The Power of Nightmares: Progressive Neoconservatives vs. Radical Islamists–Videos

Posted on February 2, 2012. Filed under: American History, Banking, Blogroll, Business, Communications, Economics, Federal Government, Federal Government Budget, Fiscal Policy, Foreign Policy, government spending, history, History of Economic Thought, Immigration, Inflation, Investments, Language, Law, liberty, Life, Links, Macroeconomics, media, Microeconomics, Monetary Policy, Money, People, Philosophy, Politics, Security, Tax Policy, Technology, Unemployment, Unions, Video, War, Wealth, Wisdom | Tags: Adam Curtis, conservatives, John Birch Society, Neoconservatives, Progressive Neoconservatives, Radical Islamists, Ron Paul, Terrorists, The Power of Nightmares |

The Power of Nightmares Part 1 – Baby It’s Cold Outside

The Power of Nightmares Part 2 – The Phantom Victory

The Power of Nightmares Part 3 – The Shadows in the Cave

SA@TAC – What’s a ‘Neoconservative?’

The Lew Rockwell Show 08/27/2008: What is Neoconservatism?

Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (Cato Institute Book Forum, 2011)

Conservative vs. Neoconservative

The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline

Neo-cons: Invasion of the Party Snatchers Part 1

Neo-cons: Invasion of the Party Snatchers Part 2

Neo-cons: Invasion of the Party Snatchers Part 3

Congressman Ron Paul, MD – We’ve Been NeoConned

TNI Interview with Richard Perle

Israel’s Clean Break Strategy (part 1)

Great changes are seldom achieved without a plan. The Israeli policy paper “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (ACB) was authored by a group of policy advisors to Israel. Subsequently, nearly all members ascended to influential policy making positions within U.S. government, media, and academic circles.

Israel’s Clean Break Strategy (part 2)

The Neocon Agenda

What to do about Iran?

Israel, Iran and the New Neocons

Neoconservatives on Iran (compilation)

Conversations With History – Francis Fukuyama

Neoconservative View of Foreign Policy

Background Articles and Videos

The Power of Nightmares

“…The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis’s narration. The series was first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and has subsequently been broadcast in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

The films compare the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

The Power of Nightmares has been praised by film critics in both Britain and the United States. Its message and content have also been the subject of various critiques and criticisms from conservatives and progressives.

Synopsis

Part 1: “Baby It’s Cold Outside”

The first part of the series explains the origin of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting the U.S. to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through individualism. When he returns to Egypt, he is disturbed by westernisation under Gamal Abdel Nasser and becomes convinced that in order to save society it must be completely restructured along the lines of Islamic law while still using western technology. He also becomes convinced that this can only be accomplished through the use of an elite “vanguard” to lead a revolution against the established order. Qutb becomes a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, after being tortured in one of Nasser’s jails, comes to believe that western-influenced leaders can justly be killed for the sake of removing their corruption. Qutb is executed in 1966, but he influences the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own secret Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat, in 1981, in hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise, and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted not only by their western-inspired leaders, but Muslims themselves have been affected by jahilliyah and thus both may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him. They continued to have the belief that a vanguard was necessary to rise up and overthrow the corrupt regime and replace with a pure Islamist state.

At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the perceived failure of President Johnson’s “Great Society”. They come to the conclusion that the emphasis on individual liberty was the undoing of the plan. They envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy. These factions, the Neo-Conservatives, came to power under the Reagan administration, with their allies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and work to unite the United States in fear of the Soviet Union. The Neo-Conservatives allege the Soviet Union is not following the terms of disarmament between the two countries, and, with the investigation of “Team B”, they accumulate a case to prove this with dubious evidence and methods. President Reagan is convinced nonetheless.^[1]

Part 2: “The Phantom Victory”

In the second episode, Islamist factions, rapidly falling under the more radical influence of Zawahiri and his rich Saudi acolyte Osama bin Laden, join the Neo-Conservative-influenced Reagan Administration to combat the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. When the Soviets eventually pull out and when the Eastern Bloc begins to collapse in the late 1980s, both groups believe they are the primary architects of the “Evil Empire’s” defeat. Curtis argues that the Soviets were on their last legs anyway, and were doomed to collapse without intervention.

However, the Islamists see it quite differently, and in their triumph believe that they had the power to create ‘pure’ Islamic states in Egypt and Algeria. However, attempts to create perpetual Islamic states are blocked by force. The Islamists then try to create revolutions in Egypt and Algeria by the use of terrorism to scare the people into rising up. However, the people were terrified by the violence and the Algerian government uses their fear as a way to maintain power. In the end, the Islamists declare the entire populations of the countries as inherently contaminated by western values, and finally in Algeria turn on each other, each believing that other terrorist groups are not pure enough Muslims either.

In America, the Neo-Conservatives’ aspirations to use the United States military power for further destruction of evil are thrown off track by the ascent of George H. W. Bush to the presidency, followed by the 1992 election of Bill Clinton leaving them out of power. The Neo-Conservatives, with their conservative Christian allies, attempt to demonise Clinton throughout his presidency with various real and fabricated stories of corruption and immorality. To their disappointment, however, the American people do not turn against Clinton. The Islamist attempts at revolution end in massive bloodshed, leaving the Islamists without popular support. Zawahiri and bin Laden flee to the sufficiently safe Afghanistan and declare a new strategy; to fight Western-inspired moral decay they must deal a blow to its source: the United States.^[2]

Part 3: “The Shadows in the Cave”

The Neo-Conservatives use the September 11th attacks, with al-Fadl’s description of al-Qaeda, to launch the War on Terror.^[3]

The final episode addresses the actual rise of al-Qaeda. Curtis argues that, after their failed revolutions, bin Laden and Zawahiri had little or no popular support, let alone a serious complex organisation of terrorists, and were dependent upon independent operatives to carry out their new call for jihad. However, the film argues that in order to prosecute bin Laden in absentia for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, US prosecutors had to prove he was the head of a criminal organisation responsible for the bombings. They find a former associate of bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl, and pay him to testify that bin Laden was the head of a massive terrorist organisation called “al-Qaeda”. With the September 11th attacks, Neo-Conservatives in the new Republican government of George W. Bush use this created concept of an organisation to justify another crusade against a new evil enemy, leading to the launch of the War on Terrorism.

After the American invasion of Afghanistan fails to uproot the alleged terrorist network, the Neo-Conservatives focus inwards, searching unsuccessfully for terrorist sleeper cells in America. They then extend the war on “terror” to a war against general perceived evils with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The ideas and tactics also spread to the United Kingdom where Tony Blair uses the threat of terrorism to give him a new moral authority. The repercussions of the Neo-Conservative strategy are also explored with an investigation of indefinitely-detained terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay, many allegedly taken on the word of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance without actual investigation on the part of the United States military, and other forms of “preemption” against non-existent and unlikely threats made simply on the grounds that the parties involved could later become a threat. Curtis also makes a specific attempt to allay fears of a dirty bomb attack, and concludes by reassuring viewers that politicians will eventually have to concede that some threats are exaggerated and others altogether devoid of reality.^[3] “In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.”

Content

Adam Curtis originally intended to create a film about conflict within the conservative movement between the ideologies of Neo-Conservative “elitism” and more individualist libertarian factions. During his research into the conservative movement, however, Curtis first discovered what he saw as similarities in the origins of the Neo-Conservative and Islamist ideologies. The topic of the planned documentary shifted to these latter two ideologies while the libertarian element was eventually phased out.^[4] Curtis first pitched the idea of a documentary on conservative ideology in 2003 and spent six months compiling the films.^[5][6] The final recordings for the three parts were made on 10 October, 19 October and 1 November 2004.^[7][8][9]

As with many of Curtis’s films, The Power of Nightmares uses a montage of various stock footage from the BBC archives, often for ironic effect, over which Curtis narrates.^[4][5] Curtis has credited James Mossman as the inspiration for his montage technique, which he first employed for the 1992 series Pandora’s Box,^[10] while his use of humour has been credited to his first work with television as a talent scout for That’s Life!^[5] He has also compared the entertainment format of his films to the American Fox News channel, claiming the network has been successful because of “[their viewers] really enjoying what they’re doing”.^[4]

To help drive his points, Curtis includes interviews with various political and intellectual figures. In the first two films, former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency member Anne Cahn and former American Spectator writer David Brock accuse the Neo-Conservatives of knowingly using false evidence of wrongdoing in their campaigns against the Soviet Union and President Bill Clinton.^[1][2] Jason Burke, author of Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, comments in The Shadows in the Cave on the failure to expose a massive terrorist network in Afghanistan.^[3] Additional interviews with major figures are added to drive the film’s narrative. Neo-Conservatives William and Irving Kristol, Richard Pipes and Richard Perle all appear to chronicle the Neo-Conservative perspective of the film’s subject.^[1][3] The history of Islamism is discussed by the Institute of Islamic Political Thought’s Azzam Tamimi, political scientist Roxanne Euben and Islamist Abdulla Anas.^[1][2]

The film’s soundtrack includes at least two pieces from the films of John Carpenter, whom Curtis credited as inspiration for his soundtrack arrangement techniques,^[10] as well as tracks from Brian Eno’s Another Green World. There is also music by composers Charles Ives and Ennio Morricone, while Curtis has credited the industrial band Skinny Puppy for the “best” samples in the films.^{[11] …”}

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares}

Neoconservatism

“…Neoconservatism is a variant of the political ideology of conservatism which combines features of traditional conservatism with political individualism and a qualified endorsement of free markets.^[1] Neoconservatism (or new conservatives) is rooted in a group of former liberals, who in the late 1960s, began to oppose many of the policies and principles associated with President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs.^[2] The term “neoconservative” was initially used in the 1930s to describe American liberals who criticized other liberals who followed a path closer to Soviet communism.^[3]

Terminology

The term “neoconservative” was popularized in the United States in 1973 by Socialist leader Michael Harrington, who applied it his opposition to the policy ideas of Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol.^[4]

The “neoconservative” label was embraced by Irving Kristol in his 1979 article “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed ‘Neoconservative.'”^[5] His ideas have been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited Encounter magazine.^[6] Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. By 1982 Podhoretz was calling himself a neoconservative, in a New York Times Magazine article titled “The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan’s Foreign Policy”.^[7][8] In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the neoconservatives were driven by “the notion that liberalism” had failed and “no longer knew what it was talking about, ” according to E. J. Dionne,^[9]

The term neoconservative, which originally was used by a socialist to criticize the politics of Social Democrats, USA,^[10] has since 1980 been used as a criticism against proponents of American modern liberalism who had “moved to the right”.^[5][11] The term “neoconservative” was the subject of increased media coverage during the presidency of George W. Bush,^[12][13] with particular focus on a perceived neoconservative influence on American foreign policy, as part of the Bush Doctrine.^[14] The term neocon is often used as pejorative in this context.

History

Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, inspiration for neoconservative foreign policy in 1970s

Through the 1950s and early 1960s the future neoconservatives had supported the American Civil Rights Movement, integration, and Martin Luther King, Jr..^[15] From the 1950s to the 1960s, there was broad support among liberals to support military action to prevent a communist victory in Vietnam.^[16]

Neoconservatism was triggered by the repudiation of coalition politics by the American New Left: Black Power, which denounced coalition-politics and racial integration as “selling out” and “Uncle Tomism” and which frequently gave rise to anti-semitic outbursts,^{[citation needed]} anti-anticommunism, which seemed indifferent to the fate of Southern Vietnam, and which in the late 1960s included substantial support for Marxist Leninist movements, and the “new politics” of the New left, which upheld students and alienated minorities as the agents of social change (replacing the majority of the population and the labor movement).^[17] Irving Kristol edited the journal The Public Interest (1965–2005), featuring economists and political scientists, focused on ways that government planning in the liberal state had produced unintended harmful consequences.^[18]

Norman Podhoretz’s magazine Commentary of the American Jewish Committee, originally a journal of the liberal left, became a major voice for neoconservatives in the 1970s. Commentary published an article by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, an early and prototypical neoconservative, albeit not a New Yorker. …”

“…View on Foreign Policy

In foreign policy, the neoconservatives’ main concern is to prevent the arrival of a new rival. Defense Planning Guidance, a document prepared in 1992 by Under Secretary for Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, is regarded by Distinguished Professor of the Humanities John McGowan at the University of North Carolina as the “quintessential statement of neoconservative thought”. The report says:^[63]

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

According to Lead Editor of e-International Relations, Stephen McGlinchey, “Neo-conservatism is something of a chimera in modern politics. For its opponents it is a distinct political movement that emphasizes the blending of military power with Wilsonian idealism, yet for its supporters it is more of a ‘persuasion’ that individuals of many types drift into and out of. Regardless of which is more correct, it is now widely accepted that the neo-conservative impulse has been visible in modern American foreign policy and that it has left a distinct impact” ^[64]

Neoconservatives hold the “conviction that communism was a monstrous evil and a potent danger”.^[65] They supported social welfare programs that were rejected by libertarians and paleoconservatives.

Neoconservatism first emerged in the late 1960s as an effort to combat the radical cultural changes taking place within the United States. Irving Kristol wrote: “If there is any one thing that neoconservatives are unanimous about, it is their dislike of the counterculture.”^[66] Norman Podhoretz agreed: “Revulsion against the counterculture accounted for more converts to neoconservatism than any other single factor.”^[67] The movement began to focus on such foreign issues in the mid-1970s.^[68]

In 1979 an early study by liberal Peter Steinfels concentrated on the ideas of Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Daniel Bell. He noted that the stress on foreign affairs “emerged after the New Left and the counterculture had dissolved as convincing foils for neoconservatism …. The essential source of their anxiety is not military or geopolitical or to be found overseas at all; it is domestic and cultural and ideological.”^[69]

Neoconservative foreign policy is more idealistic. Thinking that human rights belong to everyone, neoconservatives support democracy promotion by the U.S. and other democracies. They criticized the United Nations and detente with the Soviet Union. On domestic policy, they support a welfare state, like European and Canadian conservatives and unlike U.S. social conservatives. According to Norman Podhoretz,

“the neo-conservatives dissociated themselves from the wholesale opposition to the welfare state which had marked American conservatism since the days of the New Deal” and . . . while neoconservatives supported “setting certain limits” to the welfare state, those limits did not involve “issues of principle, such as the legitimate size and role of the central government in the American constitutional order” but were to be “determined by practical considerations.”^[70]

Democracy promotion is supported by a belief that freedom is a universal human right and by polls showing majority support for democracy in countries with authoritarian regimes. Democracy promotion is said to have another benefit, in that democracy and responsive government are expected to reduce the appeal of Islamicism. Neoconservatives have cited political scientists^{[citation needed]} who have argued that democratic regimes are less likely to start wars. Further, they argue that the lack of freedoms, lack of economic opportunities, and the lack of secular general education in authoritarian regimes promotes radicalism and extremism. Consequently, neoconservatives advocate the democracy promotion to regions of the world where it currently does not prevail, notably the Arab nations of the Middle East, communist China and North Korea, and Iran.

In July 2008 Joe Klein wrote in TIME magazine that today’s neoconservatives are more interested in confronting enemies than in cultivating friends. He questioned the sincerity of neoconservative interest in exporting democracy and freedom, saying, “Neoconservatism in foreign policy is best described as unilateral bellicosity cloaked in the utopian rhetoric of freedom and democracy.”^[71]

In February 2009 Andrew Sullivan wrote he no longer took neoconservatism seriously because its basic tenet was defense of Israel:^[72]

The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right. That’s the conclusion I’ve been forced to these last few years. And to insist that America adopt exactly the same constant-war-as-survival that Israelis have been slowly forced into… But America is not Israel. And once that distinction is made, much of the neoconservative ideology collapses.

Neoconservatives respond to charges of merely rationalizing support for Israel by noting that their “position on the Middle East conflict was exactly congruous with the neoconservative position on conflicts everywhere else in the world, including places where neither Jews nor Israeli interests could be found—not to mention the fact that non-Jewish neoconservatives took the same stands on all of the issues as did their Jewish confrères.”^[73]

Views on economics

While neoconservatism is primarily concerned with foreign policy, there is also some discussion of internal economic policies. Neoconservatism is generally supportive of free markets and capitalism, favoring supply side approaches, but it shows several points of disagreement with classical liberalism and fiscal conservatism: Irving Kristol states that neocons are more relaxed about budget deficits and tend to reject the Hayekian notion that the growth of government influence on society and public welfare is “the road to serfdom”.^[74] Indeed, to safeguard democracy, government intervention and budget deficits may sometimes be necessary, Kristol argues.

Further, neoconservative ideology stresses that while free markets do provide material goods in an efficient way, they lack the moral guidance human beings need to fulfill their needs. Morality can be found only in tradition, they say and, contrary to the libertarian view, markets do pose questions that cannot be solved within a purely economic framework. “So as the economy only makes up part of our lives, it must not be allowed to take over and entirely dictate to our society”.^[75] Stelzer concludes that while neoconservative economic policy helped to lower taxes and generate growth, it also led to a certain disregard of fiscal responsibility.^[76] Critics consider neoconservatism a bellicose and “heroic” ideology opposed to “mercantile” and “bourgeois” virtues and therefore “a variant of anti-economic thought”.^[77] Political scientist Zeev Sternhell states that “Neoconservatism has succeeded in convincing the great majority of Americans that the main questions that concern a society are not economic, and that social questions are really moral questions.”^[78]

Distinctions from other conservatives

Some influential members of the early neoconservative movement, such as Elliot Abrams, were originally members of the Democratic Party, where they advocated for “cold war liberalism”.^[79][80] They have been in electoral alignment with other conservatives and served in the same presidential administrations. While they have often ignored ideological differences in alliance against those to their left, neoconservatives differ from paleoconservatives. In particular, they disagree with nativism, protectionism, and non-interventionism in foreign policy, ideologies that are rooted in American history, but which have fallen out of the mainstream U.S. politics after World War II. Compared with traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism, which may be non-interventionist, neoconservatism emphasizes defense capability, challenging regimes hostile to the values and interests of the United States^{[citation needed]}. Neoconservatives also believe in democratic peace theory, the proposition that democracies never or almost never go to war with one another.

Neoconservatives are opposed to realist (and especially neorealist) theories and policies of international relations^{[citation needed]}, often associated with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Though Republican and anti-communist, Nixon and Kissinger made pragmatic accommodation with dictators and sought peace through negotiations, diplomacy, and arms control. They pursued détente with the Soviet Union, rather than rollback, and established relations with the Communist People’s Republic of China. On the other hand, American neoconservatives are often held up as exemplars of idealism (often, paradoxically, called liberalism) in international relations, on account of their state-centered and ideological (as opposed to systematic and security-centered) interpretation of world politics. …”

Notable figures connected to neoconservatism

The list includes public figures identified as personally a neoconservative at an important time or a high official with numerous neoconservative advisors, such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Some are dead, or are ex-neoconservatives.

Who Were & Who Are The “Neo-Cons”? – PART 1 of 3

Who Were & Who Are The “Neo-Cons”? – PART 2 of 3

Who Were & Who Are The “Neo-Cons”? – PART 3 of 3