The Neocons & The Power of Nightmares- Part I
6/2/2005 5:19:00 PM GMT
By: John Lynch
By far and away the best documentary on British terrestrial television about the so-called ''war on terror'' is Adam Curtis’ three part series ‘The Power of Nightmares’.
Curtis’s thesis is that the two groups responsible for the war on terror are mirror images of each other - the American neoconservatives and the "Muslims extremists".
Both were triggered by political theorists who, in the 1950s, disdained American liberal democracy. Since then both movements have been trying to increase their political power by conjuring up dire political nightmares to frighten people into supporting them.
This article does not present a critique of curtis’ work: suffice it to say that although Curtis is virtually the only documentary maker who talked about the American Neocons, his series is marred by two striking deficiencies: firstly, the failure to mention that lost of the American Neocons are Israelis and, secondly, his sidelining of the Palestinian- Israeli conflict. He focuses almost solely on the Neocons’ domestic policies when it is precisely their foreign policies which distinguishes them from all other types of American conservatives.
The major achievement of Curtis’s work is his analysis of the emergence of the Neocons in the early 1970s. He reinterprets the past in a way that man compassionate people would find shocking. For those of a compassionate nature who lived through the Vietnam war and its aftermath, it is shocking to discover that the people we used to condemn turn out to be relatively benign in comparison to the evil spirits lurking in their shadows.
How many of us used to condemn president Nixon, Henry Kissinger and the CIA as being forces of evil in the world? How many of us realized at the time that both Kissinger and the CIA were acting, at least as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, pragmatically and were willing to compromise in order to maintain a stable world order?
How many of us realized at the time that there were people who regarded both Kissinger and the CIA as being too soft on what they deemed to be the forces of evil in the world? How many of us realized that these people became powerful enough to eventually defeat both Kissinger and the CIA?
How many of us realized that these people were the Neocons – the same pro-Israel people who drove America into the invasion of Iraq and are currently driving the new Bush administration towards armageddon?
The great shock of Curtis's series is the discovery that the Neocons didn’t just appear out of nowhere during the Bush administration to push America into the needless invasion of Iraq. Most other commentators on the Neocons trace their roots back only to their 1996 Israeli foreign policy document for Benjamin Netanyahu. In fact they had been formulating reactionary American foreign policies since the mid 1970s. >>>continued
6/2/2005 5:19:00 PM GMT
By: John Lynch
By far and away the best documentary on British terrestrial television about the so-called ''war on terror'' is Adam Curtis’ three part series ‘The Power of Nightmares’.
Curtis’s thesis is that the two groups responsible for the war on terror are mirror images of each other - the American neoconservatives and the "Muslims extremists".
Both were triggered by political theorists who, in the 1950s, disdained American liberal democracy. Since then both movements have been trying to increase their political power by conjuring up dire political nightmares to frighten people into supporting them.
This article does not present a critique of curtis’ work: suffice it to say that although Curtis is virtually the only documentary maker who talked about the American Neocons, his series is marred by two striking deficiencies: firstly, the failure to mention that lost of the American Neocons are Israelis and, secondly, his sidelining of the Palestinian- Israeli conflict. He focuses almost solely on the Neocons’ domestic policies when it is precisely their foreign policies which distinguishes them from all other types of American conservatives.
The major achievement of Curtis’s work is his analysis of the emergence of the Neocons in the early 1970s. He reinterprets the past in a way that man compassionate people would find shocking. For those of a compassionate nature who lived through the Vietnam war and its aftermath, it is shocking to discover that the people we used to condemn turn out to be relatively benign in comparison to the evil spirits lurking in their shadows.
How many of us used to condemn president Nixon, Henry Kissinger and the CIA as being forces of evil in the world? How many of us realized at the time that both Kissinger and the CIA were acting, at least as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, pragmatically and were willing to compromise in order to maintain a stable world order?
How many of us realized at the time that there were people who regarded both Kissinger and the CIA as being too soft on what they deemed to be the forces of evil in the world? How many of us realized that these people became powerful enough to eventually defeat both Kissinger and the CIA?
How many of us realized that these people were the Neocons – the same pro-Israel people who drove America into the invasion of Iraq and are currently driving the new Bush administration towards armageddon?
The great shock of Curtis's series is the discovery that the Neocons didn’t just appear out of nowhere during the Bush administration to push America into the needless invasion of Iraq. Most other commentators on the Neocons trace their roots back only to their 1996 Israeli foreign policy document for Benjamin Netanyahu. In fact they had been formulating reactionary American foreign policies since the mid 1970s. >>>continued
http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/review/article_full_story.asp?service_ID=8656
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 2:34 AM
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