The plan had run out of control. But rather than reveal this, the technocrats began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan. And what emerged instead was a fake version of society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real. Because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everyone had to play along and pretend that it was real. Because no-one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it HyperNormalisation. You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal. ibid.
‘Into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind. God bless America.’ ibid. Reagan
Israel was now determined to finally destroy the power of the Palestinians. And in 1982 they sent a massive army to encircle the Palestinian camps in the Lebanon. Two months later thousands of Palestinians were massacred in the camps. It horrified the world … Israel had allowed it to happen. ibid.
Assad decided get the Americans out of the Middle East, and to do this he made an alliance with the new revolutionary force of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran … Khomeini told his followers that they could destroy themselves in order to save the revolution, providing that in the process they killed as many enemies around them as possible. ibid.
President Reagan withdrew all the American troops from the Lebanon. Secretary of State George Shultz explained: ‘We became paralysed by the complexity we faced.’ So the Americans turned and left. ibid.
By the middle of the 1980s the banks were rising up and becoming ever more powerful in America … The banks and the new corporations were beginning to link themselves together through computer systems. What they were creating was a series of giant networks of information that were invisible to ordinary people and to politicians. ibid.
Gibson gave this new world a name: he called it cyberspace. And his novels described a future that was dangerous and frightening. Hackers could literally enter into cyberspace … In cyberspace there were no laws, no politician to protect you. Just raw corporate power. ibid.
Many of those who had taken LSD in the ’60s were convinced it was more than just another drug. That it opened human perception and allowed other people to see new realities that were normally hidden from them. ibid.
Faced with the humiliating defeat in the Lebanon, President Reagan’s government was desperate to shore up the vision of a moral world where a good America struggled against evil. And to do this, they were going to create a simple villain, an imaginary villain … and the perfect candidate was waiting in the wings: Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya. The Americans were going to ruthlessly use Colonel Gaddafi to create a fake terrorist mastermind. And Gaddafi was going to happily play along because it would turn him into a famous global figure. ibid.
In December 1985 terrorists attacked Rome and Vienna airport simultaneously killing 19 people, including 5 Americans. There was growing pressure on President Reagan to retaliate. President Reagan immediately announced that Colonel Gaddafi was definitely behind the attacks. But the European Security Services who investigated the attacks were convinced that Libya was not involved at all. And that the mastermind behind the attacks was in fact Syria. ibid.
He [Gaddafi] promoted himself as an international revolutionary who would help liberate the repressed peoples around the world. Even the blacks in America. ibid.
The Americans and Gaddafi now became locked together in a cycle of mutual reinforcement … The Americans and Gaddafi were creating a fictional world. ibid.
In the 1980s more and more people in the United States reported seeing unexplained objects and lights in the sky … The American government might have been making it all up. That they had created a fake conspiracy to deliberately mislead the population. ibid.
What was going to emerge instead was a new system that had nothing to do with politics. A system whose aim was not to try and change things but rather to manage a post-political world. ibid.
Donald Trump was one of the heroes of the age. But in reality much of his success was a facade. The banks that had lent Trump millions had discovered that he could no longer pay the interest on the loans. Trump’s empire was facing bankruptcy … He was forced to sell most of his buildings to the banks … He himself would become a celebrity tycoon. ibid.
In December 1988 a bomb exploded on a Pam Am plane over Lockerbie in Scotland. Almost immediately investigators and journalists pointed the finger at Syria. The bombing had been done, they said, in revenge for the Americans shooting down an Iranian airliner in the Gulf a few months before. ibid.
And in America all optimistic visions of the future had also disappeared … and everyone became possessed by dark forebodings imagining the very worst might happen. ibid.
Many of the facts that Trump asserted were also completely untrue. But Trump didn’t care. He and his audience knew that much of what he said bore little relationship to reality. This meant that Trump defeated journalism … The liberals were outraged by Trump. ibid.
The version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable. That the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense. And in the face of that, you could play with reality. ibid.
Money has created a society where nobody believes in anything, and nothing can be trusted. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? ***** BBCiplayer 2021
Part of something that had started 200 years before with the French Revolution: it was the idea that through revolution you could break through to a new kind of world. Something beyond the corrupt reality of this one. ibid.
Out in the margins of societies there was a growing anger and a total disillusion with the system because it offered hundreds of thousands of people nothing and gave their lives no purpose or meaning. ibid.
The reality is that all these societies, not just America and Britain but China and Russia too, are exhausted, empty of any new ideas. All of them have corruption that has burrowed deep into their institutions. ibid.