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 … 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 letter’s 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 … One 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
One evening after making a speech in Reading Michael X [DeFreitas] was arrested. And he was sent to prison for ten months for inciting racial hatred. The MP Enoch Powell had also made a speech at the same time violently attacking immigrants. He wasn’t charged and he carried on being an MP, which Michael X said rather proved his point about the racism underlying the country. ibid.
The Second World War revealed how frightening and deceptive human beings could be particularly in Nazi Germany. ibid.
The question of who to attack in New York got more and more complicated … Afeni Shakur’s group came up with a plan: they were going to plant bombs in big department stores like Macey’s and they would bomb the Bronx Botanical Gardens, and attack local police stations. ibid.
Michael X realised that what was happening now in Notting Hill was the opposite: people were being treated as subjects to be counted and measured and managed. He became increasingly cynical about the liberals’ real intentions. Michael X had come to believe that the talk of revolution had just been empty rhetoric that disguised something else. The new groups might look like radicals and dance to black music but really they were the children of the colonialists who had run the empire, and they had no intention of giving up their power. That old system of power was simply mutating, morphing into a new form that camouflaged itself in radicalism but still would manage and control. ibid.
People are in control is a comforting illusion … You could never change people’s behaviour by appealing to them rationally … Human beings did live in a simplified dream world but what he was saying was that there was nothing you could do about that. And in an age of individualism when you could no longer order people about, the only solution was to keep them in that dream world and to make sure the dream world was safe and happy. The idea of appealing to them rationally and changing the world was pointless. ibid.
The members of the Red Army Faction were now planting bombs and robbing banks all across West Germany. They announced that they had now become Moaists, followers of Moa Zedong, and they were going to awaken the popular masses. The government were desperate to catch them. ibid.
Notting Hill 1970: All the politics had gone. The counter-culture had transformed completely into a new kind of consumerism, with self-expression at its heart. ibid.
One morning armed police stormed into Afeni Shakur’s apartment and arrested her. All the other members of her cell were also arrested. They were charged with what the government said was a giant plan to destroy those elements of society which the defendants called the Power Structure. It included attacking police stations and planning to bomb five large department stores and the Bronx botanical gardens. They became known as the Panther 21. Their trial was held in a state of paranoia about further attacks by the Panthers. And it also caused a sensation when it was revealed that three of the founding members of the group had been undercover police officers. ibid.
Pessimism finally took hold … The fault is inside you, the individual, not in society. Those who had wanted to change the world now began to turn inwards. This distrust was going to be reinforced by the growing influence of the psychologists who said that human beings were really irrational and lived in a dream world. Out of that was going to come the modern system of power in which Psychology would join with Economics and with Finance to make sure that that dream world was managed. ibid.
A wonderful world to live in, but its weakness would be that at its root was a pessimism about human beings, and whether they should ever be allowed any control. ibid.
In America in the 1960s was a man who was convinced that there was something frightening hidden under the surface of the new modern suburbs. Behind what looked like a confident individualism was rising up throughout America there were really hidden fears eating away at people from inside. There were feelings of anxiety, loneliness and emptiness, and he was convinced he could make a lot of money out of these feelings: he was called Arthur Sackler … Valium: he offered it to the doctors as an extraordinary new way to treat these inner anxieties, and he said it wasn’t dangerous or addictive. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head III: Money Changes Everything
They had discovered before anyone else the underlying weakness with the new individualism: that you were free but you were alone. ibid.
In the past there had been repeated sudden changes both heating and cooling of the world’s climate at speeds that no-one thought possible. ibid.
Richard Nixon came to power because he had harnessed a new force: he called it the silent majority … It was a fragile power-base … Nixon promised to represent the silent majority … his feelings of dread … suspicious and paranoid … He told his aides to start the enemies’ list. ibid.
Suddenly there was no fixed value for any currency anywhere in the world. There was immediate confusion … He [Nixon] went to China … a giant mysterious country that had been cut off from the world for decades. But he was going to bring it into the modern global system. ibid.
He [Nixon] had set up a conspiracy based in the White House. It was run by a group of ex-intelligence agents, and they already planned to bug, burgle, and blackmail Nixon’s opponents. ibid.
Solzhenitsyn: he was secretly writing a novel … faced by the failure of the revolutionary dream, it was now difficult to believe in anything. That maybe ideology itself was the problem … But in every case, he said, thousands and often millions were killed. Solzhenitsyn’s book contained a damning conclusion … The only way to escape from that horror was to stop trying to change the world. Instead the safest thing to believe in the future was to believe in nothing. ibid.
For 20 years the CIA had been planning assassinations and overthrowing leaders of foreign governments all around the world using poisons and specially made secret weapons. ibid.
Kerry Thornley had begun Operation Mindfuck: he and his friend Greg Hill had planted fake conspiracy theories in the press and in underground magazines alleging that the Illumanati was a secret organisation behind all the assassinations in America. Their aim was to make people see how absurd all such theories were … Stories about the Illuminati and a plot to create a New World Order began to get mixed up with revelations about brain-washing and secret mind control programs run by the CIA. ibid.
‘The plague of money. The disease of money. The plague of buying and selling that’s their handiwork. I hate this system … It’s Me, Eddie … People think they are free. But really they are becoming like simplified robots following the rules of money.’ ibid.
Betty Ford’s admission had a dramatic effect. In its wake stories began to pour out of people all across America who were also addicted to Valium. It seemed that there was a private hidden world of anxiety behind the public faces that affected millions of people. But Arthur Sackler who in the 1960s had promoted Valium as beneficial and non-addictive was unrepentant. And a company that he and his two brothers had started was about to develop a new drug: a synthetic form of opium called Oxycontin, and that was going to deal with the next wave of anxiety that would hit America. ibid.