Anybody see it? I felt about this week the way I felt about Farhenheit 9/11; nothing new for me, but a smart, clearheaded review of the history of this thing, correctly framed, IMV, in terms of two columns of fundamentalism, and in terms oftheir relative marginalisation and petulence as expressed through launching war/terror.
I thought it was brilliant. Yeah we already knew most of the facts contained in the program, but the public in general don't know the relevence of those facts tied together. Both fundamentalism and neoconservatism are justified through ridiculous myth's which costs the lives of scores of innocent people. I think this series will result in alot of new political ideas to solve the problems these myths have created, personally I think we should go back to basics and base everything on truth.
Torrent [67meg] This is a small real media version. Hopefully someone will release a higher quality version soon.
I thought the bit where the guy says 'I don't want to see my lord and saviour dipped in a vat of urine by a homosexual' was hilarious... but maybe that's just me. I found some of the stuff about the GIA quite interesting as well. Particularly the part that covered their final position that stated they should kill the entire population of Algeria. One can see how that would put a crimp in an election manifesto. I'd be interested to know exactly what the neocons 'final solution' would be and to what extent they would turn in on themselves in extremis. I may have mentioned this before but, if not, in my opinion this series is best viewed alongside Curtis's 'The Century of the self' series. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/century_of_the_self.shtml Part Two is 'The Engineering of Consent' 'The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise - that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind' From part three 'There is a Policeman Inside All Our Head: He Must Be Destroyed', 'This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training - into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation. But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality' Essentially the series covers this conflict between those that think people need controlling and those that think they don't, or, more accurately, because they can make a buck out of the illusion of them not being controlled. It could be argued that that's pretty much the entry point for the current series. Well, at least, from one perspective.
I've been watching BBC4's 'A brief history of disbelief and, in light of the current debate, couldn't help noticing Jonathan Miller's comment regarding the need for fear... the idea being that fear serves a useful purpose sometimes in that it can make us afraid of things that are genuinely dangerous, natural phenomena such as extreme weather, etc. He was talking about it in relation to religion, of course. He said that religion gave structure to ideas of how and why god(s) may be angry and create cold, storms, waves, etc. but it seems to me that this requirement for structure of the world around us is exactly what we're talking about in our requirement for fear to be provided. However, this puts the current programme in a rather different light, doesn't it, because it implies that it's not so much a question of particular rulers 'using' fear to control us as of us choosing those rulers who will provide us with our daily dose of fear to make us feel more secure because now, we UNDERSTAND what's happening. Just a thought.
Should be on the torrent sites around Thursday morning (EST). Perhaps earlier given the present circumstances.