There are some histories that the US media – especially the mainstream private media – feel that the American people can’t handle. This three-part BBC documentary series, The Power of Nightmares, is one of them. Although the creator, Adam Curtis, has tried countless times since 2004 to have this series aired on US television, he has been rejected every time. Curtis points out the scary obvious when he says that “something extraordinary has happened to American TV since September 11. A head of the leading networks who had better remain nameless said to me that there was no way they could show it. He said, ‘Who are you to say this?’ and then he added, ‘We would get slaughtered if we put this out’” (wikipedia.org). When our own history can’t be examined by our media, our media is no longer democratic – a fact that I’m sure CVLT Nation readers are already well aware of. American media is no longer a tool to inform us about our world so that we can make political decisions based on reality. As Curtis points out throughout “The Power of Nightmares,” we are making decisions based on fantasy – a fantasy constructed by powerful government figures in order to steer our politics in a false and favorable direction. Check out this amazing documentary, and see how this fantasy has been constructed by both the neo-conservatives in the US and the fundamental Islamist groups in the Middle East. Post-Egyptian Revolution, this series is even more poignant, considering the stance the American media tried to take on the Muslim Brotherhood, hyping them up as the next big threat to “our” security…
The Power of Nightmares is an amazing series just because it factually lays out how the majority of the population has been duped. History has been written and re-written by the government and powerful capitalists so many times that it has become increasingly difficult to put today’s politics into context. Throughout the West, but especially in America, we are fed a daily diet of fear every time we turn on our televisions or open a newspaper – although these fears are being fed to an ever more skeptical audience, I hope. The harsh realities of the American government’s lies about “the War on Terror” and the Iraq War have snuck in through the internet and through the very few objective and publicly-owned media in the US. Today, we are fed a constant stream of bullshit from all angles, pseudo-justifying war in Afghanistan and increasingly in Libya. At the center of the past decade’s brainwashed nightmare has been Osama Bin Laden, and now that he has been vanquished in the all-American glory style, I am preparing myself for the next nightmare to rear it’s Middle Eastern, North Korean or even Russian head in the American media circus…
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