The meeting at Bitter Lake … President Franklin Roosevelt (right) meets King Abdulaziz.
‘Increasingly, we live in a world where nothing makes any sense,” says Adam Curtis. “Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow.”
So Curtis ~ who made The Century of Self, The Power of Nightmares, and The Trap: What Happened To Our Dream of Freedom ~ has made a new film, called Bitter Lake, about why those stories stopped making sense, and to try to make sense of them.
The Bitter Lake of the title refers to an actual saltwater lake through which the Suez canal flows. In 1945 President Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia on board a warship on the Great Bitter Lake. It was a meeting that would have extraordinary, far-reaching and unintended consequences, for the west, for the world.
Curtis’s story unfurls from there, taking in America, Saudi Arabia, Britain, the Soviet Union. And Afghanistan, which found itself not just at the centre of the world, but the centre of a snowballing ~ and ongoing ~ international scandal. It’s a story that includes the spread of Wahhabism; the oversimplification of the world, by Reagan and Bush (Sr) and Bush (Jr) and Blair, into a kind of fairytale of good v evil; the banks, inevitably; Bin Laden and 9/11 too, also inevitably; and now Islamic State, who want pretty much exactly what the Wahhabists wanted over half a century ago. Amazing vintage historical clips.
It’s a story full of violence, bloodshed, and bitter ironies, mainly about how the west, through misunderstanding and oversimplification, repeatedly achieved pretty much the opposite of what it was trying to achieve. America protected Wahhabism through its thirst for Saudi oil, and in doing so helped sow the seeds of radical Islam today. In Afghanistan they built dams to irrigate the Helmand valley, making it perfect to sow actual seeds, opium poppy seeds. The past is strewn with patterns, and warnings, if only anyone had bothered looking and tried to understand. But history is a bit too complicated for today’s politicians.
It is distinctive, genuinely different. It’s also worrying, beautiful, funny (really), ambitious, serious, gripping and very possibly important. I’m not saying everything now makes sense; there’s still confusion and uncertainty aplenty. But Adam Curtis is at least taking a step back, to look at the modern world, then take it on. As with The Century of the Self, watching this series is a bit of a time investment, but well worth it.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hdcji
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hdd54
The Trap: What Happened To Our Dream of Freedom links to the film “Network”
Here is the correct link to all three parts;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuPz97bjuLM&list=PLhzJUsF_8dE-uHosgi5OJ6cdLk2nbpJcA
“how the west, through misunderstanding and oversimplification, repeatedly achieved pretty much the opposite of what it was trying to achieve!
If you watch the Trap it opens with – “the seeds of a new revolutionary system of social control” his words – that’s no misunderstanding or incompetence by our leaders, its quite deliberate ….. and who pulls the strings of our world leaders?
Sure George Orwell could see this a mile off.
It would take more that Bing “beat my kids with oranges in a stocking” Crosby singing “Freedom” to convince me America was ever free in the way Hollywood would have you believe – i mean the Nazis wanted to enslave us, i think it was our one last chance to be free of international Zionism that has all but consumed the world.
Adam Curtis has a go at trying to explain….. without stepping on the toes of orthodox “history” and again there lies the problem, back to George Orwell.