Among the rarely privileged few to see, in a theatrical presentation, BBC Writer/Producer Adam Curtis's brilliantly controversial documentary, THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES, I was surprised by the number of questions about our involvement in "the war on terror" for which this 180 minute mini-series provides answers.

Startlingly unconventional and unexpected answers.

Certainly new answers, even to me, and in a compelling context.

For instance:

Question: Who started "The War on Terror"?

Answer: A pair of innocents (at the time, at least): A shy, middle-aged Egyptian engineer named Sayyed Qutb, and a reclusive refugee German philosopher of classical philosophy named Leo Strauss. For the same reason, but from very different points of view, these solitary intellectuals set in motion, during the 1940's, seemingly small and inconsequential forces which have been exploited into the madness now spiraling out of control in the Middle East, and if not stopped, throughout the entire World.

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Question: Who started "al-Quaeda (translated, "The Foundation"); the evil terrorist network dedicated to destroying the seats of American power in the World?

Answer: Why, a strike force of Federal Attorneys in the Southern District of New York, United States of America, during January 2001, about nine months before 9/11.

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Question: When did Osama bin Laden become the leader of "al-Quaeda"?

Answer: Surprisingly -- if "al-Quaeda" existed initially (which seems unlikely, in the form it has been promoted), and if indeed, he has ever been anything more than a front man, a venture capitalist banker for terror -- Osama bin Laden adopted the position of supreme leadership, or was elevated to it, sometime after the group's title was publicized by the Bush Administration, following September 11, 2001.

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Question: What is the most compelling evidence that "al-Quaeda" has organized and fielded insidious, all encompassing plots against America since 9/11?

Answer: When the BBC broadcast THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES in October-November 2005, in response to what Producer Curtis considers the generally isolated criminal acts of 19 Saudi and Egyptian thugs on 9/11, the evidence for a widespread coordinated Islamic conspiracy to create terror within the United States had essentially dwindled down to 1) the announcement of a young man's wedding plans to his friends; and 2) a video tape of a group of Buffalo teenagers going for a trip to Disneyland.

[New charges surface daily, of course, but a careful eye on them usually suggests that, even the efforts of the 180,000 member Homeland Security force have not produced much evidence that would legally put more than a few away for anything but illegal entry into the U.S. But, critics will respond, it only takes a few, and we are redefining "legality" today in ways at odds with our accepted Constitutional interpretations. Curtis's point is that there was no worldwide conspiracy until we invented it. Even the slightly more scrupulous British now report that the two London transit bombing "cells" appear to have been isolated -- though that made them no less deadly.]

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Question: Should a "dirty [atom] bomb" be exploded in a large American city, how many people would die directly and immediately as a result?

Answer: Hundreds of thous -- No, say Curtis and his scientific witnesses. Only a relative handful would die as the direct result of such a terrorist act. As one expert explains, those killed or wounded in the immediate proximity would be a result of the explosive charge used to disperse the atomic material. Radiation might kill a person, an expert notes, if she or he stood on the site of the bomb blast "for a solid year." Another expert (from the Society of Atomic Scientists) observes that many more people would likely die or be injured from being trampled, or engaging in mayhem, or suffering in car crashes, during the panic ensuing from "a dirty bomb blast," a result of sensationally overblown announcements on Radio and TV.

[Of course, a population already conditioned to a traumatic state by our politicians, and our fragile, over-extended economy, if one follows Curtis's general line, might sink into a much greater malaise than it did after 9/11. More ominous, in four years since 9/11, we still have not secured our ports. The great tragedy, if and when it comes, will be a full-sized atom bomb brought in the hold of a merchant vessel to New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles or . . . San Francisco.]

Without minimizing how serious, due to incompetence of the Coalition Powers and zeal of contending forces, our situation has become, THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR (Adam Curtis's full title) provides detailed, often provocatively accurate answers to these questions, and dozens of others.

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Adam Curtis, a former professor of Political Science (Political Economy, as the British say) -- a jack of all trades and master of most -- structures his documentary like three well-illustrated, entertainingly scored, and powerfully narrated lectures: 1) "Baby, It's Cold Outside; 2) "The Phantom Menace"; 3) "Shadows in the Cave."

[A more concise version of the mini-series, integrating and trimming introductions to the three episodes, was prepared for showing at Cannes, but because at this date, the BBC has no intentions of distributing the mini-series in general release, or upon a DVD, and because no American TV network has agreed to show the picture in any form, the several showings I've seen at the SF Film Festival and at San Francisco's Roxie Theater, with minor variations, have been projected in three one-hour, stand alone, episodes.]

Aside from a transmission by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and a showing at Tribeca, if you are not able to make your way to the Roxie Theater, you will not see this documentary for some time to come.

Which is a pity.

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Opening Montage: Young Don Rumsfeld, young Osama bin Laden looking benignly into the camera; squinty President George W. Bush, guilty looking Prime Minister Tony Blair; a glimpse of Max Schreck behind a door in NOSFERATU (1922); the cold green eyes of Conrad Veidt as Jaffar in THE THIEF OF BAGDAD 1939); Sabu, the little thief, and Rex Ingram as the Genie escaping from the bottle in the same picture.

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THE POWER OF NIGHTMARE's extraordinary argument, and evidence in support for the above thesis, begins with these words written and narrated by Adam Curtis:

"Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful."

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PART ONE: "Baby It's Cold Outside": [Cue Frank Loesser's 1949 smash hit, sung by Johnny Mercer (who did the words) and Margaret Whiting.]

In the year 1949, Truman is President; we have the Atom Bomb; and though the World has not quite recognized it yet, God is an American.

In rustic Greeley, Colorado, at Colorado State, a meek Egyptian engineer, an intellectual named Sayyed Qutb, age 29 that year, is studying American educational methods on a scholarship. But he abandons his studies and returns to Egypt after recognizing what he perceives as evil tendrils beneath the surface of American Society: materialism, conspicuous consumption, racism, and godless sexual practices. For instance, as he later reflects, residents of Greeley use an inordinate amount of water to care for their lawns. Coming from a land where grass is scarce, and water is more precious than gold, he sees this practice as a sin of elemental proportions. He will pass on news of this and other heresies; eventually, the news will reach one Osama bin Laden.

At the same moment, Professor Leo Strauss, a philosophy professor from Germany, is lecturing his students at the University of Chicago on the corrupting flaws in American Liberalism; the creation of a society, which he sees, as more and more believing in nothing but material goods and hedonism. His students and the students of his students will eventually produce the 91 page Project for a New American Century, the blueprint for American World Domination, a puritan Mein Kampf for the 21st Century.

Absurd?

It doesn't sound quite so wild as it would have, say, ten years ago.

Crazy, then?

The documentary? or "[Our] Struggle"? The documentary is very sane, if occasionally a bit overstated. "Our Struggle" may be the ultimate madness, which mankind has been working toward for millions of years.

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Yes, it was around the late summer of 1949, at a Christian church hall near his college, that Sayyed Qutb took a break from his diligent scholarship to attend a "church social," where even then, liberal churches were "trying to reach" the new Teenage Class created by American Post War advertising. While chatting with the pastor, Qutb observed young dewy white girls, displaying themselves in their newly invented strapless evening dresses, dancing to Frank Loesser's sensuous pop ballad, listening to what he interpreted as Johnny Mercer's seductively pornographic lyrics. He wrote: ". . . chests met chests, arms circled waists, and the hall was full of lust and love." He tried to avert his eyes, perhaps, from a rose pinned to prominent bosom; avoided efforts by friends to get him to approach one of these houris for a close-dance fox trot that plaid jacketed, bow-tied lothario-undergraduates were practicing.

The social conversation, even in those days, was beginning to be of celebrity and material possessions: of movie stars and automobiles, the insatiable lure of consumer goods. These luminously attractive young Americans were, to Qutb, corrupted and lost. What could be more sinful?

And of course, in 1949, the slightly built, owl-eyed Qutb would have been regarded a rare black man at a Greeley Christian Social.

Qutb, meditating over time on his Colorado experience, concluded that this kind of American culture would spread around the Earth, challenging the one and only Book -- not the Bible -- the Quran; polluting the holiness of the sacred Islamic shrines. Upon his return home to Egypt, he joined the new Muslim Brotherhood, dedicated himself to banishing from Holy Lands the Western colonial powers, who were already bringing practices he had witnessed to befoul ancient traditions and the culture from which he came.

What was decaying beautiful young Americans must not infect devout Muslims!

Sayyed Qutb wrote a highly influential book which many think helped crystallize modern Islamic thought. It described the jahilliyah, a state of barbarous ignorance existing before the coming of Mohammed -- which Western culture would spread anew across Arabic countries. He began a quest for purity that would lead to Osama bin Laden, and according to Adam Curtis, to a realization of the "al-Quaeda Myth": the unquestioning acceptance of "the politics of fear" among Western governments -- hence, their peoples -- security agencies and International media.

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Meanwhile, in 1949, at the University of Chicago . . . another idealist, Dr. Leo Strauss, from a much different culture, had come to a similar conclusion as Qutb. Strauss inadvertently would create a group of adherents who would pervert his ideas and his legacy. Leo Strauss (1899-1973), now considered a significant American philosopher, a refugee from Nazi persecution, deeply believed in classical thought. Reclusive, never interviewed on radio or film, seldom photographed, Strauss urged his students to reject both individualist and conventional liberal values, which he believed led only to directionless nihilism.

As Harvard Straussian Professor Harvey Mansfield notes, for a United States lacking two thousand years of inbred classical philosophy, Strauss believed two unifying factors for our Nation would be found in our Religious roots and in the original ideas which had created and preserved the American State.

Strauss stressed that his followers must go back to the radical premises of Western Philosophy. They must learn classical Greek in order to understand what Plato and Aristotle really meant; read the history of Rome in Latin; pore over Aramaic and Hebrew Texts to know the radical beginnings of the Judeo-Christian Tradition; study medieval Italian to fully understand what Machiavelli meant in The Prince. In American political philosophy classes, he had his students learn of the underpinnings of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution from the essays of John Locke, Edmund Burke, from the work Jean Jacques Rousseau and Charles de Montesquieu.

Quixotically, according to Professor Stanley Rosen, a student of Strauss in 1949, the intellectually demanding Philosopher saw his ideas embodied in two popular TV series of the age: GUNSMOKE and PERRY MASON. He used lecture-lightening examples of the former to show how America represented a clear-cut force for Good against Evil in the World, but cited the latter to illustrate how men of superior intellect might legitimately, as in the Law, say one thing professionally while thinking quite another in their own minds.

[Cue James Arness in his White Hat blasting a Black Hatted villain at high noon into the desert dust of . . . Old Dodge City. Cue Raymond Burr, in an eternal "present," smiling enigmatically after delivering a persuasive legal argument in court.]

Some Strauss adherents garnered from this rigorous but eclectic mix that occasionally the "noble lie" of Plato, as applied by Machiavelli in a need to unify the Italian states, was justified, to create and consolidate the power necessary to combat Liberalism and Secular Humanism. As others put it later, a Straussian leader might advance a myth to give confidence to the people, but without himself necessarily believing in his own "noble lie." Karl Rove, Chief Advisor to George W. Bush, is said to have put it more simply: "We shall create our own reality."

[Whether or not, the above formulations were accurate interpretations of Leo Strauss's thought is still debated. Now more than ever!]

In any case, it was a philosophical stance open to hypocrisy, fraud, and deception.

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By the late 1960's, with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, former Attorney Robert F. Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King, with the growing Vietnam War (which hardly anyone could justify coherently), with race riots and drug addiction enflaming America, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson's "War on Poverty" not a real panacea for forty million Americans suffering under the poverty line, Liberalism was becoming a dirty word to a majority of Americans -- for the first time since 1932. Also in the 1960's, the American Cold War Foreign Policy first engineered by Secretary John Foster Dulles and carried out by CIA Chief Alan Dulles (the Bush Family's early brotherly lawyer team), was supporting the overthrow of governments around the Globe.

In this pragmatic situation, the studious members of the Strauss School of Philosophy were often not able to find positions in the burgeoning American economy, which was pushing tired European Colonial practices aside. The Straussians, as they became known, tended to gravitate to lesser policy posts in Washington, or to Academia. Obsessed with their take on Strauss's theories, often deeply religious -- believing in such fundamentalist ideas as Armageddon, the Second Coming of Christ, the Rapture -- the students of these men, often Christian converts or former Marxists, turned out to be, among others, Irving Kristol, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, David Frume, John Bolton, Richard Pipes, Michael Ledeen and Douglas Fithe. They developed a quasi-religious mission which aimed to make America the dominant, God-ordained Empire in the World, to bring about the triumph of Good over Evil.

[They wrote it down in the early 1990's, and developed it over time as The Project for a New American Century, which became even before 9/11 the blue print for "the war on terror." In fact, as if by God's hand, 9/11 provided "the new Pearl Harbor" they believed necessary in order to carry out their plan in the Middle East and Central Asia.]

These were the men who, to a greater or lesser degree, became highly influential behind the scenes, from the Nixon Administration down to the present. During the Reagan Years, they enlisted other talents, such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Chaney, and William Casey, who were willing to exploit "the noble lie" to ensure the "Victory of Democracy" over our enemies. They manned the ramparts of the Cold War against the "cells" (everywhere!) of Godless Communism, and when Soviet Russia collapsed, they turned to find a new Enemy, the latest representative of Satan on the planet.

In "The Wake of Watergate," the Straussian ideologues, few in number but increasingly influential, had moved with the American public steadily to the Right, financed by plutocratic institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society; fulminating more and more loudly at the Communist influence on Liberalism, Secular Humanism, the Unions, in our Public Schools, and in the Media. They were so pure that they believed that Henry Kissinger was too far to the Left. America was rotting from within, but first, "The Neocon Cabal," as they came to see, indeed call themselves, was occupied in defeating the shadowy minions of "Godless Communism" abroad, by any means necessary.

The now forgotten "Irangate" employed American industry, the Agriculture Department and "off the shelf" secret military plans to support one of our many totalitarian heroes of the time, Saddam Hussein, with materials to manufacture poison gas to slaughter Soviet-supported Iranians and Kurds. And then, "the noble lie" was extended to our CIA secret war in Afghanistan (which also trained Osama bin Laden and, eventually, gave us the Taliban).

[We might remember that the forebears of these people were The John Birch Society of the 1950's. Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer who founded that Society, came to believe near the end of his life that the secret master behind the "Communist Conspiracy" in the United States was the Chairman of the Board of General Motors!]

Once they had influenced President Ronald Reagan to retreat from Detente with the Soviet Union, and the Communist Empire had collapsed largely of its own inefficient weight, what the Straussians needed for their future plans were foot soldiers, and as the consummate politician Richard Nixon found an appeal to racists in his "Southern Strategy," the Straussians gravitated toward finding a New Enemy by courting Evangelical Christianity and its fears of another foreign damnation, the dark things that hid in the forest beyond the edge of an older America, a 17th Century America:

Satan's Hordes: The Muslim Extremists.


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PART TWO: "The Phantom Victory" -- Back in Egypt, Sayyed Qutb was not faring so well. He and his Muslim Brothers had applauded the end of King Faruk's puppet rule, and the humbling of the British, French and Israelis at Suez in 1956 (facilitated by President Dwight Eisenhower and the Dulles Brothers). They hoped that General Abdel Gamal Nasser, as well as other revolutions sweeping the area, would return the holy lands to Fundamentalist Islamic principles. Instead, Nasser and the new rulers of Middle Eastern nations, set out to take Western aid, to create modern secular states; and/or, worst of all, at the same time, to adopt Marxist principles, to cooperate with the "Godless Communists." Qutb was among protesters thrown in jail for their criticism of Nasser. Two dozen of Qutb's fellow Muslim Brotherhood were murdered by the Egyptian Secret Police, scores injured using torture techniques learned from CIA experts (who had gleaned them from old Nazi Cold War "retreads," and from studying manuals stolen from the Soviet Gulags.)

A training film for Egyptian police interrogators shows men stripped naked, humiliated, and beaten. Qutb himself was smeared with pig fat and had dogs set upon him (sound familiar?), after which he suffered a heart attack. This experience is said to have truly radicalized him, embittered the little man, and he redoubled his vitriolic critiques of Nasser's regime, in writings smuggled from jail, until he was executed in 1966.

According to Curtis, the day after Qutb's death, a teenage hero-worshipper named Aiman Al-Zawaheri started a student chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. In time, Al-Zawaheri was a leader of the plot which assassinated Nasser's successor, Anwar Saddat, for making peace with Israel, and for offering asylum to the Shah of Iran following his deposal and replacement by the Islamic Fundamentalist, Ayatollah Khomeini. Defiant, Al-Zawaheri acted as a spokesman for the Brotherhood, screaming in English a declaration of "Islamic Freedom" from his cage in an Egyptian courtroom, on behalf of his fellow conspirators. After being spared and released, Al-Zawaheri gained a new pupil and adherent named Osama bin Laden, scion to thirtieth part of a great Saudi construction family fortune, whose late half-brother was a close associate of a young Texas chip-kicker, George W. Bush. (Thus, the devout bin Laden already knew how perfidious the West could be.) Al-Zawaheri taught the tall, shy Saudi businessman all he knew of revolutionary practices, and made great use of bin Laden's finances.

This string of coincidences was capped when followers of both Sayyed Qutb and Leo Strauss united successfully to defeat "The Godless Communist Menace" in Afghanistan. By that time, the Islamic revolutionary movements, which had set up training camps there, were being destroyed back in their own countries (such as Algeria); were cannibalizing themselves; and declaring, in one case, at least, that the average Muslim "on the street" had become so corrupted by liberal ideas that he was a traitor and did not deserve to remain alive with pure followers of Islam. (Given a change in nomenclature, and slight change in tone, does that also not sound familiar?) And, at home, the Straussians were already looking around for a way to create what President George H.W. Bush, at the beginning of the Gulf War, called, "The New World Order." His failure to take their advice and press on to Baghdad in 1991 enraged and humiliated them.

Given a chance, the Straussians would make it right.

The defeat of the Russians by Islam and the United States in Afghanistan, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, proved to be "The Phantom Victory." Liberalism, which they both so hated, still infected "the Masses" in the lands they held so dear.

With Communism vanquished, Donald Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, and their champions Dick Chaney and Donald Rumsfeld, turned to the Middle East. According to Adam Curtis, Aiman Al-Zawaheri and Osama bin Laden, with British, French and Russian Colonialism banished from their Holy Lands, focused on the one great colonial power remaining: The United States of America. Osama hired a mule, some warriors (who were required to bring their own weapons), made a video, and held a press conference. Islam had gingerly entered the Modern World. From that "reality show" what became known as "al-Quaeda" was born.

Among the proposals presented to Al-Zwaheri and bin Laden for financial support was one preposterous sounding scheme: to hijack airliners and fly them into American skyscrapers.

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PART THREE: "Shadows in the Cave." This part, after the standard opening, begins with the terrible events of September 11, 2001, and goes back to recapitulate what forces brought them about, but more importantly, explores to what use the event was put, both in the far reaches of the Hindu Kush, in the cellar of the Defense Department, and on Downing Street. Though punctuated with humorous squawks and snorts from a band known as The Skinny, a good many funny clips from old movies, this segment is truly tragic in its implications.

We listen to Richard Pipes, a veteran American Political Science guru, explain in a confidential tone "The Predictive Theory" with which he inculcated several White Houses: That, when faced with an enemy like Communism or Islamic Extremism, we must act against what the enemy might do. In fact, when there is no evidence for wrong doing, that is when we must act most decisively and harshly. In other words, we must act on our fears of what the enemy might do, and give no quarter.

Paul Weyrich, the chief strategist of The Heritage Foundation, credited by those in the know with having facilitated the new Russian Post-Soviet system, leans against the front of his desk to describe how the neocons triumphed.

Curtis describes how the same methods which worked against the Communists were applied by figures like those above, and Special Prosecutor Ken Starr (a member of the Federalist Society), against the folksy, slightly right of center William Jefferson Clinton and his intellectually arrogant wife, Hillary Rodam Clinton.

In an equally convincing way, Curtis shows how all these disparate elements dovetailed in "the war on terror" with the political ambitions of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Laborites, reeling under the disasters of "Thatcherism." He shows us Jason Burke, an expert on "The al-Quaeda." It's his belief that al-Quaeda began as a legalistic convenience and fiction, created by Federal prosecutors when they invoked the Rico Anti-Organized Crime Laws to bolster their case against the original car-bombers of the World Trade Center, and to help extradite a number of bin Laden financed terrorists who pulled off attacks on our embassies in Africa. It then became an even more convenient romantic myth and explanation for 9/11, the excuse to invade Afghanistan, and finally another fiction justifying the Attack on Iraq by the Coalition of the Willing. Curtis pictures President George W. Bush speaking of "60 nations" we may wage preemptive war against, but he has the good manners not to suggest that Iran is obviously first (next) on the list.

Curtis also comments on a bored looking Saddam Hussein. The dictator was, as many should know by now, originally put into power and encouraged with our help. When our interference in Iran backfired and brought Islamic Extremists to leadership in Teheran, Saddam was encouraged to attack Iran, supplied by us with poison gas and armaments to slaughter Iranians and Kurds, in order to curtail their power. After that war, Saddam appears to have been set up as a fall guy, like "assets" before him such as Bautista in Cuba and Noriega in Panama. The "evidence" against him was fabricated, or "just made up," by the Neocons. For instance, Saddam, grandiosely dreaming of becoming a hero to Arabic peoples, in a brutally sentimental way, laid the equivalent of $25,000 on the family of EVERY Palestinian young person who died in the Infitada against Israel. The Neocons, after 9/11, used these gestures, tasteless to many devout Muslims as well, as evidence that Saddam was behind "the war on terror," a partner of Osama bin Laden (who hated him as an Unbeliever), and even the mastermind behind 9/11 itself. Little of this was true, but as both Straussian former Under Secretary of State Richard Pearle and crooked informant Achmid Chalabi (creator of the WMD myth, and now Iraqi Minister of Oil) noted, in slightly different fashions: "We're in Baghdad, aren't we?"

The search for terrorists at home and abroad is examined in some detail, emphasizing up how little "the Coalition to the Willing" has accomplished under President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. Most telling is a clip of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld describing -- with elaborate diagrams of generators, garages, arsenals, barracks -- Osama bin Laden's vast complex built into the caves of Afghanistan's Tora Bora. Then, we see dogged American Special Forces being sold scruffy al Quaeda suspects by our proxy army, the Northern Alliance; and blowing up tiny caves, to no profit. Then, to the stirring tempo of "The Dam Busters March," the British arrive in great personnel helicopters "to show the Americans how to do it properly." A bluff brigadier, Guards mustache bristling, promises to find the huge hideout (capable of accommodating tanks, Rumsfeld says) that has been described to him. "Six Weeks Later": the brigadier is asked how many al-Quaeda he has found. He replies just as proudly: "Not one. They weren't there."

[To which "Predictive Theory Strategist" Pipes no doubt would have replied: "That's it! That you didn't find them is the greatest, most compelling evidence that they must be there!" A similar defense was made for claims of WMD in Iraq.]

But huge numbers of Americans and British live, according to Writer/Producer Curtis, in fear of Straussian Platonic shadows cast on their own cave walls by the fires in their Televison sets. And of course, we are paying for the show in hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

And so, according to the logic of THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR, following the bloody model of The Crusades, despondent Islamic Jihadists and disappointed old Cold Warriors of extreme religious or philosophical persuasion were exploited by opportunistic leaders like Aiman Al-Zawaheri, Osama bin Laden, George Bush and Tony Blair and certain individuals around them. The Magic Fire of "The Project for a New American Century" would lead us into madness and destruction

[It is not by accident, perhaps, given the intrigue which led to two World Wars, that the elegiac theme which dominates Part Three of THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES comes to my mind as the music for the BBC Television series, SIDNEY RILEY, ACE OF SPIES!]

And what of today?

Please try to find some way to see Adam Curtis's BBC documentary, THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR. It's essential thesis is that two groups of narrow idealists -- devout Islamic intellectuals or clerics vs misguided followers of the teachings of Leo Strauss in the United States -- saw an evil outside threat to the core values of their societies. For the Islamists it was U.S. culture; for the neo-Straussians, it was the moral decay of American Liberal Thought, from within and from without, destroying the bedrock principles of the Republic. The two groups became mirror images of each other. Almost inadvertently, they created "the war on terror" together -- which has been exploited by political and economic forces in terrible and unexpected ways.

THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES represents a magnificent if flawed work (180 minutes, in three parts), shown in Britain, France [Cannes], Canada, and two places in America -- New York and San Francisco. No American network has so far agreed to show it.

Email your Cable and Network TV Companies, and ask them:

WHY NOT?

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UPDATE: April 16, 2007 -- If you have not seen and downloaded THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES; THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR through Google, I urge you to do so. Such opportunities sometimes do not last forever on the Internet. [See details in the Bottom Line above.] You will have to install a Google player, but it is free.

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For a review of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1939), one of the films used to illustrate Curtis's thesis, go to the following URL:

http://www.epinions.com/content_23139552900

And here is a review of the first great film nightmare, NOSFERATU (1922), which Curtis uses as a visual cue in his Introductions:

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-4F2E-56CFE2-38BEC376-bd3

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I invite you to visit the "BLOG" which I now maintain on my Epinions Profile Page, where I occasionally discuss matters of the day:

http://www.epinions.com/user-macresarf1/show_~View_Profile#long_bio














Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older