In 1989 across eastern Europe the people rose up to overthrow their communist leaders. It was a remarkable series of revolutions. All driven by the desire for freedom and the ending of tyranny. ibid.
A form of order and a new kind of democracy in which the market, not politics, gave people what they wanted. But things didn’t work out how the theory predicted. ibid.
A new elite was beginning to emerge who snapped up vast sections of Russian industry: they became known as the Oligarchs. ibid.
August 1998: Russia’s economy is out of control tonight and it’s causing an international financial crisis. Huge queues in Moscow. There’s a run on the banks. The Rouble lost nearly half its value. And prices are soaring. ibid. BBC News
Overnight, the Americans destroyed the civil structure of Iraqi society. But instead of trying to create new institutions ... The country would then be thrown open to international corporations who in return for investing, would take 100% of their profits out of the country untaxed. Only one of Saddam Hussein’s laws remained: the one that restricted trade unions. Out of this was supposed to come spontaneous order. What resulted was chaos. ibid.
What also resulted was corruption on a huge scale: more than $350 billion has been sent to Iraq for reconstruction. ibid.
The Americans began to turn to violence and torture to enforce their kind of freedom. ibid.
Positive liberty is driven by a vision that freedom is for something. The freedom to do or become something new. Out of which a better world would come. Negative liberty has no such vision. It isn’t for anything. At its heart it has no purpose other than to keep us free from unnecessary constraint or harm. And in using force to create a world based on negative liberty, the democratic revolutionaries have actually led millions people abroad into a world without purpose or meaning. This idea of freedom is still portrayed by many politicians and influential commentators as a universal absolute. They assume it is only a matter of time before it spreads throughout the world. But this may not be true. ibid.
The idea of freedom that we live with today is a narrow and limiting one; it was born out of a specific and dangerous time: the Cold War. It may have had meaning and purpose then as an alternative to communist tyranny but now has become a dangerous trap. Our government relies on a simplistic economic model of human beings that allows inequality to grow and offers nothing positive in the face of reactionary forces they have helped awake around the world. ibid.
Isaiah Berlin was wrong: not all attempts to change the world for the better lead to tyranny. ibid.
The rise of a new powerful individualism that could not fit with the idea of collective political action … ‘the revolution was deferred indefinitely.’ Adam Curtis, HyperNormalisation, BBC 2016
The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make. And could just as easily make differently. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head I: Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain, David Graeber 1961-2020, BBCiplayer 2021
We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised. Not just in politics but across the whole culture. There is anger at the inequality and the ever-growing corruption. And a widespread distrust of the elite. But at the same time there is a paralysis, a sense that no-one knows how to escape from it … And never a different tomorrow. ibid.
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. 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. the hidden system of power underneath … 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 letters’ 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 … On 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