The Power of Nightmares

The BBC showed and enjoyable and articulate show the other night (Wed. @ 9pm I think) about the rise of both Islamic fundamentalism and American Neo Conservatism. Cleverly drawing parallels between the two concepts (both philosophies are rooted in the apparent collapse of the “Liberal” American or at least Western vision), the show basically suggests Radical Islam and the kind of Ultra Conservative American administration now in power rely on carefully constructed myths and the dissemination of fear to maintain their power.
America’s most powerful men such as Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are exposed (yet again) in the show as having been directly involved in falsifying information about The Soviet Union during the cold war (sound familiar?), suggesting falsely that every terrorist group in the world was being funded by the USSR etc, etc…
Basically, the men in charge of America right now were involved in propagating and disseminating lies in order to build a mythical America, an America whose mission it was to police a “dangerous” world, and therefore control it. They are still, quite obviously, on that same mission.
Sayyid Qutb, the man whose radical philosophies were taken up many others including Bin Laden, was executed before he could see his words mutate into the justifiable murder of any non-Muslim.
The show gets right to the root of two seemingly disparate worldviews that turn out to be basically the same in many respects. Both philosophies take it as a given that we can’t be trusted to look after ourselves. They saw Western society in the sixties and seventies as "in a state of collapse" and saw individualism as the problem. Both ideologies are determined to rein in our freedom and develop lost “shared moralities” synonymous with cultures of yesteryear. And they have both decided to do it using fear as their weapon, one feeding off the other – the Great Satan has a new enemy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The message of the show seems to be there is nothing really to be afraid of, it’s the same old same old.
The next episodes will document how the two camps worked together to oust the USSR from Afghanistan and will go on to underline the fact that al-Qaeda doesn’t really exist. Cracking stuff, well worth a watch.