South China Seas: In 1979 a Frenchman called Bernard Kouchner who had founded Medicines sans Frontiers chartered an old cargo ship. And he went to rescue thousands of starving refugees trapped on a tiny island – refugees that no-one else seemed to care about. They were fleeing from the new communist government that had taken over Vietnam. To many liberals in the West the communists had been heroes in their fight against America. Which meant that the refugees did not deserve to be helped. To Kouchner this was outrageous. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid?
Possibly, being good was not as easy as it seemed. ibid.
Liveaid: To change the world you had to bypass all politics, because politicians both left and right had become corrupted by power and petty nationalism. Instead, you connected directly with others suffering around the planet and rescue them … The food being bought in by Liveaid was being used as a weapon in a civil war … It showed a weakness at the heart of the growing humanitarian movement … They couldn’t challenge power. ibid.
Boris Yeltsin was the president of the new Russia. He had promised to turn the country into a mass democracy. Yeltsin appointed a group of young technocrats and they set out to do this through what they called shock therapy. Advised by Western bankers and economists. They believed that they had to move fast because the communists might try to take power again. ibid.
The whole idea of mass democracy began to be questioned and undermined from inside the political establishment itself. It began almost unnoticed, hidden behind the wave of enthusiasm after the fall of communism. But a political scientist called Peter Mair has argued that what happened in the 1990s was that the old idea of democracy started to disappear in the West. And it was replaced by something else which we haven’t fully comprehended yet or even seen because it is outside the old categories of politics. Western politicians, Meyer said, literally changed their roles: they gave up being representatives of the people and instead they became the agents of a new bureaucracy which was rising up and promising that it could manage the dangerous and unpredictable force of individualism better than the politicians could ... Individualism and its drive to self-actualisation can corrode and eat away at the collective power of mass democracy. Peter Mair said the same was now happening in the West. ibid.
Bill Clinton: He came to power promising to represent what he called the forgotten middle class. And very quickly, within weeks of entering the White House, Clinton agreed to give up on many of his promised reforms and to give power over to the financial world. He did this not through any cynical motive but because he knew that the old power base of mass politics had gone. No-one joined political parties any more. Organised labour was a vanishing force. Clinton might be in office but he no longer had the collective power of the people behind him. The power that in the past had allowed politicians to challenge the elites in society. And in the face of that, Clinton decided to give power instead to the new force that promised that it could create a wealthier and happier society – the bankers and the economists and the management experts who were now spreading and multiplying through the corridors of Washington. ibid.
In Russia the democracy experiment had gone out of control. The president Boris Yeltsin had lost all power. It had been seized by a small group called the oligarchs who were using it to loot Russia. There was massive inflation. Millions of people were reduced to selling what they owned on the street. ibid.
Yeltsin responding by dissolving parliament; he cut the phone lines and sealed the building off. But a group of protesters broke through and fighting began around the parliament and then spread to the television station. ibid.
The geopolitics of money, a force that had already enslaved the American people and now wanted to bend the Russia people to its will. ibid.
The Balkans: President Clinton’s representative, Richard Holbrooke, brought the question out into the open. Suppose elections are free and fair, he said, and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists. That is the dilemma. ibid.
In Russia President Yeltsin had lost all control. He was drunk most of the time. He had become the puppet of the oligarchs. ibid.
Ghosts of the past were returning at the margins in England too. In August 1999 a farmer in Norfolk called Tony Martin shot two burglars who were travellers; he killed one of them called Fred Barras. Tony Martin was a recluse … Martin was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison. His conviction touched off a wave of protest. On the surface it was about Martin’s right to defend himself. But it also expressed a much wider feeling that was simmering under the surface. That the very institutions that were supposed to protect the people – the law, the police and the politicians – were now being turned against them. A growing sense that you couldn’t trust those in power any longer. What began to be called elites. ibid.
Politicians in the West had given large parts of their power away. What had begun with Bill Clinton in the early 1990s had spread. When Tony Blair came to power he had immediately given control over much of the economy to the Bank of the England. But in 1998 the global financial system showed how unstable it could be. An economic crisis that begun in Russia and then spread to Asia had consequences throughout the world. ibid.
In the north of England factories began to close. Tony Blair insisted that it was a price the country had to pay if it wanted to be a part of what he called the world economy. ibid.
The politicians increasingly found there was little they could do to respond to this anger. Because over the past ten years all sorts of new organisations had grown up that were deliberately designed to limit the politician’s power. Because national politics was dangerous to the stability of the global system. ibid.
The people driven by the new individualism had retreated into their own private worlds. So the politicians switched sides and became instead the representatives of the new powerful technocratic class. It still looked like they were powerful and had control over events. But now the people had gone, beneath them was a void. ibid.
Blair came to Kosovo 1999 and was welcomed as a hero. At the refugee camp Blair presented what they had done as an expression of that epic vision … We are all one world simply linked together as individuals … and we the good politicians of the west have a duty to intervene to help the victims of all evil dictators wherever they may be in the world … ‘This is a battle for humanity. It is a just cause.’ ibid.
Liberal politicians in the West had willingly given up much of their power in the interests of the greater good – a global stability. Power had gone first to the global financial institutions and now it was being given to the American military as well. ibid.
What the Chinese were alleging in their campaign was historically accurate, but what they didn’t know was that the opium trade had also had powerful consequences inside Britain itself. It had started to undermine the self-confidence of the British empire, and introduce a dark and corrosive fear into the heart of British society. By the middle of the nineteenth century those who ran Britain were already aware of the horrors created by the slave trade. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head V: The Lordly Ones *****
In the early 1990s the western democracies seemed to be the future. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that their ideas were now going to spread all across the world. But at home in both Britain and America there were still forces deep in the heart of both societies that had little to do with democracy. It seemed that despite all the changes of the last thirty years, that underneath, the old structures of power and the corruption and the anger that created were still there. ibid.
In Britain a series of scandals revealed that dozens of innocent people had been held in jail. Some for over 15 years: they included the Guildford 4 and the Birmingham 6. Most of them were Irishmen who had been accused of being members of the IRA and planting bombs in English cities. Every time they had tried to prove their innocence, they had been blocked by some of the most senior figures in the British establishment despite overwhelming evidence of false confessions and fake evidence. ibid.
The Soviet Union was about to collapse: it was a colossal failure of the whole Western system of Intelligence. ibid.
The empire had led to giant industrial cities rising up all across England. They were dark frightening places where millions of people lived in appalling conditions. What alarmed those in charge was the violence and the anger that was building up there among the masses. ibid.
Unlike Britain, America had emerged from the First World War as the most powerful country in the world. Its president Woodrow Wilson had a vision that America should now use that power to spread democracy all around the globe. Behind this was a belief in what was called American Exceptionalism – that the country was special, not like the old corrupt empires of Europe. And it could use the specialness to remake the world. But the Republicans who controlled Congress refused to back this … Instead, the American economy went into a severe depression. In a growing mood of fear there were race riots as whites turned on the black communities in the cities … They even dropped aircraft to drop bombs. ibid.
Out of this fear came an organisation called the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had first been formed after the American Civil War but now it reemerged. The Klan also believed in the idea of America’s Exceptionalism – but they took that myth and turned it into something frightening and violent. ibid.
They used aircraft to bomb the rebels: they called it aerial policing, they took back control and set about creating the new country called Iraq. But because there was no money, the group could also not afford to survey the country. Instead, with no information, Bell and the others simply projected on to the Arabs that powerful romantic dream of an old England. They decided that the middle classes in the cities who had run the country under the Ottoman empire were corrupt and untrustworthy, which meant that they had to be excluded from power. Instead, power should be given to the Sheikhs who ruled the tribes out in the countryside. To the British the Sheikhs represented the true Iraq because they hadn’t been infected by the corruption of the modern world. Their system was one of a natural order just like in the England of the past. The Sheikhs said Gertrude Bell was like great aristocrats; they will run a system that will maintain a natural equilibrium. The truth was that this picture of Iraq was completely detached from reality. The Sheikhs were really marginal figures. While the Ottomans had begun to create a modern progressive society in the cities. The British now tore that apart. ibid.
A new drug was created: it was made by a company that had been founded by Arthur Sackler. In the 1970s Sackler had marketed the drug Valium to deal with the feelings of anxiety and loneliness in the sufferers. He had died in the 1980s but in the mid-’90s his company released a new drug called Oxycontin. It was a synthetic form of opium and it was sold as a painkiller … The doctors gave them Oxycontin, they got their benefits, they also discovered that Oxycontin made them feel safe, in a bubble, protected from the anxieties and fears of the new post-industrial world. ibid.