Because in the age of the individual what you felt and what you wanted and what you dreamed of were going to become the driving force across the world. ibid.
Often power that was decaying and desperate to keep its ascendancy. These strange days did not just happen; we and those in power created them together. ibid.
In the late 1950s as the British empire was falling apart, there was a growing sense that something was badly wrong under the surface. There was a feeling of unease. Despite all the reforms after the Second World War and the welfare state, the old forms of power had not gone away. And neither had the violence and the corruption that had always been a part of that power. ibid.
Reports had started to come back from one of the last parts of the empire Kenya that seemed to show that those in charge had gone out of control. They had been fighting a liberation movement called the Mau Mau. The reports said that hundreds of thousands of Kenyans had been put into special camps where they were going to be psychologically adjusted. The British were trying to manipulate what their chief psychologist called the African Mind. But what then happened in the camps turned into a frenzied madness. The British used mass torture and killing as they desperately tried to hold on to power. The government in London denied all the accusations but the rumours of violence and horror continued. ibid.
Those who came to Britain from the empire were shocked at the strange country they found … a sad and frightened country. ibid.
In America the idea of individualism had become central to the politics of the Cold War. Because it was what defined the United States against the collective ideology of Russia … Out of these fears came a paranoia that was fuelled by groups on the extreme Right like the John Birch Society. They said that the American government had been taken over by hidden groups controlled by the communists. ibid.
In the homeland, England, the old structure of power remained intact. And not only in the Institutions. But inside people’s heads as well. The old attitudes of power were still deeply embedded in the minds of the establishment who dominated the country. Those in charge demanded obedience. ibid.
Peter Rachman was far more than the brutal gangster that he was portrayed as. He had lived an extraordinary life … Rachman judged nobody, but the English judged him: he was hated with an overwhelming disgust as the face of evil … On the surface there was the overt racism against the immigrants that Rachman was bringing into Notting Hill … Rachman’s property empire was a brutal and violent one but it was doing something that polite English society completely refused to do: he was giving people on the very margins of society – prostitutes and black immigrants – somewhere to live. His empire shone a harsh light on the hypocrisy … [and] they hated him for it. ibid.
‘This is Peter Rachman: one of Britain’s big-time twentieth century racketeers.’ ibid. BBC Panorama
Behind the polite veneer of the middle classes there was a hard ruthlessness and a suspicion of others. DeFreitas [Rachman heavy] gave it a name: he called it Englishism, it came he said from both an anger and melancholy at the loss of their empire. Then, Peter Rachman died of a heart attack. And Michael DeFreitas suddenly found that he was the new face of evil. ibid.
For men like Robin Douglas-Home the expectation of power had been deeply embedded inside their minds. But as the world had changed around them, real power ebbed away. They were left with a terrible melancholy. But in some would turn to despair. A year after filming, Robin Douglas-Home committed suicide. ibid.
Garrison: Another secret system of power that controlled the country. But you could never discover it through normal means because it was so deeply hidden … In a dark world of hidden power you couldn’t expect everything to make sense. ibid.
The Central Intelligence Agency was trying to find ways to wipe the past from people’s minds. To see if they could free them from the conditioning that had been implanted there … They wanted to see if they could implant new patterns of thought into their minds. The CIA set up a secret project called M K Ultra … Dr Cameron’s experiments were a disaster. ibid.
An experiment that would make people see how absurd all conspiracy theories really were: he called it Operation Mindfuck: in 1969 … Operation Mindfuck by placing a false letter in the Playboy letter’s page; they put it between another letter asking if gun fanatics had small penises and one from a man asking about the physical danger to his testicles from heavy petting. Thornley’s fake letter asked if all the political assassinations in America were really being masterminded by a single secret society, and the society it named was the Illuminati. It said that the Illuminati was behind all the chaos and the fear that now was gripping America. ibid.
When the internet was created those patterns of suspicion would move into the data and multiply endlessly across the system … Suspicion and distrust crept back into what was going to be the new system of power. ibid.
Edgar Mittelholzer had come to England in the 1950s from British Guyana. And he had become a best-selling novelist. What Mittelholzer wrote about was violence: the violence and the racism that had been at the heart of the European empires. Mittelholzer believed that it still haunted the minds of those who had ruled the empires … One night Mittelholzer walked up the hill by his house, poured paraffin over himself and set himself alight. He burned to death. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head II: Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing
Horst Mahler had been born in what was now East Germany. His father had been a fervent Nazi and an anti-Semite … They knew that many of those in charge of the country had been senior members of the Nazi party. But no-one talked about it and they wanted to expose the Nazi crimes of those in charge. A student movement was astonished at the violent reaction of the German government. And Horst Mahler and other radicals began to think the problem was far deeper than just individual Nazis. That maybe the whole Nazi system had also survived and was hiding behind the facade of modern capitalism. They argued that the very system of industrial rationality and bureaucratic control that had made the Nazi state so efficient had simply mutated. It had been taken up by the victors, above all by America, and was now being used to run the new global capitalism and the multinational corporations that were ruthlessly exploiting what was called the Third World. Anything that stood in the system’s way was bombed or burnt. ibid.
The people in the West couldn’t see this because they had been led into a dreamworld that used mass consumerism and sexualised imagery to entrance and distract everywhere. In reality it was an iron cage designed to look like an open and free welfare state, a false state of peace that was built really on horror and war. ibid.
The Black Panthers believed that the only way to stop racism in America was for black people to get power. Simply changing the law was not enough. The anger and the fear remained hidden away in millions of people’s minds. The solution was black power, and the first person to articulate this was Stokely Carmichael. ibid.
‘The Panther Party at that time took my rage and channelled it against them, instead of against us. They educated my mind and gave me direction, and with that direction came hope.’ ibid. Alice Feye Williams aka Afeni Shakur
One evening after making a speech in Reading Michael X [DeFreitas] was arrested. And he was sent to prison for ten months for inciting racial hatred. The MP Enoch Powell had also made a speech at the same time violently attacking immigrants. He wasn’t charged and he carried on being an MP, which Michael X said rather proved his point about the racism underlying the country. ibid.
The Second World War revealed how frightening and deceptive human beings could be particularly in Nazi Germany. ibid.
The question of who to attack in New York got more and more complicated … Afeni Shakur’s group came up with a plan: they were going to plant bombs in big department stores like Macey’s and they would bomb the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and attack local police stations. ibid.
Michael X realised that what was happening now in Notting Hill was the opposite: people were being treated as subjects to be counted and measured and managed. He became increasingly cynical about the liberals’ real intentions. Michael X had come to believe that the talk of revolution had just been empty rhetoric that disguised something else. The new groups might look like radicals and dance to black music but really they were the children of the colonialists who had run the empire, and they had no intention of giving up their power. That old system of power was simply mutating, morphing into a new form that camouflaged itself in radicalism but still would manage and control. ibid.
People are in control is a comforting illusion … You could never change people’s behaviour by appealing to them rationally … Human beings did live in a simplified dream world but what he was saying was that there was nothing you could do about that. And in an age of individualism when you could no longer order people about, the only solution was to keep them in that dream world and to make sure the dream world was safe and happy. The idea of appealing to them rationally and changing the world was pointless. ibid.
The members of the Red Army Faction were now planting bombs and robbing banks all across West Germany. They announced that they had now become Moaists, followers of Moa Zedong, and they were going to awaken the popular masses. The government were desperate to catch them. ibid.
Notting Hill 1970: All the politics had gone. The counter-culture had transformed completely into a new kind of consumerism, with self-expression at its heart. ibid.
One morning armed police stormed into Afeni Shakur’s apartment and arrested her. All the other members of her cell were also arrested. They were charged with what the government said was a giant plan to destroy those elements of society which the defendants called the Power Structure. It included attacking police stations and planning to bomb five large department stores and the Bronx botanical gardens. They became known as the Panther 21. Their trial was held in a state of paranoia about further attacks by the Panthers. And it also caused a sensation when it was revealed that three of the founding members of the group had been undercover police officers. ibid.