The Power of Nightmares

It's an interesting documentary, particularly in its rendering of the birth of radical Islam with Said Qtub. I haven't seen it for a while, but from what I remember it wasn't particularly "anti-American" at all. It was more anti-terrorist, and anti-media hyperbole.
 
volatile said:
It's an interesting documentary, particularly in its rendering of the birth of radical Islam with Said Qtub. I haven't seen it for a while, but from what I remember it wasn't particularly "anti-American" at all. It was more anti-terrorist, and anti-media hyperbole.
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This is the message I got from the series as well.

I thought the entire thing was very well done, though I think it delved a bit into hyperbole itself when it began attributing motives for activities of individuals. I think that assuming the reasoning behind the actions of both the groups who evolved into modern terrorists and the US government entities who oppose them (both of which are covered, and covered quite well) is tricky because there are so many individuals involved and thus there were more factors involved than the series could cover.

However, its overall message that these things the media are in a hurry to portray as nightmarish zero-sum threats are, in fact, a result of the collective cognitive dissonance between western culture, eastern culture, and a backlash in both against what each believes are the sources of all of the evil in the world.
 
GreNME said:
This is the message I got from the series as well.

I thought the entire thing was very well done, though I think it delved a bit into hyperbole itself when it began attributing motives for activities of individuals. I think that assuming the reasoning behind the actions of both the groups who evolved into modern terrorists and the US government entities who oppose them (both of which are covered, and covered quite well) is tricky because there are so many individuals involved and thus there were more factors involved than the series could cover.

However, its overall message that these things the media are in a hurry to portray as nightmarish zero-sum threats are, in fact, a result of the collective cognitive dissonance between western culture, eastern culture, and a backlash in both against what each believes are the sources of all of the evil in the world.
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Indeed. I think the overarching message was essentially "fear is useful", be it for politicians in the West or radicals in the Middle East. It was more of an overview of the use of occasionally convergent ideologies in politics from two distinct sets of beliefs. It certainly had an agenda (it was born as a project intended to be critical of the Neo-Con Republicans, after all) but it certainly wasn't woo or a conspiracy. It's perfectly clear that terrorism is a real threat - indeed, a large part of the documentary is devoted to establishing just why that might be the case. It doesn't promote any conspiracy theories that the LCF crowd would subscribe to, and whilst it is critical of the ideologies and politics of people like Rumsfeld and Cheney, there's not even any sense that "America deserved 911" or anything like that.

I think those right-wing commentators who saw it as anti-American were coming from the "my country right or wrong" perspective that seems rather common in that line of work.
 
Indeed. It had a very "the only thing we have to fear is fearmongering" vibe throughout much of the series. It doesn't claim to provide an answer to the problem, but instead defines the problem as one borne of inflating fear beyond its useful means, and how that results in extremist behavior.
 
The biggest issue I have with that series is the very dishonest portrayal of Leo Strauss. The film-makers basically painted him as the Dr. Moriarty of neo-conservatism - to the delight of truthers everywhere. In actual fact, he was explicitly apolitical; he was a professor and a political philosopher, and his project, in broad terms, was the restoration of political philosophy as a counter to the adcendance of empirical social "science" in academia.

Even a cursory reading of his work reveals that the portrayal in PofN is pure fantasy. He had critics within academia, (Drury, for example), but polemicists such as the makers of this series have plainly unaware of his actual work or are willfully misrepresenting it. (And its quite safe to assume that the truthers who assign him such a high position in their NWO pantheon can barely read at all, much less read and comprehend philosophy).

BTW: That film was my first exposure to Strauss and I took it at face value at the time. When I encountered his work as a student later on, it was eye-opening.
 
applecorped said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares

Quote:

"The Power of Nightmares has been described as "conspiracy theory", anti-American or both."


I have not seen this yet. If anyone has please let me know what you think. Thank you.
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Yes it is incredibly anti-American. By that I'm using the definition that anti-American is anything critical of US (it's worth x2 points if it is critical of a Republican).

LLH
 
LordoftheLeftHand said:
Yes it is incredibly anti-American. By that I'm using the definition that anti-American is anything critical of US (it's worth x2 points if it is critical of a Republican).

LLH
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Bear in mind it's also equally (if not more) critical of Islamic terrorists, so the particular accusations of bias don't really hold water. It's also not really anti-American in that it demonises America itself - it is, however, deeply critical of a particular subset of America's political class and their ideologies and strategies. I don't think those types of criticisms can really be labelled "anti-American" in any meaningful way.
 
volatile said:
Bear in mind it's also equally (if not more) critical of Islamic terrorists, so the particular accusations of bias don't really hold water. It's also not really anti-American in that it demonises America itself - it is, however, deeply critical of a particular subset of America's political class and their ideologies and strategies. I don't think those types of criticisms can really be labelled "anti-American" in any meaningful way.
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Which ideologies and strategies is it critical of and what evidence do they use to substantiate their illegitimacy?

Do they advocate the ever popular meme that the USA deserved, and still does deserve, any and all terrorist attacks?
 
Travis said:
Which ideologies and strategies is it critical of and what evidence do they use to substantiate their illegitimacy?
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Specifically the ideologies collected and currently named the neocon Republicans.

Travis said:
Do they advocate the ever popular meme that the USA deserved, and still does deserve, any and all terrorist attacks?
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Not even once, if I recall correctly. Quite the opposite considering their treatment of the jihadist movements.
 
I saw it years ago, so my memory might be failing me, but I seem to remember it using a lot of spooky music and imagery to suggest that because Western governments – or neoconservatives in particular – broadly rule through fear (presumably, for example, by propagating false security alerts, etc.), they and Islamist groups are somehow symbiotically connected and thus alike. I also seem to remember one fellow claiming that the concept of al-Qaeda – i.e. its name and notion that it’s a somewhat organised terrorist group – was simply fabricated during the trail of some terrorist or other.

There was, however, a lot of interesting and presumably true stuff as well.

In any event, I might have confused it with something else.
 
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Travis said:
Which ideologies and strategies is it critical of and what evidence do they use to substantiate their illegitimacy?
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Well, you'd need to watch it. The particular focus is the cabal of neo-Conservatives that served under Reagan and then under Bush, and their use of fear tactics to justify policy.

Do they advocate the ever popular meme that the USA deserved, and still does deserve, any and all terrorist attacks?
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No. I think I said that above. It does explain why Qtub thought the USA deserved to be attacked, but it certainly doesn't apologise for that position at all. As I said - you're probably better of watching it that relying on the hazy memories of it filtered through my commie-pinko America-hating brain... :D
 
volatile said:
Well, you'd need to watch it. The particular focus is the cabal of neo-Conservatives that served under Reagan and then under Bush, and their use of fear tactics to justify policy.



No. I think I said that above. It does explain why Qtub thought the USA deserved to be attacked, but it certainly doesn't apologise for that position at all. As I said - you're probably better of watching it that relying on the hazy memories of it filtered through my commie-pinko America-hating brain... :D
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Your a commie? Damn! This whole time I thought you were a disgruntled Libertarian.
 
applecorped said:
Your a commie? Damn! This whole time I thought you were a disgruntled Libertarian.
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Libertarians call me commie, and commies call me libertarian and/or "neo-liberal". Honestly - a peer-review of some of my work called me neo-liberal, which I'm sure will come as quite a surprise to The Painter. I must be doing something right... :D
 
One of the points made by the series, as I remember it, was that al-Qaeda does not exist as a registered legal entity, so therefore al-Qaeda is merely a bogeyman created by the neo-conspiracy.

There's nothing novel about this, mind you. It's Michael Moore's old "guy in a cave" argument.
 
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Gazpacho said:
One of the points made by the series, as I remember it, was that al-Qaeda does not exist as a registered legal entity, so therefore al-Qaeda is merely a bogeyman created by the neo-conspiracy.

There's nothing novel about this, mind you. It's Michael Moore's old "guy in a cave" argument.
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The point made in The Power of Nightmares was that Al Qaeda was a small organization with informal connections to other jihadist groups. They were dangerous, but not nearly as powerful as our political leaders claimed.

We didn't find thousands of Al Qaeda fighters in massive underground command complexes in Afghanistan because they never existed. They were just figments of Neocon imagination.
 
volatile said:
Libertarians call me commie, and commies call me libertarian and/or "neo-liberal". Honestly - a peer-review of some of my work called me neo-liberal, which I'm sure will come as quite a surprise to The Painter. I must be doing something right... :D
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Wait! That means I'm the commie?
 
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