A Very Heavy Agenda 2015 - Trump Takes on the World TV - Secret Wars Uncovered TV - Adam Curtis TV - The Israel Lobby in the US TV -
Did the warmakers find the War on Terror not useful any more? Did we need a new enemy, but really an old enemy? A Very Heavy Agenda II: How We Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Neo-Cons, 2015
The PNAC Neo-Cons were invited on television to plead for more NATO posturing, stronger sanctions, more aggressive rhetoric and essentially all the ingredients for having a confrontation with Russia either by proxy or directly. ibid.
Why did there seem to be so little dissenting voices from the new Cold War rhetoric in the American media landscape if we indeed had a free and independent press? ibid.
Only three days after the 9/11 attacks, Congress held a vote for a Bill titled The Authorization to Use Military Force. This Bill was designed as retaliation for the 9/11 attacks and allowed the US not only the power to wage war in Afghanistan, but also endless war in the Middle East, essentially what was labelled the War on Terror. A Very Heavy Agenda III: Maintaining the World Order
The Project for the American Century had been associated with the failures of the Iraq War. ibid.
Kagan received [Nicaraguan/Iran] dirty money funnelled inside the US State Department to fund these propaganda campaigns. ibid.
‘When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.’ ibid. Donald Trump
‘I would bomb the shit out of ’em.’ ibid.
‘From this day forward it’s going to be only America first. America first.’ Trump Takes on the World I, BBC 2021
One of the most divisive presidents in history riding roughshod over conventions at home and abroad … He ripped up the rule book and took America to the brink of nuclear war. ibid.
Donald Trump’s rise to power was based on a promise to reforge American foreign policy. In the days after his victory his switchboard was buzzing with world leaders anxious to know what America First really meant. The first foreign leader to get a taste of Trump in the White House was the British prime minister. ibid.
Trump refused to sign up to the End of Summit statement endorsing the Paris accord. Their first bruising from the president left European leaders shaken to the core. ibid.
Five months into his presidency concerns over Russia’s role in Trump’s election were mounting. ibid.
Trump called the other Nato members deadbeats who owed their freedom to America. Then he said that if they didn’t pay up, the US would go its own way. ibid.
‘Never ever ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran.’ Trump Takes on the World II
Trump brings his own brand of diplomacy to one of the world’s most volatile regions. He takes America to the brink of war. ibid.
Trump decides to go ahead with the embassy move. The Palestinian authorities severed all communication with his administration. Tens of millions of evangelicals who had helped Trump get elected were ecstatic. ibid.
He claimed that the Iran nuclear deal gave the regime billions of dollars to finance terrorism. The Europeans were told they had four months to fix it or the US was out. ibid.
He takes on China in a battle for global supremacy and tries to strike the deal of the century. Trump Takes on the World III
Away from the cameras Obama delivered a sobering message: China wasn’t the only problem in Asia. ibid.
North Korea: It was an extraordinary U-turn for a president who had just told his secretary of state that diplomacy was a waste of time. ibid.
The United States also saw a threat growing in the country from a new socialist political powerhouse: he [Allende] was a doctor, he loved fine wine and expensive suits … Under orders from the White House, the CIA and National Security Council drew up a twin-track plan … Track Two of the military plan was a military takeover. Secret Wars Uncovered s1e9: Coups D’etat, History 2020
America would support the forces in doing what ever they needed to do to tighten their grip over the country. ibid.
In reality Arbenz was a democratic socialist with no links to Moscow. Bernays set out to turn him into a communist threat to America. He organised a trip to Guatemala for influential American journalists. Few of them knew anything about the country or its politics … He also created a fake independent news agency in America – the Middle-American Information Bureau. It bombarded the American media with press releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a beach-head to attack America. All of this had the desired effect. But what Bernays was doing was not just trying to blacken the Arbenz regime, he was part of a secret plot. President Eisenhower had agreed that America should topple the Arbenz government. But secretly. The CIA were instructed to organise a coup. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self II: The Engineering of Consent, BBC 2002
The Neo-Conservatives believed that they had the chance to implement their vision of America’s revolutionary destiny … in an epic battle to defeat the Soviet Union. Adam Curtis: The Power of Nightmares I: Baby It’s Cold Outside, BBC 2004
The Neo-Conservatives set out to prove that the Soviet threat was … the majority of terrorist and revolutionary movements around the world were actually part of a secret network coordinated by Moscow to take ever the world. ibid.
Reagan agreed to give the Neo-Conservatives what they wanted … The country would now fight covert wars to push back the hidden Soviet threat around the world. ibid.
They began to believe their own fiction … who were going to use force to change the world. ibid.
For the Neo-Conservatives religion was a myth … Strauss had taught that these myths were necessary to give ordinary people meaning and purpose and to ensure a stable society. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives were idealists: their aim was to try to stop the social disintegration they believed liberal freedoms had unleashed. They wanted to find a way to unite the people by giving them a shared purpose, and one of their great influences in doing this would be the theories of Leo Strauss. ibid.
By 1998 all their attempts to transform America by creating a moral revolution had failed. Faced with the indifference of the people, the Neo-Conservatives had become marginalized in both domestic and foreign policy. But with the attacks that were about to hit America the Neo-Conservatives would at last find the evil enemy they had been searching for ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in their reaction to the attacks the Neo-Conservatives would transform the failing Islamist movement into what would appear to be the grand revolutionist cause that Zawahiri had always dreamed of. But much of it would exist only in people’s imaginations. It would be the next phantom enemy. ibid.
The American Neo-Conservatives and radical Islamism … The two groups come together to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan … Both failed in their revolutions. Adam Curtis, The Power of Nightmares II: The Phantom Victory
The strange world of fantasy, deception, violence and fear in which we now live. ibid.
The Americans were setting out to defeat a mythological enemy. ibid.
American money and weapons now began to pour across the Pakistan border into Afghanistan. ibid.
Zawahiri and his small group settled in Peshawar … a military rejection of all American influence over the jihad, because America was the source of this corruption. ibid.
Then in 1987 the New Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev decided he was going to withdraw Russian troops from Afghanistan. Gorbachev was convinced that the whole Soviet system was facing collapse. He was determined to try and save it through political reform and this meant reversing the policies of his predecessors including the occupation of Afghanistan. ibid.
For the Neo-Conservatives the collapse of the Soviet Union was a triumph. And out of that triumph was going to come a central myth that still inspires them today. That through the aggressive use of American power they could transform the world and spread democracy. But in reality their victory was an illusion. ibid.
Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from terrible dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism ... But much of this threat is a fantasy which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media. This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created and who it benefits. Adam Curtis, The Power of Nightmares III: The Shadows in the Cave
But then the Neo-Conservatives began to reconstruct the Islamists. They created a phantom enemy. And as this nightmare fantasy began to spread, politicians realised the new power it gave them in a deeply disillusioned age. ibid.