This TV documentary series I'd love to see is not referenced again as to when and where it will be broadcast. Maybe BBC 2? The website and Google are silent. Thanks to The Agonist for the link.
The Scotsman - S2 Thursday - Was Islamic extremism born in the USA?
- COULD 9/11 have its roots in one man's visit to a dance in Colorado in 1949? Could the current terrorist threat stem from the same man's belief that gardening was a selfish Western pastime? Could the invasion of Iraq have its origins in the cowboy TV series, Gunsmoke?
Intriguing ideas, and they were thrown up by a new documentary series, The Power of Nightmares. Its central thesis was that politicians exaggerated the terrorist threat in order to retain power, and its starting-point was the observation that, instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise protection from nightmares. Thus far thus arguable.
Complete Articles
Thu 21 Oct 2004
Was Islamic extremism born in the USA?
Robert McNeil
The Power of Nightmares, BBC 2
Writing Scotland, BBC 2
COULD 9/11 have its roots in one man's visit to a dance in Colorado in 1949? Could the current terrorist threat stem from the same man's belief that gardening was a selfish Western pastime? Could the invasion of Iraq have its origins in the cowboy TV series, Gunsmoke?
Intriguing ideas, and they were thrown up by a new documentary series, The Power of Nightmares. Its central thesis was that politicians exaggerated the terrorist threat in order to retain power, and its starting-point was the observation that, instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise protection from nightmares. Thus far thus arguable.
More dubious seemed the claim that radical American neo-conservatives and militant Islamicists had similar roots. In 1949, we learned, a middle-aged Egyptian school inspector arrived in Colorado. Sayyid Qutb saw crassness, corruption and vulgarity everywhere. Americans' devotion to lawn-maintenance epitomised this: a selfish, shallow activity designed only for show.
But worse took place indoors. One summer night, Qutb attended a dance in a church hall. The pastor at the gramophone put on a song called Baby, It's Cold Outside, and shameless couples danced chest to chest, desire forming like fire in their minds. Qutb was appalled. The following year, he returned to Egypt, only to find American ways spreading in his own country. Determined to stem such selfish individualism, he set up the Moslem Brotherhood, which spawned the current generation of fanatics.
In America, meanwhile, parallel developments were taking place. An obscure political philosopher called Leo Strauss believed prosperous liberal society, with its individualistic expressions of desire, contained the seeds of its own destruction.
His solution was for politicians to assert powerful myths that everyone could believe in, partly using fundamentalist Christianity and partly promoting the notion of America's unique destiny to battle evil. The good v evil prototypes were to be found in Gunsmoke, which he adored, and also in Perry Mason.
So far so kooky. But as riots erupted across America in the 1970s, neo-conservative idealists resurrected his work, believing he'd been proven right. The evil force, too, was obvious: the Soviet Union. Dismayed by détente, the neo-cons set about reinstating fear of the Soviets, with wild military claims that even the CIA dismissed as fantasy. Indeed, one former CIA chief said false information planted in European newspapers was taken as gospel by the neo-cons and formed the basis of much of their case. As he put it: "Lies became reality."
Meanwhile, radical Islamicists were similarly taking leave of the planet Earth. As one founder of Islamic Jihad recalled: "Psychologically, we thought we were superior to reality."
The two fantasist blocs even co-operated in Afghanistan to kick out the Soviets. That said, it seems ludicrous to think that the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George W Bush, and even Tony Blair could share anything in common with Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It's surely demonstrably obvious that the latter are more evil than the former.
Nonetheless, the thesis that their ideological origins have a common root is an interesting one. I'm too thick to comment on it authoritatively, but I can discourse impressively on a trend for art and current affairs to meet. This documentary featured much ironic use of music to match its pictures: whirling dervishes apparently dancing to 1950s American crooning, for example. Speeded-up black-and-white footage of cheerleaders or tenpin bowling was also deployed to disconcerting effect. Jolly postmodern, I suppose, and doubtless this way lies the future of documentary.
It was a relief to watch next the sedate, civilised discussion of Writing Scotland, with Carl MacDougall standing beside a stone bridge over placidly burbling waters. The grey northern light and the verdant countryside seemed a million miles from bomb-racked desert towns and riot-torn inner cities.
However, radical ideas were on the agenda here too, principally inspired by Robert Burns's dictum that A Man's A Man For A' That. Burns was inspired by the French and American revolutions, and other Scottish writers followed in the rebel tradition. Today, indeed, proletarians rule the literary roost for, as Des Dillon put it: "Intelligence fell like snow on the planet. It didn't [just] fall on Bearsden." MacDougall's enlightening excursion took us from John Galt, who illustrated the effects of industrialisation, through George Douglas Brown, who described the hatred of the real kailyard, through Edward Gaitens and William McIlvanney to James Kelman, who presented the profound internal life of an "alkie booze-bag bastard".
Andrew O'Hagan said their muse had been Thatcher, who drove them down into creative depths of anger and frustration. Once more, it seems, strange fruit appeared from even stranger roots.
This article:
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/s2.cfm?id=1224322004
Robert McNeil:
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=814
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