow “rotten” and “decaying.”

Each prefers autocratic control to rampant individualism.

Each uses religion to define social rules, and to rally the faithful to the cause.

Each views the other as a vast, dangerous conspiracy.

Each uses a phantom enemy, Al Queda or Western Zionist Liberalism, to gain power.

Neo-Con, CIA, and various other Americans met with most of the future Al Queda in Afghanistan while fighting the Russians. Americans and Jihadists believe that they defeated the Russians, while in truth the foreign Islamicists did little fighting, and the Americans mostly supplied some training and the all-important high-tech weapons.

The series’ most interesting assertions:

There is no Al Queda organization, even the name was invented in the West. There is only a ragtag bunch in loose contact with other terrorist groups.

Originally the radical Islamists wanted to provoke revolution in Egypt and Algeria, but repeatedly failed to achieve any popular support. They only focussed on attacking Western targets after attempts in the Middle East failed.

The Bush and Blair administrations create and manipulate an irrational fear of terror in order to stay in power and to gain control over internal power strutures.

My observations, not necessarily based on the series:
There is something weird about both the Neo-Cons and the Islamic radicals. They lack any sense of humor or compassion of course, but in a greater sense they lack humaness. There is a kind of paranoid, self-defining fanaticism in them, as if they are incapable of fun, or love, or even sex. They remind me of Maoists or the Spanish Inquisitors more than anything else. The farther they go, the less information they let in, the more determined thay are to be absolutely right in the face of contradictory evidence. Perhaps we can just refer to The Banality of Evil as the definitive description of the type.

While watching the documentary I had a sense of the motivations behind the Islamic terrorists for the first time. The universal question after 9-11, “why attack the West?” was never really answered for me. The series depicts the history of the radical Islamicists as a progression from unsuccessful attempts at popular revolt, followed by imprisonment and torture, followed by ever-increasing radicalism and exile. What do failed revolutionaries do but up the ante until they are noticed. They go from blowing up soldiers to local civilians, to foreign tourists, finally in desperation they turn to attacks on foreign soil. The panicky reaction of the Bush Administration, coupled with a crack-down, and invasion of Iraq, were the best present the radical Islamicists could get. Finally they were important.