[Leo] Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything. All values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires and this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. ibid.
Leo Strauss: What he taught them was that the prosperous liberal society they are living in contained the seeds of its own destruction. ibid.
On his return Qutb became politically active in Egypt; he joined a group called the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted Islam to play a major role in the governing of Egyptian society. And in 1952 the Brotherhood supported the revolution led by General Nasser that overthrew the last remnants of British rule. But Nasser very quickly made it clear that the new Egypt was going to be a secular society that emulated western models. ibid.
Sayid Qutb’s ideas were now spreading rapidly in Egypt above all among students. Because his predictions about the corruption from the West seemed to have come true. The government of President [Anwar] Sadat was controlled by a small group of millionaires who were backed by Western banks. The banks had been let in by what Sadat called his open-door policy. ibid.
This group became known as the Neo-Conservatives. The Neo-Conservatives were idealists; their aim was to try and stop the social disintegration they believed personal freedoms had unleashed. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives were going to have to defeat one of the most powerful men in the world: Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State under President Nixon and he didn’t believe in a world of good and evil. What drove Kissinger was a ruthless pragmatic vision of power in the world; with America’s growing political and social chaos, Kissinger wanted the country to give up its ideological battles; instead, it should come to terms with countries like the Soviet Union to create a new kind of global interdependence, a world in which America would be safe. ibid.
But a world without fear was not what the Neo-Conservatives wanted to pursue their purpose. And they now set out to destroy Henry Kissinger’s vision. ibid.
They allied themselves with two right-wingers in the new administration of Gerard Ford: one was Donald Rumsfeld, the new secretary of defence, the other was Dick Cheney, the president’s chief of staff. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives were successful in creating a simplistic fiction: a vision of the Soviet Union as the centre of all evil in the world. 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.
This dramatic battle between good and evil was precisely the kind of myth Strauss had taught his students would be necessary to rescue the country from moral decay. It might not be true but it was necessary. ibid.
Sayid Qutb’s ideas were now spreading rapidly in Egypt above all among students. Because his predictions about the corruption from the West seemed to have come true. The government of President [Anwar] Sadat was controlled by a small group of millionaires who were backed by Western banks. The banks had been let in by what Sadat called his open-door policy. ibid.
They had forged an alliance with the religious wing of the [Republican] party. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives believed that they now had the chance to implement their vision of America’s revolutionary destiny: to use the country’s power aggressively as a force for good in the world. ibid.
In 1977 [Anwar] Sadat was flown to Jerusalem to start the peace process. To the west it was an heroic act but to the Islamists it was a complete betrayal. ibid.
Religion was being mobilised in America for a very different purpose. And those encouraging this were the Neo-Conservatives. Many Neo-Conservatives had become advisers to the political campaign of Ronald Reagan. ibid.
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. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives set out to prove that the Soviet threat was … the majority of terrorisism 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.
At the heart of the story are groups: the American Neo-Conservatives and the radical Islamists. In this week’s episode the two groups come together to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; and both believed that they defeated the evil empire and so have the power to transform the world, But 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.
But 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. CIA agents trained the Mijahideen in the techniques of assassination and terror including car-bombing. 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. They had conquered a phantom enemy … It was a decrepit system decaying from within. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives set out to reform America. And at the heart of their project was the political use of religion. Together with their long-term allies, the religious right, they began a campaign to bring moral and religious issues back into the center of conservative politics. 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.
Out of this [Neo-Conservative] campaign a new and powerful moral agenda began to take over the Republican Party. It reached a dramatic climax with the Republican Convention in 1992 when the religious right seized control of the Party’s policy making machinery. George Bush became committed to run for President with policies that would ban abortion, gay rights and multiculturalism. ibid.
By the mid-’90s politics in Washington was dominated by one issue: the moral character of the President of the United States. Behind this were an extraordinary barrage of allegations against Clinton that were obsessing the media. These included stories of sexual harassment, stories that Clinton and his wife were involved in Whitewater, a corrupt property deal, stories they had murdered their close friend, Vince Foster, and stories that Clinton was involved in smuggling drugs from a small airstrip in Arkansas. ibid.
Finally, his [Starr’s] committee stumbled upon Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky which Clinton denied. ibid.
By 1997 Bin Laden & Zawahiri had returned to Afghanistan where they had first met ten years before … The new jihad would be against America itself. 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.
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
The Islamists after their moment of triumph were virtually destroyed within months. While the Neo-Conservatives took power in Washington. But then the Neo-Conservatives begun 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.
Bin Laden had no formal organisation until the Americans invented one for him. ibid.
Bin Laden had given this network a name: Al Qaeda … The focus of a loose association of dissident Muslim militants who were attracted by the new strategy. But there was no organisation … He was not their commander. ibid.