music: the vanishing american familyby scuba z advertise your product or brand herecontact www.opensubtitles.org today explosion we live in a strange time. extraordinary events keep happening that undermine thestability of our world. suicide bombs, waves of refugees, donald drumpf, vladimir putin, even brexit.
yet those in controlseem unable to deal with them, and no-one has any vision of a differentor a better kind of future. music: something i can never haveby nine inch nails this film will tell the storyof how we got to this strange place. it is about how,over the past 40 years, politicians, financiersand technological utopians, rather than face up to the realcomplexities of the world, retreated.
instead, they constructeda simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. and as this fake world grew,all of us went along with it, because the simplicitywas reassuring. even those who thought they wereattacking the system - the radicals, the artists,the musicians, and our whole counterculture - actually became partof the trickery, because they, too, had retreatedinto the make-believe world,
which is why their oppositionhas no effect and nothing ever changes. but this retreat into a dream world allowed dark and destructive forcesto fester and grow outside. forces that are now returningto pierce the fragile surface of our carefully constructedfake world. # in dreams # i live... # the story begins in two citiesat the same moment in 1975.
one is new york. the other is damascus. it was a moment when two ideasabout how it might be possible to run the world without politicsfirst took hold. in 1975, new york citywas on the verge of collapse. for 30 years, the politicianswho ran the city had borrowed more and more moneyfrom the banks to pay for its growing servicesand welfare. but in the early '70s, the middleclasses fled from the city
and the taxes they paid disappearedwith them. so, the banks lent the cityeven more. but then, they began to get worriedabout the size of the growing debt and whether the city would ever beable to pay it back. and then one day in 1975, the banks just stopped. the city held its regular meetingto issue bonds in return for the loans, overseen bythe city's financial controller. good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
today, the city of new york isoffering for competitive bidding the sale of 260 milliontax anticipation notes, of which 100 million will matureon june 3rd, 1975. the banks were supposedto turn up at 11am, but it soon became clear that noneof them were going to appear. the meeting was rescheduled for 2pm and the bankspromised they would turn up. the announcement on behalf of thecontroller is that the offer, which we had expected to receive
and announce at two o'clockthis afternoon, is now expected at four o'clock. paul, does this mean that, so far,nobody wants those bonds? we will be making a furtherannouncement at four o'clock and anything further that i couldsay now i think would not advance the interest of the sale,which is now in progress. does this mean that you have notbeen able to sell them so far today? we will have a further announcementat four o'clock. what happened that day in new yorkmarked a radical shift in power.
the banks insisted that in orderto protect their loans they should be allowedto take control of the city. the city appealed to the president, but he refused to help, so a new committee was set upto manage the city's finances. out of nine members,eight of them were bankers. it was the startof an extraordinary experiment where the financial institutionstook power away from the politicians and started to runsociety themselves.
the city had no other option. the bankers enforced what was called"austerity" on the city, insisting that thousands ofteachers, policemen and firemen were sacked. this was a new kind of politics. the old politicians believedthat crises were solved through negotiation and deals. the bankers had a completelydifferent view. they were just the representatives
of something that couldn'tbe negotiated with - the logic of the market. to them, there was no alternativeto this system. it should run society. just by shifting paper around, these slobs can make 60 million,65 million in a single transaction. that would take care of allof the lay-offs in the city, so it's reckless, it's crueland it's a disgrace. there would be a fair numberof bankers, of course,
who'd say it's the unions who havebeen too greedy. what would your reaction be to that?i guess they're right in a way. if you can make 60 millionon a single transaction, and a worker makes 8,000, 9,000a year, i suppose they're correct, and as they go back to their littleestates in greenwich, connecticut, i want to wish them well, the slobs. but the extraordinary thing wasno-one opposed the bankers. the radicals and the left-wingerswho, ten years before, had dreamt of changing americathrough revolution did nothing.
they had retreated and were living in the abandonedbuildings in manhattan. the singer patti smith laterdescribed the mood of disillusion that had come over them. "i could not identify "with the political movements anylonger," she said. "all the manic activityin the streets. "in trying to join them,i felt overwhelmed "by yet another formof bureaucracy."
what she was describing was the riseof a new, powerful individualism that could not fit with the ideaof collective political action. instead, patti smith and many others became a new kindof individual radical, who watched the decaying citywith a cool detachment. they didn't try and change it. they just experienced it. look at that. isn't that cool? i love that, where, like,kids write all over the walls.
that, to me, is neaterthan any art sometimes. "jose and maria forever." oh, there's a lot of things, like,when you pass by big movie houses, maybe we'll find one, but they havelittle movie screens, where you can see clips of,like, z, or something like that. people watch it over and over. i've seen people,i've checked them out. all day! i've gone back and forthand they're still there watching the credits of a movie,cos they don't have enough dough,
but it's some entertainment,you know? instead, radicals across americaturned to art and music as a means of expressingtheir criticism of society. they believed that instead of tryingto change the world outside the new radicalism should tryand change what was insidepeople's heads, and the way to do this was throughself-expression, not collective action. u
v w x y z but some of the left saw thatsomething else was really going on - that by detaching themselves andretreating into an ironic coolness, a whole generation were beginningto lose touch with the reality of power.
shut up. shut up! one of them wrote of that time, "it was the mood of the era "and the revolution wasdeferred indefinitely. "and while we were dozing,the money crept in." sobbing what's your date of birth, larry? but one of the people who didunderstand how to use this new power
was donald drumpf. drumpf realised that there wasnow no future in building housingfor ordinary people, because all the governmentgrants had gone. but he saw there were other ways to get vast amounts of moneyout of the state. drumpf started to buy upderelict buildings in new york and he announced that he was goingto transform them into luxury hotelsand apartments.
but in return, he negotiatedthe biggest tax break in new york's history,worth 160 million. the city had to agreebecause they were desperate, and the banks,seeing a new opportunity, also started to lend him money. and donald drumpf began to transformnew york into a city for the rich, while he paid practically nothing. at the very same time, in 1975, there was a confrontation betweentwo powerful men in damascus,
the capital of syria. one was henry kissinger,the us secretary of state. the other was the presidentof syria, hafez al-assad. the battle between the two men was going to have profoundconsequences for the world. and like in new york,it was going to be a struggle between the old idea of usingpolitics to change the world and a new idea that you could runthe world as a stable system. president assad dominated syria.
the country was full of giant imagesand statues that glorified him. he was brutal and ruthless, killing or imprisoning anyonehe suspected of being a threat. but assad believed thatthe violence was for a purpose. he wanted to find a way of unitingthe arab countries and using that powerto stand up to the west. four, three, two,
one. kissinger was also toughand ruthless. he had started in the 1950s as an expert in the theoryof nuclear strategy. what was called"the delicate balance of terror." it was the system that ranthe cold war. both sides believedthat if they attacked, the other side would immediatelylaunch their missiles and everyone would be annihilated.
kissinger had been one of themodels for the character of dr strangelovein stanley kubrick's film. mr president, i would not ruleout the chance to preserve a nucleusof human specimens. it would be quite easy. at the bottom of someof our deeper mineshafts. henry was not a warm, friendly,modest, jovial sort of person. he was thought of as oneof the more... ..anxious, temperamental,self-conscious,
ambitious, inconsiderate peopleat harvard. kissinger saw himselfas a hard realist. he had no time for the emotionalturmoil of political ideologies. he believed that history had alwaysreally been a struggle for power between groups and nations. but what kissinger tookfrom the cold war was a way of seeing the worldas an interconnected system, and his aim was to keepthat system in balance and prevent it from fallinginto chaos.
i believe that with all thedislocations we now experience, there also existsan extraordinary opportunity to form, for the first time inhistory, a truly global society carried up by the principleof interdependence, and if we act wisely,and with vision, i think we can look backto all this turmoil as the birth pangs of a morecreative and better system. if we miss the opportunity,i think there's going to be chaos. the flight has been delayed,we understand now.
kissinger will be arriving hereabout an hour and a half from now, so we'll justhave the press informed and then we'll stayin contact with you... and it was this idea that kissingerset out to impose on the chaotic politicsof the middle east. but to manage it, he knew that he was going to have todeal with president assad of syria. president assad was convincedthat there would only ever be a real and lasting peace betweenthe arabs and israel
if the palestinian refugees wereallowed to return to their homeland. hundreds of thousandsof palestinians were living in exile in syria, as well as in the lebanonand jordan. have you found that the palestinianshere want to integrate with the syrians at all? oh, no. no, never. they don't want... not here or neither in lebanonor in jordan, never.
no, because they want to stay asa whole, as...palestinian. as... they call themselves,"those who go back" - "al-a'iduun", you say in arabic. assad also believedthat such a peace would strengthen the arab world. but kissinger thought thatstrengthening the arabs would destabilisehis balance of power. so, he set outto do the very opposite - to fracture the powerof the arab countries,
by dividing themand breaking their alliances, so they wouldkeep each other in check. kissinger now played a double game. or as he termed it,"constructive ambiguity". in a series of meetings,he persuaded egypt to sign a separate agreementwith israel. but at the same time, he led assadto believe that he was workingfor a wider peace agreement, one that would include thepalestinians.
in reality,the palestinians were ignored. they were irrelevantto the structural balance of the global system. the hallmark of kissinger's thinkingabout international politics is its structural design. everything is always connectedin his mind to everything else. but his first thoughtsare on that level, on this structuralglobal balance of power level. and as he addresses questionsof human dignity,
human survival, human freedom... ..i think they tendto come into his mind as an adjunct of the play of nationsat the power game. when assad found out the truth,it was too late. in a series of confrontationswith kissinger in damascus, assad raged about this treachery. he told kissingerthat what he had done would release demons hidden underthe surface of the arab world. kissinger described their meetings.
"assad's controlled fury," he wrote, "was all the more impressivefor its eerily cold, "seemingly unemotional, demeanour." assad now retreated. he started to build a giant palacethat loomed over damascus... ..and his belief that it would bepossible to transform the arab world began to fade. a british journalist,who knew assad, wrote... "assad's optimism has gone.
"a trust in the future has gone. "what has emerged insteadis a brutal, vengeful assad, "who believes in nothingexcept revenge." the original dreamof the soviet union had been to createa glorious new world. a world where not only the society, but the people themselveswould be transformed. they would become new and betterkinds of human beings. but by the 1980s, it was clearthat the dream had failed.
woman gasps woman speaks russian the soviet union became instead a society where no-one believedin anything or had any vision of the future. russian song plays those who ran the soviet unionhad believed that they could plan and manage a new kindof socialist society. but they had discovered thatit was impossible
to control and predict everything and the plan had run out of control. but rather than reveal this,the technocrats began to pretend that everything was still goingaccording to plan. and what emerged insteadwas a fake version of the society. the soviet union became a societywhere everyone knew that what their leaders saidwas not real because they could seewith their own eyes that the economy was falling apart.
but everybody had to play alongand pretend that it was real because no-one could imagineany alternative. one soviet writer called it"hypernormalisation". you were so mucha part of the system that it was impossibleto see beyond it. the fakeness was hypernormal. tannoy announcement in russian in this stagnant world,two brothers - called arkady and boris strugatsky -
became the inspirationof a growing new dissident movement. they weren't politicians,they were science fiction writers, and in their stories, they expressedthe strange mood that was rising up as the soviet empire collapsed. their most famous bookwas called roadside picnic. it is set in a worldthat seems like the present, except there is a zone thathas been created by an alien force. people, known as "stalkers",go into the zone.
they find that nothingis what it seems, that reality changesminute by minute. shadows go the wrong way. there are hidden forcesthat twist your body and change the wayyou think and feel. the picture the strugatskys gave was of a worldwhere nothing was fixed. where reality - both what you sawand what you believed - had become shifting and unstable.
and in 1979, the film directorandrei tarkovsky made a film that was basedon roadside picnic. he called it stalker. wind whistles i, ronald reagan,do solemnly swear... ..that i will faithfully execute the office of presidentof the united states. ..that i will faithfully execute the new president of americahad a new vision of the world.
it wasn't the harsh realismof henry kissinger any longer, it was different - it was a simple, moral crusade, where america had a special destinyto fight evil and to make the worlda better place. the places and the periodsin which man has known freedom are few and far between - just scattered momentson the span of time. and most of those momentshave been ours.
the american people have a geniusfor great and unselfish deeds. into the hands of america, god has placed the destinyof an afflicted mankind. god bless america. but this crusadewas going to lead reagan to come face-to-facewith henry kissinger's legacy... ..and, above all, the vengeful furyof president assad of syria. explosionisrael was now determined to finally destroythe power of the palestinians.
and, in 1982,they sent a massive army to encircle the palestinian campsin the lebanon. do you know... do you know howstrong the israelis are? do you know how many tanksthey have outside beirut? do you know how strong they are? he translates that means"we are not ready to surrender". young, young, young! nearby explosions
keep going! dashed into this building herebecause the plo guys with us expect that, sooner or later,there will be a huge explosion. there've been several of thesein the last few minutes. as you can see, there's enormous damagein all the buildings round here. quick, quick! distant explosions two months later,thousands of palestinian refugees
were massacred in the camps. it horrified the world. but what was even more shocking was that israelhad allowed it to happen. its troops had stood by and watched as a christian lebanese factionmurdered the palestinians. this was the first of the massacreswe discovered yesterday. now, 24 hours later,the stench here is appalling. but the effects on the israelis
of what their christian alliesdid here and in dozens of other placesaround this camp are going to be immense. there's always been a risk of suchmassacres if christian militiamen were allowed to comeinto palestinian camps, and the israelisseem to have done nothing to prevent themcoming into this one. in the face of the horrorand the growing chaos, president reagan was forced to act.
he announced that american marineswould come to beirut to lead a peacekeeping force. reagan insisted thatthe troops were neutral. but president assad was convincedthat there was another reality. he saw the troops as partof the growing conspiracy between america and israel to dividethe middle east into factions and destroy the power of the arabs. assad decided to get the americansout of the middle east. and to do this, he made an alliance
with the new revolutionary forceof ayatollah khomeini's iran. and what khomeinicould bring to assad was an extraordinary new weaponthat he had just created. it was called it"the poor man's atomic bomb". chanting: ayatollah khomeini had come to powertwo years before as the leaderof the iranian revolution. but his hold on powerwas precarious, and khomeini had developed a newidea of how to fight his enemies
and defend the revolution. khomeini told his followersthat they could destroy themselves in order to save the revolutionproviding that, in the process, they killed as many enemiesaround them as possible. this was completely new, because the koranspecifically prohibited suicide. in the past, you became a martyron the battlefield because god chose the time and placeof your death. but khomeini changed this.
he did it by going back to one ofthe central rituals of shia islam. music plays every year,shi'ites march in a procession mourning the sacrificeof their founder, husayn. as they do, they whip themselves, symbolically re-enactinghusayn's suffering. khomeini said thatthe ultimate act of penitence was not just to whip yourself, but to kill yourself...
..providing it was forthe greater good of the revolution. in the name of god,the compassionate, the merciful, good afternoon. "an iraqi soviet-made mig-23was shot down "by the air-force jet fightersof the islamic republic "over the north-western iranianborder region of marivan "at 10.08 hours local time,saturday," said the joint staff commandscommunique numbered 1710. khomeini had mobilised this force
when the countrywas attacked by iraq. iran faced almost certain defeat because iraqhad far superior weapons, many of them supplied by america. so, the revolutionariestook tens of thousands of young boys out of schools, put them on busesand sent them to the front line. chanting their job was to walk throughthe enemies' minefields, deliberately blowing themselves upin order to open gaps
that would allow the iranian armyto pass through unharmed. it was organised suicideon a vast scale. this human sacrificewas commemorated in giant cemeteriesacross the country. fountains flowingwith blood red-water glorified this new kindof martyrdom. and it was this new idea - of an unstoppable human weapon - that president assadtook from khomeini,
and brought to the westfor the first time. but, as it travelled, it would mutateinto something even more deadly. instead of just killing yourself, you would take explosives with youinto the heart of the enemy and then blow yourself up, taking dozens or even hundredsalong with you. it would become knownas "suicide bombing". in october 1983, two suicide bombers
drove trucks intothe us marine barracks in beirut. it was seeing something movethat took me out of my trance. and then i recognised, "oh, yes,marines were in that building. "a lot of marineswere in that building." and that's when i ran down and... and it was a black...black marine. he looked white. the dust had just covered him. the massive explosionskilled 241 americans.
the bombers were membersof a new militant group that no-one had heard of. they called themselves hezbollah and, although many of themwere iranian, they were very muchunder the control of syria and the syrianintelligence agencies. president assad was using themas his proxies to attack america. whoever carried out yesterday'sbombings - shia muslim fanatics, devotees of the ayatollah khomeini,or whatever -
it is syriawho profits politically. the most significant fact is thatthe dissidents live and work with syrian protection. so, it is to syria rather than tothe dissident group's guiding light, ayatollah khomeini of iran, that wemust look for an explanation of the group's activities.destabilisation is syria's middle-eastern way of remindingthe world that syria must not be left out of plansfor the future of the area. there are no words that can expressour sorrow and grief
for the loss of thosesplendid young men and the injury to so many others. these deeds make so evidentthe bestial nature of those who would assume power if they could have their wayand drive us out of that area. but despite his words,within four months, president reagan withdrew all theamerican troops from the lebanon. the secretary of stategeorge shultz explained. "we became paralysed by thecomplexity that we faced," he said.
so, the americans turned and left. for president assad,it was an extraordinary achievement. he was the only arab leader to havedefeated the americans and forced themto leave the middle east. he had done it by usingthe new force of suicide bombing. a force that, once unleashed, was going to spreadwith unstoppable power. but at this point,both assad and the iranians thought that they could control it.
and what gave it thisextraordinary power was that it held out the dream of transcending the corruptionsof the world and entering a new and better realm. translation:one should defendthe realm of islam and muslims against heretics and invaders. and to fulfil this duty, one shouldeven sacrifice one's life. we believe that martyrs can overlookour deeds from the other world. it means that, after death,
the martyr lives and can stillwitness this world. by the middle of the 1980s,the banks were rising up and becoming ever more powerfulin america. what had started ten years beforein new york, the idea that the financial systemcould run society, was spreading. but unlike older systems of power,it was mostly invisible. a writer called william gibson tried to dramatise what washappening
in a powerful, imaginative way,in a series of novels. gibson had noticed how the banksand the new corporations were beginning to link themselvestogether through computer systems. what they were creating wasa series of giant networks of information that were invisibleto ordinary people and to politicians. but those networks gavethe corporations extraordinary new powers of control. 'good morning. south-westdevelopment. may i help you?'
gibson gave this new world a name. he called it "cyberspace" and his novels described a futurethat was dangerous and frightening. hackers could literally enterinto cyberspace and as they did, they travelled through systemsthat were so powerful that they could reach out and crushintruders by destroying their minds. in cyberspace, there were no lawsand no politicians to protect you. just raw, brutal corporate power. but then, a strange thing happened.
a new group of visionariesin america took gibson's idea ofa hidden, secret world and transformed it into somethingcompletely different. they turned itinto a dream of a new utopia. they were the technological utopianswho were rising up on the west coast of america. they turned gibson's ideaon its head. instead of cyberspacebeing a frightening place, dominated by powerful corporations,
they reinvented itas the very opposite. a new, safe world where radicaldreams could come true. ten years before, faced by thecomplexity of real politics, the radicals had given up onthe idea of changing the world. but now, the computer utopianssaw, in cyberspace, an alternative reality. a place they could retreat to awayfrom the harsh right-wing politics that now dominated reagan's america. the roots of this vision lay backin the counterculture
of the 1960s,and, above all, with lsd. we've got some more acid over hereif you want to go ahead. many of those who hadtaken lsd in the '60s were convinced that it was morethan just another drug, that it opened human perception and allowed people to seenew realities that were normallyhidden from them. see, the ones that have whitein them are really great. she giggles
i feel like a rabbit. it freed them from the narrow,limited view of the world that was imposed on them bypoliticians and those in power. in the united states, in the next,five, ten, 15 years, you're going to see more and morepeople taking lsd and making it a part of their lives, so there willbe an lsd country within 15 years. an lsd society, there willbe less interest in, obviously, warfare, in power politics.
you know, politics today isa disease, it's a real addiction. politics, politics, politics,politics. don't politick, don't vote -these are old men's games. impotent and senile old manthat want to put you onto their old chess gamesof war and power. 20 years later, the new networksof machines seemed to offer a way to constructa real alternate reality. not just one that waschemically induced, but a space that actually existed
in a parallel dimensionto the real world. and like with acid, cyberspace could be a place whereyou would be liberated from the old, corrupt hierarchies of politics andpower and explore new ways of being. one of the leading exponents of thisidea was called john perry barlow. in the '60s, he had written songsfor the grateful dead and been part of the acidcounterculture. now, he organisedwhat he called "cyberthons", to try and bring the cyberspacemovement together.
well, you know, the cyberthonas it was originally conceived was supposed to be... ..the '90s equivalent ofthe acid test and we had thought to involvesome of the same personnel. you and i and timmy should sit downand talk. ok. that is good. and it immediately acquireda financial quality or a commercial qualitythat was initially a little unsettlingto an old hippy like me, but as soon as i saw it actuallyworking, then i thought,
"ah, well, if you're going to havean acid test for the '90s, "money better be involved." instead of having a glass barrierthat separates you - your mind - from the mind ofthe computer, the computer pulls us insideand creates a world for us. incorporates everythingthat could be incorporated. it incorporates experience itself. barlow then wrote a manifesto that he called a declaration ofindependence of cyberspace.
it was addressed to all politicians, telling them to keep outof this new world. it was going to be incrediblyinfluential, because what barlow did was givea powerful picture of the internet not as a network controlledby giant corporations, but, instead, as a kindof magical, free place. an alternative to theold systems of power. it was a vision that would cometo dominate the internet over the next 20 years.
governments of the industrial world, cyberspace does not liewithin your borders. we are creatinga world where anyone, anywhere, may express his or herbeliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. i declare the global social spacewe are building to be naturally independent
of the tyrannies you seekto impose on us. we will create a civilisationof the mind in cyberspace. may it be more humane and fair than the world your governmentshave made before. it's begun. this is the key to a new order. this code disk means freedom. but two young hackers in new yorkthought that barlow was describing a fantasy world,
that his vision boreno relationship at all to what was really emerging online. they were cult figureson the early online scene and their fans followedand recorded them. they called themselves phiber optikand acid phreak and they spent their time exploringand breaking in to giant computer networksthat they knew were the hard realitiesof modern digital power. my specific instance, i was chargedwith conspiracy
to commit a few dozen "overacts",they called them. among a number of things having todo with computer trespass and... and i guess computer eavesdropping,interception. unauthorised access to federalinterest computers, which is pretty vague law. communications networkcomputers and so on. in a notorious public debate online,the two hackers attacked barlow. what infuriated them mostwas barlow's insistence that there was no hierarchy
or controlling powers inthe new cyber world. the hackers set out to demonstratethat he was wrong. acid phreak hacked intothe computers of a giant corporation called trw. trw had originally built the systems that ran the cold warfor the us military. they had helped create thedelicate balance of terror. now, trw had adapted theircomputers to run a new system, that of credit and debt.
their computers gathered up thecredit data of millions of americans and were being used by the banks todecide individuals' credit ratings. the hackers broke into thetrw network, stole barlow's credit historyand published it online. the hackers were demonstratingthe growing power of finance. how the companies that ran the newsystems of credit knew more and more about you, and, increasingly, used thatinformation to control your destiny. but the system that was allowingthis to happen
were the newgiant networks of information connected through computer servers. the hackers were questioning whetherbarlow's utopian rhetoric about cyberspace might really bea convenient camouflage hiding the emergence of a new andgrowing power that was way beyond politics. but cyberspace was not the onlyimaginary story being created. faced with the humiliating defeatin the lebanon, president reagan's governmentwas desperate to shore up
the vision of a moral world where a good americastruggled against evil. and to do this they were going tocreate a simple villain. an imaginary enemy, one that wouldfree them from the paralysing complexity ofreal middle-eastern politics. the perfect candidate waswaiting in the wings. colonel gaddafi, the ruler of libya. the americans were going toruthlessly use colonel gaddafi to create a fake terroristmastermind.
and gaddafi was going to happilyplay along, because it would turn him intoa famous global figure. colonel gaddafi had taken powerin a coup in the 1970s but from the very start, he was convinced that he was morethan just the leader of one country. he believed that he wasan international revolutionary whose destiny was to challengethe power of the west. gentlemen, the queen. god save the queen plays
when he was a young officer, gaddafi had been sentto england for training and he had detestedthe patronising racism that he said he had foundat the heart of british society. yes, i attended a course. i had been in england in 1966from february to august. you had the best months. he chuckles i was in beaconsfield,
a village called beaconsfield, in an army school. in fact, we were ill-treated in thatplace from some british officers. i think the officers were jews, maybe jews. ill-treated in what sort of way? in many ways. they ill-treat us every time. by being rude or by bullying or...?
in their own behaviour towards us,they ill-treated us. they hate us in there because of colonisation. it is the result of colonising. once in power, gaddafi had developedhis own revolutionary theory, which he calledthe third universal theory. it was an alternative, he said,to communism and capitalism. he published it in a green book, but practically no-one read it.
he had sent money and weaponsto the ira in ireland to help them overthrowthe british ruling class. but all the other arab leadersrejected him and his ideas. they thought that he was mad. and by the mid-1980s,gaddafi was an isolated figure with no friendsand no global influence. then, suddenly, that changed. in december 1985, terrorists attacked romeand vienna airports simultaneously,
killing 19 people, including five americans. there was growing pressure onpresident reagan to retaliate. it's time to renameyour state department the capitulation department. get off of your stick, mr president. the american people are sickand tired of being kicked around. you talk tough, let's see you use someof these billions and billions
and billions of dollars' worthof weapons that you've asked us to approve. your words are cheap talk. president reaganimmediately announced that colonel gaddafi wasdefinitely behind the attacks. these murdererscould not carry out their crimes without the sanctuary and support provided by regimessuch as colonel gaddafi's in libya. the rome and vienna murdersare only the latest
in a series of brutal terrorist actscommitted with gaddafi's backing. but the european security serviceswho investigated the attacks were convinced that libyawas not involved at all and that the mastermind behindthe attacks was, in fact, syria - that the terroristshad been directed by the syrian intelligence agencies. but the americans say thatthe attack at rome airport was organised by gaddafi,not by damascus. what do you say? no, we don't have any evidence...you have no evidence?
..supporting such an...affirmation. the only evidence we have shows a syrian connection. you say that it was libyaand the president said the evidence of libya'sculpability was irrefutable.yeah. but the italian authorities to whomi've spoken say emphatically on the record that theirinvestigations have shown that it was entirelymasterminded by syria. i don't agree with that at all.
well, they interrogatedthe surviving terrorists. i must just sayi don't agree with that. but you've no evidence that libyawas in on the planning either. our evidence on libya iscircumstantial, but very strong. but why does the presidentthen say it's "irrefutable", if you call it "circumstantial"? well, people can be convictedand sentenced in our courts on circumstantial evidence. but what made iteven more confusing
was that although thereseemed to be no evidence that gaddafi had beenbehind the attacks, he made no attemptto deny the allegations. instead, he went the other way and turned the crisisinto a global drama... it is not a time of saying. it is a time of war, a time of confrontation. ..threatening suicide attacksagainst america.
translation: gaddafi now started to play a role that was goingto become very familiar. he grabbed the publicitythat had been given to him by the americansand used it dramatically. he promoted himself asan international revolutionary who would help to liberateoppressed peoples around the world, even the blacks in america. gaddafi arrangedfor a live satellite link
to a mass meeting ofthe nation of islam in chicago. brothers and sisters, it is with great honour andprivilege that i present to you the leader of theal-fateh revolution from libya, our brother muammar al-gaddafi. applause gaddafi told them that libyawas now their ally in their struggle againstwhite america. ..to express my full supportand support of my country
to your struggle for freedom,for emancipation. gaddafi promised thathe would supply weapons to create a black army in americaof 400,000 men. "if white america refusesto accept blacks as us citizens," he told them,"it must therefore be destroyed." gaddafi also inviteda group of german rocket scientists to come to libyato build him a rocket. he insisted thatit had no military purpose. libya was now going toexplore outer space.
i think it is peaceful and civil... civilian? ..civilian activity for investigation of space and something like this and it has nothing to dowith any military things. but no-one believed him. journalists warned that gaddafi wasreally preparing to attack europe, vividly dramatisingthe new danger.
that is something like this which goes that wayto put something into space. but the same device tilted, say,to an angle of 45 degrees could, of course,become something very different - a missile possiblycarrying a warhead. that would put libyawithin range of an enormous area. a chilling propositionwith its range of 2,000km. the americans and gaddafinow became locked together in a cycle of mutual reinforcement.
in the process,a powerful new image was created that was going to capturethe imagination of the west. gaddafi becamea global supervillain, at the head ofwhat was called a "rogue state" - a madman who threatenedthe stability of the world. and gaddafi was lovingevery minute of it. so, you think, in the past, his decisions sometimeshave been taken too quickly... maybe, maybe...on world affairs?maybe.
i think, sometimes, that is whathas made people in the world nervous of you, perhaps?maybe. then, there wasanother terrorist attack at a discotheque in west berlin. a bomb killed an american soldierand injured hundreds. the americans releasedwhat they said were intercepts by the national security agency that proved that colonel gaddafiwas behind the bombing and a dossier that they said provedthat he was also the mastermind
behind a whole rangeof other attacks. president reaganordered the pentagon to prepare to bomb libya. but again, there were doubts - this time, within theamerican government itself. there were concernsthat analysts were being pressured to make a casethat didn't really exist... ..and to do it, they were takinggaddafi's rhetoric about himself as a global revolutionaryand his manic ravings
and then re-presentingthem as fact. and, in the process, together, the americans and gaddafi wereconstructing a fictional world. the analysts were certainly,i'm convinced... pressured into developinga prima facie case against the libyan government. from the somewhatincoherent ravings of a maniac, both interceptionsof a clandestine nature and interceptions of an open radiobroadcast or whatever,
as well as other sources,quotations of his, one can assemblea neatly-put-together package demonstrating that the manhad violent interests against the united statesand its european allies. the european intelligence agencies told the americansthat they were wrong, that it was syria that wasbehind the bombing, not libya. but the americanshad decided to attack libya because they couldn't facethe dangerous consequences
of attacking syria. instead, they went for gaddafi, a man without friends or allies. libya had less downsidedconsequences, if you will. there's less arab supportfor gaddafi, we figured there would be lesssoviet support for gaddafi. there's no question that libya wasmore vulnerable than syria and iran. he was a soft target?and thatis certainly an element, of course. in april 1986,the americans attacked libya.
their targets includedcolonel gaddafi's own house. immediately after the attack, gaddafi appeared in the ruinsto describe what had happened. translation:the familywere asleep and my wife was, that day, tied down to the bed because she had a slipped disc. i tried to rescue the children and the house started to collapse, as you can see.
and the bombs started to land. they concentratedon the children's room so that they would killall the children. our small adopted daughterwas killed and two of our childrenwere injured. but, yet again,gaddafi might have been lying. ever since then, there have been rumours that hisadopted daughter actually survived. but many other childrenwere killed in the raid
because the american bombingwas so inaccurate. gaddafi realised thatthe attention of the whole world was now focused on him and he grabbed the moment to promotehis own revolutionary theory, the third way, as aglobal alternative to democracy. translation:i feel thati'm really responsible for conveying the third way theoryand the green book to the rising generations, to theyoung american and british people, so that we can rescue americaand britain
and these generationsof young people from this theory, this electoral party theory which enabled an imbecilelike reagan to rule the mightiest power on earth and use it to destroyother people's homes and enabled a harlot like thatcherto rule a great nation like britain. man:wow, look at that.what the heck is that? oh, my god, look at that. holy crap!
it's just moving really slowly. wow! look, look, look! come here,come here! what is it doing? what the heck?! guys, it's... whoa!oh, my gosh! wow! what is happening?dude, what is happening?! what is going on?oh, my gosh! oh, my god, guys!guys, is that a freaking ufo?
wait, can you get a good video?what is it?what the hell? in the 1980s, more and more peoplein the united states reported seeing unexplained objectsand lights in the sky. at the same time,investigators who believed in ufos revealed that they had discoveredtop-secret government documents that stated that alien crafthad visited earth. the documents had been hiddenfor 20 years and they seemed to prove thatthere had been a giant cover-up. but, actually, the realitywas even stranger.
the american governmentmight have been making it all up, that they had createda fake conspiracy to deliberately misleadthe population. the lights that peopleimagined were ufos may, in reality, have beennew high-technology weapons that the us government were testing. the governmenthad developed the weapons because they, in turn, imagined that the soviet unionwas far stronger than it was
and still wanted to conquerthe world. the government wantedto keep the weapons secret, but they couldn't always hidetheir appearance in the skies so it is alleged that they chosea number of people to use to spread the rumour that thesewere really alien visitations. one of those chosenwas called paul bennewitz who lived outsidea giant air base in new mexico and had noticed strange thingsgoing on. years later,
i sat down with paul at dinner and told paul exactlythat everything we did was a sanctioned counterintelligenceoperation to convince him that what he was seeing was ufos and that what we didn't want himto know was that he had tappedinto something on the base and we didn't want himto ever disclose that. we kind of planted the seed in paul that what he was seeingand what he was hearing
and what he was collectingwas, in fact, probably, maybe, ufos. bennewitz and otherschosen by the agency were, it is alleged,given a series of forged documents. many of them were top-secret memosby the military describing sightings ofunidentified aerial vehicles. the documents spread like wildfire and they formed the basisfor the wave of belief in ufos that would spread throughamerica in the 1990s.
what the fuck is that?that's a... that's crazy, bro. is that that space, uh...? and it also fuelledthe wider growing belief that governments lied to you - that conspiracies were real. what the reagan administrationwere doing, both with colonel gaddafiand with the ufos, was a blurring of fact and fiction
but it was part ofan even broader programme. the president's advisershad given it a name - they called it"perception management" and it became a central partof the american government during the 1980s. the aim was to tell dramatic storiesthat grabbed the public imagination, not just about the middle east, but about central america and the soviet union
and it didn't matterif the stories were true or not, providing they distracted peopleand you, the politician, from having to deal with the intractable complexitiesof the real world. reality became less and less of an important factorin american politics. it wasn't what was real that wasdriving anything or the facts driving anything. it was how you could turn thosefacts or twist those facts
or even make up the facts to makeyour opponent look bad. so, perception management becamea device and the facts could be twisted.anything could be anything. it becomes how can you manipulatethe american people? and, in the process, realitybecomes what? reality becomes simply somethingto play with to achieve that end. reality is not importantin this context. reality is simply somethingthat you handle. but something was about to happenthat would demonstrate dramatically
just how far the american governmenthad detached from reality. the soviet empire was aboutto implode. and no-one, none of thepoliticians, or the journalists, or the think tank experts, or the economists, or the academics saw it coming. that's it! whoo! get ready to work out.
gunshots the collapse of the soviet union also had a powerful effecton the west. for many, it symbolised the finalfailure of the dream that politics could be used to builda new kind of world. what was going to emerge insteadwas a new system that had nothing to do with politics. a system whose aim was not to tryand change things, but rather, to managea post-political world.
one of the first people to describethis dramatic change was a left-wing german politicalthinker called ulrich beck. beck said that any politician whobelieved that they could take control of society, and drive itforward to build a better future, was nowseen as dangerous. in the past, politicians might havebeen able to do this. but now they were faced with whathe called "a runaway world." where things wereso complex and interconnected, and modern technologiesso potentially dangerous
that it was impossible to predictthe outcomes of anything you did. the catalogue of environmentaldisasters proved this. politicians would have to give upany idea of trying to change the world. instead, their new aim would beto try and predict the dangers in the future, and then, find waysto avoid those risks. although beck camefrom the political left, the world he saw coming was deeplyconservative. the picture he gave
was of a political class reduced totrying to steer society into a dark and frightening future. constantly peering forward and trying to see the riskscoming towards them. their only aim, to avoid those risks and keep society stable. it only lasted for a few secondsso you were basically shocked, you really didn't know whatwas going on at the time. where were you in the buildingand where was the explosion?
explosionoh, my god! but a system that couldanticipate the future and keep society stable was alreadybeing built, pieced togetherfrom all kinds of different, and sometimes surprising, sources. all of them outside politics. one part of it was taking shapein a tiny town in the far north-west of the unitedstates called east wenatchee. it was a giant computer
whose job was to makethe future predictable. the man building it wasa banker called larry fink. back in 1986, mr fink's career had collapsed. shoot! he lost 100 million in a dealand had been sacked. he became determinedit wouldn't happen again. fink started a company calledblackrock and built a computer he called aladdin.
it is housed in a seriesof large sheds in the apple orchardsoutside wenatchee. fink's aim was to use the computerto predict, with certainty, what the risk of any dealor investment was going to be. the computer constantlymonitors the world and it take things that it seeshappening, and then, compares them to eventsin the past. it can do this because it has,in its memory, a vast history of the past 50 years. not justfinancial, but all kinds of events.
out of the millions and millionsof correlations, the computerthen spots possible disasters, possible dangers lying in thefuture and moves the investmentsto avoid any radical change and keep the system stable. today, i'm goingto deliver 1.8 million reports. execute 25,000 trades. and avert 3,000 disasters. i'm going to monitor interest ratesin europe.
silver prices in asia.droughts in the midwest. i'm going to witness 4 billionshares change hands on the new york stock exchange. and record the effectson 14 trillion in assets across 20,000 portfolios. i am aladdin.i am aladdin. and, today, i'll find the numbersbehind the numbers. i will see the trends the modelsdon't. the connections.the risks.
i am aladdin.i am aladdin, and iwill get the data right. i am 25 million lines of code. written by hundreds of people. across two decades. i'm smarter than any algorithm. more powerful than any processor. because i am aladdin. i am aladdin. i am aladdin...
aladdin has proved to beincredibly successful. the assets it guides and controls now amount to 15 trillion, which is 7% of the world'stotal wealth. but wenatcheewas also a dramatic example of another kind of craving for stability and reassurance. more of its citizenstook prozac than practicallyany other town in america.
when a person's central nervoussystem is changed by an ssri, with that medicine they will viewthings differently and they will be strangers. they look at things differently. i have a chemical up here thatchanges me. i think differently. for me it was like walking aroundlike this for my whole life and really not knowing that i wasnear-sighted. i mean, really. i mean, no-one had ever offeredme glasses.
and then, all of a sudden,here comes somebody that says, "ok, now try these on.try this prozac on." and i tried it on and for thefirst time in my life i went, "whoa! is this the wayreality really is?" your perception can be changedand it's frightening and it's scary to people. it speaks of science fiction almost. well, the medicine just kind of letsyou listen to what needs to go on. and then your doctor,every time you come back, says,
"you're looking so much better." and then every time i go in he goes, "you're so beautiful." you know? he isn't even sucking up.he's being nice, you know? "you're beautiful, you're nice,you're friendly. "you've got so much going for you."i think, "yeah, i do." so, i go out and tell my friends, "i feel so much betterabout myself." mom goes out, "oh, i feel so muchbetter about myself."
so, your friends start saying,"i've seen such an improvement. "i've seen such improvement." and everybody improves all the wayaround. they see improvement. it's like everybody's brainwashingeach other into being happy. but there was a more effective wayof reassuring people that was being developed that didnot involve medication. it, too, came from computer systems but this time,artificial intelligence. but the way to do ithad been discovered by accident.
back in the 1960s, there had beenoptimistic dreams that it wouldbe possible to develop computers that could think like human beings. scientists then spent yearstrying to programme the rules that governed human thought... ..but they never worked. one computer scientist, at mit, became so disillusioned that hedecided to build a computerprogramme that would parodythese hopeless attempts.
he was called joseph weizenbaum and he built what he claimedwas a computer psychotherapist. just like a therapist, people couldcome and talk to the machine by typing in their problems. weizenbaum called the programme"eliza". he modelled it on a realpsychotherapist called carl rogers who was famous for simplyrepeating back to the patient what they had just said. and that is what eliza did.
the patient sat in front of thescreen and typed in what they were feeling and the programme repeated it backto them, often in the form of a question. he says i'm depressed muchof the time. well, i need some help. that much seems certain. one of the first people to use elizawas weizenbaum's secretary and her reaction was somethingthat he had not predicted at all.
i asked her to my office and sat herdown at the keyboard and then she began to type and, ofcourse, i looked over her shoulder tomake sure everything was operating properly.after two or three interchanges with the machine she turned tome and she said, "would you mindleaving the room, please?" and yet she knew, as weizenbaum did,that eliza didn't understand a single word that was beingtyped into it. you're like my father in some ways.
you don't argue with me.why do youthink i don't argue with you? you're afraid of me.does it pleaseyou to think i'm afraid of you? my father's afraid of everybody. my father's afraid of everybody... weizenbaum was astonished. he discovered that everyone whotried eliza became engrossed. they would sit for hourstelling the machine about their inner feelings and incredibly intimate detailsof their lives.
they also liked itbecause it was free of any kind ofpatronising elitism. one person said, "after all,the computer doesn't burn out, "look down on you,or try to have sex with you." what eliza showed was that, in anage of individualism, what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected backto them. just like in a mirror. artificial intelligence changeddirection
and started to create new systemsthat did just that, but on a giant scale. they were called intelligent agents. they worked by monitoringindividuals, gathering vast amounts of data abouttheir past behaviour and then looked for patternsand correlations from which they could predictwhat they would want in the future. it was a system that orderedthe world in a way that was centred around you.
and in an age of anxiousindividualism, frightened of the future, that was reassuring,just like eliza. a safe bubble that protected you from the complexities of theworld outside. and the applications of this newdirection proved fruitful and profitable. if you liked that, you'll love this. what was rising up indifferent ways
was a new system that promised tokeep the world stable. its tentacles reachedinto every area of our lives. finance promised that it couldcontrol the unpredictability of the free market... ..while individualswere more and more monitored to stabilise their physical andmental states. and, increasingly, theintelligent agents online predicted what peoplewould want in the future and how they would behave.
but the biggest changewas to politics. in a world where the overridingaim was now stability, politics became just part of a widersystem of managing the world. the old idea of democraticpolitics, that it gave a voice to the weakagainst the powerful, was eroded. and a resentment began to quietlygrow out on the edges of society. but the new system did havea dangerous flaw. because in the real world,not everything can be predicted by reading data from the past.
and someone who was about todiscover that, to his own cost, was donald drumpf. one day a man called jess marcumreceived a phone call. it was from donald drumpf and drumpf was desperate for help. marcum was a strange,mysterious figure. he had been a nuclear scientistin the 1950s and studied the effect of radiationfrom nuclear weapons on the human body.
then marcum had gone to las vegasand become obsessed by gambling. he had a photographic memoryand he used it to instantly process the data of the gamesas they were played. from that, he could predict theoutcome. and he always won. the las vegas gangsters werefascinated by him. they called him "the automat". where are we going?let's go. go, go, go. donald drumpf was oneof the heroes of the age.
but, in reality, much of thissuccess was a facade. the banks that had lent drumpfmillions had discovered that he could nolonger pay the interest on the loans. drumpf's empirewas facing bankruptcy. his wife ivana hated himbecause he was having an affair with miss hawaiian tropic 1985. and then, a famous japanese gamblercalled akio kashiwagi came to one of drumpf's casinos
and started to win millionsof dollars in an extraordinary run of luck. drumpf, who was desperate for money, panicked as day-after-dayhe watched millions being siphoned out of his casino. so, he turned for helpto jess marcum. marcum came to drumpf's casinoin atlantic city. he analysed all the data about theway the kashiwagi had been playing. he then told drumpf to suggesta particular high-stakes game
that he knew the japanesegambler could not resist. his model, marcum said, predictedthat kashiwagi had to lose. and after five agonising days,he did. kashiwagi lost 10 millionand he gave up. donald drumpf was elated. he thought he'd got his money back. in japanese: before kashiwagi could payhis debt, he was hacked to death inhis kitchen by yakuza gangsters...
..and donald drumpfdidn't get his money. drumpf's business went bankrupt and he was forced to sell most ofhis buildings to the banks. and he married miss hawaiian tropic. in the future, he would sell hisname to other people to put on their buildings and he himself would becomea celebrity tycoon. president assaddidn't want stability. he wanted revenge.
in december 1988, a bomb exploded on a pan am planeover lockerbie in scotland. almost immediately, investigatorsand journalists pointed the finger at syria. "the bombing had been done," theysaid, "in revenge for the americans "shooting down an iranian airlinerin the gulf a few months before." and for 18 months, everyone agreedthat this was the truth. the security agenciessaid that they had been wrong. it hadn't been syria at all.
it was libya who had been behindthe lockerbie bombing. but many journalists and politiciansdid not believe it. they were convincedthat the switch had happened for the most cynical of reasons. that america and britain desperatelyneeded assad as an ally in the coming gulf war againstsaddam hussein. so, once again, they blamed colonelgaddafi as the terrorist mastermind. syria, of course, was,unfortunately, accused of many terrorist outrages andof harbouring terrorist groups.
it appears that we have nowrestored relations with them, as have the americans.they're now our friends, although we've got no realassurances on the past whatsoever. it strikes me as very strange indeedthat many of the things we thought were previouslythe responsibility of syria have now, dramatically, becomethe responsibility of libya. but assad was not really in control. because he had released forces that no-one would be ableto control.
the force that, ten years before, he had brought from iran to attackthe west - the human bomb - was now about to jump,like a virus, from shia to sunni islam. in december 1992,the militant group hamas kidnapped an israeli border guardand stabbed him to death. the israeli responsewas overwhelming. they arrested 415 members of hamas, put them on buses and took themto the top of a bleak mountain
in southern lebanon. they left them there - and refused to allow anyhumanitarian aid through. they chant and shout but the israelishad dumped the hamas militants in an area controlled by hezbollah. they spent six months there, and during that time,they learnt from hezbollah how powerfulsuicide bombing could be.
hezbollah told them how theyhad used it to force the israelis out of beirut and back to the border. the first sign that the ideahad spread to hamas was when a group of the deportees marched in protest towards theisraeli border, dressed as martyrs,as the israelis shelled them. but it soon became morethan just theatre. hamas began a wave of suicideattacks in israel.
reporter:just before nine, at theheight of tel aviv's rush hour, the bomb ripped aparta commuter bus. an amateur cameraman recordedthe scene in the moments afterwards as a dazed woman was helped outof the smouldering wreckage. i didn't want to believe that undermy house there is a bomb. and when i realised it's a bomb,i... i started to cry. because it was the first timei saw it in tel aviv. hamas sent the bombers intothe heart of israeli cities
to blow themselves up and killas many around them as possible. in doing this, hamas were going muchfurther than hezbollah ever had. they were targeting civilians, something hezbollah had never done. the tactic shocked the sunni world. this was something completelyalien to its history. not only did thekoran forbid suicide, but sunni islam did not have anyrituals of self-sacrifice - unlike the shias.
the most senior religious leaderin saudi arabia insisted it was wrong. but a mainstream theologianfrom egypt called sheikh qaradawiseized the moment. he issued a fatwa thatjustified the attacks. "and," he added, "it was alsojustified to kill civilians, "because, in israel, everyone - "including women -serve as reservists. "so, really, they are all partof the enemy army."
translation:it's not suicide.it is martyrdom in the name of god. islamic theologians andjurisprudence have debated this issue. israeli women are not likewomen in our society, because israeli womenare militarised. secondly, i consider this typeof martyrdom operation as an indication of justiceof allah, our almighty. allah is just. through his infinite wisdom,
he has given the weakwhat the strong do not possess. and that is their ability to turntheir bodies into bombs like the palestinians do. hamas kept sending the bombersinto israel. sometimes day-after-day. the horror overwhelmedisraeli society and it completely destroyedthe ability of politics to solve the palestinian crisis. instead,in the israeli election of 1996,
benjamin netanyahu took power. he turned against the peace process,which was exactly what hamas wanted. and from then on, the two sidesbecame locked together in ever more horrific cyclesof violence. # netanyahu! # the human bomb had destroyedthe very thing that president assadhad first wanted. a real political solutionto the palestinian question. reporter:it was just after one o'clock
and the marketwas full of shoppers. sirens wail streams of ambulances came to carryaway the dead and the injured. it was a place of appallingsuffering. but even with the first grief came the immediate politicalimpact on the peace process. peace impossible! this moment, it will be the end! it must be the end ofthis bloody peace process.
and, in america, all optimisticvisions of the future had also disappeared. instead everyone in society- not just the politicians - but the scientists, the journalists,and all kinds of experts had begun to focus on the dangersthat might be hidden in the future. this, in turn, created a pessimisticmood that then began to spread outfrom the rational technocratic world and infect the whole of the culture. and everyone became possessedby dark forebodings,
imagining the very worstthat might happen. # dream, baby, dream # forever # oh, dream, baby, dream # forever... # shattering explosions # ..dream, baby, dream # oh, baby, we gottakeep that dream alive # keep that dream alive
# oh, dream, baby, dream, baby,dream, baby # dream, baby, dream, baby # oh, dream, baby, dream... #screaming panicked screams rumbling, shattering glass # oh, you keep that fire,burning, baby # oh, you gotta keep that flameburning brightly, baby... # crashing explosions silence
distant sirens the attacks in september 2001were suicide bombs, but now on a huge scale. they demonstrated the terrifyingpower of this new force to penetrate all defences. they had come to kill thousandsof americans on their own soil. 20 years before, president reagan had been confrontedby the first suicide bombers. they had been unleashed bypresident assad of syria
to force america outof the middle east. but rather than confrontthe complexity of syria and israel and the palestinianproblem, america had retreatedand left syria - and suicide bombing - to fester and mutate. they had gone insteadfor colonel gaddafi and turned him intoan evil global terrorist. but, in the process, this changedthe way people saw
and understood terrorism. instead of a violence born outof political struggles for power, it became replaced by a much simplerimage of an evil tyrant at the head of a rogue state who became more like anarchcriminal who wanted to terrorise the world. all the politics and powerdropped away. the problem was just themand their evil personalities. and after 9/11, this led to a new,and equally simple, idea.
that if only you could removethese tyrannical figures, then the grateful peopleof their country would transformnaturally into a democracy, because they would be freeof the evil. we owe it to the future ofcivilisation not to allow theworld's worst leaders to develop and deploy,and therefore, blackmail freedom-loving countries with the world's worst weapons.
we know they've already got chemicaland biological weapons there. we know that they're certainly doingtheir best to acquire nuclearweapons technology. if we allow them to do that, and do nothing about it, then, i think, later generations willconsider us deeply irresponsible. both tony blair and george bushbecame possessed by the idea of ridding the worldof saddam hussein. so possessed that they believedany story
that proved his evil intentions. and the line between reality andfiction became ever more blurred. in september 2002, the headof mi6 rushed to downing street to tell blair excitedly thatthey had finally found the source that confirmed everything. the source, he said,had "direct access" to saddam hussein's chemicalweapons programme which was making vast quantitiesof vx and sarin nerve agents. the nerve agents were being loadedinto "linked hollow glass spheres".
but then someone in mi6 noticed that the detail the sourcewas describing was identical to scenes in the 1996 moviethe rock, starring sean conneryand nicolas cage. really elegant string-of-pearlsconfiguration. unfortunately, incredibly unstable. what exactly does this stuff do? if the rocket renders it aerosol, it could take out the entire cityof people.
how?it's acholinesterase inhibitor. stops the brain from sending nervemessages down the spinal cord... a later report intothe iraq war pointed out, "glass containers were not typicallyused in chemical munitions..." ..seizes your nervous system...do not move that! "..and the informanthad obviously seen "a popular movie known as the rock "that had inaccurately depictednerve agents being carried "in glass beads or spheres."
..that's after your skin melts off. my god. that there is a threat fromsaddam hussein and the weapons of mass destructionthat he has acquired, is not in doubt at all. hafez al-assad had died in 2000. his son, bashar, became the newpresident of syria. but he couldn't escape theinexorable logic of what his father had started.
20 years before, his father hadsent shi'ite suicide bombers to attack the americans in lebanon. now, as america and britaininvaded iraq, bashar decided thathe would copy his father. but what he was about to let loosewould tear the arab world apart - and then come back to tryto destroy him. stately fanfare plays bashar assad had was neversupposed to have been president. it was always going to havebeen his elder brother, bassel.
but then, bassel had diedin a car crash. so now, bashar tookover the giant palace that his father had builtabove damascus. up to this point, bashar had notbeen interested in politics. he was fascinated by computers. he founded thesyrian computer society and brought theinternet to the country. his favourite band was theelectric light orchestra. but now, he was president.
and he set out to attack america. bashar assad was convincedthat the invasion of iraq was just the first step of a plotby the western powers to take over the wholeof the middle east. he knew that the invasionhad outraged many of the radical islamistsin syria and what they most wanted to do wasto go to iraq and kill americans. so, bashar instructedthe syrian intelligence services to help them do this.
syrian agents set up a pipeline that began to feed thousandsof militants across the border and into the heartof the insurgency. and it grew. within a year,almost all of the foreign fighters from across the world werecoming through syria... ..and they brought suicidebombing with them. the americans estimated that 90%of the suicide bombers in iraq were foreign fighters.
but it began to run out of control. most of the jihadists had joinedthe group al-qaeda in iraq that then turned to killing shi'itesin an attempt to create a civil war. and the force that had originallybeen invented by the shi'ites, suicide bombing, now returned and started to kill them. then, this. stunned silence a moment of silence before peoplerealised what was happening.
screaming a few seconds ago, we justhad repeated explosions in the street below me. people are now fleeing in terror from the central squarearound the mosque. this is what everybody feared...distant explosion we just heard another explosionin the distance. ..that somebody would try to targetthis religious festival to try to bring abouta sectarian conflict in iraq.
there was panic. a terrified stampede. but some of these peoplewere running into the next bombs. explosions we counted at least sixseparate explosions. music drowns audio tony blair and george bushwere faced by disaster. iraq was imploding. while, at home, they were beingaccused of lying to their own people
to justify the invasion. what they desperately neededwas something that would show that the invasion was havinga good effect in the arab world. so, they madean extraordinary decision. they turned for help to the manwho they had always insisted was one of the world's mostdangerous tyrants. colonel gaddafi. and, instead, they set out to makehim their new best friend. it was going to bethe highest achievement
of perception management. a man who had been createdby the west as a fake global supervillain was now going to be turnedinto a fake hero of democracy. and everyone, not just politicians,would become involved. public relations, academics, television presenters, spies,and even musicians were all going tohelp reinvent colonel gaddafi. it would show just how many peoplein the western establishment
had, by now, become the engineersof this fake world. ever since he had been accusedof the lockerbie bombing, colonel gaddafihad been a complete outcast. the west had imposedsanctions on libya and the economy was falling apart. but then, suddenly, tony blair brokelive into the bbc evening news. the prime minister, tony blair,is about to make a statement, the bbc understands,from downing street. it's of international significance.
he'll be making his statementat any moment now. we can see picturesof him in durham... this evening...here he is. ..colonel gaddafi has confirmedthat libya has, in the past, sought to developweapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities. libya has now declared its intentionto dismantle its weapons ofmass destruction completely. this decision by colonel gaddafiis a historic one,
and a courageous one,and i applaud it. today, in tripoli, the leader of libya, colonel muammar al-gaddafi... ..publically confirmed hiscommitment to disclose and dismantle all weapons-of-mass-destructionprogrammes in his country. colonel gaddafi now became, for western politicians,a heroic figure. his decision to give up his weaponsof mass destruction
seemed to provethat the invasion of iraq could transform the middle east. and tony blair travelled to meetgaddafi in his desert tent. to welcome him back intowhat one journalist called, "the communityof civilised nations." but, as in the past, nothing was what it seemedwith colonel gaddafi. in reality, gaddafidid not really have the terrifyingweapons of mass destruction
that he was promising to destroy. his nuclear programmehad stuttered to a halt long ago and never producedanything dangerous. he had managed to buy someequipment on the black market, but his technicians had beenunable to assemble it. his biological weaponswere non-existent. all he had was some old mustard gasin leaking barrels. but now, he had to pretend to havea terrifying arsenal of weapons. and the west had to pretend
that they had avoidedanother global threat. and then the made-up storiesbecame even more complicated. as part of the deal, the west saidthat if gaddafi admitted that libya had donethe lockerbie bombing, then they would liftthe sanctions. but many of those whohad investigated lockerbie were still convincedthat libya hadn't done it. that, really, it had been syria. but colonel gaddafi confessed.
his son, saif, was interviewedabout this confession. he said that his fatherwas simply pretending that he had been behindthe lockerbie bombing to get the sanctions lifted. that new lies were being builton top of old lies to construct a completelymake-believe world. you have to accept,or you had to accept at the time, a responsibility, because you haveto accept responsibilities, you have to pay compensation inorder to get rid of sanction.
we did that, not because we areconvinced that we did it, but because of the final exitout of this nightmare. so, what you're saying is thatyou accept responsibility, but you're not admittingthat you did it. yes. and this is all a sham, you're saying,just to get sanctions over with so that you can start normaldiplomatic relations with the west. ok. ok. what's wrong with that? it's a very cynical way to behave,as a country, isn't it?
many people would say...first of all... i mean,the americans and the british, they told us to write that letter. they told us to pay compensation. and then, they opened theirembassies and they restored their relation. they came to us. it was their game. not our game. does the... does the leader knowthere's a picture on the television?
will you tell him?oh, good. thank you. indistinct conversation public relations companiesthen came to libya to do what theycalled "reframing the narrative". one firm was paid3 million to turn gaddafi into what they describedas a modern world thinker. crew murmurs ok. we're going in ten. they did this by bringingother famous world thinkers
and tv presenters out to libyato meet the colonel and discuss his theories. hello, and welcome tolibya in the global age, a conversation with muammar gaddafi. but first,let's get the story so far of libya. one world thinker was calledlord anthony giddens. coincidentally, he had a theorywhich he called "the third way" which had inspired tony blair. colonel gaddafi's own theory wascalled "the third universal theory."
lord giddens later wroteabout his talks with the libyan leader. "colonel gaddafi likes my term'the third way' "because his own politicalphilosophy "is a version of this idea. "he makes many intelligentand perceptive points. "i leave enlivened and encouraged." that for 40 years, the leader oflibya, muammar gaddafi... and then, colonel gaddafiachieved his lifelong dream.
he was invited to addressthe united nations. he spent almost two hours explaininghis third international theory. and also demanding an investigation into the shootings of presidentkennedy and martin luther king. when he was in new york,gaddafi was offered a tent, just like the one he had at home, in the gardens of a grand mansion. the man who made the offer wasdonald drumpf. drumpf:'i've dealt with everybody.
'and by the way, i can tell yousomething else!' what? 'i've dealt with gaddafi.' what did you do?'excuse me.i rented him a piece of land. 'he paid me more for one nightthan the land was worth 'for the whole yearor for two years. 'and then,i didn't let him use the land! 'that's what we should be doing.'was that over in new jersey? 'i don't want to use the word"screw", but i screwed him. 'that's what we should be doing!'
people in britain andamerica now began to turn away from politics. the effect of the iraq war had beenvery powerful. not only did millions of people feelthat they had been lied to over the weapons ofmass destruction, but there was a deeperfeeling - that whatever they did or said had no effect. that despite the mass protests, andthe fears and the warnings - the war had happened anyway.
liberals, radicals anda whole new generation of young people retreated. they turned instead to another worldthat was free of this hypocrisy and the corruption of politics they went into cyberspace. # once upon a time it was you by thedoor # i... # by now cyberspace hadbecome even more sophisticated andresponsive to human interaction.
the onlineworld was full of algorithms that couldanalyse and predict human behaviour. the manbehind much of this was a scientist called judea pearl. he was the godfather of modernartificial intelligence. pearl's breakthrough hadbeen to use what were called bayesian belief networks. they were systems that couldpredict behaviour, even when the information wasincomplete.
but to make the system work, pearland others had imported a model of human beingsdrawn from economics. they created what werecalled rational agents, software that mimicked human beings but in a very simplified form. the model assumed that the agentwould always act rationally in order to get what itwanted. nothing more. one of the earlyutopians of cyberspace, jaron lanier, warned ofthe implications of this.
"the agent's model ofwhat you are "interested in willalways be a cartoon. "and in return youwill see a cartoon "version of the worldthrough the agent's eyes." and, he added,"it will never be clear "who they are workingfor - you or someone else." new technology began toallow people to upload millions of images andvideos into cyberspace. and the web - which upto that point had seemed
like an abstractotherworld - began to look and feel like thereal world. indistinct no, not yet. from videos of animals,personal moments of experience,extraordinary events, to horrific terror videos,more and more was uploaded. hip-hop music plays and in astrange, sad twist,
the first terroristbeheading video that was posted online was that of judea pearl's own son, daniel pearl. he was a journalist for the wall street journal andhad been kidnapped by radical islamists in pakistan. they recorded what they said was hisconfession... ..and then his killing. my name is daniel pearl.
i'm a jewish-american. i come from... on my father's sideof the family, are zionists. my father is jewish. my mother is jewish.i'm jewish. only now do i think about some ofthe people in guantanamo bay must be in a similar situation. this was a new worldthat the old systems of power found it verydifficult to deal with. in the wake of the 9/11attacks,
the security agencies secretlycollected data from millions of people online. one programme was calledoptic nerve. it took stills from the webcam conversations ofmillions of people across the world, trying to spot terrorists planninganother attack. the programme did notdiscover a single terrorist. but it diddiscover something else. a top secret assessment said... but increasingly, peoplewere using
the internet in other ways - topresent themselves as they wanted to be seen. i guess the video blog is about me. i don't really want to tell youwhere i live because you could, like, stalk me. the web drew people inbecause it was mesmerising. it was somewhere that you couldexplore and get lost in in any wayyou wanted. but behind the screen,like in a two-way mirror,
the simplifiedagents were watching and predicting and guidingyour hand on the mouse. stop... i nearly...threw my phone away! stop! stop! pose.pose. and snap a selfie... phone camera whirs there you go.there you go. they play with themselves.
but what they don't know... as the intelligentsystems online gathered ever more data, newforms of guidance began to emerge. social mediacreated filters - complex algorithms thatlooked at what individuals liked - andthen fed more of the same back to them. in the process,individuals began to move, without noticing,into bubbles that
isolated them from enormous amountsof other information. theyonly heard and saw what they liked. and the newsfeeds increasingly excluded anything thatmight challenge people's pre-existing beliefs. # and now it's all right # i know my own lie # is coming to say # you will call out
# yourself # i know i thought # makes my face and hands cold # and i # ooh # ooh... # the version ofcyberspace that was rising up seemed to bevery much like william gibson's original vision.
that behind the superficial freedomsof the web were a few giant corporations withopaque systems that controlled what people saw andshaped what they thought. and what waseven more mysterious was how they made their decisions aboutwhat you should like. and whatshould be hidden from you. but then, the other utopian visionof cyberspace re-emerged. taking over the roadway. take it!
cheering and whooping after the financialcrash of 2008 the politicians saved the banks. but they did practically nothingabout the massive corruption that wasrevealed in its wake. and the reason they gavewas that it might destabilise the system. public anger burst out. the occupymovement took over wall street and then the senate in washington.
the issue is that certainindividuals that are very wealthy, have prettymuch corrupted our political system and this is the heart of it. this is the senate building. these people have been cut off andthey've corrupted our democracy and it's literally killing people. i'm an iraqi war vet.i went to iraq in 2009. i've seen what happens first handwhen we let corruption rule our elected government anddemocracy. we're coming here today
just to raise awareness. what drove the occupymovement was the original dream of theinternet that people like john perry barlowhad outlined in the early 1990s. in his declaration of theindependence of cyberspace, barlow had described a new worldfree of politics and the old hierarchies of power. a space where people connectedtogether as equals in a network and built anew society without leaders.
now, the occupymovement set out to build that kind ofsociety in the real world. the camps were tobe the models. all the meetings used the ideaof the human microphone. people throughout thecrowd repeated a speaker's words soeveryone could hear them. all:we are now going to vote... speaker:..on whether to stay herefor the next two hours... all:..on whether to stay here forthe next two hours...
speaker:..or leave now. all:..or leave now. but if someone wanted tochallenge the speaker, the human amplifiersalso had to repeat their words so their voicehad equal power. speaker:..what she said... all:..what she said... speaker: ..was that...all: ..wasthat...speaker: ..the proposal... each person was an autonomousindividual who expressed
what they believed. but together they became componentsin a network that organised itself through the feedback of informationaround the system. you could organise people withoutthe exercise of power. car horns blare the crisis in egypt. chanting and shouting a march through our main streets. looks like chaos. looks like
police is running around and a few hundred people walkingdown the street. then, almost immediately,the arab spring began. the firstrevolution started in tunisia, but itquickly spread to egypt. on january 25th 2011,thousands of egyptians came out in groupsacross cairo and then started moving towardstahrir square. it seemed like a spontaneousuprising but the internet
had played akey role in organising the groups. one of the main activists was an egyptian computerengineer called wael ghonim. he worked for google in egypt but he had also set up thefacebook site that played the key role inorganising the first protests. as hundreds ofthousands took over tahrir square, ghonimgave an interview on egyptian tv. but ghonim was alsooverwhelmed by the power
this new technology had, that a computer engineer with akeyboard could call out thousands of people... some of whom then died in themidst of the protests. many liberals in thewest saw this as proof of the revolutionarypower of the internet. again it seemed to beable to organise a revolution without leaders. a revolution powerful enough totopple a brutal dictator
who had been backed byamerica and the west for 30 years. but the internetradicals were not the only ones who saw theirdreams being fulfilled in the arab spring. many of the political leaders of thewest also enthusiastically supported therevolutions because it seemed to fit with theirsimple idea of regime change. it might havefailed in iraq but now the people, everywhere,were rising up to rid
themselves of the eviltyrants. and democracy would flourish. so when an uprisingbegan in libya, britain, france andamerica supported it. and suddenly, colonelgaddafi stopped being a hero of the west. all the politicians, and the publicrelations people, and the academics who had all promoted him asa global thinker suddenly disappeared.
and gaddafi became yet again an evildictator who had to be overthrown. his son saif said, "theway these people are "disowning me and myfather is disgusting. "just a few months ago, wewere being treated as "honoured friends. "now that rebels are threatening ourcountry, these cowards "are turning on us." colonel gaddafi retreated to theruins of the house that the americans had bombed 30 yearsbefore and addressed the world.
translation:muammar gaddafi is the glory. if i had a position, if i were apresident, i would have resigned. i would have thrown my resignationin your face. but i have no position, no post. i have nowhere to resign from. i have my gun, i have my rifleto fight for libya. withdraw your children from thestreets. take your children back.
they are drugging your children. they are making your children drunk and they are sending them to hell. your children will die. what for? in november 2011 a large convoy wasspotted driving at high speed away from colonel gaddafi's hometown of sirte. an american drone, controlled from a shedoutside las vegas, was sent to follow it.
car horn beeps car horns beep the operator fired a missile at thelead car of the convoy. gaddafi then fled -looking for shelter from the oncoming rebel forces. he hid under the road in a drainagepipe. but instead of becominga democracy, libya began to descend into chaos. and the otherrevolutions were also failing.
the occupy camps had become trappedin endless meetings. and itbecame clear that there was a terrible confusionat the heart of the movement. the radicalshad believed that if they could create a newway of organising people then a new societywould emerge. but what they did not have was apicture of what that society would be like, avision of the future. the truth was that theirrevolution was not about an idea.
it was abouthow you manage things. and those who hadstarted the revolution in egypt came face-to-face with thesame terrible fact. social media had helped to bring people togetherin tahrir square. but once there, theinternet gave no clue as to what kind of newsociety they could create in egypt. the movement stalled. and a group that did have apowerful idea - the
muslim brotherhood -rushed in to fill the vacuum. the brotherhoodtook power in an election and one of them, mohamed morsi,became president. the liberals and the left wereshocked. and, bit bybit, they turned back to the military, protesting,asking them to save the revolution frombeing captured by islamists. in the spring of 2013,the military took action. they arrestedthe president and
killed hundreds of hissupporters who protested. and an extraordinary spectacleunfolded in tahrir square. thousands of theliberal activists who had begun the revolutiontwo years before, summoned by socialmedia, now welcomed the military back by wavingtheir laser pens at the helicopters flying overhead. the crowd had been summoned thereonce again by facebook. after the failure of therevolutions, it was not
just the radicals -no-one in the west had any idea of how tochange the world. at home, the politicians hadgiven so much of their power away, to financeand the ever-growing managerial bureaucracies,that they in effect had become managers themselves. while abroad, all their adventureshad failed. and their simplistic vision of theworld had been exposed as dangerous anddestructive.
but in russia, therewas a group of men who had seen how this verylack of belief in politics, and darkuncertainty about the future could work totheir advantage. what they had done was turnpolitics into a strange theatre where nobodyknew what was true or what was fake any longer. they were called politicaltechnologists and they were the key figures behindpresident putin.
they had kept him in power,unchallenged, for 15 years. some of them had been dissidentsback in the 1970s and had been powerfullyinfluenced by the science fiction writingsof the strugatsky brothers. 20 yearslater, when russia fell apart after the end ofcommunism, they rose up and took control of the media. and they used it to manipulate theelectorate on a vast scale. for them, realitywas just something that
could be manipulatedand shaped into anything you wanted it to be. glass thuds but then a technologistemerged who went much further. and his ideaswould become central to putin's grip on power. he was called vladislav surkov. surkov came originally from thetheatre world and those who have studied his career say that whathe did was take
avant-garde ideas fromthe theatre and bring them into the heart ofpolitics. surkov's aim was not just tomanipulate people but to go deeper and playwith, and undermine their very perception ofthe world so they are never sure what isreally happening. surkov turned russianpolitics into a bewildering, constantlychanging piece of theatre. he used kremlinmoney to sponsor
all kinds of groups - from massanti-fascist youth organisations, to thevery opposite - neo-nazi skinheads. and liberalhuman rights groups who then attacked the government. surkov even backed whole politicalparties that were opposed to president putin. but the key thing was that surkovthen let it be known that this was what he was doing. which meant that no-one was surewhat was real or what was fake
in modern russia. as one journalist put it, "it's a strategy of powerthat keeps any opposition "constantly confused - "a ceaseless shape-shiftingthat is unstoppable "because it is indefinable." meanwhile, real powerwas elsewhere - hidden away behind the stage, exercised withoutanyone seeing it.
and then the same thing seemed tostart happening in the west. by now it was becoming ever moreclear that the system had deep flaws. every month there werenew revelations, of most of the banks' involvementin global corruption, of massive tax avoidance byall the major corporations, of the secret surveillanceof everyone's e-mails by the national security agency. yet no-one was prosecuted,
except for a few peopleat the lowest levels. and behind it all, the massive inequalitykept on growing. yet the structure of powerremained the same. nothing ever changed - because nothing could be allowedto destabilise the system. but then the shape-shifting began. cheering thank you very much. so nice.
so amazing. so amazing. woman: we love you.what? that's ok. i love you more, ok? the campaign that donald drumpf ran was unlike anything beforein politics. nothing was fixed. what he said, who he attacked and how he attacked them wasconstantly changing and shifting. drumpf attacked his republican rivals
as all being part ofa broken and corrupt system - a politics where everyonecould be bought, using words that could have comefrom the occupy movement. you've also donated to severaldemocratic candidates, hillary clinton included,nancy pelosi. you explained away those donationssaying you did that to get business-related favours. and you said recently,"when you give, "they do whatever the hellyou want them to do."
you'd better believe it.so what specifically did they do? if i ask them, if i need them... you know, most of the peopleon this stage, i've given to, just soyou understand, a lot of money. i will tell you thatour system is broken. i give to many people. before this, before two months ago,i was a businessman. i give to everybody.when they call, i give. and you know what, when i needsomething from them,
two years later, three years later,i call them. they are there for me. so what didyou get?and that's a broken system. but at the same time,drumpf used the language of the extreme racist rightin america, connecting withpeople's darkest fears - pushing them and bringingthose fears out into the open. get the fuck out of here! our country, motherfucker! our country!
proud fucking american! made in the usa, bitch! made in the fucking usa! don't fucking come back,burrito bitch! go fucking right back to jail,motherfucker! build that fucking wall for me! drumpf! donald drumpf! fuck you! i love my country! yeah! i'll fuck like at leastten of you up in one session,
you fucking pussy! many of the factsthat drumpf asserted were also completely untrue. but drumpf didn't care. he and his audience knewthat much of what he said bore little relationship to reality. this meant thatdrumpf defeated journalism - because the journalists'central belief was that their job was to exposelies and assert the truth.
with drumpf, this became irrelevant. not surprisingly,vladimir putin admired this. man speaks russian the liberals were outraged by drumpf. but they expressed theiranger in cyberspace, so it had no effect - because the algorithms made surethat they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. instead, ironically, their wavesof angry messages and tweets
benefitted the large corporationswho ran the social media platforms. one online analyst put it simply,"angry people click more." it meant that the radical fury that came like waves acrossthe internet no longer had the powerto change the world. instead, it was becoming a fuel that was feeding the new systemsof power and making them ever more powerful. but none of the liberalscould possibly imagine
that donald drumpfcould ever win the nomination. it was just a giant pantomime. then of coursethere's donald drumpf. donald drumpf has been saying thathe will run for president as a republican,which is surprising, since i just assumed he wasrunning as a joke. laughter donald drumpf often appears onfox, which is ironic, because a fox often appears ondonald drumpf's head.
donald drumpf ownsthe miss usa pageant, which is great for republicans because it will streamline theirsearch for a vice president. donald drumpf said recently he has agreat relationship with the blacks. though unless the blacksare a family of white people, i bet he's mistaken. but underneath the liberal disdain, both donald drumpf in america,and vladislav surkov in russia had realised the same thing -
that the version of reality thatpolitics presented was no longer believable, that the stories politicians toldtheir people about the world had stopped making sense. and in the face of that,you could play with reality, constantly shifting and changing, and in the process,further undermine and weaken the old forms of power. children sing
and there was another force that wasabout to dramatically reveal just how weak politics hadbecome in the west - syria. the attack happened here ata central police station in damascus. police say the bombercame up the stairs, police then opened fire, and then police sayhe detonated the explosives. and the damage is here to see.
behind me, the pockmarked wallswhere the ball bearings hit. blood splattered on the walls. and the force of the blastcaused walls to collapse. and everything is topsy-turvy,everything destroyed. by now syria was being torn apartby a horrific civil war. what had started as part of thearab spring had turned into a vicious battleto the death between bashar assadand his opponents. and at the heart of the conflict
was the force that his father hadfirst brought to the west - suicide bombing. they speak in own language back in the 1980s bashar assad's father hadseen suicide bombing as a weapon he could use to force the americansout of the middle east. but over the next 30 years it hadshifted and mutated into something that had now ended updoing the very opposite -
tearing the arab world apart. hafez al-assad's dream of apowerful and united arab world was now destroyed. in iraq, extremist sunni groupshad used suicide bombing as a way to start a sectarian war. and now groups like isis brought thesame techniques into syria to attack not just assad's sonbut his fellow shi'ites. and like his father,bashar assad retaliated with a vengeful fury.
and the country fell apart. man:allahu akbar. whooshing allahu akbar. allahu akbar. roaring my fellow americans... tonight i want to talk to youabout syria - why it matters andwhere we go from here. faced by the war, westernpoliticians were bewildered.
they insisted bashar assad was evil. but then it turned out thathis enemies were more evil and more horrific than him. the question before the house today is how we keep the british peoplesafe from the threat posed by isil. this is not about whether we wantto fight terrorism, it's about how best we do that. so britain, america and france
decided to bombthe terrorist threat. but the effect of thatwas to help keep assad in power. clattering then it became more confusing. suddenly, the russians intervened. president putin sent hundreds ofplanes and combat troops to support assad. but no-one knew whattheir underlying aim was. they seemed to be usinga strategy that
vladislav surkov had developedin the ukraine. he called it non-linear warfare. it was a new kind of war -where you never know what the enemy are really up to. the underlying aim, surkov said,was not to win the war, but to use the conflictto create a constant state of destabilised perception - in order to manage and control. man breathes heavily
allahu akbar. orchestra plays in march 2016 the russians suddenlyannounced with a great fanfare that they were leaving syria. and a concert was heldin the ruins of palmyra to celebrate the withdrawal. but in reality,the russians never left. they are still there, and stillno-one knows what they want.
he speaks in own language and within syriathere was a new islamist ideologist who was determined to exploitthe growing uncertainties in europe and america. he was calledabu musab al-suri - the syrian. al-suri had originally worked withosama bin laden in afghanistan, but he had turned against him. al-suri gave lectures thathad a powerful effect
on the islamist movement. he argued thatbin laden had been wrong to attack the west head on, because it created a massivemilitary response that had almost destroyed islamism. instead, al-suri said, independent groups or individuals should stage random,small-scale attacks on civilians in europe and america.
the aim was to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt - and undermine the already failingauthority of western politicians. the effect of the attacks shockedeurope and america and gave powerful force to the newpolitics of uncertainty and anxiety. i'm sure that you, with me, share the absolute horrorand total revulsion at what happened in parislast friday. and i'm afraid there is,
and we have to be honest and frankabout this and talk about these thingswithout being fearful, there is a problem with some of themuslim community in this country. there is a problem.and we have to be honest about it. our politicians, i'm afraid,haven't had the guts. this could be the great trojan horseof all time, because you look at the migration...study it, look at it. now they'll start infiltratingwith women and children. both the brexit campaign in britain
and donald drumpf in america did exactly whatal-suri had predicted. they used the fear to dramatisea world where everything - even going to a restaurant -had become a risky event. and what had been seen as doomedcampaigns on the fringes of society that could never winbecame frighteningly real. i am genuinely freaked out rightnow about this whole brexit thing. because we'd all been told thatit wasn't going to happen, like it was going away, it was goingaway from brexiting
and on to the staying. and because i had this,like bedrock belief... i have friends who, like,live and work in london, and they said, "don't worry,we're a very sensible people." "this isn't going to happen.it's a lot of talk, "but we don't do thatsort of stuff here." um...they were wrong. and that really kind ofcrushes my view of, like, what can happen that is bad
that we don't thinkis going to happen. like it's just not supposedto happen. crowd gasps clanking dripping i fear that we are watching the stirrings of fascismin europe again. and i genuinely never thoughtit would be my country that did that.
i thought this would be america. i thought america was the peoplewho were so filled with hate. not us. and i'm so disappointed. i'm so hurt. zee. music: standing room onlyby barbara mandrell. # you must think my bed's a bus stop # the way you come and gohe coughs
# i ain't seen youwith the lights on # two nights in a row # so pack your rusty razor # don't bother with goodbye # your cup runneth open # but mine is always dry # standing room only # i can't stand no more # outside my door
# don't help me set the table # cos now there's one less place # i won't lay mama's silver # for a man who won't say grace # if home is where the heart is... # this is my right to free speechgoing on here, ok? # then your home's on the streets # me, i'll read a good book # turn out the lightsand go to sleep
# i can't stand no more, no more # outside my door... # tinny music plays indistinct speech oh. you're on video.oh. say bye, heather. video off2468