I still haven't managed to catch up with the first part of the BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares -- mainly because I've been a bit busy in the past couple of days coping with the nightmare of appearing on the BBC. But this review by Clive Davis gives a flavour of what to expect:

'The Power of Nightmares would have us believe that the international terrorist threat is a myth concocted by governments and orchestrated by a cabal of devious neoconservatives. Since the public has lost faith in ideology, politicians must now use fear in order to maintain their hold over the masses. Al Qaeda is a figment of our imagination; there are no sleeper cells, and talk of lethal dirty bombs is all so much radioactive hot air.If that seems bizarre enough, the series also sets out to claim that the Islamists and the neocons are, in reality, soul mates. As Curtis explained in a magazine interview this week: "My original intention was to look at the neo-cons and then the radical Islamists. I was astonished to discover that they have the same philosophical roots. They both believe that the problem with modern society is that individuals question anything; by doing that they [those individuals] have already torn down God, that eventually they will tear down everything else and therefore they will have to be opposed." '

You obviously can't overestmate the creative imagination of a pukka conspiracy theorist. It's not enough wilfully to invent a conspiacy by sinister neo-cons, aka Jews, in Washington to subvert American foreign policy. It's not enough wilfully to lie that they invented an Islamist threat that never existed. Now it is alleged that the Jewish conspiracy (which we are told does exist) and the Islamic conspiracy (which we are told does not) are basically brothers in struggle! They are both identical sets of crazed fundamentalists!

Truly, we live in delirious times. As Davis comments:

'This symbiotic relationship with Islamism will no doubt come as a surprise to the good folks at the American Enterprise Institute. It is a sign of how fevered political debate has become in Britain's media-land that such lurid, Michael Moore-ish notions are given a prime-time slot on the channel that once gave us Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation...The opening episode amounts to a ludicrously one-sided account of the rise of the neocons which manages to impute all manner of sinister motives to a tight-knit circle devoted to the teachings of Leo Strauss. In Curtis's world, it is Strauss, not Osama bin Laden, who is the real evil genius.'

The eminent historian Richard Pipes, who by this account is stitched up by dishonest editing, says of allegations that are made that they are

'so preposterous that I would be at a loss to answer them: they are similar to those made by the Holocaust deniers. They sort of leave you speechless.'

But the British are lapping it all up and believing it. Wicked stuff.

Posted by melanie at October 22, 2004